If Arnolfo di Cambio is the architect not only of the Duomo but of the
Palazzo Vecchio, and if Orcagna conceived the delicate beauty of the
Loggia de' Lanzi, it is, if we may believe Vasari, partly to Arnolfo and
partly to Agnolo Gaddi that we owe Bargello, that palace so like a
fortress, at the corner of Via del Proconsolo and Via Ghibellina. Begun
in the middle of the thirteenth century for the Capitano del Popolo, it
later became the Palace of the Podestà, passing at last, under the Grand
Dukes, to the Bargello, the Captain of Justice, who turned it
barbarously enough into a prison, dividing the great rooms, as it is
said, into cells for his prisoners. To-day it is become the National
Museum, where all that could be gathered of the work of the Tuscan
sculptors is housed and arranged in order.
Often as I wander through those rooms or loiter in the shadow under the
cloisters of the beautiful courtyard, perhaps the most lovely court in
Tuscany, the remembrance of that old fierce life which desired beauty so
passionately and was so eager for every superiority, comes to me, and I
ask myself how the dream which that world pursued with so much
simplicity and enthusiasm can have led us at last to the world of
to-day, with its orderly disorder, its trams and telegraphs and
steam-engines, its material comfort which, how strangely, we have
mistaken for civilisation. In all London there is no palace so fine as
this old prison, nor a square so beautiful as Piazza della Signoria.
Instead of Palazzo Pitti (so much more splendid is our civilisation than
theirs) we are content with Buckingham Palace, and instead of Palazzo
Riccardi we have made the desolate cold ugliness of Devonshire House.
Our craftsmen have become machine-minders, our people, on the verge of
starvation, as we admit, without order, with restraint, without the
discipline of service, having lost the desire of beauty or splendour,
have become serfs because they are ignorant and fear to die. And it is
we who have claimed half the world and thrust upon it an all but
universal domination. In thus bringing mankind under our rule, it is
ever of our civilisation that we boast, that immense barbarism which in
its brutality and materialism first tried to destroy the Latin Church
and then the Latin world, which alone could have saved us from
ourselves. Before our forests were cleared here in Italy they carved
statues, before our banks were founded here in Italy they made the
images of the gods, and in those days there was happiness, and men for
joy made beautiful things. And to-day, half dead with our own smoke,
herded together like wild beasts, slaves of our own inventions, ah,
blinded by our unthinkable folly, before the statues that they made,
before the pictures that they painted, before the palaces that they
built, in the churches where they still pray, stupefied by our own
stupidity, brutalised by our own barbarism, we boast of a civilisation
that has already made us ridiculous, and of which we shall surely die.
Here in the Bargello, the ancient palace of the Podestà of a Latin city,
let us be silent and forget our madness before the statues of the Gods,
the images of the great and beautiful people of old.
Tuscan sculpture, that of all the arts, save architecture, was the first
to rise out of the destruction with which the barbarians of the North
had overwhelmed the Latin world, came to its own really in the fifteenth
century. After the beautiful convention of Byzantium had passed away,
and Gruamone and Adeodatus had carved at Pistoja, Biduinus at S.
Cassiano, Robertus at Lucca, Bonamicus and Bonannus at Pisa, and Guido
da Como again at Pistoja, in the work of Niccolò Pisano at Pisa we come
upon the first thought of the Renaissance, the reliefs of the pulpit in
the Baptistery, in which the Middle Age seems to have passed over the
work of Antiquity almost like a caress. In these panels of the pulpit at
Pisa, where Madonna masquerades as Ariadne and the angel speaks with the
gesture of Hermes, some sentiment of a new sweetness in the world seems
to lurk amid all the naïve classicism, finding expression at last in
such a thing, for instance, as the divine figure of Virtue in the pulpit
of the Duomo of Siena, in which some have thought to find French
influence, the work of the artists of Chartres and Rheims, visible
enough, one might think, in the work of Niccolò's son Giovanni Pisano,
whose ivory Statue of Madonna is to-day perhaps the greatest treasure of
the sacristy of the Duomo at Pisa.
Niccolò Pisano was from Apulia. He may well have seen the beautiful
fragments of Greek and Roman art scattered over the South before he came
to Pisa, yet there may, too, be more truth in Vasari's tale than we are
sometimes willing to admit, so that in the northern city beside Arno it
may well have been with a sort of delight he came upon the art of the
ancients, asleep in the beautiful Campo Santo of Pisa, and awakened it,
yes, almost with a kiss.
It is, however, in the work of his pupils Giovanni Pisano and Arnolfo
Fiorentino[115] that Tuscan sculpture begins to throw off the yoke of
antiquity and to express itself. Fra Guglielmo, another pupil of
Niccolò's, in his work at Perugia more nearly preserves the manner of
his master, though always inferior to him in beauty and force: but in
the work of Arnolfo which remains to us chiefly in the tomb of Cardinal
de Braye in S. Domenico at Orvieto, and in the Tabernacle of S. Paolo
Fuori at Rome, and more especially in the work of Giovanni Pisano in the
pulpit for the Duomo of Pisa, now in the Museo, for instance, we may see
the beginnings of that new Tuscan sculpture which in Andrea Pisano and
Andrea Orcagna was to make the work of Nanni di Banco, of Ghiberti and
Donatello possible, and through them to inspire the art of all the
sculptors of the fifteenth century, that is to say of the Renaissance
itself.
