preachers of new doctrines; but witnesses against the betrayal of the
old ones, which were on the lips of all men, and in the lives of none.
Nay, the painters are indeed more pure reformers than the priests. They
rebuked the manifest vices of men, while they realized whatever was
loveliest in their faith. Priestly reform soon enraged itself into mere
contest for personal opinions; while, without rage, but in stern rebuke
of all that was vile in conduct or thought,--in declaration of the
always-received faiths of the Christian Church, and in warning of the
power of faith, and death,[G] over the petty designs of men,--Botticelli
and Holbein together fought foremost in the ranks of the Reformation.
45. To-day I will endeavor to explain how they attained such rank. Then,
in the next two lectures, the technics of both,--their way of speaking;
and in the last two, what they had got to say.
First, then, we ask how they attained this rank;--who taught _them_ what
they were finally best to teach? How far must every people--how far did
this Florentine people--teach its masters, before _they_ could teach
_it_?
Even in these days, when every man is, by hypothesis, as good as
another, does not the question sound strange to you? You recognize in
the past, as you think, clearly, that national advance takes place
always under the guidance of masters, or groups of masters, possessed of
what appears to be some new personal sensibility or gift of invention;
and we are apt to be reverent to these alone, as if the nation itself
had been unprogressive, and suddenly awakened, or converted, by the
genius of one man.
No idea can be more superficial. Every nation must teach its tutors, and
prepare itself to receive them; but the fact on which our impression is
founded--the rising, apparently by chance, of men whose singular gifts
suddenly melt the multitude, already at the point of fusion; or suddenly
form, and _in_form, the multitude which has gained coherence enough to
be capable of formation,--enables us to measure and map the gain of
national intellectual territory, by tracing first the lifting of the
mountain chains of its genius.
46. I have told you that we have nothing to do at present with the great
transition from ancient to modern habits of thought which took place at
the beginning of the sixteenth century. I only want to go as far as that
point;--where we shall find the old superstitious art represented
_finally_ by Perugino, and the modern scientific and anatomical art
represented _primarily_ by Michael Angelo. And the epithet bestowed on
Perugino by Michael Angelo, 'goffo nell' arte,' dunce, or blockhead, in
art,--being, as far as my knowledge of history extends, the most cruel,
the most false, and the most foolish insult ever offered by one great
man to another,--does you at least good service, in showing how
trenchant the separation is between the two orders of artists,[H]--how
exclusively we may follow out the history of all the 'goffi nell' arte,'
and write our Florentine Dunciad, and Laus Stultitiae, in peace; and
never trench upon the thoughts or ways of these proud ones, who showed
their fathers' nakedness, and snatched their masters' fame.
47. The Florentine dunces in art are a multitude; but I only want you to
know something about twenty of them.
Twenty!--you think that a grievous number? It may, perhaps, appease
you a little to be told that when you really have learned a very little,
accurately, about these twenty dunces, there are only five more men
among the artists of Christendom whose works I shall ask you to examine
while you are under my care. That makes twenty-five altogether,--an
exorbitant demand on your attention, you still think? And yet, but a
little while ago, you were all agog to get me to go and look at Mrs. A's
sketches, and tell you what was to be thought about _them_; and I've had
the greatest difficulty to keep Mrs. B's photographs from being shown
side by side with the Raphael drawings in the University galleries. And
you will waste any quantity of time in looking at Mrs. A's sketches or
Mrs. B's photographs; and yet you look grave, because, out of nineteen
centuries of European art-labor and thought, I ask you to learn
something seriously about the works of five-and-twenty men!
48. It is hard upon you, doubtless, considering the quantity of time you
must nowadays spend in trying which can hit balls farthest. So I will
put the task into the simplest form I can.
