Florentine art, that had expressed itself so charmingly, and at last so
passionately and profoundly, in sculpture, where design, drawing, that
integrity of the plastic artist, is everything, and colour almost
nothing at all, shows itself in painting, where it is most
characteristic, either as the work of those who were sculptors
themselves, or had at least learned from them--Giotto, Orcagna,
Masaccio, the Pollaiuoli, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo--or in such work
as that of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Leonardo,
where painting seems to pass into poetry, into a canticle or a hymn, a
Trionfo or some strange, far-away, sweet music. The whole impulse of
this art lies in the intellect rather than in the senses, is busied
continually in discussing life rather than in creating it, in discussing
one by one the secrets of movement, of expression; always more eager to
find new forms for ideas than to create just life itself in all its
splendour and shadow, as Venice was content to do. Thus, while Florence
was the most influential school of art in Italy, her greatest sons do
not seem altogether to belong to her: Leonardo, a wanderer all his life,
founds his school in Milan, and dies at last in France; Michelangelo
becomes almost a Roman painter, the sculptor, the architect in paint of
the Sistine Chapel; while Andrea del Sarto appears from the first as a
foreigner, the one colourist of the school, only a Florentine in this,
that much of his work is, as it were, monumental, composing itself
really--as with the Madonna delle Arpie or the great Madonna and Saints
of the Pitti, for instance--into statuesque groups, into sculpture. So
if we admit that Leonardo and Michelangelo were rather universal than
Florentine, the most characteristic work of the school lies in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the work of Giotto, so full of
great, simple thoughts of life; in that of the Pollaiuoli, so full of
movement; but most of all perhaps in the work of Angelico, Lippo Lippi,
and Botticelli, where the significance of life has passed into beauty,
into music.
The rise of this school, so full of importance for Italy, for the world,
is very happily illustrated in the Accademia della Belle Arti; and if
the galleries of the Uffizi can show a greater number of the best works
of the Florentine painters, together with much else that is foreign to
them; if the Pitti Palace is richer in masterpieces, and possesses some
works of Raphael's Florentine period and the pictures of Fra Bartolomeo
and Andrea del Sarto, as well as a great collection of the work of the
other Italian schools, it is really in the Accademia we may study best
the rise of the Florentine school itself, finding there not only the
work of Giotto, his predecessors and disciples, but the pictures of Fra
Angelico, of Verrocchio, of Filippo Lippi, of Botticelli, the painters
of that fifteenth century which, as Pater has told us, "can hardly be
studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of
the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its
special and prominent personalities with their profound aesthetic charm,
but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of
which it is a consummate type."
The art of the Sculptors had been able to free itself from the beautiful
but sterile convention of the Byzantine masters earlier than the art of
Painting, because it had found certain fragments of antiquity scattered
up and down Southern Italy, and in such a place as the Campo Santo of
Pisa, to which it might turn for guidance and inspiration. No such
forlorn beauty remained in exile to renew the art of painting. All the
pictures of antiquity had been destroyed, and though in such work as
that of the Cavallini and their school at Assisi there may be found a
faint memory of the splendour that had so unfortunately passed away, it
is rather the shadow of the statues we find there--in the Abraham of the
upper church of S. Francesco, for instance--than the more lyrical and
mortal loveliness of the unknown painters of Imperial Rome. Yet it is
there, in that lonely and beautiful church full of the soft sweet light
of Umbria, that Giotto perhaps learned all that was needed to enable him
not only to recreate the art of painting, but to decide its future in
Italy.
Here in the Accademia in the Sala dei Maestri Toscani you may see an
altarpiece that has perhaps come to us from his hands, amid much
beautiful languid work that is still in the shadow of the Middle Age, or
that, coming after him, has almost failed to understand his message, the
words of life which may everywhere be found in his frescoes in Assisi,
in Florence, in Padua, spoiled though they be by the intervention of
fools, the spoliation of the vandals.