Here in the Bargello it is chiefly that art of the fifteenth century
that we see in all its beauty and realism: and though for the proper
understanding of it some knowledge of its derivation might seem to be
necessary, a knowledge not to be had in the Museo itself, it is really a
new impulse in sculpture, different from, though maybe directed by, that
older art which we come upon, and may watch there, in its dawn and in
its splendour, till with Bandinelli and the pupils of Michelangelo it
loses itself in a noisy grandiosity, a futile gesticulation.
Realism, I said in speaking of the character of this fifteenth century
work, and indeed it is just there that we come upon the very thought of
the time. Sculpture is no longer content with mere beauty, it has
divined that something is wanting, yes, even in the almost miraculous
work of Niccolò Pisano himself; is it only an expression of character,
of the passing moment, of movement that is lacking, or something
comprising all these things--some indefinable radiance which is very
life itself? It is this question which seems to have presented itself to
the sculptors of the fifteenth century: and their work is their answer
to it.
For even as the philosophers and alchemists had sought so patiently for
life, for the very essence of it, through all the years of the Middle
Age, so art now set out in search of it, the greatest treasure of all,
and seems to have found it at last, not hardly or hidden away in some
precipitous place of stones, or among the tombs, but as a little child
playing among the flowers.
The great masters of the Middle Age had set themselves to express in
stone or colour the delicate beauty of the soul, its terror, too, in the
loneliness of the world, where only as it were by chance it might escape
everlasting death. The subtle beauty and pathos of their art has
escaped our eyes filled as they are with the marvellous work of Greece,
unknown till our own time, the splendid and joyful work of the
Renaissance, the mysterious and lovely work of our own day: it remains,
nevertheless, a consummate and exquisite art in its dawn, in its noon,
in its decadence, but it seeks to express something we have forgotten,
and its secret is for the most part altogether hidden from us. It is
from this art, as beautiful in its expression of itself as that of
Greece, that Niccolò Pisano turns away, not to Nature, but to Antiquity.
The movement which followed, producing while it continued almost all
that is to-day gathered in the Bargello, together with much else that is
still happily where it was born, is as it were an appeal from Antiquity
to Life, to Nature. In the simplicity and impulse of this movement, so
spontaneous, so touching, so full of a sense of beauty, which sometimes,
though not often, becomes prettiness, the art of sculpture, awakened at
last from the mysticism of the Middle Age, seems to look back with
longing to the antique world, which it would fain claim as its brother,
and after a little moment in the sun falls again into a sort of
mysticism, a new kingdom of the spirit with Michelangelo, and of the
senses merely with Sansovino and Giovanni da Bologna.
Really Tuscan in its birth, the art of the Quattrocento became at last
almost wholly Florentine, a flower of the Val d'Arno or of the hills
about it, where even to-day at Settignano, at Fiesole, at Majano, at
Rovezzano, you may see the sculptors at work in an open bottega by the
roadside, the rough-hewn marble standing here and there in many sizes
and shapes, the chips and fragments strewing the highway.
In the twilight of this new dawn of the love of nature, perhaps the
first figure we may descry is Piero di Giovanni Tedesco (1386-1402), who
carved the second south door of the Duomo about 1398, where amid so many
lovely natural things, the fig leaf and the oak leaf and the vine, you
may see the lion and the ox, the dog and the snail, and man too; little
fantastic children peeping out from the foliage, or blowing through
musical reeds, or playing with a kitten, tiny naked creatures full of
life and gladness.
The second door north of the Duomo was carved by Niccolò di Piero
d'Arezzo, who was still working more than forty years after Tedesco's
death; but his best work, for we pass by his Statue of St. Mark in the
chapel of the apex of the Duomo, is the little Annunciation over the
niche of the St. Matthew of Or San Michele. In his work on the gate of
the Duomo, however, he was assisted by his pupil Nanni di Banco, who,
born in the fourteenth century, died in 1420; and in his work, and in
that of Jacopo della Quercia, a Sienese, and a much greater man, we see
the very dawn itself.
Nanni di Banco, Vasari tells us, was a man who "inherited a competent
patrimony, and one by no means of inferior condition." He goes on to say
that Nanni was the pupil of Donatello, and though in any technical sense
that seems to be untrue, it may well be that he sought Donato's advice
whenever he could, for he seems to have practised his art for love of
it, and may well have recognised the genius of Donatello, who probably
worked beside him. He too worked at Or San Michele, where he carved the
St. Philip, the delightful relief under the St. George of Donatello, the
Four Saints, which seem to us so full of the remembrance of antiquity,
and the S. Eligius with its beautiful drapery, a little stupid still, or
sleepy is it, with the mystery of the Middle Age that after all was but
just passing away. Something of this sleepiness seems also to have
overtaken the St. Luke, that tired figure in the Duomo; and so it is
with a real surprise that we come at last upon the best work of Nanni's
life, "the first great living composition of the Renaissances," as
Burckhardt says, the Madonna della Cintola over Niccolò d'Arezzo's door
of the Duomo. Even with all the work of Ghiberti, of Donatello even, to
choose from, that relief of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory,
stretching out her hands among the cherubim, with a gesture so eager and
so moving to St. Thomas, who kneels before her, remains one of the most
beautiful works of that age, and one of the loveliest in all Tuscany.