1200 1300 1400
| 1250 | 1350 |
+ + + + +
Niccola Pisano |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | | | | |
Arnolfo |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | |
Cimabue |-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | | |
Giovanni Pisano |-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | |
Andrea Pisano |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | |
Giotto |-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | |
Orcagna |-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | |
1400 1500 1600
| 1450 | 1550 |
+ + + + +
Quercia |-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Brunelleschi |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Ghiberti |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Donatello |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Luca della Robbia |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | | | | |
Filippo Lippi |-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Giovanni Bellini |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | |
Mantegna |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | |
Verrocchio |-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | | | | |
Perugino |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | |
Botticelli |-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | |
Luini |-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | |
Duerer |-|-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | | |
Cima |-|-|-|-| | | | | | | | |
Carpaccio |-|-|-|-| | | | | | | |
Correggio |-|-|-|-|-| | | | | | |
Holbein |-|-|-|-|-| | | | | |
Tintoret |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|
Here are the names of the twenty-five men,[I] and opposite each, a line
indicating the length of his life, and the position of it in his
century. The diagram still, however, needs a few words of explanation.
Very chiefly, for those who know anything of my writings, there is
needed explanation of its not including the names of Titian, Reynolds,
Velasquez, Turner, and other such men, always reverently put before you
at other times.
They are absent, because I have no fear of your not looking at these.
All your lives through, if you care about art, you will be looking at
them. But while you are here at Oxford, I want to make you learn what
you should know of these earlier, many of them weaker, men, who yet, for
the very reason of their greater simplicity of power, are better guides
for you, and of whom some will remain guides to all generations. And,
as regards the subject of our present course, I have a still more
weighty reason;--Vandyke, Gainsborough, Titian, Reynolds, Velasquez, and
the rest, are essentially portrait painters. They give you the likeness
of a man: they have nothing to say either about his future life, or his
gods. 'That is the look of him,' they say: 'here, on earth, we know no
more.'
49. But these, whose names I have engraved, have something to
say--generally much,--either about the future life of man, or about his
gods. They are therefore, literally, seers or prophets. False prophets,
it may be, or foolish ones; of that you must judge; but you must read
before you can judge; and read (or hear) them consistently; for you
don't know them till you have heard them out. But with Sir Joshua, or
Titian, one portrait is as another: it is here a pretty lady, there a
great lord; but speechless, all;--whereas, with these twenty-five men,
each picture or statue is not merely another person of a pleasant
society, but another chapter of a Sibylline book.
50. For this reason, then, I do not want Sir Joshua or Velasquez in my
defined group; and for my present purpose, I can spare from it even four
others:--namely, three who have _too_ special gifts, and must each be
separately studied--Correggio, Carpaccio, Tintoret;--and one who has no
special gift, but a balanced group of many--Cima. This leaves twenty-one
for classification, of whom I will ask you to lay hold thus. You must
continually have felt the difficulty caused by the names of centuries
not tallying with their years;--the year 1201 being the first of the
thirteenth century, and so on. I am always plagued by it myself, much as
I have to think and write with reference to chronology; and I mean for
the future, in our art chronology, to use as far as possible a different
form of notation.
51. In my diagram the vertical lines are the divisions of tens of years;
the thick black lines divide the centuries. The horizontal lines, then,
at a glance, tell you the length and date of each artist's life. In one
or two instances I cannot find the date of birth; in one or two more,
of death; and the line indicates then only the ascertained[J] period
during which the artist worked.
And, thus represented, you see nearly all their lives run through the
year of a new century; so that if the lines representing them were
needles, and the black bars of the years 1300, 1400, 1500 were magnets,
I could take up nearly all the needles by lifting the bars.
52. I will actually do this, then, in three other simple diagrams. I
place a rod for the year 1300 over the lines of life, and I take up all
it touches. I have to drop Niccola Pisano, but I catch five. Now, with
my rod of 1400, I have dropped Orcagna indeed, but I again catch five.
Now, with my rod of 1500, I indeed drop Filippo Lippi and Verrocchio,
but I catch seven. And here I have three pennons, with the staves of the
years 1300, 1400, and 1500 running through them,--holding the names of
nearly all the men I want you to study in easily remembered groups of
five, five, and seven. And these three groups I shall hereafter call the
1300 group, 1400 group, and 1500 group.
1300.
^
|
1240-1302 Cimabue +-+-+-+-+-+-+
|
1250-1321 Giovanni Pisano +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
|
1232-1310 ARNOLFO -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
|
1270-1345 Andrea Pisano +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
|
1276-1336 Giotto +-+-+-+-+-+
1400.
