It is a pity that, as regards painting, this Tuscan feeling (for
Giottesque painting had the cosmopolitan, as distinguished from local,
quality of the Middle Ages and of the Franciscan movement) should have
been at its strongest just in the century when mere scientific
interest was uppermost. Nay, one is tempted to think that matters were
made worse by that very love of the strenuous, the definite, the
lucid, which is part of the Tuscan spirit. So that we have to pick
out, in men like Donatello, Uccello, Pollaiolo and Verrocchio, nay,
even in Lippi and Botticelli, the fragments which correspond to what
we get quite unmixed and perfect in the Romanesque churches of Pisa,
Florence, and Pistoia, in the sacristies and chapels of Brunelleschi,
Alberti, and Sangallo, and in a hundred exquisite cloisters and
loggias of unnoticed town houses and remote farms. But perhaps there
is added a zest (by no means out of keeping with the Tuscan feeling)
to our enjoyment by the slight effort which is thus imposed upon us:
Tuscan art does not give its exquisiteness for nothing.
Be this as it may, the beauty of Florentine Renaissance painting must
be sought, very often, not in the object which the picture represents,
but in the mode in which that object is represented. Our habits of
thought are so slovenly in these matters, and our vocabulary so poor
and confused, that I find it difficult to make my exact meaning clear
without some insistence. I am not referring to the mere moral
qualities of care, decision, or respectfulness, though the recognition
thereof adds undoubtedly to the noble pleasure of a work of art; still
less to the technical or scientific lucidity which the picture
exhibits. The beauty of fifteenth-century painting is a visible
quality, a quality of the distribution of masses, the arrangement of
space; above all, of the lines of a picture. But it is independent of
the fact of the object represented being or not what in real life we
should judge beautiful; and it is, in large works, unfortunately even
more separate from such arrangement as will render a complicated
composition intelligible to the mind or even to the eye. The problems
of anatomy, relief, muscular action, and perspective which engrossed
and in many cases harassed the Florentines of the Renaissance, turned
their attention away from the habit of beautiful general composition
which had become traditional even in the dullest and most effete of
their Giottesque predecessors, and left them neither time nor
inclination for wonderful new invention in figure distribution like
that of their contemporary Umbrians. Save in easel pictures,
therefore, there is often a distressing confusion, a sort of dreary
random packing, in the works of men like Uccello, Lippi, Pollaiolo,
Filippino, Ghirlandaio, and even Botticelli. And even in the more
simply and often charmingly arranged easel pictures, the men and women
represented, even the angels and children, are often very far from
being what in real life would be deemed beautiful, or remarkable by
any special beauty of attitude and gesture. They are, in truth,
studies, anatomical or otherwise, although studies in nearly every
case dignified by the habit of a very serious and tender devoutness:
rarely soulless or insolent studio drudgery or swagger such as came
when art ceased to be truly popular and religious. Studies, however,
with little or no selection of the reality studied, and less thought
even for the place or manner in which they were to be used.
But these studies are executed, however scientific their intention,
under the guidance of a sense and a habit of beauty, subtle and
imperious in proportion, almost, as it is self-unconscious. These
figures, sometimes ungainly, occasionally ill-made, and these
features, frequently homely or marred by some conspicuous ugliness,
are made up of lines as enchantingly beautiful, as seriously
satisfying, as those which surrounded the Tuscans in their landscape.
And it is in the extracting of such beauty of lines out of the
bewildering confusion of huge frescoes, it is in the seeing as
arrangements of such lines the sometimes unattractive men and women
and children painted (and for that matter, often also sculptured) by
the great Florentines of the fifteenth century, that consists the true
appreciation and habitual enjoyment of Tuscan Renaissance painting.
The outline of an ear and muscle of the neck by Lippi; the throw of
drapery by Ghirlandaio; the wide and smoke-like rings of heavy hair by
Botticelli; the intenser, more ardent spiral curls of Verrocchio or
the young Leonardo; all that is flower-like, flame-like, that has the
swirl of mountain rivers, the ripple of rocky brooks, the solemn and
poignant long curves and sudden crests of hills, all this exists in
the paintings of the Florentines; and it is its intrinsic nobility and
exquisiteness, its reminiscence and suggestion of all that is
loveliest and most solemn in nature, its analogy to all that is
strongest and most delicate in human emotion, which we should seek for
and cherish in their works.