There follows Ciuffagni (1381-1457), that poor sculptor working in his
old age amid much that was splendid and strange at Rimini, where Lorenzo
Ghiberti (1378-1455) had painted in his youth. For all his genius,
Ghiberti, that euphuist, did not influence those who came after him as
Donatello did. His work, inspired by the past, by Andrea Pisano, for
instance, is full of the lost beauty of the Middle Age, the old secrets
of the Gothic manner. His solution of the problem before him, a problem
of movement, of character, of life, is to make the relief as purely
picturesque as possible; with him sculpture almost passes into painting,
using not without charm the perspective of a picture the mere seeming of
just that, but losing how profoundly, much of the nobility, the delight
of pure form, the genius peculiar to sculpture. As an artist pure and
simple, as a master of composition, he may well have no superior, for
the fantasy and beauty of his work, its complexity, too, are almost
unique, and entirely his own; but in simplicity, and in a certain sense
of reality, he is wanting, so that however delightful his work may be,
those "gates of Paradise," for instance, that Michelangelo praised, it
seems to be complete in itself, to suggest nothing but the wonderful
effect one may get by using the means proper to one art for expression
in another, as though one were to write a book that should have the
effect upon one of an opera, to allow the strange rhythm and sensuous
beauty of Tristan and Isolde, for instance, to disengage itself from
pages which were full of just musical words.
Ghiberti's gift for composition, as well as his failure to understand,
or at least to satisfy the more fundamental needs of his art, may be
seen very happily in those two panels now in the Bargello, which he and
Brunellesco made in the competition for the gates of the Baptistery.
Looking on those two panels, where both artists have carved the
Sacrifice of Isaac, you see Ghiberti at his best, the whole interest not
divided, as it is in Brunellesco's panel, between the servants and the
sacrifice, but concentrated altogether upon that scene which is about
to become so tragical. Yet with what energy Brunellesco has conceived an
act that in his hands seems really to have happened. How swiftly the
angel has seized the hand of Abraham; how splendidly he stands, the old
man who is about to kill his only son for the love of God. And then
consider the beauty of Isaac, that naked body which in Brunellesco's
hands is splendid with life, really living and noble, with a truth and
loveliness far in advance of the art of his time. Ghiberti has felt none
of the joy of a creation such as this; his Isaac is sleepy, a little
surprised and altogether docile; he has not sprung up from his knees as
in Brunellesco's panel, but looks up at the angel as though he had never
understood that his very life was at stake. Yet it was in those gates
which, Brunellesco, as it is said, retiring from the contest, the Opera
then gave into his hands, that we shall find the best work of Ghiberti.
There it is really the art of Andrea Pisano that he takes as a master,
and with so fair an example before him produces as splendid a thing as
he ever accomplished, simpler too, and it may be more sincere, though a
little lacking in expressiveness and life. All the rest of his work
seems to me to be lacking in conviction, to be frankly almost an
experiment. His Statue of St. John Baptist, his St. Matthew and St.
Stephen, too, at Or San Michele, different though they are, and with six
years between each of them, seem alike in this, that they are, while
splendid in energy, wanting in purpose, in intention: he never seems
sufficiently sure of himself to convince us. His reliquary in bronze
containing the ashes of S. Zenobius in the apse of the Duomo, is
difficult to see, but it is in the manner of the gates of Paradise. It
was not to the disciples of Ghiberti that the future belonged, but to
those who have studied with Brunellesco. His crucifix in S. Maria
Novella, his Evangelists in the Pazzi Chapel, are among the finest work
of that age, full of life and the remembrance of it in their strength
and beauty.
It is, however, in the art of a contemporary that the new age came at
last to its own--in the work of Donatello. In his youth he had worked
for the Duomo and for Or San Michele side by side with Nanni di Banco,
who may perhaps pass as his master. Of Donatello's life we know almost
nothing If we seek to learn something of him, it must be in his works of
which so many remain to us. We know, however, that he was the intimate
friend of Brunellesco, and that it was with him he set out for Rome soon
after this great and proud man had withdrawn from the contest with
Ghiberti for the Baptistery gates. Donatello was to visit Rome again in
later life, but on this first journey that he made with Brunellesco for
the purposes of study, he must have become acquainted with what was left
of antiquity in the Eternal City. It was too soon for that enthusiasm
for antiquity, which later overwhelmed Italian art so disastrously, to
have arisen. When Donatello returned about a year later to Florence to
work for the Opera del Duomo, it is not any classic influence we find in
his statues, but rather the study of nature, an extraordinary desire to
express not beauty, scarcely ever that, but character. His work is
strong, and often splendid, full of energy, movement, and conviction,
but save now and then, as in the S. Croce Annunciation, for instance, it
is not content with just beauty.
