Florentine painting in the fourteenth century may be seen to best
advantage in the churches of Florence and in the Accademia delle Belle
Arti, for here in the Uffizi there is nothing from Giotto's or Orcagna's
hand, though the work of their schools is plentiful. In the first long
gallery, among certain Sienese pictures of which I speak elsewhere, you
may find these works; and there, too, like antique jewels slumbering in
the accustomed sunlight, you come upon the tabernacles and altar-pieces
of Don Lorenzo Monaco, monk of the Angeli of Florence, as Vasari calls
him, the pupil of Agnolo Gaddi, who has most loved the work of the
Sienese. Lorenzo was of the Order of Camaldoli, and belonged to the
monastery of the Angeli, which was founded in 1295 by Fra Guittone
d'Arezzo, himself of the Military Order of the Virgin Mother of Jesus,
whose monks were called Frati Gaudenti, the Joyous Brothers. Born about
1370, seventeen years before Angelico, and dying in 1425, his works,
full of an ideal beauty that belongs to some holy place, are altogether
lost in the corridors of a gallery. Those works of his, the Virgin and
St. John, both kneeling and holding the body of our Lord (40), dated
1404; the Adoration of the Magi (39), or the triptych (41), where
Madonna is in the midst with her little Son standing in her lap, while
two angels stand in adoration, and St. John Baptist and St. Bartholemew,
St. Thaddeus and St. Benedict, wait on either side, was painted in 1410,
and was brought here from the subterranean crypt of S. Maria of Monte
Oliveto, not far away. Another triptych (1309), the Coronation of the
Virgin, in the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco, is perhaps his masterpiece. In
the midst is the Coronation of our Lady, surrounded by a glory of
angels, while on either side stand ten saints, and on the frames are
angels, cherubs, saints, and martyrs, scattered like flowers. Painted in
1413 for the high altar of the Monastery of the Angels, it was lost on
the suppression of the Order, and only found about 1830 at the Badia di
S. Pietro at Cerreto, in Val d'Elsa. Though it has doubtless suffered
from repainting, for we read of a restoration in 1866, it remains,
lovely and exquisite beyond any other work of the master.
Fra Angelico may well have been the pupil of Lorenzo Monaco. Here in the
Uffizi are two of his works, the great Tabernacle (17), with its
predella (1294), and the great Coronation of the Virgin (1290), with its
predelle (1162 and 1178). The Tabernacle was painted in 1433 for the
Arte de' Linaioli, which paid a hundred and ninety gold florins for it.
It is an early work, but such an one as in Florence at any rate, only
Fra Angelico could have achieved. Within the doors is the Virgin
herself, with Christ standing on her knee between two saints, surrounded
by twelve angels of heavenly beauty playing on various instruments of
music In the doors themselves are St. John Baptist and St. Mark while
outside are St. Peter and St. Jerome. In the predella St. Peter preaches
at Rome, St. Mark writes his Gospel, the Kings come to adore Jesus in
Bethlehem, and St. Mark is martyred. The whole is like some marvellous
introit for St. Mark's day, in which the name of Mary has passed by.
The Coronation of the Virgin (1290) is like a litany of the saints and
of the Virgin herself, chanted in antiphon, ending in the simpler
splendour of Magnificat, sung to some Gregorian tone full of gold, of
faint blues as of a far-away sky, of pale rose-colours as of roses
fading on an altar in the sunlight, and the candles of white are more
spotless than the lily is. Amidst a glory of angels, the piping voices
of children, she in whose name all the flowers are hidden is crowned
Queen of Angels by the Prince of Life. This marvellous dead picture
lived once in S. Maria Nuova; its predelle have been torn away from it,
but may be found here, nevertheless, in the Birth of St. John Baptist
(1162) and the Spozalizio (1178).
