THE RENAISSANCE
Who is this old gentleman in our next picture reading so quietly and
steadily? Does he not look absorbed in his book? Certainly the peacock,
the bird, and the cat do not worry him or each other, and there is
still another animal in the distance--a lion! Can you see him? He is
walking down the cloister pavement on the right, with his foot lifted
as though it were hurt. The story is that this particular lion limped
into the monastery in which this old man lived, and while all the other
monks fled in terror, this monk saw that the lion's fore-paw was hurt.
He raised it up, found what was the matter, and pulled out the thorn;
and ever afterwards the lion lived peacefully in the monastery with
him. Now, whenever you see a lion in a picture with an old monk, him
you will know to be St. Jerome. He was a learned Christian father who
lived some fifteen hundred years ago, yet his works are still read,
spoken, and heard every day throughout the world. He it was who made
the standard Latin version of the Scriptures. The services in Roman
Catholic churches in all countries are held in Latin to this day, and
St. Jerome's translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate, is the
version still in use.
Here you see St. Jerome depicted sitting in his own study, reading
to prepare himself for his great undertaking; and what a study it is!
You must go to the National Gallery to enjoy all the details, for the
original painting is only 18 inches high by 14 inches broad, and the
books and writing materials are so tiny that some are inevitably lost
in this beautiful photograph. The study is really a part of a monastery
assigned to St. Jerome himself, his books, manuscripts, and other such
possessions. He has a pot of flowers and a dwarf tree, and a towel
to dry his hands on, and a beautiful chair at his desk. He has taken
off his dusty shoes and left them at the foot of the steps.
The painter of this picture, must have had in his mind a very happy
idea of St. Jerome. Others have sometimes painted him as they thought
he looked when living in a horrible desert, as he did for four years.
But at the time this picture was painted, about the year 1470, St.
Jerome in his study was a more usual subject for painters than St.
Jerome in the desert. One reason of this was that in Italy, in the
latter half of the fifteenth century, St. Jerome was considered the
patron saint of scholars, and for the first time since the fall of
the Roman Empire, scholars were perhaps the most influential people
of the day.
[Illustration: ST. JEROME IN HIS STUDY
From the picture by Antonello da Messina, in the National Gallery,
London]
Of course you all know something about the remarkable revival of
learning in the fifteenth century, which started in Italy, spread
northward, and reached England in the reign of Henry VIII. Before the
fifteenth century, Italians seem to have been indifferent to the
monuments around them of ancient civilization. Suddenly they were
fired with a passion for antiquity. They learnt Greek and began to
take a keen interest in the doings of the Greeks and Romans, who in
many ways had lived a life so far superior to their own. Artists studied
the old statues, which taught them the beauty of the human figure.
The reacquired wisdom of the ancients by degrees broke down the
medieval barriers. There was born a spirit of enterprise into the world
of thought as well as into the world of fact, which revolutionized
life and art. The period which witnessed this great mental change is
well known as the Renaissance or 'rebirth.'
When you first looked at this picture you must have thought it very
different from the two earlier ones. Such a subject could only have
been painted thus in an age when men admired the scholar's life. Though
the figure is called that of St. Jerome, there is really nothing
typically saintly about him; he is only serious. The subjects chosen
by painters of the Renaissance were no longer almost solely religious,
but began to be selected from the world of everyday life; even when
the subject was taken from Christian legend, it was now generally
treated as an event happening in the actual world of the painter's
own day.
The manner in which this picture is painted is still more suggestive
of change than the subject itself. Our artist knew a great deal about
the new science of perspective, for instance. One might almost think
that, pleased with his new knowledge, he had multiplied the number
of objects on the shelves so as to show how well he could foreshorten
them. Medieval painters had not troubled about perspective, and were
more concerned, as we have seen, to make a pretty pattern of shapes
and colours for their pictures. The Van Eycks, as we noted, only
acquired the beginnings of an understanding of it, and were very proud
of their new knowledge. It was in Italy that all the rules were at
last brought to light.
The Renaissance Period in Italy may be considered as lasting from 1400
to 1550. The pioneer artists who mastered perspective and worked at
the human figure till they could draw it correctly in any attitude,
lived in the first seventy-five years of the fifteenth century. They
were the breakers of stone and hewers of wood who prepared the way
for the greater artists of the end of the century, but in the process
of learning, many of them painted very lovely things.