Of his work for the Duomo and the Campanile, I speak elsewhere; it will
be sufficient here to note the splendour of the St. John the Divine in
the apse of the Duomo, which, as Burckhardt has divined, already
suggests the Moses of Michelangelo. The destruction of the unfinished
façade has perhaps made it more difficult to identify the figures he
carved there, but whether the Poggio of the Duomo, for instance, be Job
or no, seems after all to matter very little, since that statue itself,
be its subject what it may, remains to us.
In his work at Or San Michele, in the St. Peter, in the St. Mark, so
like the St. John the Divine and in the St. George, here in the
Bargello, we see his progress, and there in that last figure we find
just that decision and simplicity which seem to have been his own, with
a certain frankness and beauty of youth which are new in his work.
[Illustration: ST. JOHN THE DIVINE
_By Donatello. Duomo, Florence_
_Alinari_]
There are some ten works by the master in the Bargello, together with
numerous casts of his statues and reliefs in other parts of Italy, so
that he may be studied here better than anywhere else. Looking thus on
his work more or less as a whole, it is a new influence we seem to
divine for the first time in the marble David, a little faintly,
perhaps, but obvious enough in the St. George, a Gothic influence that
appears very happily for once, in work that almost alone in Italy seems
to need just that, well, as an excuse for beauty. That marble statue of
David was made at about the same time as the St. John the Divine, for
the Duomo too, where it was to stand within the church in a chapel there
in the apse. A little awkward in his half-shy pose, the young David
stands over the head of Goliath, uncertain whether to go or stay. It is
a failure which passes into the success, the more than success of the
St. George, which is perhaps his masterpiece. Made for the Guild of
Armourers, from the first day on which it was set up it has been
beloved. Michelangelo loved it well, and Vasari is enthusiastic about
it, while Bocchi, writing in 1571,[116] devotes a whole book to it. In
its present bad light--for the light should fall not across, but from in
front and from above, as it did once when it stood in its niche at Or
San Michele--it is not seen to advantage, but even so, the life that
seems to move in the cold stone may be discerned. With a proud and
terrible impetuosity St. George seems about to confront some renowned
and famous enemy, that old dragon whom once he slew. Full of confidence
and beauty he gazes unafraid, as though on that which he is about to
encounter before he moves forward to meet it. Well may Michelangelo have
whispered "March!" as he passed by, it is the very order he awaits, the
whisper of his own heart. It is in this romantic and beautiful figure
that, as it seems to me, that new Gothic influence may be most clearly
discerned. M. Reymond, in his learned and pleasant book on Florentine
sculpture, has pointed out the likeness which this St. George of
Donatello bears to the St. Theodore of Chartres Cathedral, and though
it is impossible to deny that likeness, it seems at first almost as
impossible to explain it. It is true that many Italians were employed in
France in the building of the churches; it is equally true that
Michelozzo, the friend and assistant of Donato, was the son of a
Burgundian; but it seems as unlikely that an Italian artist, inspired by
the French style, returned from France to work in Florence, as that
Michelozzo was born with a knowledge of the northern manner which he
never practised. An explanation, however, offers itself in the fact that
the Religious Orders, those internationalists, continually passed from
North to South, from East to West, from monastery to monastery, and that
they may well have brought with them certain statues in ivory of Madonna
or the Saints, in which such an one as Donatello could have found the
hint he needed. That such statues were known in Italy is proved not only
by their presence in this museum, but by the ivory Madonna of Giovanni
Pisano in the sacristy of the Duomo at Pisa.
The Marzocco which stood of old on the Ringhiera before the Palazzo
Vecchio might seem to be a work of this period, for it is only saved by
a kind of good fortune from failure. It is without energy and without
life, but in its monumental weight and a certain splendour of design it
impresses us with a sort of majesty as no merely naturalistic study of a
lion could do. If we compare it for a moment with the heraldic shield in
Casa Martelli, where Donato has carved in relief a winged griffin
rampant, cruel and savage, with all the beauty and vigour of Verrocchio,
we shall understand something of his failure in the Marzocco, and
something, too, of his success. In that heavy grotesque and fantastic
Lion of the Bargello some suggestion of the monumental art of Egypt
seems to have been divined for a moment, but without understanding.
In the Casa Martelli, too, you may find a statue of St. John Baptist, a
figure fine and youthful and melancholy, with the vague thoughts of
youth, really the elder brother as it were of the child of the Bargello,
who bears his cross like a delicate plaything, unaware of his destiny.