It is to a painter less mystical, but not less visionary, that we come
in the work of Paolo Uccello, the great "Battle" (52), of which two
variants exist, one in the Louvre, the other, the most beautiful of the
three, in the National Gallery. It is, as some have thought, a picture
of the Battle of S. Egidio, where Braccio da Montone made Carlo
Malatesta and his nephew Galeotto prisoners in 1416. Splendid as it is,
something has been lost to us by restoration. Paola Uccello, the friend
of Donatello and of Brunellesco, was all his life devoted to the study
of perspective. Many marvellous drawings in which he traced that
baffling vista, of which he was wont to exclaim when, labouring far into
the night, his wife poor soul, would entreat him to take rest and
sleep: "Ah, what a delightful thing is this perspective." And then, much
beautiful work of his has perished. It was on this art he staked his
life. "What have you there that you are shutting up so close?" Donatello
said to him one day when he found him alone at work on the Christ and
St. Thomas, which he had been commissioned to paint over the door of the
church dedicated to that saint in the Mercato Vecchio. "Thou shalt see
it some day,--let that suffice thee," Uccello answered. "And it
chanced," says Vasari, "that Donato was in the Mercato Vecchio buying
fruit one morning when he saw Paolo Uccello, who was uncovering his
picture." Saluting him courteously, therefore, his opinion was instantly
demanded by Paolo, who was anxiously curious to know what he would say
of the work. But when Donato had examined it very minutely, he turned to
Paolo and said: "Why, Paolo, thou art uncovering thy picture just at the
very time when thou shouldst be shutting it up from the sight of all."
These words wounded Paolo so grievously that he would no more leave his
house, but shut himself up, devoting himself only the more to the study
of perspective, which kept him in poverty and depression to the day of
his death.
Paolo had been influenced, it is said, by Domenico Veneziano, who in his
turn was influenced by the work of Masolino and Masaccio. Nothing is
known of the birthplace of this painter, who appears first at Perugia,
and was the master of Piero della Francesca. His work is very rare; in
Florence there are two heads of saints in the Pitti, and Mr. Berenson
speaks of a fresco of the Baptist and St. Francis in S. Croce. Here in
the Uffizi, however, we have a Madonna and four Saints (1305) from his
hand, formerly in the Church of S. Lucia de' Magnoli in the Via de'
Bardi. It is a very splendid work, and certainly his masterpiece;
something of Piero della Francesca's later work may perhaps be discerned
there, in a certain force and energy, a sort of dry sweetness in the
faint colouring that he seems to have loved. The Virgin is enthroned,
and in her lap she holds our Lord; on the left stands St. John Baptist
and S. Francis, on the right St. Nicholas and S. Lucia.
In the only work by Filippo Lippi in the Uffizi, the beautiful Madonna
and Child (1307) that has been so much beloved, we come again to a
painter who has been influenced by Masaccio, and thought at least to
understand and perhaps transform the work of Lorenzo Monaco and Fra
Angelico It is once more in the work of his pupil, Botticelli, that we
find some of the chief treasures of the gallery. There are some nine
works here by Sandro,--the Birth of Venus (39), the Madonna of the
Magnificat (1269 bis), the Madonna of the Pomegranate (1269), the Judith
and Holofernes (1158), the Calumny (1182), the Adoration of the Magi
(1286), and a Madonna and Child, a Portrait of Piero de' Medici (1154),
and St. Augustine (1179).
Painted for Pierfrancesco de' Medici, the Birth of Venus is perhaps the
most beautiful, the most expressive, and the most human picture of the
Quattrocento. She is younger than the roses which the south-west wind
fling at her feet, the roses of earth to the Rose of the sea. Not yet
has the Shepherd of Ida praised her, nor Adon refused the honey of her
throat; not yet has Psyche stolen away her joy, nor Mars rolled her on a
soldier's couch amid the spears and bucklers; for now she is but a maid,
and she cometh in the dawn to her kingdom dreaming over the sea. If we
compare her for a moment with the Madonna of the Magnificat, with the
Mary of the Pomegranate, she seems to us more virgin than the Virgin
herself; less troubled by a love in which all the sorrow and desire of
the world have found expression, less weary of the prayers that will be
hers no less than Mary's. How wearily and with what sadness Madonna
writes Magnificat, or dreams of the love that even now is come into her
arms! Is it that, as Pater has thought, the honour is too great for her,
that she would have preferred a humbler destiny, the joy of any other
mother of Israel? Who is she, this woman of divine and troubling beauty
that masquerades as Venus, and with Christ in her arms is so sad and
unhappy. Tradition tells us that he was Simonetta, the mistress of
Giuliano de' Medici, who, dying still in her youth, was borne through
Florence with uncovered face to her grave under the cypresses. Whoever
she may be, she haunts all the work of Botticelli, who, it might seem,
loved her as one who had studied Dante, and, one of the company of the
Platonists of Lorenzo's court, might well love a woman altogether remote
from him. As Venus she is a maid about to step for the first time upon
the shores of Cypris, and her eyes are like violets, wet with dew that
have not looked on the sun; her bright locks heavy with gold her maid
has caught about her, and the pale anemones have kissed her breasts, and
the scarlet weeds have kissed her on the mouth. As Mary, her destiny is
too great for her, and her lips tremble under the beauty of the words
she is about to utter; the mystical veils about her head have blinded
her, her eyelids have fallen over her eyes, and in her heart she seems
to be weeping. But it is another woman not less mysterious who, as
Judith, trips homeward so lightly in the morning after the terrible
night, her dreadful burden on her head and in her soul some too brutal
accusation. Again you may see her as Madonna in a picture brought here
from S. Maria Nuova, where she would let Love fall, she is so weary, but
that an angel's arm enfolds Him.