The painter of our picture lived within those seventy-five years. He
was, probably, a certain Antonello of Messina--that same town in Sicily
recently wrecked by earthquakes. Of his life little is known. He seems
to have worked chiefly in Venice where there was a fine school of
painting during the Renaissance Period; his senior Giovanni Bellini,
one of the early great painters of Venice, some of whose pictures are
in the National Gallery, taught him much. It is also said that Antonello
went to the Netherlands and there learnt the method of laying paint
on panel invented by the Van Eycks. Modern students say he did not,
but that he picked up his way of painting in Italy. Certainly he and
other Venetians and Italians about this time improved their technical
methods as the Van Eycks had done, and this picture is an early example
of that more brilliant fashion of painting. There is here a Flemish
love of detail. The Italian painters had been more accustomed to
painting upon walls than the Flemings, for the latter had soon
discovered that a damp northern climate was not favourable to the
preservation of wall-paintings. Fresco does not admit of much detail,
as each day's work has to be finished in the day, before the plaster
dries. Thus, a long tradition of fresco painting had accustomed the
Italian painters to a broad method of treatment, which they maintained
to a certain extent even in their panel pictures. But in our St. Jerome
we see a wealth of detail unsurpassed even by John van Eyck.
One needs a magnifying-glass to see everything there is to be seen
in the landscape through the window on the left. Besides the city with
its towers and walls and the mountains behind, there is a river in
the foreground where two little people are sitting in a boat. Observe
every tiny stone in the pavement, and every open page of the books
on the shelves. Here, too, is breadth in the handling. Hold the book
far away from you, so that the detail of the picture vanishes and only
the broad masses of the composition stand out. You still have what
is essential. The picture is one in which Italian feeling and sentiment
blend with Flemish technique and love of little things. There has
always been something of a mystery about the picture, and you must
not be surprised some day if you hear it asserted that Antonello did
not paint it at all. Such changes in the attributions of unsigned
paintings are not uncommon.
One of the greatest pioneer artists of the fifteenth century was Andrea
Mantegna of Padua in the north of Italy. More than any other painter
of his day, he devoted himself to the study of ancient sculpture, even
to the extent of sometimes painting in monochrome to imitate the actual
marble. Paintings by him, which look like sculptured reliefs, are in
the National Gallery; and at Hampton Court is a series of cartoons
representing the Triumph of Julius Caesar, in which the conception
and the handling are throughout inspired by old Roman bas-reliefs.
In other pictures of his, the figures look as though cast of bronze,
for he was likewise influenced by the sculptors of his own day,
particularly by the Florentine Donatello, one of the geniuses of the
early Renaissance. Mantegna's studies of form in sculpture made him
an excellent draughtsman. Strangely enough, it was this very severe
artist who was, perhaps, the first to depict the charm of babyhood.
Often he draws his babes wrapped in swaddling clothes, with their
little fingers in their mouths, or else in the act of crying, with
their eyes screwed up tight, and their mouths wide open. Such a
combination of hard sculpturesque modelling with extreme tenderness
of feeling has a charm of its own.
We have now just one more picture of a sacred subject to look at, one
of the last that still retains much of the old beautiful religious
spirit of the Middle Ages. The painter of it, Sandro Botticelli, a
Florentine, in whom were blended the piety of the Middle Ages and the
intellectual life of the Renaissance, was a very interesting man, whose
like we shall not find among the painters of his own or later days.
He was born in 1446, in Florence, the city in Italy most alive to the
new ideas and the new learning. Its governing family, the Medici, of
whom you have doubtless read, surrounded themselves with a brilliant
society of accomplished men, and adorned their palaces with the finest
works of art that could be produced in their time. The best artists
from the surrounding country were attracted to Florence in the hope
of working for the family, who were ever ready to employ a man of
artistic gifts.
In such an atmosphere an original and alert person like Botticelli
could not fail to keep step with the foremost of his day. His fertile
fancy was charmed by the revived stories of Greek Mythology, and for
a time he gave himself up to the painting of pagan subjects such as
the Birth of Venus from the Sea, and the lovely allegory of Spring
with Venus, Cupid, and the Three Graces. He was one of the early artists
to break through the old wall of religious convention, painting frankly
mythological subjects, and he did them in an exquisite manner all his
own.
The true spirit of beauty dwelt within him, and all that he painted
and designed was graceful in form and beautiful in colour. If, for
instance, you look closely into the designs of the necks of dresses
in his pictures, you will find them delightful to copy and far superior
to the ordinary designs for such things made to-day. In his love of
beauty and his keen appreciation of the new possibilities of painting
he was a true child of the Renaissance, though he had not the joyous
nature so characteristic of the time. Moreover, as I have said, he
retained the old sweet religious spirit, and clothed it with new forms
of beauty in his sacred paintings. There is something pathetic about
many of these--the Virgin, while she nurses the Infant Christ, seems
to foresee all the sorrow in store for her, and but little of the joy.
The girl angels who nestle around her in so many of his pictures, have
faces of exquisite beauty, but in most of them, notwithstanding the
fact that they are evidently painted from Florentine girls of the time,
Botticelli has infused his own personal note of sadness.