That figure, so full of mystery, seems to have haunted Donatello all his
life, and then St. John Baptist was the patron of Florence and presided
over every Baptistery in Italy; yet it is always with a particular
melancholy that Donatello deals with him, as though in his vague destiny
he had found as it were a vision. The child of the Bargello passes into
the boy of the Casa Martelli, that lad who maybe has heard a voice sweet
enough as yet while wandering by chance on the mountains, sandalled and
clad in camel's hair. We see him again as the chivalrous youth of the
Campanile, the dedicated, absorbed wanderer of the Bargello, the
haggard, emaciated prophet of the Friars' Church at Venice, and at last
as the despairing and ancient seer of Siena, a voice that is only a
voice weary of itself, crying unheeded in the wilderness. And, as it
seems to me in all these figures, which in themselves have so little
beauty, it is rather a mood of the soul that Donatello has set himself
to express than any delight. He has turned away from physical beauty, in
which man can no longer believe, using the body refined almost to the
delicacy and transparency of a shell, in which the soul may shine, or at
least be seen, in all its moods of happiness or terror. That weary
figure who, unconscious of his cross, unconscious of the world, absorbed
in his own destiny, in the scroll of his fate, trudges through the
wilderness without a thought of the way, is as far from the ideal
abstract beauty of the Greeks as from the romantic splendour of Gothic
art. Only with him the soul has lost touch with particular things, even
as the beauty of the Greeks was purged of all the accidents and feeling
that belonged alone to the individual. Like a ghost he passes by, intent
on some immortal sorrow; he is like a shadow on a day of sun, a dark
cloud over the moon, the wind in the desert. And in a moment, we knew
not why, our hearts are restless suddenly, we know not why, we are
unhappy, we know not why, we desire to be where we are not, or only to
forget.
So in the bronze David now in the Bargello we seem to see youth itself
dreaming after the first victory of all the conquests to come, while a
smile of half-conscious delight, is passing from the lips; tyranny is
dead. It is the first nude statue of the Renaissance made for Cosimo de'
Medici before his exile. For Cosimo, too, the Amorino was made that
study of pure delight, where we find all the joy of the children of the
Cantoria, but without their unction and seriousness. And then in the
portrait busts the young Gattemalata, and the terra-cotta of Niccolò da
Uzzano, we may see Donatello's devotion to mere truthfulness without an
afterthought, as though for him Truth were beauty in its loyalty, at any
rate, to the impression of a moment that for the artist is eternity.
His marvellous equestrian statue of Gattemalata is in Padua, his tomb
and reliefs and statues lie in many an Italian city, but here in the
Bargello we have enough of his work to enable us to divine something at
least of his secret. And this seems to me to have been Donatello's
intention in the art of sculpture: his figures are like gestures of
life, of the soul, sometimes involuntary and full of weariness,
sometimes altogether joyful, but always the expression of a mood of the
soul which is dumb, that in its agony or delight has in his work
expressed itself by means of the body, so that, though he never carves
the body for its own sake, or for the sake of beauty, he is as faithful
in his study of it for the sake of the truth, as he is in his study of
those moods of the soul which through him seem for the first time to
have found an utterance. His life was full of wanderings; beside the
journey to Rome with Brunellesco he went to Siena to make the tomb in
the Duomo there of Bishop Pecci of Grosseto, and in 1433, when Cosimo
de' Medici went into exile, he was again in Rome, and even in Naples.
Returning to Florence after no long time, in 1444, he went to Padua,
where he worked in S. Antonio and made the equestrian statue that was
the wonder of the world. On his return to Florence, an old man, a
certain decadence may be found in his work, so that his reliefs in S.
Lorenzo are not altogether worthy of him, are perhaps the work of a man
who is losing his sight and is already a little dependent on his
pupils. One of these, Bertoldo di Giovanni, who died in 1491, has left
us a beautiful relief of a battle, now in the Bargello, and later we
catch a glimpse of him in the garden of Lorenzo's villa directing the
studies in art of a number of young people, among whom was the youthful
Michelangelo. But of the real disciples of Donatello, those who, without
necessarily being his pupils, carried his art a step farther, we know
nothing. His influence seems to have died with him. Tuscan art after his
death, and even before that, had already set out on another road than
his.
Something of that expressiveness, that _intimité_, which Pater found so
characteristic of Luca della Robbia, seems to have inspired all the
sculptors of the fifteenth century save Donatello himself. Not vitality
merely, but a wonderful sort of expressiveness--it is the mood of all
their work. It is perhaps in Luca della Robbia and his school that we
first come upon this strange sweetness, which is really a sort of
clairvoyance, as it were, to the passing aspect of the world, of men, of
the summer days that go by so fast, bringing winter behind them. What
the Greeks had striven to attain, that naturalness in sculpture, as
though the god were really about to breathe and put out its hand, that
wonderful vagueness of Michelangelo akin to nature, by which he attained
the same life giving effect, a something more than mere form, bloomed in
Luca's work like a new wild flower. Expression, life, the power to
express the spirit in marble and terra-cotta, these are what he really
discovered, and not the mere material of his art, that painted
earthenware, as Vasari supposes.
Of his two great works in marble, the tomb of Benozzo Federighi, Bishop
of Fiesole, at San Miniato, and the Cantoria for the Duomo, of his
bronze doors for the sacristy there, and his work on the Campanile, I
speak elsewhere; but here in the Bargello, and all over Tuscany too, you
may see those terra-cotta reliefs of Madonna, of the Annunciation, of
the Birth of our Lord, painted first just white, and then blue and
white, and later with many colours which are peculiar to him and his
school--could such flower-like things have been born anywhere but in
Italy?--and then, if you take them away they fade in the shadows of the
North.
