III

One grows to feel the collection of pictures at the Pitti Palace

splendid rather than interesting. After walking through it once or twice

you catch the key in which it is pitched--you know what you are

likely not to find on closer examination; none of the works of the

uncompromising period, nothing from the half-groping geniuses of the

early time, those whose colouring was sometimes harsh and their outlines

sometimes angular. Vague to me the principle on which the pictures

were originally gathered and of the aesthetic creed of the princes who

chiefly selected them. A princely creed I should roughly call it--the

creed of people who believed in things presenting a fine face to

society; who esteemed showy results rather than curious processes, and

would have hardly cared more to admit into their collection a work by

one of the laborious precursors of the full efflorescence than to see a

bucket and broom left standing in a state saloon. The gallery contains

in literal fact some eight or ten paintings of the early Tuscan

School--notably two admirable specimens of Filippo Lippi and one of the

frequent circular pictures of the great Botticelli--a Madonna, chilled

with tragic prescience, laying a pale cheek against that of a blighted

Infant. Such a melancholy mother as this of Botticelli would have

strangled her baby in its cradle to rescue it from the future. But of

Botticelli there is much to say. One of the Filippo Lippis is perhaps

his masterpiece--a Madonna in a small rose-garden (such a “flowery

close” as Mr. William Morris loves to haunt), leaning over an Infant who

kicks his little human heels on the grass while half-a-dozen curly-pated

angels gather about him, looking back over their shoulders with the

candour of children in _tableaux vivants_, and one of them drops an

armful of gathered roses one by one upon the baby. The delightful

earthly innocence of these winged youngsters is quite inexpressible.

Their heads are twisted about toward the spectator as if they were

playing at leap-frog and were expecting a companion to come and take

a jump. Never did “young” art, never did subjective freshness, attempt

with greater success to represent those phases. But these three fine

works are hung over the tops of doors in a dark back room--the bucket

and broom are thrust behind a curtain. It seems to me, nevertheless,

that a fine Filippo Lippi is good enough company for an Allori or a

Cigoli, and that that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli might

happily balance the flower-like irresponsibility of Raphael’s “Madonna

of the Chair.”

Taking the Pitti collection, however, simply for what it pretends to

be, it gives us the very flower of the sumptuous, the courtly, the

grand-ducal. It is chiefly official art, as one may say, but it presents

the fine side of the type--the brilliancy, the facility, the amplitude,

the sovereignty of good taste. I agree on the whole with a nameless

companion and with what he lately remarked about his own humour on

these matters; that, having been on his first acquaintance with

pictures nothing if not critical, and held the lesson incomplete and

the opportunity slighted if he left a gallery without a headache, he

had come, as he grew older, to regard them more as the grandest of

all pleasantries and less as the most strenuous of all lessons, and to

remind himself that, after all, it is the privilege of art to make us

friendly to the human mind and not to make us suspicious of it. We do

in fact as we grow older unstring the critical bow a little and strike

a truce with invidious comparisons. We work off the juvenile impulse

to heated partisanship and discover that one spontaneous producer isn’t

different enough from another to keep the all-knowing Fates from smiling

over our loves and our aversions. We perceive a certain human solidarity

in all cultivated effort, and are conscious of a growing accommodation

of judgment--an easier disposition, the fruit of experience, to take

the joke for what it is worth as it passes. We have in short less of a

quarrel with the masters we don’t delight in, and less of an impulse

to pin all our faith on those in whom, in more zealous days, we fancied

that we made our peculiar meanings. The meanings no longer seem quite so

peculiar. Since then we have arrived at a few in the depths of our own

genius that are not sensibly less striking.

And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly on one’s mood--as

a traveller’s impressions do, generally, to a degree which those who

give them to the world would do well more explicitly to declare. We have

our hours of expansion and those of contraction, and yet while we follow

the traveller’s trade we go about gazing and judging with unadjusted

confidence. We can’t suspend judgment; we must take our notes, and the

notes are florid or crabbed, as the case may be. A short time ago I

spent a week in an ancient city on a hill-top, in the humour, for which

I was not to blame, which produces crabbed notes. I knew it at the

time, but couldn’t help it. I went through all the motions of liberal

appreciation; I uncapped in all the churches and on the massive ramparts

stared all the views fairly out of countenance; but my imagination,

which I suppose at bottom had very good reasons of its own and knew

perfectly what it was about, refused to project into the dark old town

and upon the yellow hills that sympathetic glow which forms half the

substance of our genial impressions. So it is that in museums and

palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. On some days we ask

but to be somewhat sensibly affected; on others, Ruskin-haunted, to be

spiritually steadied. After a long absence from the Pitti Palace I went

back there the other morning and transferred myself from chair to

chair in the great golden-roofed saloons--the chairs are all gilded and

covered with faded silk--in the humour to be diverted at any price. I

needn’t mention the things that diverted me; I yawn now when I think of

some of them. But an artist, for instance, to whom my kindlier judgment

has made permanent concessions is that charming Andrea del Sarto. When

I first knew him, in my cold youth, I used to say without mincing that

I didn’t like him. _Cet âge est sans pitié_. The fine sympathetic,

melancholy, pleasing painter! He has a dozen faults, and if you insist

pedantically on your rights the conclusive word you use about him will

be the word weak. But if you are a generous soul you will utter it

low--low as the mild grave tone of his own sought harmonies. He is

monotonous, narrow, incomplete; he has but a dozen different figures and

but two or three ways of distributing them; he seems able to utter but

half his thought, and his canvases lack apparently some final return on

the whole matter--some process which his impulse failed him before he

could bestow. And yet in spite of these limitations his genius is both

itself of the great pattern and lighted by the air of a great period.

