The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are strange: its l

Produced by Marc D'Hooghe

EUPHORION: BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIEVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE

BY

VERNON LEE

_Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro," etc._

_VOL. II._

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

THE PORTRAIT ART

THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO

MEDIAEVAL LOVE

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX

* * * * *

THE PORTRAIT ART

I.

Real and Ideal--these are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving,

which criticism claps with random facility on to every imaginable

school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real--the

upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of

artists seeks after the ideal--the ideal which may mean sublimity or

platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a

realist or an idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or

idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of almost moral

importance. Now the fact of the case is that the question of realism and

idealism, which we calmly assume as already settled or easy to settle by

our own sense of right and wrong, is one of the tangled questions of

art-philosophy; and one, moreover, which no amount of theory, but only

historic fact, can ever set right. For, to begin with, we find realism

and idealism coming before us in different ways and with different

meaning and importance. All art which is not addressing (as decrepit art

is forced to do) faculties to which it does not spontaneously and

properly appeal--all art is decorative, ornamental, idealistic

therefore, since it consciously or unconsciously aims, not merely at

reproducing the already existing, but at producing something which shall

repay the looking at it, something which shall ornament, if not a place,

at least our lives; and such making of the ornamental, of the worth

looking at, necessarily implies selection and arrangement--that is to

say idealism. At the same time, while art aims definitely at being in

this sense decorative, art may very possibly aim more immediately at

merely reproducing, without, selection or arrangement, the actually

existing things of the world; and this in order to obtain the mere power

of representation. In short, art which is idealistic as a master will

yet be realistic as a scholar: it decorates when it achieves, it copies

when it studies. But this is only half the question. Certain whole

schools may be described as idealistic, others as realistic, in

tendency; and this, not in their study, but in their achievement. One

school will obviously be contented with forms the most unselected and

vulgar; others will go but little out of their way in search of

form-superiority; while yet others, and these we must emphatically call

idealistic, are squeamish to the last degree in the choice and

adaptation of form, anxious, to get the very best, and make the very

best of it. Yet, on thinking over it, we shall find that realistic and

idealistic schools are all, in their achievements, equally striving

after something which is not the mere reproduction of the already

existing as such--striving, in short, after decoration. The pupil of

Perugino will, indeed, wait patiently to begin his work until he can

find a model fit for a god or goddess; while the fellow-craftsman of

Rembrandt will be satisfied with the first dirty old Jew or besotten

barmaid that comes to hand. But the realistic Dutchman is not,

therefore, any the less smitten with beauty, any the less eager to be

ornamental, than the idealistic Italian: his man and woman he takes

indeed with off-hand indifference, but he places them in that of which

the Italian shall perhaps never have dreamed, in that on which he has

expended all his science, his skill, his fancy, in that which he gives

as his addition to the beautiful things of art--in atmosphere, in light,

which are to the everyday atmosphere and light what the patiently sought

for, carefully perfected god or goddess model of Raphael is to the

everyday Jew, to the everyday barmaid, of Rembrandt.

The ideal, for the man who is quite coarsely realistic in his figures,

exists in the air, light, colour; and in saying this I have, so to

speak, turned over the page too quickly, forestalled the expression of

what I can prove only later: the disconnection of such comparative

realism and idealism as this (the only kind of realism, let us remember,

which can exist in great art) with any personal bias of the artist, its

intimate dependence upon the constitution and tendency of art, upon its

preoccupations about form, or colour, or light, in a given country and

at a given moment. And now I should wish to resume the more orderly

treatment of the subject, which will lead us in time to the second half

of the question respecting realism and idealism. These considerations

have come to me in connection with the portrait art of the Renaissance;

and this very simply. For portrait is a curious bastard of art, sprung

on the one side from a desire which is not artistic, nay, if anything,

opposed to the whole nature and function of art: the desire for the mere

likeness of an individual. The union with this interloping tendency, so

foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has produced portrait;

and by the position of this hybrid, or at least far from regularly bred

creature; by the amount of the real artistic quality of beauty which it

is permitted to retain by the various schools of art, we can, even as by

the treatment of similar social interlopers we can estimate the

necessities and tendencies of various states of society, judge what are

the conditions in which the various schools of art struggle for the

object of their lives, which is the beautiful.

I have said that art is realistic in its periods or moments of study;

and this is essentially the case even with the school which in many

respects was the most unmistakably decorative and idealistic in

intention: the school of Giotto. The Giottesques are more than

decorative artists, they are decorators in the most literal sense.