^
|
1374-1438 Quercia -+-+-+-+-+-+-+
|
1381-1455 Ghiberti +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
|
1377-1446 BRUNELLESCHI +-+-+-+-+-+-+-
|
1386-1468 Donatello +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
|
1400-1481 Luca +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
1500.
^
|
1431-1506 Mantegna -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
|
1457-1515 Botticelli +-+-+-+-+-+-
|
1426-1516 Bellini +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
|
1446-1524 PERUGINO +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
|
1470-1535 Luini +-+-+-+-+-+-+-
|
1471-1527 Duerer -+-+-+-+-+-
|
1498-1543 Holbein +-+-+-+-+
53. But why should four unfortunate masters be dropped out?
Well, I want to drop them out, at any rate; but not in disrespect. In
hope, on the contrary, to make you remember them very separately
indeed;--for this following reason.
We are in the careless habit of speaking of men who form a great number
of pupils, and have a host of inferior satellites round them, as masters
of great schools.
But before you call a man a master, you should ask, Are his pupils
greater or less than himself? If they are greater than himself, he is a
master indeed;--he has been a true teacher. But if all his pupils are
less than himself, he may have been a great _man_, but in all
probability has been a bad _master_, or no master.
Now these men, whom I have signally left out of my groups, are true
_Masters_.
Niccola Pisano taught all Italy; but chiefly his own son, who succeeded,
and in some things very much surpassed him.
Orcagna taught all Italy, after him, down to Michael Angelo. And these
two--Lippi, the religious schools, Verrocchio, the artist schools, of
their century.
Lippi taught Sandro Botticelli; and Verrocchio taught Lionardo da Vinci,
Lorenzo di Credi, and Perugino. Have I not good reason to separate the
masters of such pupils from the schools they created?
54. But how is it that I can drop just the cards I want out of my pack?
Well, certainly I force and fit matters a little: I leave some men out
of my list whom I should like to have in it;--Benozzo Gozzoli, for
instance, and Mino da Fiesole; but I can do without them, and so can you
also, for the present. I catch Luca by a hair's-breadth only, with my
1400 rod; but on the whole, with very little coaxing, I get the groups
in this memorable and quite literally 'handy' form. For see, I write my
lists of five, five, and seven, on bits of pasteboard; I hinge my rods
to these; and you can brandish the school of 1400 in your left hand, and
of 1500 in your right, like--railway signals;--and I wish all railway
signals were as clear. Once learn, thoroughly, the groups in this
artificially contracted form, and you can refine and complete afterwards
at your leisure.
55. And thus actually flourishing my two pennons, and getting my grip of
the men, in either hand, I find a notable thing concerning my two flags.
The men whose names I hold in my left hand are all sculptors; the men
whose names I hold in my right are all painters.
You will infallibly suspect me of having chosen them thus on purpose.
No, honor bright!--I chose simply the greatest men,--those I wanted to
talk to you about. I arranged them by their dates; I put them into three
conclusive pennons; and behold what follows!
56. Farther, note this: in the 1300 group, four out of the five men are
architects as well as sculptors and painters. In the 1400 group, there
is one architect; in the 1500, none. And the meaning of that is, that in
1300 the arts were all united, and duly led by architecture; in 1400,
sculpture began to assume too separate a power to herself; in 1500,
painting arrogated all, and, at last, betrayed all. From which, with
much other collateral evidence, you may justly conclude that the three
arts ought to be practiced together, and that they naturally are so. I
long since asserted that no man could be an architect who was not a
sculptor. As I learned more and more of my business, I perceived also
that no man could be a sculptor who was not an architect;--that is to
say, who had not knowledge enough, and pleasure enough in structural
law, to be able to build, on occasion, better than a mere builder. And
so, finally, I now positively aver to you that nobody, in the graphic
arts, can be quite rightly a master of anything, who is not master of
everything!
57. The junction of the three arts in men's minds, at the best times, is
shortly signified in these words of Chaucer. Love's Garden,
Everidele
Enclosed was, and walled well
With high walls, embatailled,
Portrayed without, and well entayled
With many rich portraitures.
The French original is better still, and gives four arts in unison:--
Quant suis avant un pou ale
Et vy un vergier grant et le,
Bien cloz de bon mur batillie
Pourtrait dehors, et entaillie
Ou (for au) maintes riches escriptures.