Those strange and lovely altarpieces ruthlessly torn from the convents
and churches of Tuscany still keep inviolate the secret of those who,
not without tears, made them for the love of God: once for sure they
made a sunshine in some shadowy place. Hung here to-day in a museum,
just so many specimens that we number and set in order, they seem rude
and fantastic enough, and in the cold light of this salone, crowded
together like so much furniture, they have lost all meaning or
intention. They are dead, and we gaze at them almost with contempt; they
will never move us again. That rude and almost terrible picture of
Madonna and Saints with its little scenes from the life of our Lord,
stolen from the Franciscan convent of S. Chiara at Lucca, what is it to
us who pass by? Yet once it listened for the prayers of the little nuns
of S. Francis, and, who knows, may have heard the very voice of Il
Poverello. That passionate and dreadful picture of St. Mary Magdalen
covered by her hair as with a robe of red gold, does it move us at all?
Will it explain to us the rise of Florentine painting? And you, O
learned archaeologist, you, O scientific critic, you, O careless and
curious tourist, will it bring you any comfort to read (if you can) the
inscription--
"Ne desperetis, vos qui peccare soletis
Exemploque meo vos reperate Deo."
Those small pictures of the life of St. Mary, which surround her still
with their beauty, do you even know what they mean? And if you do, are
they any more to you than an idle tale, a legend, which has lost even
its meaning? No, we look at these faint and far-off things merely with
curiosity as a botanist looks through his albums, like one who does not
know flowers.
Then there is the great Ancona (102) from S. Trinità attributed to
Cimabue about which the critics have been so eloquent, till under their
hands Cimabue has vanished into a mere legend; and Madonna too, is she
now any more than a tale that is told? Beside it you find another
Madonna (103) from Ognissanti which they agree together is really from
the hand of Giotto, though with how much intervention and repainting;
but they confess too that there is little to be learnt from it, since
Giotto may be seen to better advantage and more truly himself in his
frescoes, which yet remain in the churches as of old. And it is for this
we have robbed the lowly and stolen away the images of their gods.
It is a lesser because a merely imitative art that you see in the work
of Taddeo Gaddi and the Madonna and Child with six saints of his son
Agnolo, or the Entombment ascribed to Taddeo but really the work of an
inferior painter, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini from Or San Michele. Yet
those twelve scenes from the lives of Christ and St. Francis are lovely
enough; and in the Crucifixion there (112) we seem to see the work of a
master. A host of painters, "the Giottesques," as we may call them,
followed: Puccio Capanna, Buffalmacco, Francesco da Volterra, Stefano
Fiorentino, the grandson of Giotto, Giottino, and Spinello Aretino, all
of whom were painting about the middle of the fourteenth century in
Giotto's manner but without his genius, or any true understanding of his
art. The gradual passing of this derivative work, the prophecy of such
painters as Masolino, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico may be found in the
work of Orcagna, of Antonio Veneziano, and Starnina, and possibly too in
the better-preserved paintings of Lorenzo Monaco of the order of S.
Romuald of Camaldoli, in the Annunciation (143), for instance, here in
this very room.
Andrea Orcagna was born about 1308. He was a man of almost universal
genius, but his altarpiece in S. Maria Novella is nearly all that
remains to us of his painting, and splendid though it be, has been
perhaps spoiled by a later hand than his. In the Accademia here there is
a Vision of St. Bernard (No. 138), faint, it is true, but still soft and
charming in colour, while in the Uffizi there is in the corridor an
altarpiece with St. Matthew in the midst that is certainly partially his
own. Nothing at all remains to us of the work of Starnina, the master of
Masolino, and thus we lose the link which should connect the art of
Giotto and the Giottesques with the art of Masolino and Angelico.[117]
It was about the same time as Starnina was painting in the chapel of S.
Girolamo at the Carmine that Lorenzo Monaco was working in the manner of
Agnolo Gaddi. His work is beautiful by reason of its delicacy and
gentleness, but it is so completely in the old manner that Vasari gives
his altarpiece of the Annunciation now here in the Accademia (No. 143)
to Giotto, praising that master for the tremulous sweetness of Madonna
as she shrinks before the Announcing Angel just about to alight from
heaven. It is a very different scene you come upon in his altarpiece in
S. Trinità, where Gabriel, his beautiful wings furled, has already
fallen on his knees, and our Lord Himself, still among the Cherubim,
speeds the Dove to Mary, who has looked up from her book suddenly in an
ecstasy.
[Illustration: THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS
_By Domenico Ghirlandajo, Accademia_
_Anderson_]
No work that we possess of the fourteenth century, save Giotto's,
prepares us for the frescoes of Masolino: they must be sought in the
Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine. But of the work of Masaccio his pupil,
though his best work remains in the same place, there may be found here
in the Accademia an early altarpiece of Madonna and Child with St.