Painting with them is merely one of the several arts and crafts enslaved

by mediaeval architecture and subservient to architectural effects. Their

art is the only one which is really and successfully architecturally

decorative; and to appreciate this we must contrast their fresco-work

with that of the fifteenth century and all subsequent times. Masaccio,

Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, turn the wall into a mere badly made frame; a

gigantic piece of cardboard would do as well, and better; the colours

melt into one another, the figures detach themselves at various degrees

of relief; those upon the ceiling and pendentives are frequently upside

down; yet these figures, which are so difficult to see, are worth seeing

only in themselves, and not in relation to their position. The masonry

is no longer covered, but carved, rendered uneven with the cavities and

protrusions of perspective. In Mantegna's frescoes the wall becomes a

slanting theatre scene, cunningly perspectived like Palladio's Teatro

Olimpico; with Correggio, wall, masonry, everything, is dissolved, the

side or cupola of a church becomes a rent in the clouds, streaming with

light.

Not so with the Giottesque frescoes: the wall, the vault, the triumphant

masonry is always present and felt, beneath the straight, flat bands of

uniform colour; the symmetrical compartments, the pentacles, triangles,

and segments, and borders of histories, whose figures never project,

whose colours are separate as those in a mosaic. The Giottesque

frescoes, with their tiers and compartments of dark blue, their vague

figures dressed in simple ultramarines, greens, dull reds, and purples;

their geometrical borders and pearlings and dog-tooths; cover the walls,

the ribbed and arched ceilings, the pointed raftering almost like some

beautiful brown, blue, and tarnished gold leather-hangings; the figures,

outlined in dark paint, have almost the appearance of being stencilled,

or even stamped on the wall. Such is Giottesque painting: an art which

is not merely essentially decorative, but which is, moreover, what

painting and sculpture remained throughout the Gothic period,

subservient to the decorative effect of another art; an art in which all

is subordinated to architectural effect, in which form, colour, figures,

houses, the most dramatic scenes of the most awful of all dramas,

everything is turned into a kind of colossal and sublime wall-paper; and

such an art as this would lead us to expect but little realism, little

deliberate and slavish imitation of the existing. Yet wherever there is

life in this Gothic art (which has a horrible tendency, piously

unobserved by critics, to stagnate into blundering repetition of the

same thing), wherever there is progress, there is, in the details of

that grandiose, idealistic decoration, realism of the crudest kind.

Those Giottesque workers, who were not content with a kind of Gothic

Byzantinism; those who really handed over something vital to their

successors of the fifteenth century, while repeating the old

idealistical decorations; were studying with extraordinary crudeness of

realism. Everything that was not conventional ornament or type was

portrait; and portrait in which the scanty technical means of the

artist, every meagre line and thin dab of colour, every timid stroke of

brush or of pencil, went towards the merciless delineation not merely of

a body but of a soul. And the greater the artist, the more cruel the

portrait: cruellest in representation of utter spiritual baseness in the

two greatest of these idealistic decorators; Giotto, and his latest

disciple, Fra Angelico. Of this I should like to give a couple of

examples.