[Illustration: THE BIRTH OF VENUS
_By Sandro Botticelli. Uffizi Gallery_
_Anderson_]
In the Calumny you see a picture painted from the description Alberti
had given in his treatise on painting of the work of Apelles. "There was
in this picture," says Alberti, "a man with very large ears, and beside
him stood two women; one was called Ignorance, the other Superstition.
Towards him came Calumny. This was a woman very beautiful to look upon,
but with a double countenance (_ma parea nel viso troppo astuta_). She
held in her right hand a lighted torch, and with the other hand she
dragged by the hair a young man (_uno garzonotto_), who lifted his hands
towards heaven. There was also a man, pale, _brutto_, and gross, ... he
was guide to Calumny, and was called Envy. Two other women accompanied
Calumny, and arranged her hair and her ornaments, and one was Perfidy
and the other Fraud. Behind them came Penitence, a woman dressed in
mourning, all ragged. She was followed by a girl, modest and sensitive,
called Truth."[121]
The Birth of Venus was the first study of the nude that any painter had
dared to paint; but profound as is its significance, Florentine painting
was moving forward by means less personal than the genius, the great
personal art of Botticelli. Here in the Uffizi you may see an
Annunciation (56) of Baldovinetti (1427-99), in which something of that
strangeness and beauty of landscape which owed much to Angelico, and
more perhaps in its contrivance to Paolo Uccello, was to come to such
splendour in the work of Verrocchio and Leonardo. Baldovinetti's pupil,
Piero Pollaiuoli (1443-96), the younger brother of Antonio (1429-98),
whose work in sculpture is so full of life, was, with his brother's help
and guidance, giving to painting some of the power and reality of
movement which we look for in vain till his time. In a picture of St.
James, with St. Vincent and St. Eustace on either side (1301), you may
see Piero's work, the fine, rather powerful than beautiful people he
loved. It is, however, in the work of one whom he influenced, Andrea
Verrocchio, the pupil of Donatello and Baldovinetti, that, as it seems
to me, what was best worth having in his work comes to its own,
expressed with a real genius that is always passionate and really
expressive. The Baptism in the Accademia, a beautiful but not very
charming work, perhaps of his old age, received, Vasari tells us, some
touches from the brush of Leonardo, and for long the Annunciation of the
Uffizi (1286) passed as Leonardo's work. Repainted though it is, in
almost every part (the angel's wings retain something of their original
brightness), this Annunciation remains one of the loveliest pictures in
the gallery, full of the eagerness and ardour of Verrocchio. In a garden
at sunset, behind the curiously trimmed cypresses under a portico of
marble, Madonna sits at her _prie dieu_, a marvellously carved
sarcophagus of marble, while before her Gabriel kneels, holding the
lilies, lifting his right hand in blessing. The picture comes from the
Church of Monte Oliveto, not far away.
[Illustration: THE ANNUNCIATION
_By Andrea Verrocchio, Uffizi Gallery_
_Anderson_]
Verrocchio was the master of Lorenzo di Credi and of Leonardo, while,
as it is said, Perugino passed through his bottega. There are many works
here given to Lorenzo, who seems to have been a better painter than he
was a sculptor: the Madonna and Child (24), the Annunciation (1160), the
Noli me Tangere (1311), and above all, the Venus (3452), are beautiful,
but less living than one might expect from the pupil of Verrocchio.
Verrocchio's true pupil, if we may call him a pupil of any master at all
who was an universal genius, wayward and altogether personal in
everything he did, was Leonardo da Vinci. Of Leonardo's rare work (Mr.