Among the first to give Luca commissions for this exquisite work in clay
was Piero de' Medici. For him Luca decorated a small book-lined chamber
in the great Medici palace that Cosimo had built. His work was for the
ceiling and the pavement, the ceiling being a half sphere. For the hot
summer days of Italy, when the streets are a blaze of light and the sun
seems to embrace the city, this terra-cotta work with its cool whites
and blues, was particularly delightful bringing really, as it were,
something of the cool morning sea, the soft sky, into a place confined
and shut in, so that where they were, coolness and temperance might find
a safe retreat. And it was in such work as this that he found his fame.
Andrea della Robbia, his nephew, the best artist of his school, follows
him, and after come a host of artists, some little better than
craftsmen, who add colour to colour, till Luca's blue and white has been
almost lost amid the greens and yellows and reds which at last
altogether spoil the simplicity and beauty of what was really as
delicate as a flower peeping out from the shadow into the sun and the
rain.
But of one of the pupils of Luca, Agostino di Duccio, 1418-81(?),
something more remains than these fragile and yet hardy works in
terra-cotta. He has carved in marble with something of Luca's gentleness
at Perugia and Rimini. He left Florence, it is said, in 1446, after an
accusation of theft, returning there to carve the lovely tabernacle of
the Ognissanti. It is said that he had tried unsuccessfully to deal with
that block of marble which stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi, and from which
Michelangelo unfolded the David. Two panels attributed to him remain in
the Bargello, a Crucifixion and a Pietà, which scarcely do him justice.
The last sculptor of the first half of the fifteenth century, his best
work seems to me to be at Rimini, where he worked for Sigismondo
Malatesta in the temple Alberti had built in that fierce old city by the
sea.
It is with the second half of the fifteenth century that the art
contrived for the delight of private persons, for the decoration of
palaces, of chapels, and of tombs, begins. Already Donatello had worked
for Cosimo de' Medici, and had made portrait busts, and, as it might
seem, the work of Luca della Robbia was especially suited for private
altars or oratories, or the cool rooms of a people which had not yet
divided its religion from its life. And then, in Florence at any rate,
all the great churches were finished, or almost finished; it was
necessary for the artist to find other patrons. Among those workers in
metal who had assisted Ghiberti when he cast the reliefs of his first
baptistery gate was the father of a man who had with his brother learned
the craft of the goldsmiths. His name was Antonio Pollajuolo. Born in
1429, he was the pupil of his father and of Paolo Uccello, learning from
the latter the art of painting, which he practised, however, like a
sculptor, his real triumph being, in that art at any rate, one of
movement and force. His best works in sculpture seem to me to be his
tombs of Sixtus IV and Innocent VII in S. Pietro in Rome; but here in
the Bargello you may see the beautiful bust in terra-cotta of a young
condottiere in a rich and splendid armour, and a little bronze group of
Hercules and Antaeus. In the Opera del Duomo his silver relief of the
Birth of St. John Baptist is one of the finest works of that age; but
his art is seen at its highest in that terra-cotta bust here in the
Bargello, perhaps a sketch for a bronze, where he has expressed the
infinite confidence and courage of one of those captains of adventure,
who, with war for their trade, carried havoc up and down Italy.
It is, however, in the work of another goldsmith--or at least the pupil
of one, whose name he took--that we find the greatest master of the new
age, Andrea Verrocchio. Born in 1435, and dead in 1488, he was
preoccupied all his life with the fierce splendour of his art, the
subtle sweetness that he drew from the strength of his work. The master,
certainly, of Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo, and finally of Perugino
also, he was a painter as well as a sculptor; and though his greatest
work was achieved in marble and bronze, one cannot lightly pass by the
Annunciation of the Uffizi, or the Baptism of the Accademia. Neglected
for so long, he is at last recognised as one of the greatest of all
Italian masters of the Renaissance.
The pupil of a goldsmith practising the craft of a founder, he cast the
sacristy gates of the Duomo for Luca della Robbia. In sculpture he
appears to have studied under Donatello, though his work shows little of
his influence; and working, as we may suppose, with his master in S.
Lorenzo, he made the bronze plaque for the tomb of Cosimo there before
the choir, and the monument of Piero and Giovanni de' Medici beside the
door of the sacristy. It was again for Lorenzo de' Medici that he made
the exquisite Child and Dolphin now in the court of Palazzo Vecchio, and
the statue of the young David now in Bargello. The subtle grace and
delight of this last seem not uncertainly to suggest the strange and
lovely work of Leonardo da Vinci. There for the first time you may
discern the smile that is like a ray of sunshine in Leonardo's shadowy
pictures. More perfect in craftsmanship and in the knowledge of anatomy
than Donatello, Verrocchio here, where he seems almost to have been
inspired by the David of his master, surpasses him in energy and beauty,
and while Donatello's figure is involved with the head of Goliath, so
that the feet are lost in the massive and almost shapeless bronze,
Verrocchio's David stands clear of the grim and monstrous thing at his
feet. Simpler, too, and less uncertain is the whole pose of the figure,
who is in no doubt of himself, and in his heart he has already "slain
his thousands."