In Giotto's frescoes at Santa Croce--one of the most lovely pieces of

mere architectural decoration conceivable--there are around the dying

and the dead St. Francis two groups of monks, which are astoundingly

realistic. The solemn ending of the ideally beautiful life of sanctity

which was so fresh in the memory of Giotto's contemporaries, is nothing

beyond a set of portraits of the most absolutely mediocre creatures,

moral and intellectual, of creatures the most utterly incapable of

religious enthusiasm that ever made religion a livelihood. They gather

round the dying and the dead St. Francis, a noble figure, not at all

ecstatic or seraphic, but pure, strong, worn out with wise and righteous

labour, a man of thought and action, upon whose hands and feet the

stigmata of supernatural rapture are a mere absurdity. The monks are

presumably his immediate disciples, those fervent and delicate poetic

natures of whom we read in the "Fioretti di San Francesco." To represent

them Giotto has painted the likeness of the first half-dozen friars he

may have met in the streets near Santa Croce: not caricatures, nor

ideals, but portraits Giotto has attempted neither to exalt nor to

degrade them into any sort of bodily or spiritual interestingness. They

are not low nor bestial nor extremely stupid. They are in various

degrees dull, sly, routinist, prosaic, pedantic; their most noteworthy

characteristic is that they are certainly the men who are not called by

God. They are no scandal to the Church, but no honour; they are sloth,

stupidity, sensualism, and cunning not yet risen to the dignity of a

vice. They look upon the dying and the dead saint with indifference,

want of understanding, at most a gape or a bright look of stupid

miscomprehension at the stigmata: they do not even perceive that a saint

is a different being from themselves. With these frescoes of Giotto I

should wish to compare Fra Angelico's great ceremonial crucifixion in

the cloister chapel of San Marco of Florence; for it displays to an

extraordinary degree that juxtaposition of the most conventionally

idealistic, pious decorativeness with the realism straightforward,

unreflecting, and heartless to the point of becoming perfectly

grotesque. The fresco is divided into two scenes: on the one side the

crucifixion, the mystic actors of the drama, on the other the holy men

admitted to its contemplation. A sense that holy things ought to be

old-fashioned, a respect for Byzantine inanity which invariable haunted

the Giottesques in their capacity of idealistic decorators, of men who

replaced with frescoes the solemn lifeless splendours of mosaic; this

kind of artistico-religious prudery has made Angelico, who was able to

foreshorten powerfully the brawny crucified thieves, represent the

Saviour dangling from the cross bleached, boneless, and shapeless, a

thing that is not dead because it has never been alive. The holy persons

around stand rigid, vacant, against their blue nowhere of background,

with vague expanses of pink face looking neither one way nor the other;

mere modernized copies of the strange, goggle-eyed, vapid beings on the

old Italian mosaics. This is not a representation of the actual reality

of the crucifixion, like Tintoret's superb picture at S. Rocco, or

Duerer's print, or so many others, which show the hill, the people, the

hangman, the ladders and ropes and hammers and tweezers: it is a sort of

mystic repetition of it; subjective, if I may say so; existing only in

the contemplation of the saints on the opposite side, who are spectators

only in the sense that a contemplative Christian may be said to be the

mystic spectator of the Passion. The thing for the painter to represent

is fervent contemplation, ecstatic realization of the past by the force

of ardent love and belief; the condition of mind of St. Francis, St.

Catherine of Siena, Madame Guyon: it is the revelation of the great

tragedy of heaven to the soul of the mystic. Now, how does Fra Angelico

represent this? A row of saints, founders of orders, kneel one behind

the other, and by their side stand apostles and doctors of the Church;

admitting them to the sight of the super-human, with the gesture, the

bland, indifferent vacuity of the Cameriere Segreto or Monsignore who

introduces a troop of pilgrims to the Pope; they are privileged persons,

they respect, they keep up decorum, they raise their eyes and compress

their lips with ceremonious reverence; but, Lord! they have gone through

it all so often, they are so familiar with it, they don't look at it any

longer; they gaze about listlessly, they would yawn if they were not too

well bred for that. The others, meanwhile, the sainted pilgrims, the men

whose journey over the sharp stones and among the pricking brambles of

life's wilderness finds its final reward in this admission into the

presence of the Holiest, kneel one by one, with various expressions: one

with the stupid delight of a religious sightseer; his vanity is

satisfied, he will next draw a rosary from his pocket and get it blessed

by Christ Himself; he will recount it all to his friends at home.

Another is dull and gaping, a clown who has walked barefoot from

Valencia to Rome, and got imbecile by the way; yet another, prim and

dapper; the rest indifferent looking restlessly about them, at each

other, at their feet and hands, perhaps exchanging mute remarks about

the length of time they are kept waiting; those at the end of the

kneeling procession, St. Peter Martyr and St. Giovanni Gualberto

especially, have the bored, listless, devout look of the priestlets in

the train of a bishop. All these figures, the standing ones who

introduce and the kneeling ones who are being introduced, are the most

perfect types of various states of dull, commonplace, mediocre routinist

superstition; so many Camerlenghi on the one hand, so many Passionist or

Propagandists on the other: the first aristocratic, bland and bored; the

second, dull, listless, mumbling, chewing Latin Prayers which never

meant much to their minds, and now mean nothing; both perfectly

reverential and proper in behaviour, with no more possibility of

individual fervour of belief than of individual levity of disbelief: the

Church, as it exists in well-regulated decrepitude. And thus does the

last of the Giottesques, the painter of glorified Madonnas and dancing

angels, the saint, represent the saints admitted to behold the supreme

tragedy of the Redemption.

Thus much for the Giottesques. The Tuscans of the early Renaissance

developed up to the utmost, assisted by the goldsmiths and sculptors,

who taught them modelling and anatomy, that realistic element of

Giottesque painting. Its ideal decorative part had become impossible.

Painting could no longer be a decoration of architecture, and it had not

yet the means of being ornamental in itself; it was an art which did

not achieve, but merely studied. Among its exercises in anatomy,

modelling, perspective, and so forth, always laborious and frequently

abortive, its only spontaneous, satisfactory, mature production was its

portrait work, Portraits of burghers in black robes and hoods; of

square-jawed youths with red caps stuck on to their fuzzy heads, of bald

and wrinkled scholars and magnificoes; of thinly bearded artizans;

people who stand round the preaching Baptist or crucified Saviour, look

on at miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complacent, heedless, against

their background of towered, walled, and cypressed city--of buttressed

square and street; ugly but real, interesting, powerful among the

grotesque agglomerations of bag-of-bones nudities, bunched and taped-up

draperies and out-of-joint architecture of the early Renaissance

frescoes; at best among its picture-book and Noah's-ark prettinesses of

toy-box cypresses, vine trellises, inlaid house fronts, rabbits in the

grass, and peacocks on the roofs; for the early Renaissance, with the

one exception of Masaccio, is in reality a childish time of art, giving

us the horrors of school-hour blunders and abortions varied with the

delights of nursery wonderland: maturity, the power of achieving, the

perception of something worthy of perception, comes only with the later

generation, the one immediately preceding the age of Raphael and Michael

Angelo; with Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, Filippino, Botticelli, Perugino,

and their contemporaries.