Berenson finds but nine paintings that may pass as his in all Europe)
there is but one example in the Uffizi, and that is unfinished. It is
the Adoration of the Magi (1252), scarcely more than a shadow, begun in
1478. Leonardo was a wanderer all his life, an engineer, a musician, a
sculptor, an architect, a mathematician, as well as a painter. This
Adoration is the only work of his left in Tuscany, and there are but
three other paintings from his hand in all Italy. Of these, the fresco
of the Last Supper, at Milan, has been restored eight times, and is
about to suffer another repainting; while of the two pictures in Rome,
the St. Jerome of the Vatican is unfinished, and the Profile of a Girl,
in the possession of Donna Laura Minghetti, is "not quite finished"
either, Mr. Berenson tells us. It is to the Louvre that we must go to
see Leonardo's work as a painter.
Tuscan painting at its best, its most expressive, in the work of
Botticelli, fails to convince us of sincerity in the work of his pupil
Filippino Lippi, the son of Fra Filippo. Of all his pictures here in the
Uffizi, the two frescoes--the portrait of himself (286), the portrait of
an old man (1167), the Adoration of the Magi (1217), painted in 1496,
the Madonna and Saints (1268), painted in 1485, it is rather the little
picture of Madonna adoring her Son (1549) that I prefer, for a certain
sweetness and beauty of colour, before any of his more ambitious works.
Ghirlandajo too, that sweet and serene master, is not so lovely here as
in the Adoration of the Shepherds at the Accademia. In his so-called
Portrait of Perugino (1163),[122] the Adoration of the Magi (1295), and
the Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels (1297), his work seems to
lack sincerity, in all but the first, at any rate, to be the facile work
of one not sufficiently convinced of the necessity for just that without
which there is no profound beauty.
But the age was full of misfortune; it was necessary, perhaps, to
pretend a happiness one did not feel. Certainly in the strangely
fantastic work of Pier di Cosimo, the Rescue of Andromeda (1312), for
instance, there is nothing of the touching sincerity and beauty of his
Death of Procris, now in the National Gallery, which remains his one
splendid work. His pupil Fra Bartolommeo, who was later so unfortunately
influenced by Michelangelo, may be seen here at his best in a small
diptych (1161); in his early manner, his Isaiah (1126) and Job (1130),
we see mere studies in drapery and anatomy. His most characteristic work
is, however, in the Pitti Gallery, where we shall consider it.
Much the same might be said of his partner Albertinelli, and his friend
Andrea del Sarto, whom again we shall consider later in the Pitti
Palace. It will be sufficient here to point out his beautiful early Noli
me Tangere (93), The Portrait of his Wife (188), the Portrait of Himself
(280), the Portrait of a Lady, with a Petrarch in her hands (1230), and
the Madonna dell' Arpie (1112), that statuesque and too grandiose
failure that is so near to success.
Michelangelo, that Roman painter--for out of Rome there are but two of
his works, and one of these, the Deposition in the National Gallery, is
unfinished--has here in the Uffizi a very splendid Holy Family (1139),
splendid perhaps rather than beautiful, where in the background we may
see the graceful nude figures which Luca Signorelli had taught him to
paint there. Luca Signorelli, born in Cortona, the pupil of Piero della
Francesca, passes as an Umbrian painter, and indeed his best work may
be found there. But he was much influenced by Antonio Pollaiuolo, and is
altogether out of sympathy with the mystical art of Umbria. Here in the
Uffizi are two of his early works, the Holy Family (1291) and a Madonna
and Child (74), where, behind the Virgin holding her divine Son in her
lap, you may see four naked shepherds, really the first of their race.
This picture was painted for Lorenzo de' Medici, and doubtless
influenced Michelangelo when he painted his Holy Family for Messer
Angelo Doni, who haggled so badly over his bargain.
It is really the decadence, certainly prophesied in the later work of
Andrea del Sarto, that we come to in the work of that pupil of his, who
was influenced by what he could understand of the work of Michelangelo.
Jacopo Pontormo's work almost fails to interest us to-day save in his
portraits. The Cosimo I (1270), the Cosimo dei Medici (1267), painted
from some older portrait, the Portrait of a Man (1220), have a certain
splendour, that we find more attenuated but still living in the work of
his pupil Bronzino, who also failed to understand Michelangelo. Fine
though his portraits are, his various insincere and badly coloured
compositions merely serve to show how low the taste of the time--the
time of the end of the Republic--had fallen.
Thus we have followed very cursorily, but with a certain faithfulness
nevertheless, the course of Florentine Art. With the other schools of
Italy we shall deal more shortly.