Anne (Sala III, No. 70). Born in 1401, dying when he was but
twenty-seven years of age, he recreated for himself that reality in
painting which it had been the chief business of Giotto to discover.
Influenced by Donatello, his work is almost as immediate as that of
sculpture. Impressive and full of an energy that seems to be life
itself, his figures have almost the sense of reality. "I feel," says Mr.
Berenson, "that I could touch every figure, that it would yield a
definite resistance ... that I could walk round it." There follow Paolo
Uccello, whose work will be found in the Uffizi, and Andrea del
Castagno, who painted the equestrian portrait of Niccolò da Tolentino in
the Duomo, and the frescoes in S. Apollonia.
Thus we come really into the midst of the fifteenth century, to the work
of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Botticelli, which we have loved so
much.
It is really the Middle Age, quite expressed for once, by one who,
standing a little way off perhaps, could almost scorn it, that we come
upon in Gentile da Fabriano's picture, on an easel here, of the
Adoration of the Shepherds. It is one of the loveliest of all early
Umbrian pictures, full of a new kind of happiness that is about to
discover the world. And if with Gentile we seem to look back on the
Middle Age from the very dawn of the Renaissance, it is the Renaissance
itself, the most simple and divine work it achieved in its earliest and
best days, that we see in the work of Fra Angelico. One beautiful and
splendid picture, the Descent from the Cross, alas! repainted, stands
near Gentile's Adoration, among several later pictures, of which
certainly the loveliest is a gentle and serene work by Domenico
Ghirlandajo, an Adoration of the Shepherds; but the greater part of
Angelico's work to be found here is in another room. There, in many
little pictures, you may see the world as Paradise, the very garden
where God talked with Adam. Or he will tell us the story of S. Cosmas
and S. Damian, those good saints who despised gold, so that with their
brethren they were cast into a furnace, but the beautiful bright flames
curled and leaped away from them as at the breath of God, licking
feverishly at the persecutors, who with iron forks try to thrust the
faggots nearer, while one hides from the heat of the fire behind his
shield, and another, already dead, is consumed by the flames. Above in a
gallery of marble, decked with beautiful rugs and hangings of
needlework, the sultan looks on astonished amid his courtiers. Or it is
the story of our Lord he tells us: how in the evening Mary set out from
Nazareth mounted on a mule, her little son in her arms, Joseph following
afoot, with a pipkin for the fire in the wilderness, and a _fiasco_ of
wine lest they be thirsty, a great stick over his shoulder for the
difficult way, and a cloak too, for our Lady. Or it is the Annunciation
he shows us: how in the dawn of that day of days, his bright wings still
tremulous with flight, Gabriel fell like a snowflake in the garden, in
the silence of the cypresses between two little loggias, light and fair,
where Madonna was praying; far and far away in the faint clear sky the
Dove hovers, that is the Spirit of God, the Desire of all Nations. Or it
is Hosanna he sings, when Christ rides under the stripped palms into
Jerusalem, while the people strew the way with branches. Or again he
will tell us of Paradise, beneath whose towers, in a garden of wild
flowers, the saints dance with the angels, crowned with garlands, in the
light that streams through the gates of heaven from the throne of God.
How may we rightly speak of such a man, who in his simplicity has seen
angels on the hills of Tuscany, the flowers and trees of our world
scattered in heaven? Truly his master is unknown, for, as perhaps he was
too simple to say, St. Luke taught him in an idle hour, after the vision
of the Annunciation, when he was tired of writing the Magnificat of
Mary: and Angelico was his only pupil. That such things as these could
come out of the cloister is not so marvellous as that, since they grew
there, we should have suppressed the convents and turned the friars
away. For just as the lily of art towered first and broke into blossom
on the grave of St. Francis, so here in the convent of S. Marco of the
Dominicans was one who for the first time seems to have seen the world,
the very byways and hills of Tuscany, and dreamed of them as heaven.