But this period is not childish, is not immature in everything. Or,

rather, the various arts which exist together at this period are not all

in the same stage of development. While painting is in this immature

ugliness, and ideal sculpture, in works like Verrocchio's and

Donatello's David, only a cleverer, more experienced, but less

legitimate kind of painting, painting more successful in the present,

but with no possible future; the almost separate art of

portrait-sculpture arises again where it was left by Graeco-Roman

masters, and, developing to yet greater perfection, gives in marble the

equivalent of what painting will be able to produce only much later:

realistic art which is decorative; beautiful works made out of ugly

materials.

The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are strange: its life, its

power, depend upon death; it is an art developed in the burying vault

and cloister cemetery. During the Middle Ages sculpture had had its

reason, its vital possibility, its something to influence, nay, to keep

it alive, in architecture; but with the disappearance of Gothic building

disappears also the possibility of the sculpture which covers the

portals of Chartres and the belfry of Florence. The pseudo-classic

colonnades, entablatures, all the thin bastard Ionic and Corinthian of

Aberti and Bramante, did not require sculpture, or had their own little

supply of unfleshed ox-skulls, greengrocer's garlands, scallopings and

wave-linings, which, with a stray siren and one or two bloated emperors'

heads, amply sufficed. On the other hand, mediaeval civilization and

Christian dogma did not encourage the production of naked of draped

ideal statues like those which Antiquity stuck on countless temple

fronts, and erected at every corner of square, street, or garden. The

people of the Middle Ages were too grievously ill grown, distorted,

hideous, to be otherwise than indecent in nudity; they may have had an

instinct of the kind, and, ugly as they knew themselves to be, they must

yet have found in forms like those of Verrocchio's David insufficient

beauty to give much pleasure. Besides, if the Middle Ages had left no

moral room for ideal sculpture once freed from the service of

architecture; they had still less provided it with a physical place.

Such things could not be set up in churches, and only a very moderate

number of statues could be wanted as open-air monuments in the narrow

space of a still Gothic city; and, in fact, ideal heroic statues of the

early Renaissance are fortunately not only ugly, but comparatively few

in number. There remained, therefore, for sculpture, unless contented to

dwindle down into brass and gold miniature work, no regular employment

save that connected with sepulchral monuments. During the real Middle

Ages, and in the still Gothic north, the ornamentation of a tomb

belonged to architecture: from the superb miniature minsters, pillared

and pinnacled and sculptured, cathedrals within the cathedral, to the

humbler foliated arched canopy, protecting a simple sarcophagus at the

corner of many a street in Lombardy. The sculptor's work was but the

low relief on the church flags, the timidly carved, outlined,

cross-legged knight or praying priest, flattened down on his pillow as

if ashamed even of that amount of prominence, and in a hurry to be

trodden down and obliterated into a few ghostly outlines. But to this

humiliated prostrate image, to this flat thing doomed to obliteration,

came the sculptor of the Renaissance, and bade the wafer-like simulacrum

fill up, expand, raise itself, lift itself on its elbow, arise and take

possession of the bed of state, the catafalque raised high above the

crowd, draped with brocade, carved with rich devices of leaves and

beasts of heraldry, roofed over with a dais, which is almost a triumphal

arch, garlanded with fruits and flowers, upon which the illustrious dead

were shown to the people; but made eternal, and of eternal magnificence,

by the stone-cutter, and guarded, not for an hour by the liveried pages

or chaunting monks, but by winged genii for all eternity. Some people, I

know, call this a degradation, and say that it was the result of corrupt

pride, this refusal to have the dear or illustrious dead scraped out any

longer by the shoe-nails of every ruffian, rubbed out by the knees of

every kitchen wench; but to me it seems that it was due merely to the

fact that sculpture had lost its former employment, and that a great art

cannot (thank Heaven!) be pietistically self-humiliating. Be this as it

may, the sculpture of the Renaissance had found a new and singularly

noble line of work, the one in which it was great, unique, unsurpassed,

because untutored. It worked here without models, to suit modern

requirements, with modern spirit; it was emphatically-modern sculpture;

the only modern sculpture which can be talked of as something original,

genuine, valuable, by the side of antique sculpture. Greek Antiquity had

evaded death, and neglected the dead; a garland of maenads and fauns

among ivy leaves, a battle of amazons or centaurs; in the late

semi-Christian, platonic days, some Orphic emblem, or genius; at most,

as in the exquisite tombs of the Keramikos of Athens, a figure, a youth

on a prancing steed, like the Phidian monument of Dexileus; a maiden,

draped and bearing an urn; but neither the youth nor the maiden is the

inmate of the tomb: they are types, living types, no portraits. Nay,

even where Antiquity shows us Death or Hermes, gently leading away the

beloved; the spirit, the ghost, the dead one, is unindividual.