In the portrait of Monna Vanna degli Albizi, the Lady with the Nosegay,
Verrocchio is the author of the most beautiful bust of the Renaissance.
She fills the room with sunshine, and all day long she seems to whisper
some beloved name. A smile seems ever about to pass over her face under
her clustering hair, and she has folded her beautiful hands on her
bosom, as though she were afraid of their beauty and would live ever in
their shadow.
[Illustration: THE LADY WITH THE NOSEGAY (VANNA TORNABUONI?)
_In the Bargello. Andrea Verrocchio_
_Alinari_]
In two reliefs of Madonna and Child, one in marble and one in
terra-cotta, you find that strange smile again, not, as with Leonardo,
some radiance of the soul visible for a moment on the lips, but the
smile of a mother happy with her little son. In the two Tornabuoni
reliefs that we find here too in the Bargello, it is not Verrocchio's
hand we see; but in the group of Christ and St. Thomas at Or San
Michele, and in the fierce and splendid equestrian statue of Bartolomeo
Colleoni at Venice, you see him at his best, occupied with a subtle
beauty long sought out, and with an expression of the fierce ardour and
passion that consumed him all his life. He touches nothing that does not
live with an ardent splendour and energy of spirit because of him. If he
makes only a leaf of bronze for a tomb, it seems to quiver under his
hands with an inextinguishable vitality.
Softly beside him, untouched by the passion of his style, grew all the
lovely but less passionate works of the sculptors in marble, the sweet
and almost winsome monuments of the dead. Bernardo Rossellino, born in
1409, his elder by more than twenty years, died more than twenty years
before him, in 1464, carving, among other delightful things, the lovely
Annunciation at Empoli, the delicate monument of Beata Villana in S.
Maria Novella, and creating once for all, in the tomb of Leonardo Bruni
in S. Croce, the perfect pattern of such things, which served as an
example to all the Tuscan sculptors who followed, till Michelangelo
hewed the great monuments in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo. His brother
Antonio, born in 1427, worked with him at Pistoja certainly in the tomb
of Filippo Lazzari in S. Domenico, surpassing him as a sculptor, under
the influence of Desiderio da Settignano. His finest work is the
beautiful tomb in S. Miniato of the young Cardinal of Portugal, who died
on a journey to Florence. In that strange and lovely place there is
nothing more beautiful than that monument under the skyey work of Luca
della Robbia, before the faintly coloured frescoes of Alessio
Baldovinetti. Under a vision of Madonna borne by angels from heaven,
where two angels stoop, half kneeling, on guard, the young Cardinal
sleeps, supported by two heavenly children, his hands--those delicate
hands--folded in death. Below, on a frieze at the base of the tomb,
Antonio has carved all sorts of strange and beautiful things--a skull
among the flowers over a garland harnessed to two unicorns; angels too,
youthful and strong, lifting the funeral vases. At Naples, again, he
carved the altar of the Cappella Piccolomini in S. Maria at Montoliveto.
Here in the Bargello some fragments of beautiful things have been
gathered--a tabernacle with two adoring angels, a little St. John made
in 1477 for the Opera, a relief of the Adoration of the Shepherds,
another of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory of cherubim, and, last of
all, the splendid busts of Matteo Palmieri and Francesco Sassetti; but
his masterpiece in pure sculpture is the S. Sebastian in the Collegiata
at Empoli, a fair and youthful figure without the affectation and
languor that were so soon to fall upon him.
Perhaps the greatest of these sculptors in marble, whose works, as
winsome as wild flowers, are scattered over the Tuscan hills, was
Desiderio da Settignano, born in 1428. He had worked with Donatello in
the Pazzi Chapel, and his tabernacle in the chapel of the Blessed
Sacrament in S. Lorenzo is one of the most charming things left in that
museum of Tuscan work. Of his beautiful tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S.
Croce I speak elsewhere: it is worthy of its fellows--Bernardo
Rosellino's tomb of Leonardo Bruni in the same church, and the tomb of
the Cardinal of Portugal by Antonio Rossellino at S. Miniato. Desiderio
has not the energy of Rossellino or the passionate ardour of Verrocchio.
He searches for a quiet beauty full of serenity and delight. His work in
the Bargello is of little account. The bust of a girl (No. 198 in the
fifth room on the top floor) is but doubtfully his: Vasari speaks only
of the bust of Marietta Strozzi, now in Berlin. He died in 1464, and his
work, so rare, so refined and delicate in its beauty, comes to its own
in the perfect achievement of Benedetto da Maiano, born in 1442, who
made the pulpit of S. Croce, the ciborium of S. Domenico in Siena. It
was for Pietro Mellini that he carved the pulpit of S. Croce, and here
in the Bargello we may see the bust he made of his patron. In his youth
he had carved in wood and worked at the intarsia work so characteristic
a craft of the fifteenth century; but on bringing some coffers of this
work to the King of Hungary, Vasari relates that he found they had
fallen to pieces on the voyage, and ever after he preferred to work in
marble. Having acquired a competence, of this work too he seems to have
tired, devoting himself to architectural work--porticos, altars, and
such--buying an estate at last outside the gate of Prato that is towards
Florence; dying in 1497.