At the end of the fifteenth century, when Botticelli was beginning
to grow old, great events took place in Florence. Despite the revival
of learning, we are told by historians that the Church was becoming
corrupt and the people more pleasure-loving and less interested in
the religious life. Then it was that Savonarola, a friar in one of
the convents of Florence, all on fire with enthusiasm for purity and
goodness, began to awaken the hearts of the people with his burning
eloquence, and his denunciations of their worldliness and the deadness
of the Church. He prophesied a great outpouring of the wrath of God,
and in particular that the Church would be purified and renewed after
a quick and terrible punishment. The passion, the conviction, the
eloquence of Savonarola for a time carried the people of Florence away,
and Botticelli with them, so that he became one of the 'mourners' as
the preacher's followers were called.
At this time many persons burnt in great 'bonfires of vanities' all
the pretty trinkets that they possessed. But when the prophecies did
not literally come true, and the people began to be weary of
Savonarola's vehemence, we read that a reaction set in, which afforded
a chance for his enemies within the Church, whom he had lashed with
his tongue from the pulpit of the cathedral. They contrived to have
him tried for heresy and burnt in the market-place of Florence, in
the midst of the people who so shortly before had hung on every word
that fell from his lips.
This tragedy entirely overwhelmed Botticelli, who thenceforward
almost abandoned painting, and gave up his last years to the practices
of the religious life. It was at this time, says Mr. Horne, and under
the influence of these emotions, in the year 1500, when he was sixty
years of age, that he painted the picture here reproduced, as an
illustration to the prophecies of Savonarola, and a tribute to his
memory. Savonarola had been wont to use the descriptions, in the Book
of Revelations, of the woes that were to fall upon the earth before
the building of the new Jerusalem, to illustrate his prophecy of the
scourge that was to come upon Italy, before the Church became purified
from the wickedness of the times. At the top of the picture is written
in Greek:
I, Sandro, painted this picture at the end of the year 1500, during
the troubles of Italy, in the half year after the first year of the
loosing of the Devil for 3-1/2 years, in accordance with the fulfilment
of the 11th chapter of the Revelations of St. John. Then shall the
Devil be chained, according to the 12th chapter, and we shall see him
trodden down as in the picture.
The Devil which was loosed for three and a half years stood for the
stage of wickedness through which Botticelli believed that Florence
was passing in 1500. In the bottom corners of the picture you can see
minute little devils running away discomfited; otherwise all is pure
joy and peace, symbolic of the gladness to come upon Italy when the
Church had been purified:
When Life is difficult, I dream
Of how the angels dance in Heaven.
Of how the angels dance and sing
In gardens of eternal spring,
Because their sins have been forgiven....
And never more for them shall be
The terrors of mortality.
When life is difficult, I dream
Of how the angels dance in Heaven....[2]
[Footnote 2: By Lady Alfred Douglas.]
That is what Botticelli dreamed. He saw the beautiful angels in green,
white, and red dancing with joy, because of the birth of their Saviour,
and into their hands he put scrolls, upon which were written:--'Glory
to God in the Highest.' The rest of the verse, 'Peace and goodwill
towards men' is on the scrolls of the shepherds, brought by the angel
to behold the Babe lying in the manger. The three men, embraced with
such eagerness and joy by the three angels in the foreground, are
Savonarola and his two chief companions, burnt with him, who, after
their long suffering upon earth, have found reward and happiness in
heaven.
[Illustration: THE NATIVITY
From the picture by Sandro Botticelli, in the National Gallery, London]
Such is the meaning of this beautiful little picture, as spiritual
in idea as any of the paintings of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. But while the earlier painters had striven with inadequate
powers to express the religious feeling that was in them, Botticelli's
skill matched his thought. His drawing of the angels in their Greek
dresses is very lovely, and one scarce knows in any picture a group
surpassing that of the three little ones upon the roof of the manger,
nor will you soon see a lovelier Virgin's face than hers. Botticelli
had great power of showing the expression in a face, and the movement
in a figure. Here the movements may seem overstrained, a fault which
grew upon him in his old age; the angel, with the two shepherds on
the right, has come skimming over the ground and points emphatically
at the Babe, and the angel in front embraces Savonarola with vehemence.
The artists of the early Renaissance had learnt with so much trouble
to draw figures in motion that their pleasure in their newly acquired
skill sometimes made them err by exaggeration as their predecessors
by stiffness.
The way in which Botticelli treated this subject of the Nativity of
Christ, is, as you see, very different from the way in which Hubert
van Eyck painted the Three Maries at the Sepulchre. We saw how the
latter pictured the event as actually taking place outside Jerusalem.
To Botticelli the Nativity of Christ was emblematic of a new and happier
life for people in Florence, with the Church regenerated and purified,
as Christ would have wished it to be. To him the Nativity was a symbol
of purity, so he painted the picture as a commentary on the event,
not as an illustration of the Biblical text.
The angels rejoice in heaven as the shepherds upon earth, the devils
flee away discomfited, and Savonarola and his companions obtain peace
after the tribulations of life. Such was the message of Botticelli
in the picture here reproduced.