It was another friar who was, as it were, to people that world, a little
more human perhaps, a little less than Paradise, which Angelico had
seen; to people it at least with children, little laughing rascals from
the street corner, caught with a soldo and turned into angels. Another
friar, but how different. The story, so romantic, so full of laughter
and tears, that Vasari has told us of Fra Lippo Lippi, is one of his
best known pages; I shall not tell it again. Four little panels painted
by him are here in this room, beside the work of Fra Angelico. While not
far away you come upon two splendid studies by Perugino of two monks of
the Vallombrosa, Dom Biagio Milanesi and Dom Baldassare, the finest
portraits he ever painted, and in some sort his most living work.[118]
Four other works by Perugino may also be found here,--the Assumption of
the Blessed Virgin, a Pietà, and the Agony in the Garden in the Sala di
Perugino, a Crucifixion in the Sala di Botticelli. The Assumption was
painted at Vallombrosa late in the year 1500, and is a fine piece of
work in Perugino's more mannered style. Above, God the Father, in a
glory of cherubim with a worshipping angel on either side, blesses
Madonna, who in mid-heaven gazes upward, seated on a cloud, in a
mandorla of cherubs, surrounded by four angels playing musical
instruments, while two others are at her feet following her in her
flight; below, three saints, with St. Michael, stand disconsolate. In
the Pietà, painted much earlier, where the dead Christ lies on His
Mother's knees, while an angel holds the head of the Prince of Life on
his shoulders, and Mary Magdalen weeps at his feet, and two saints, St.
John and St. Joseph, perhaps, watch beside Him, there might seem to be
little to hold us or to interest us at all; the picture is really
without life, just because everything is so unreal, and if we gather any
emotion there, it will come to us from the soft sky, full of air and
light, that we see through a splendid archway, or from a tiny glimpse of
the valley that peeps from behind Madonna's robe. And surely it was in
this valley, on a little hill, that, as we may see in another picture
here, Christ knelt; yes, in the garden of the world, while the disciples
slept, and the angel brought Him the bitter cup. Not far away is
Jerusalem, and certain Roman soldiers and the priests; but it is not
these dream-like figures that attract us, but the world that remains
amid all interior changes still the same, and, for once in his work,
those tired men, really wearied out, who sleep so profoundly while
Christ prays. In the Crucifixion all the glamour, the religious
impression that, in Perugino's work at least, space the infinite heaven
of Italy, the largeness of her evening earth, make on one, is wanting,
and we find instead a mere insistence upon the subject. The world is
dark under the eclipsed sun and moon, and the figures are full of
affectation. Painted for the convent of St. Jerome, it was necessary to
include that saint and his lion, that strangely pathetic and sentimental
beast, so full of embarrassment, that looks at one so wearily from many
an old picture in the galleries of the world. If something of that
clairvoyance which created his best work is wanting here, it has
vanished altogether in that Deposition which Filippino Lippi finished,
and instead of a lovely dream of heaven and earth, one finds a laboured
picture full of feats of painting, of cleverness, and calculated
arrangement. This soft Umbrian world of dreamy landscape, which we find
in Perugino's pictures, is like a clearer vision of the land we already
descry far off with Fra Angelico, where his angels sing and his saints
dance for gladness.
It is a different and a more real life that you see in the work of Fra
Lippo Lippi. Realism, it is the very thought of all Florentine work of
the fifteenth century. Seven pictures by the Frate have been gathered in
this gallery,--the Madonna and Child Enthroned, the St. Jerome in the
Desert, a Nativity, a Madonna adoring Her Son, and the great Coronation
of the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel and the Baptist, and a Madonna and
St. Anthony.
Here in the Accademia you may see Lucrezia Buti, that pale beauty whom
he loved, very fair and full of languor and sweetness. She looks at you
out of the crowd of saints and angels gathered round the feet of
Madonna, whom God crowns from His throne of jasper. Behind her, looking
at her always, Lippo himself comes--_iste perfecit opus_,--up the steps
into that choir where the angels crowned with roses lift the lilies, as
they wait in some divine interval to sing again Alleluia. And for this
too he should be remembered, for his son was Filippino Lippo and his
pupil Sandro Botticelli.