"Sarkophagen und Urnen bekraenzte der Heide mit Leben," said Goethe; but

it was the life which was everlasting because it was typical: the life

not which had been relinquished by the one buried there, but the life

which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes. The Romans, on

the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as

more domestic, less coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from

the Etruscans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a desire

unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband

and wife stare forth togaed and stolaed, half reduced to a conventional

crop-headedness, grim and stiff as if sitting unwillingly for their

portrait; or reclining on the sarcophagus-lid, neither dead, nor asleep,

nor yet alive and awake, but with a hieratic mummy stare, have little of

aesthetic or sympathetic value. The early Renaissance, then, first

bethought it of representing the real individual in the real death

slumber. And I question whether anything more fitting could be placed on

a tomb than the effigy of the dead as we saw them just before the

coffin-lid closed down; as we would give our all to see them but one

little moment longer; as they continue to exist for our fancy within the

grave; for to any but morbid feelings the beloved can never suffer

decay. Whereas a portrait of the man in life, as the throning popes in

St. Peter's, seems heartless and derisive; such monuments striking us as

conceived and ordered by their inmates while alive, like Michael

Angelo's Pope Julius, and Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied

about his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the late Middle

Ages, felt better than this: on the extreme pinnacle, high on the roof,

they might indeed place against the russet brick or the blue sky, amid

the hum of life and the movement of the air, the living man, like the

Scaligers, the mailed knight on his charger, lance in rest: but in the

church below, under the funereal pall, they could place only the body

such as it may have lain on the bier.

And that figure on the bier was the great work of Renaissance sculpture.

Inanimate and vulgar when in heroic figures they tried to emulate the

ancients, the sculptors of the fifteenth century have found their own

line. The modesty, the simplicity, the awful and beautiful repose of the

dead; the individual character cleared of all its conflicting meannesses

by death, simplified, idealized as it is in the memory of the

survivors--all these are things which belong to the Renaissance. As the

Greeks gave the strong, smooth life-current circulating through their

heroes; so did these men of the fifteenth century give the gentle and

harmonious ebbing after-life of death in their sepulchral monuments.

Things difficult to describe, and which must be seen and remembered.

There is the monument, now in the museum at Ravenna, by a sculptor whose

name, were it known, would surely be among the greatest, of the

condottiere, Braccioforte: the body prone in its heavy case of armour,

not yet laid out in state, but such as he may have been found in the

evening, when the battle was over, under a tree where they had carried

him to die while they themselves went back to fight; the head has fallen

back, side-ways, weighed down by the helmet, which has not even been

unbuckled, only the face, the clear-cut, austere features, visible

beneath the withdrawn vizor; the eyes have not been closed; and there

are few things more exquisite and solemn at once in all sculpture, than

the indication of those no longer seeing eyes, of that broken glance,

beneath the half-closed lids. There is Rossellino's Cardinal of Portugal

at S. Miniato a Monte: the slight body, draped in episcopal robes, lying

with delicate folded hands, in gracious decorum of youthful sanctity;

the strong delicate head, of clear feature and gentle furrow of

suffering and thought, a face of infinite purity of strength, strength

still ungnarled by action: a young priest, who in his virginal dignity

is almost a noble woman. And there is the Ilaria Guinigi of Jacopo della

Quercia (the man who had most natural affinity with the antique of all

these sculptors, as one may see from the shattered remains of the Fonte

Gaia of Siena), the lady stretched out on the rose-garlanded bed of

state in a corner of Lucca Cathedral, her feet upon her sleeping dog,

her sweet, girlish head, with wavy plaits of hair encircled by a

rose-wreathed, turban-like diadem, lying low on round cushions; the bed

gently giving way beneath the beautiful, ample-bosomed body, round which

the soft robe is chastely gathered, and across which the long-sleeved

arms are demurely folded; the most beautiful lady (whose majestic tread

through the palace rooms we can well imagine) that the art of the

fifteenth century has recorded. There is, above all, the Carlo

Marsuppini of Desiderio da Settignano, the humanist Secretary of the

Commonwealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb with shell fretwork and

curling acanthus, in Santa Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty

of the Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady Ilaria are commonplace

compared with the refinement of this worn old face, with scant wavy hair

and thin, gently furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features. The

slight figure looks as if in life it must have seemed almost

transparent; and the hands are very pathetic: noble, firm hands, subtle

of vein and wrist, crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, but

in gentle weariness, over the book on his breast. That book is certainly

no prayer-book; rather a volume of Plato or Cicero: in his last moments

the noble old man has longed for a glance over the familiar pages; they

have placed the book on his breast, but it has been too late; the

drowsiness of death has overtaken him, and with his last sigh he has

gently folded his hands over the volume, with the faint, last clinging

to the things beloved in this world.