Three gifts he had largely: an instinctive, unaffected, unerring grace;

a large and rich, and yet a sort of withdrawn and indifferent sobriety;

and best of all, as well as rarest of all, an indescribable property

of relatedness as to the moral world. Whether he was aware of the

connection or not, or in what measure, I cannot say; but he gives, so to

speak, the taste of it. Before his handsome vague-browed Madonnas; the

mild, robust young saints who kneel in his foregrounds and look round

at you with a conscious anxiety which seems to say that, though in the

picture, they are not of it, but of your own sentient life of commingled

love and weariness; the stately apostles, with comely heads and

harmonious draperies, who gaze up at the high-seated Virgin like early

astronomers at a newly seen star--there comes to you the brush of the

dark wing of an inward life. A shadow falls for the moment, and in it

you feel the chill of moral suffering. Did the Lippis suffer, father

or son? Did Raphael suffer? Did Titian? Did Rubens suffer? Perish

the thought--it wouldn’t be fair to _us_ that they should have had

everything. And I note in our poor second-rate Andrea an element of

interest lacking to a number of stronger talents.

Interspersed with him at the Pitti hang the stronger and the weaker

in splendid abundance. Raphael is there, strong in portraiture--easy,

various, bountiful genius that he was--and (strong here isn’t the word,

but) happy beyond the common dream in his beautiful “Madonna of the

Chair.” The general instinct of posterity seems to have been to

treat this lovely picture as a semi-sacred, an almost miraculous,

manifestation. People stand in a worshipful silence before it, as they

would before a taper-studded shrine. If we suspend in imagination on the

right of it the solid, realistic, unidealised portrait of Leo the Tenth

(which hangs in another room) and transport to the left the fresco of

the School of Athens from the Vatican, and then reflect that these were

three separate fancies of a single youthful, amiable genius we recognise

that such a producing consciousness must have been a “treat.” My

companion already quoted has a phrase that he “doesn’t care for

Raphael,” but confesses, when pressed, that he was a most remarkable

young man. Titian has a dozen portraits of unequal interest. I never

particularly noticed till lately--it is very ill hung--that portentous

image of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. He was a burlier, more imposing

personage than his usual legend figures, and in his great puffed sleeves

and gold chains and full-skirted over-dress he seems to tell of a

tread that might sometimes have been inconveniently resonant. But the

_purpose_ to have his way and work his will is there--the great stomach

for divine right, the old monarchical temperament. The great Titian, in

portraiture, however, remains that formidable young man in black, with

the small compact head, the delicate nose and the irascible blue eye.

Who was he? What was he? “_Ritratto virile_” is all the catalogue is

able to call the picture. “Virile!” Rather! you vulgarly exclaim. You

may weave what romance you please about it, but a romance your dream

must be. Handsome, clever, defiant, passionate, dangerous, it was not

his own fault if he hadn’t adventures and to spare. He was a gentleman

and a warrior, and his adventures balanced between camp and court.

I imagine him the young orphan of a noble house, about to come into

mortgaged estates. One wouldn’t have cared to be his guardian, bound to

paternal admonitions once a month over his precocious transactions with

the Jews or his scandalous abduction from her convent of such and such a

noble maiden.

The Pitti Gallery contains none of Titian’s golden-toned groups; but

it boasts a lovely composition by Paul Veronese, the dealer in silver

hues--a Baptism of Christ. W---- named it to me the other day as the

picture he most enjoyed, and surely painting seems here to have proposed

to itself to discredit and annihilate--and even on the occasion of such

a subject--everything but the loveliness of life. The picture bedims and

enfeebles its neighbours. We ask ourselves whether painting as such can

go further. It is simply that here at last the art stands complete.

The early Tuscans, as well as Leonardo, as Raphael, as Michael, saw the

great spectacle that surrounded them in beautiful sharp-edged elements

and parts. The great Venetians felt its indissoluble unity and

recognised that form and colour and earth and air were equal members

of every possible subject; and beneath their magical touch the hard

outlines melted together and the blank intervals bloomed with meaning.

In this beautiful Paul Veronese of the Pitti everything is part of

the charm--the atmosphere as well as the figures, the look of radiant

morning in the white-streaked sky as well as the living human limbs, the

cloth of Venetian purple about the loins of the Christ as well as the

noble humility of his attitude. The relation to Nature of the other

Italian schools differs from that of the Venetian as courtship--even

ardent courtship--differs from marriage.