It is with a prolific master, Mino da Fiesole, the last pupil, according
to Vasari, of Desiderio da Settignano, that the delicate and flower-like
work of the Tuscan sculptors may be said to pass into a still lovely
decadence. His facile work is found all over Italy. The three busts of
the Bargello are among his earliest and best works--the Piero de'
Medici, the Giuliano de' Medici, and the small bust of Rinaldo della
Luna. There, too, are two reliefs from his hand, and some tabernacles
which have no great merit. A relief of the Madonna and Child is a finer
achievement in his earlier manner, and in the Duomo of Fiesole there
remains a bust of the Bishop, Leonardo Salutati, while in the same
chapel, an altar and relief, from his hand, seem to prove that it was
only a fatal facility that prevented him from becoming as fine an artist
as Benedetto da Maiano.
With Andrea Sansovino, born in 1460, we come to the art of the sixteenth
century, very noble and beautiful, at any rate in its beginning, but so
soon to pass into a mere affectation. The pupil, according to Vasari, of
Antonio Pollaiuolo, Sansovino's work is best seen in Rome. Here in
Florence he made in his youth the altar of the Blessed Sacrament in the
left transept of S. Spirito, and in 1502 the Baptism of Christ, over the
eastern gates of the Baptistery, but this was finished by another hand.
And there followed him Benedetto da Rovezzano, whose style has become
classical, the sculptor of every sort of lovely furniture,--mantelpieces,
tabernacles, and such,--yet in his beautiful reliefs of the life of
S. Giovanni Gualberto you see the work of the sixteenth century at its
best, without the freshness and delicate charm of fifteenth-century
sculpture, but exquisite enough in its perfect skill, its real
achievement.
There follows Michelangelo (1475-1564). It is with a sort of surprise
one comes face to face with that sorrowful, heroic figure, as though,
following among the flowers, we had come upon some tragic precipice,
some immense cavern too deep for sight. How, after the delight, the
delicate charm of the fifteenth century, can I speak of this beautiful,
strong, and tragic soul? It might almost seem that the greatest Italian
of the sixteenth century has left us in sculpture little more than an
immortal gesture of despair, of despair of a world which he has not been
content to love. His work is beautiful with the beauty of the mountains,
of the mountains in which he alone has found the spirit of man. His
figures, half unveiled from the living rock, are like some terrible
indictment of the world he lived in, and in a sort of rage at its
uselessness he leaves them unfinished, and it but half expressed;--an
indictment of himself too, of his own heart, of his contempt for things
as they are. Yet in his youth he had been content with beauty--in the
lovely Pietà of S. Pietro, for instance, where, on the robe of Mary,
alone in all his work he has placed his name; or in the statue of
Bacchus, now here in the Bargello, sleepy, half drunken with wine or
with visions, the eyelids heavy with dreams, the cup still in his hand.
But already in the David his trouble is come upon him; the sorrow that
embittered his life has been foreseen, and in a sort of protest against
the enslavement of Florence, that nest where he was born, he creates
this hero, who seems to be waiting for some tyranny to declare itself.
The Brutus, unfinished as we say, to-day in the Bargello, he refused to
touch again, since that city which was made for a thousand lovers, as he
said, had been enjoyed by one only, some Medici against whom, as we
know, he was ready to fight. If in the beautiful relief of Madonna we
find a sweetness and strength that is altogether without bitterness or
indignation, it is not any religious consolation we find there, but such
comfort rather as life may give when in a moment of inward tragedy we
look on the stars or watch a mother with her little son. What secret and
immortal sorrow and resentment are expressed in those strange and
beautiful figures of the tombs in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo! The names
we have, given them are, as Pater has said, too definite for them; they
suggest more than we know how to express of our thoughts concerning
life, so that for once the soul of man seems there to have taken form
and turned to stone. The unfinished Pietà in the Duomo, it is said, he
carved for his own grave: like so much of his great, tragical work, it
is unfinished, unfinished though everything he did was complete from the
beginning. For he is like the dawn that brings with it noon and evening,
he is like the day which will pass into the night. In him the spirit of
man has stammered the syllables of eternity, and in its agony of longing
or sorrow has failed to speak only the word love. All things particular
to the individual, all that is small or of little account, that endures
but for a moment, have been purged away, so that Life itself may make,
as it were, an immortal gesticulation, almost monstrous in its
passionate intensity--a mirage seen on the mountains, a shadow on the
snow. And after him, and long before his death, there came Baccio
Bandinelli and the rest, Cellini the goldsmith, Giovanni da Bologna, and
the sculptors of the decadence that has lasted till our own day. With
him Italian art seems to have been hurled out of heaven; henceforth his
followers stand on the brink of Pandemonium, making the frantic gestures
of fallen gods.
[Illustration: "LA NOTTE"
_From Tomb of Giulinto de' Medici. Michelangelo_
_Anderson_]