Such is that portrait sculpture of the early Renaissance, its only

sculpture, if we except the exquisite work in babies and angels just out

of the nursery of the Robbias, which is a real achievement. But how

achieved? This art is great just by the things which Antiquity did not.

And what are those things? Shall we say that it is sentiment? But all

fine art has tact, antique art most certainly; and as to pathos, why,

any quiet figure of a dead man or woman, however rudely carved, has

pathos; nay, there is pathos in the poor puling hysterical art which

makes angels draw the curtains of fine ladies' bedchambers, and fine

ladies, in hoop or limp Grecian dress, faint (the smelling bottle,

Betty!) over their lord's coffin; there is pathos, to a decently

constituted human being, wherever (despite all absurdities) we can

imagine that there lies some one whom it was bitter to see departing, to

whom it was bitter to depart. Pathos, therefore, is not the question;

and, if you choose to call it sentiment, it is in reality a sentiment

for line and curve, for stone and light. The great question is, How did

these men of the Renaissance make their dead people look beautiful? For

they were not all beautiful in life, and ugly folk do not grow beautiful

merely because they are dead. The Cardinal of Portugal, the beautiful

Ilaria herself, were you to sketch their profile and place it by the

side of no matter what ordinary antique, would greatly fall short of

what we call sculpturesque beauty; and many of the others, old humanists

and priests and lawyers, are emphatically ugly: snub or absurdly hooked

noses, retreating or deformedly overhanging foreheads, fleshy noses, and

flabby cheeks, blear eyes and sunk-in mouths; and a perfect network of

wrinkles and creases, which, hard as it is to say, have been scooped out

not merely by age, but by low mind, fretting and triumphant animalism.

Now, by what means did the sculptor--the sculptor, too unacquainted with

sculptural beauty (witness his ugly ideal statues), to be able, like the

man who turned the successors of Alexander into a race of leonine though

crazy demi-gods--to insidiously idealize these ugly and insignificant

features; by what means did he turn these dead men into things beautiful

to see? I have said that he took up art where Graeco-Roman Antiquity had

left it. Remark that I say Graeco-Roman, and I ought to add much more

Roman than Greek. For Greek sculpture, nurtured in the habit of perfect

form, art to whom beauty was a cheap necessity, invariably idealized

portrait, idealized it into beauty or inanity. But when Greek art had

run its course; when beauty of form had well-nigh been exhausted or

begun to pall; certain artists, presumably Greeks, but working for

Romans, began to produce portrait work of quite a new and wonderful

sort: the beautiful portraits of ugly old men, of snub little boys, work

which was clearly before its right time, and was swamped by idealized

portraits, insipid, nay, inane, from the elegant revivalist busts of

Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius down to the bonnet blocks of the lower

empire. Of this Roman portrait art, of certain heads of half-idiotic

little Caesar brats, of sly and wrinkled old men, things which ought to

be so ugly and yet are so beautiful, we say, at least, perhaps

unformulated, we think, "How Renaissance!" And the secret of the beauty

of these few Graeco-Roman busts, which is also that of Renaissance

portrait sculpture, is that the beauty is quite different in kind from

the beauty of Greek ideal sculpture, and obtained by quite different

means.