The Accademia possesses some five pictures by Botticelli,--the
Coronation of the Virgin and its predella (Nos. 73, 74), the Madonna
with saints and angels (No. 85), the Dead Christ (No. 157), the Salome
(No. 161), and the Primavera (No. 80). The Coronation is from the
Convent of S. Marco, and seems to have been painted after Botticelli had
fallen under the strange, unhappy influence of Savonarola; much the same
might be said of the Madonna with saints and angels, where his
expressiveness, that quality which in him was genius, seems to have
fallen almost into a mannerism, a sort of preconceived attitude; and
certainly here, where such a perfect thing awaits us, it is rather to
the Spring we shall turn at once than to anything less splendid.
The so-called Primavera was painted for Lorenzo de' Medici, and in some
vague way seems to have been inspired by Poliziano's verses in praise of
Giuliano de' Medici and Bella Simonetta--
"Candida è ella, e Candida la vesta,
Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba:
Lo innanellato crin dell' aurea testa
Scende in la fronte umilmente superba.
Ridele attorno tutta la foresta,
E quanto può sue cure disacerba.
Nell' atto regalmente è mansueta;
E pur col ciglio le tempeste acqueta."[119]
Here at last we see the greatest, the most personal artist of the
fifteenth century really at his best, in that fortunate moment of
half-pensive joy which was so soon to pass away. How far has he
wandered, and through what secret forbidden ways, from the simple
thoughts of Angelico, the gay worldly laughter of Lippo Lippi. On that
strange adventurous journey of the soul he has discovered the modern
world, just our way of looking at things, as it were, with a sort of
gift for seeing in even the most simple things some new and subtle
meaning. And then, in that shadowy and yet so real kingdom in which, not
without a certain timidity, he has ventured so far, he has come upon the
very gods in exile, and for him Venus is born again from the foam of the
sea, and Mars sleeping in a valley will awake to find her beside him,
not as of old full of laughter, disdain, and joy; but half reconciled,
as it were, to sorrow, to that change which has come upon her so that
men now call her Mary, that name in which bitter and sweet are mingled
together. With how subtly pensive a mien she comes through the spring
woods here in the Primavera, her delicate hand lifted half in protest,
half in blessing of that gay and yet thoughtful company,--Flora, her
gown full of roses, Spring herself caught in the arms of Aeolus, the
Graces dancing a little wistfully together, where Mercurius touches
indifferently the unripe fruit with the tip of his caducaeus, and Amor
blindfold points his dart, yes almost like a prophecy of death.... What
is this scene that rises so strangely before our eyes, that are filled
with the paradise of Angelico, the heaven of Lippo Lippi. It is the new
heaven, the ancient and beloved earth, filled with spring and peopled
with those we have loved, beside whose altars long ago we have hushed
our voices. It is the dream of the Renaissance. The names we have given
these shadowy beautiful figures are but names, that Grace who looks so
longingly and sadly at Hermes is but the loveliest among the lovely,
though we call her Simonetta and him Giuliano. Here in the garden of the
world is Venus's pleasure-house, and there the gods in exile dream of
their holy thrones. Shall we forgive them, and forget that since our
hearts are changed they are changed also? They have looked from
Olympus upon Calvary; Dionysus, who has borne the youngest lamb on his
shoulders, has wandered alone in the wilderness and understood the
sorrow of the world; even that lovely, indifferent god has been
crucified, and she, Venus Aphrodite, has been born again, not from the
salt sea, but in the bitterness of her own tears, the tears of Madonna
Mary. It is thus Botticelli, with a rare and personal art, expresses the
very thought of his time, of his own heart, which half in love with Pico
of Mirandola would reconcile Plato with Moses, and since man's
allegiance is divided reconcile the gods. You may discern something,
perhaps, of the same thought, but already a little cold, a little
indifferent in its appeal, in the Adoration of the Shepherds which Luca
Signorelli painted, now in the Uffizi, where the shepherds are fair and
naked youths, the very gods of Greece come to worship the Desire of all
Nations. But with Botticelli that divine thought is altogether fresh and
sincere. It is strange that one so full of the Hellenic spirit should
later have fallen under the influence of a man so singularly wanting in
temperance or sweetness as Savonarola. One pictures him in his sorrowful
old age bending over the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante, continually
questioning himself as to that doctrine of the Epicureans, to wit, that
the soul dies with the body; at least, one reads that he abandoned all
labour at his art, and was like to have died of hunger but for the
Medici, who supported him.[120]
[Illustration: "THE THREE GRACES FROM THE PRIMAVERA"
_By Sandro Botticelli. Accademia_
_Anderson_]