Read also carefully the description of the temples of Mars and Venus in
the Knight's Tale. Contemporary French uses 'entaille' even of solid
sculpture and of the living form; and Pygmalion, as a perfect master,
professes wood carving, ivory carving, waxwork, and iron-work, no less
than stone sculpture:--
Pimalion, uns entaillieres
Pourtraians en fuz[K] et en pierres,
En mettaux, en os, et en cire,
Et en toute autre matire.
58. I made a little sketch, when last in Florence, of a subject which
will fix the idea of this unity of the arts in your minds. At the base
of the tower of Giotto are two rows of hexagonal panels, filled with
bas-reliefs. Some of these are by unknown hands,--some by Andrea Pisano,
some by Luca della Robbia, two by Giotto himself; of these I sketched
the panel representing the art of Painting.
You have in that bas-relief one of the foundation-stones of the most
perfectly built tower in Europe; you have that stone carved by its
architect's own hand; you find, further, that this architect and
sculptor was the greatest painter of his time, and the friend of the
greatest poet; and you have represented by him a painter in his
shop,--bottega,--as symbolic of the entire art of painting.
59. In which representation, please note how carefully Giotto shows you
the tabernacles or niches, in which the paintings are to be placed. Not
independent of their frames, these panels of his, you see!
Have you ever considered, in the early history of painting, how
important also is the history of the frame maker? It is a matter, I
assure you, needing your very best consideration. For the frame was made
before the picture. The painted window is much, but the aperture it
fills was thought of before it. The fresco by Giotto is much, but the
vault it adorns was planned first. Who thought of these;--who built?
Questions taking us far back before the birth of the shepherd boy of
Fesole--questions not to be answered by history of painting only, still
less of painting in _Italy_ only.
60. And in pointing out to you this fact, I may once for all prove to
you the essential unity of the arts, and show you how impossible it is
to understand one without reference to another. Which I wish you to
observe all the more closely, that you may use, without danger of being
misled, the data, of unequaled value, which have been collected by Crowe
and Cavalcaselle, in the book which they have called a History of
Painting in Italy, but which is in fact only a dictionary of details
relating to that history. Such a title is an absurdity on the face of
it. For, first, you can no more write the history of painting in Italy
than you can write the history of the south wind in Italy. The sirocco
does indeed produce certain effects at Genoa, and others at Rome; but
what would be the value of a treatise upon the winds, which, for the
honor of any country, assumed that every city of it had a native
sirocco?
But, further,--imagine what success would attend the meteorologist who
should set himself to give an account of the south wind, but take no
notice of the north!
And, finally, suppose an attempt to give you an account of either wind,
but none of the seas, or mountain passes, by which they were nourished,
or directed.
61. For instance, I am in this course of lectures to give you an account
of a single and minor branch of graphic art,--engraving. But observe how
many references to local circumstances it involves. There are three
materials for it, we said;--stone, wood, and metal. Stone engraving is
the art of countries possessing marble and gems; wood engraving, of
countries overgrown with forest; metal engraving, of countries
possessing treasures of silver and gold. And the style of a stone
engraver is formed on pillars and pyramids; the style of a wood engraver
under the eaves of larch cottages; the style of a metal engraver in the
treasuries of kings. Do you suppose I could rightly explain to you the
value of a single touch on brass by Finiguerra, or on box by Bewick,
unless I had grasp of the great laws of climate and country; and could
trace the inherited sirocco or tramontana of thought to which the souls
and bodies of the men owed their existence?
62. You see that in this flag of 1300 there is a dark strong line in the
center, against which you read the name of Arnolfo.
In writing our Florentine Dunciad, or History of Fools, can we possibly
begin with a better day than All Fools' Day? On All Fools' Day--the
first, if you like better so to call it, of the month of _opening_,--in
the year 1300, is signed the document making Arnolfo a citizen of
Florence, and in 1310 he dies, chief master of the works of the
cathedral there. To this man, Crowe and Cavalcaselle give half a page,
out of three volumes of five hundred pages each.
But lower down in my flag, (not put there because of any inferiority,
but by order of chronology,) you will see a name sufficiently familiar
to you--that of Giotto; and to him, our historians of painting in Italy
give some hundred pages, under the impression, stated by them at page
243 of their volume, that "in his hands, art in the Peninsula became
entitled for the first time to the name of Italian."