It is, essentially, that kind of beauty which I began by saying

belonged to realistic art, to the art which is not squeamish about the

object which it represents, but is squeamish about the manner and medium

in which that indifferent object is represented; it is a kind of beauty,

therefore, more akin to that of Rembrandt and Velasquez than to that of

Michael Angelo or Raphael. It is the beauty, not of large lines and

harmonies, beauty residing in the real model's forms, beauty real,

wholesale, which would be the same if the man were not marble but flesh,

not in a given position but moving; but it is a beauty of combinations

of light and surface, a beauty of texture opposed to texture, which

would probably be unperceived in the presence of the more regal beauty

of line and colour harmonies, and which those who could obtain this

latter would employ only as much as they were conducive to such larger

beauties. And this beauty of texture opposed to texture and light

combined with surface is a very real thing; it is the great reality of

Renaissance sculpture: this beauty, resulting from the combination, for

instance, in a commonplace face, of the roughness and coarser pore of

the close shaven lips and chin with the smoothness of the waxy hanging

cheeks; the one catching the light, the other breaking it into a ribbed

and forked penumbra. The very perfection of this kind of work is

Benedetto da Maiano's bust of Pietro Mellini in the Bargello at

Florence. The elderly head is of strongly marked osseous structure, yet

fleshed with abundant and flaccid flesh, hanging in folds or creases

round the mouth and chin, yet not flobbery and floppy, but solid, though

yielding, creased, wrinkled, crevassed rather as a sandy hillside is

crevassed by the trickling waters; semi-solid, promising slight

resistance, waxy, yielding to the touch. But all the flesh has, as it

were, gravitated to the lower part of the face, conglomerated, or rather

draped itself, about the mouth, firmer for sunken teeth and shaving; and

the skin has remained alone across the head, wrinkled, yet drawn in

tight folds across the dome-shaped skull, as if, while the flesh

disappeared, the bone also had enlarged. And on the temples the flesh

has once been thick, the bone (seemingly) slight; and now the skin is

being drawn, recently, and we feel more and more every day, into a

radiation of minute creases, as if the bone and flesh were having a last

struggle. Now in this head there is little beauty of line (the man has

never been good-looking), and there is not much character in the sense

of strongly marked mental or moral personality. I do not know, nor care,

what manner of man this may have been. The individuality is one, not of

the mind but of the flesh. What interests, attaches, is not the

character or temperament, but the bone and skin, the creases and folds

of flesh. And herein also lies the beauty of the work. I do not mean its

interest or mere technical skill, I mean distinctly visible and artistic

beauty.

Thus does the sculptor of the Renaissance get beauty, visible beauty,

not psychologic interest, out of a plain human being; but the beauty

(and this is the distinguishing point of what I must call realistic

decorative art) does not exist necessarily in the plain human being: he

merely affords the beginning of a pattern which the artist may be able

to carry out. A person may have in him the making of a really beautiful

bust and yet be ugly; just as the same person may afford a subject for a

splendid painting and for an execrable piece of sculpture. The wrinkles

and creases in a face like that of Benedetto da Maiano's Mellini would

probably be ugly and perhaps disgusting in the real reddish, flaccid,

discoloured flesh; while they are admirable in the solid and

supple-looking marble, in its warm and delicate bistre and yellow.

Material has an extraordinary effect upon form; colour, though not a

positive element in sculpture, has immense negative power in

accentuating or obliterating the mere line. All form becomes vague and

soft in the dairy flaccidness of modern ivory; and clear and powerful in

the dark terra cotta, which can ennoble even the fattest and flattest

faces with its wonderful faculty for making mere surface markings, mere

crowsfeet, interesting. Thus also with bronze: the polished, worked

bronze, of fine chocolate burnish and reddish reflections, mars all

beauty of line; how different the unchased, merely rough cast, greenish,

with infinite delicate greys and browns, making, for instance, the head

of an old woman like an exquisite withered, shrivelled, veined autumnal

leaf. It is moreover, as I have said, a question of combination of

surface and light, this art which makes beautiful busts of ugly men. The

ideal statue of the Greeks intended for the open air; fit to be looked

at under any light, high or low, brilliant or veiled, had indeed to be

prepared to look well under any light; but to look well under any light

means not to use any one particular relation of light as an ally; the

surface was kept modestly subordinated to the features, the features

which must needs look well at all moments and from all points of view.

But the Renaissance sculptor knew where his work would be placed; he

could calculate the effect of the light falling invariably through this

or that window; he could make a fellow-workman of that light, present

for it to draw or to obliterate what features he liked, bid it sweep

away such or such surfaces with a broad stream, cut them with a deep

shadow, caress their smooth chiselling or their rough grainings, mark as

with a nail the few large strokes of the point which gave the firmness

to the strained muscle or stretched skin. Out of this model of his, this

plain old burgess, he and his docile friend the light, could make quite

a new thing; a new pattern of bosses and cavities, of smooth sweeps and

tracked lines, of creases and folds of flesh, of pliable linen and rough

brocade of dress: something new, something which, without a single

feature being straightened or shortened, yet changed completely the

value of the whole assemblage of features; something undreamed of by

nature in moulding that ugly old merchant or humanist. With this art

which produced works like Desiderio da Settignano's Carlo Marsuppini and

Benedetto da Maiano's Pietro Mellini, is intimately connected the art of

the great medallists of the Renaissance--Pasti, Guacialotti, Niccolo

Fiorentino, and, greatest of all, Pisanello. Its excellence depends

precisely upon its independence of the ideal work of Antiquity; nay,

even upon the fact that, while the ancients, striking their coins in

chased metal dies, obtained an astonishing minuteness and clearness of

every separate little stroke and dint, and were therefore forced into an

almost more than sculptural perfection of mere line, of mere profile and

throat and elaborately composed hair, a sort of sublime abstraction of

the possible beauty of a human face, as in the coins of Syracuse and

also of Alexander; the men of the fifteenth century employed the process

of casting the bronze in a concave mould obtained by the melting away of

a medallion in wax; in wax, which taking the living impress of the

artist's finger, and recalling in its firm and yet soft texture the real

substance of the human face, insensibly led the medallist to seek, not

sharp and abstract lines, but simple, strongly moulded bosses; not ideal

beauty, but the real appearance of life. It is, moreover, a significant

fact that while the men who, half a century or so later, made fine,

characterless die-stamped medals in imitation of the antique, Caradossi

and Benvenuto for instance, were goldsmiths and sculptors, workers with

the chisel, artists seeking essentially for abstract elegance of line;

the two greatest medallists of the early Renaissance, Vittore Pisano and

Matteo di Pasti, were both of them painters; and painters of the

Northern Italian school, to whom colour and texture were all important,

and linear form a matter of indifference. And indeed, if we look at the

best work of what I may call the wax mould medallists of the fifteenth

century, even at the magnificent marble medallions of the

laurel-wreathed head of Sigismund Malatesta on the pillars of his church

at Rimini, modelled by Pasti, we shall see that these men were

preoccupied almost exclusively with the almost pictorial effect of the

flesh in its various degrees of boss and of reaction of the light; and

that the character, the beauty even, which they attained, is essentially

due to a skilful manipulation of texture, and surface, and light--one

might almost say of colour. We all know Pisanello's famous heads of the

Malatesti of Rimini: the saturnine Sigismund, the delicate dapper

Novello, the powerful yet beautiful Isotta; but there are other

Renaissance medals which illustrate my meaning even better, and connect

my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more clearly with my

feelings towards such work as Benedetto's Pietro Mellini. Foremost among

these is the perhaps somewhat imperfect and decidedly grotesque, but

astonishingly powerful, naif and characteristic Lorenzo dei Medici by

Niccolo real grandeur of whose conception of this coarse yet imaginative

head may be profitably contrasted with the classicizing efforts after

the demi-god or successor of Alexander in Pollaiolo's famous medal of

the Pazzi conspiracy. Next to this I would place a medal by Guacialotti

of Bishop Niccolo Palmieri, with the motto, "Nudus egressus sic

redibo"--singularly appropriate to the shameless fleshliness of the

personage, with his naked fat chest and shoulders, his fat, pig-like

cheeks and greasy-looking bald head; a hideous beast, yet magnificent in

his bestiality like some huge fattened porker. These medals give us, as

does the bust of Pietro Mellini, beauty of the portrait despite ugliness

of the original. But there are two other medals, this time by Pisanello,

and, as it seems to me, perhaps his masterpieces, which show the quite

peculiar way in which this homely charm of portraiture amalgamates, so

as to form a homogeneous and most seemingly simple whole, with the

homely charm of certain kinds of pure and simple youthful types. One of

these (the reverse of which fantastically represents the four elements,

the wooded earth, the starry sky, the rippled sea, the sun, all in one

sphere) is the portrait of Don Inigo d'Avalos; the other that of Cecilia

Gonzaga. This slender beardless boy in the Spanish shovel hat and wisp

of scarf twisted round the throat; and this tall, long-necked girl, with

sloping shoulders and still half-developed bosom; are, so to speak,

brother and sister in art, in Pisanello's wonderful genius. The relief

of the two medals is extremely low, so that in certain lights the

effigies vanish almost completely, sink into the pale green surface of

the bronze; the portraits are a mere film, a sort of haze which has

arisen on the bronze and gathered into human likeness; but in this film,

this scarce perceptible relief, we are made to perceive the slender

osseous structure, the smooth, sleek, childish blond flesh and hair, the

delicate, undecided pallor of extreme youth and purity, even as we might

in some elaborate portrait by Velasquez, but with a spring-like

healthiness which Velasquez, painting his lymphatic Hapsburgs, rarely

has.

Such is this Renaissance art of medals, this side branch of the great

realistic portraiture in stone of the Benedettos, Desiderios, and

Rossellinos; a perfect thing in itself; and one which, if we muse over

it in connection with the more important works of fifteenth century

sculpture, will perhaps lead us to think that, as the sculpture of

Antiquity, in its superb idealism, its devotion to the perfect line and

curve of beauty, achieved the highest that mere colourless art can

achieve--thanks to the very purity, sternness, and narrowness of its

sculpturesque feeling--so also, perhaps, modern sculpture, should it

ever re-arise, must be a continuation of the tendencies of the

Renaissance, must be the humbler sister of painting, must seek for the

realistic portrait and begin, perhaps, with the realistic medal.

II.