63. Art became Italian! Yes, but _what_ art? Your authors give a
perspective--or what they call such,--of the upper church of Assisi, as
if that were merely an accidental occurrence of blind walls for Giotto
to paint on!
But how came the upper church of Assisi there? How came it to be
vaulted--to be aisled? How came Giotto to be asked to paint upon it?
The art that built it, good or bad, must have been an Italian one,
before Giotto. He could not have painted on the air. Let us see how his
panels were made for him.
64. This Captain--the center of our first group--Arnolfo, has always
hitherto been called 'Arnolfo di Lapo;'--Arnolfo the son of Lapo.
Modern investigators come down on us delightedly, to tell us--Arnolfo
was _not_ the son of Lapo.
In these days you will have half a dozen doctors, writing each a long
book, and the sense of all will be,--Arnolfo wasn't the son of Lapo.
Much good may you get of that!
Well, you will find the fact to be, there was a great Northman builder, a
true son of Thor, who came down into Italy in 1200, served the order of
St. Francis there, built Assisi, taught Arnolfo how to build, with Thor's
hammer, and disappeared, leaving his name uncertain--Jacopo--Lapo--nobody
knows what. Arnolfo always recognizes this man as his true father, who put
the soul-life into him; he is known to his Florentines always as Lapo's
Arnolfo.
That, or some likeness of that, is the vital fact. You never can get at
the literal limitation of living facts. They disguise themselves by the
very strength of their life: get told again and again in different ways
by all manner of people;--the literalness of them is turned topsy-turvy,
inside-out, over and over again;--then the fools come and read them
wrong side upwards, or else, say there never was a fact at all. Nothing
delights a true blockhead so much as to prove a negative;--to show that
everybody has been wrong. Fancy the delicious sensation, to an
empty-headed creature, of fancying for a moment that he has emptied
everybody else's head as well as his own! nay, that, for once, his own
hollow bottle of a head has had the best of other bottles, and has been
_first_ empty;--first to know--nothing.
65. Hold, then, steadily the first tradition about this Arnolfo. That
his real father was called "Cambio" matters to you not a straw. That he
never called himself Cambio's Arnolfo--that nobody else ever called him
so, down to Vasari's time, is an infinitely significant fact to you. In
my twenty-second letter in Fors Clavigera you will find some account of
the noble habit of the Italian artists to call themselves by their
masters' names, considering their master as their true father. If not
the name of the master, they take that of their native place, as having
owed the character of their life to that. They rarely take their own
family name: sometimes it is not even known,--when best known, it is
unfamiliar to us. The great Pisan artists, for instance, never bear any
other name than 'the Pisan;' among the other five-and-twenty names in my
list, not above six, I think, the two German, with four Italian, are
family names. Perugino, (Peter of Perugia,) Luini, (Bernard of Luino,)
Quercia, (James of Quercia,) Correggio, (Anthony of Correggio,) are
named from their native places. Nobody would have understood me if I had
called Giotto, 'Ambrose Bondone;' or Tintoret, Robusti; or even Raphael,
Sanzio. Botticelli is named from his master; Ghiberti from his
father-in-law; and Ghirlandajo from his work. Orcagna, who _did_, for a
wonder, name himself from his father, Andrea Cione, of Florence, has
been always called 'Angel' by everybody else; while Arnolfo, who never
named himself from his father, is now like to be fathered against his
will.
But, I again beg of you, keep to the old story. For it represents,
however inaccurately in detail, clearly in sum, the fact, that some
great master of German Gothic at this time came down into Italy, and
changed the entire form of Italian architecture by his touch. So that
while Niccola and Giovanni Pisano are still virtually Greek artists,
experimentally introducing Gothic forms, Arnolfo and Giotto adopt the
entire Gothic ideal of form, and thenceforward use the pointed arch and
steep gable as the limits of sculpture.
66. Hitherto I have been speaking of the relations of my twenty-five men
to each other. But now, please note their relations altogether to the
art before them. These twenty-five include, I say, all the great masters
of _Christian_ art.
Before them, the art was too savage to be Christian; afterwards, too
carnal to be Christian.