During the last years of Cosimo de' Medici, Luca Pitti, that rare old
knight, sometime Gonfaloniere of Justice, thought to possess himself of
the state of Florence, and to this end, besides creating a new Balia
against the wishes of Cosimo, distributed, as it is said, some 20,000
ducats in one day, so that the whole city came after him in flocks, and
not Cosimo, but he, was looked upon as the governor of Florence. "So
foolish was he in his own conceit, that he began two stately and
magnificent houses," Machiavelli tells us, "one in Florence, the other
at Rusciano, not more than a mile away: but that in Florence was greater
and more splendid than the house of any other private citizen
whatsoever. To finish this latter, he baulked no extraordinary way, for
not only the citizens and better sort presented him and furnished him
with what was necessary for it, but the common people gave him all of
their assistance; besides, all that were banished or guilty of murder,
felony, or any other thing which exposed them to punishment, had
sanctuary at that house provided they would give him their labour."
Now, when Cosimo was dead, and Piero de' Medici the head of that family,
Niccolò Soderini was made Gonfaloniere of Justice, and thinking to
secure the liberty of the city he began many good things, but perfected
nothing, so that he left that office with less honour than he entered
into it. This fortified Piero's party exceedingly, so that his enemies
began to resent it and work together to consider how they might kill
him, for in supporting Galeazzo Maria Sforza to the Dukedom of
Milan--which his father Francesco, just dead, had stolen for
himself--they saw, or thought they saw, the way in which Piero would
deal if he could with Florence. Thus the Mountain, as the party of his
enemies was called, leaned threatening to crush him more surely every
day. But Piero, who lay sick at Careggi, armed himself, as did his
friends, who were not few in the city. Now the leaders of his enemies
were Luca Pitti, Dietosalvi Neroni, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, and most
courageous of all, Niccolò Soderini. He, taking arms, as Piero had done,
and followed by most of the people of his quarter, went one morning to
Luca's house, entreating him to mount and ride with him to Palazzo
Vecchio for the security of the Senate, who, as he said, were of his
side. "To do this," said he, "is victory." But Luca had no mind for this
game, for many reasons,--for one, he had already received promises and
rewards from Piero; for another, he had married one of his nieces to
Giovanni Tornabuoni,--so that, instead of joining him, he admonished
Soderini to lay aside his arms and return quietly to his house. In the
meantime the Senate, with the magistrates, had closed the doors of
Palazzo Vecchio without appearing for either side, though the whole city
was in tumult. After much discussion, they agreed, since Piero could not
be present, for he was sick, to go to him in his palace, but Soderini
would not. So they set out without him; and arrived, one was deputed to
speak of the tumult, and to declare that they who first took arms were
responsible; and that understanding Piero was the man, they came to be
informed of his design, and to know whether it were for the advantage of
the city. Piero made answer that not they who first took arms were
blameworthy, but they who gave occasion for it: that if they considered
their behaviour towards him, their meetings at night, their
subscriptions and practices to defeat him, they would not wonder at what
he had done; that he desired nothing but his own security, and that
Cosimo and his sons knew how to live honourably in Florence, either with
or without a Balia. Then, turning on Dietosalvi and his brothers, who
were all present, he reproached them severely for the favours they had
received from Cosimo, and the great ingratitude which they had returned;
which reprimand was delivered with so much zeal, that, had not Piero
himself restrained them, there were some present who would certainly
have killed them. So he had it his own way, and presently new senators
being chosen and another gonfaloniere, the people were called together
in the Piazza and a new Balia was created, all of Piero's creatures.
This so terrified "the Mountain" that they fled out of the city, but
Luca Pitti remained, trusting in Giovanni Tornabuoni and the promises of
Piero. Now mark his fall. He quickly learned the difference betwixt
victory and misfortune, betwixt honour and disgrace. His house, which
formerly was thronged with visitors and the better sort of citizens, was
now grown solitary and unfrequented. When he appeared abroad in the
streets, his friends and relations were not only afraid to accompany
him, but even to own or salute him, for some of them had lost their
honours for doing it, some their estates, and all of them were
threatened. The noble structures which he had begun were given over by
the workmen, the good deeds requited with contumely, the honours he had
conferred with infamy and disgrace. For many persons, who in the day of
his authority had loaded him with presents, required them again in his
distress, pretending they were but loans and no more. Those who before
had cried him to the skies, cursed him down as fast for his ingratitude
and violence; so that now, when it was too late, he began to repent
himself that he had not taken Soderini's advice and died honourably,
seeing that he must now live with dishonour.
So far Machiavelli. The unfinished, half-ruinous palace, designed in
1444 by Brunellesco, was a century later sold by the Pitti, quite ruined
now, to Eleonora, the wife of Grand Duke Cosimo, and was finished by
Ammanati. The great wings were added later. In May 1550, Cosimo I
entered Palazzo Pitti as his Grand-Ducal residence. To-day it is the
King of Italy's Palace in Florence.
The Galleria Palatina is a gallery of the masterpieces of the high
Renaissance, formed by the Grand Dukes, who brought here from their own
villas and from the Uffizi the greatest works in their possession. Like
other Italian galleries, it suffered from Napoleon's generals; but
though sixty or more pictures were taken to Paris, they all seem to have
been returned. Here the Grand Dukes gathered ten pictures by Titian
eight by Raphael, as well as two, the Madonna del Baldacchino and the
Vision of Ezekiel, which he designed, ten by Andrea del Sarto, six by
Fra Bartolommeo, two lovely Peruginos, two splendid portraits by Ridolfo
Ghirlandajo, four portraits by Tintoretto, several pictures by Rubens,
two portraits, one of himself, by Rembrandt, a magnificent Vandyck, and
many lesser pictures. In the royal apartments, among other interesting
or beautiful things, is Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur, painted, as
some have thought, to celebrate Lorenzo's return from Naples in 1480. It
is, then, rather as a royal gallery than as a museum that we must
consider the Galleria Palatina, a more splendid if less catholic Salon
Carré, the Tribuna of Italian painting. It is strange that, among all
the beautiful and splendid pictures with which the Grand Dukes
surrounded themselves, there is not one from the hand of Leonardo, nor
one that Michelangelo has painted. And then, of the many here that pass
under the name of Botticelli, only the Pallas and the Centaur in the
royal apartments seems to be really his; so that when we look for the
greatest pictures of the Florentine school, we must be content with the
strangely unsatisfactory work of Andrea del Sarto, often lovely enough
it is true, but as often insincere, shallow, not at one with itself, and
certainly a stranger here in Florence.
The work of Andrea del Sarto, as we are assured, might but for his
tragic story have been so splendid; but in truth that sentimental and
pathetic tale neither excuses nor explains his failure, if failure it
be. He is the first artist who has worked badly because he loved a
woman. He was born in 1456, and became the pupil of Piero di Cosimo.
There in that fantastic bottega he must have met Fra Bartolommeo, who
later influenced him so deeply. Nor was Michelangelo, or at least his
grand and tremendous art, without its effect upon one so easily moved,
so subject to every passing mood, as Andrea. Yet he never seems to have
expressed just himself, save in those tragic portraits of himself and of
his wife, of which there are three here in the Pitti (188, 280, 1176).
He has been called the faultless painter, and indeed he seems to be
incapable of fault, to be really a little effeminate, a little vague,
bewildered by the sculpture of Michelangelo, the confusion of art in
Florence, the advent of the colourists, of whom here in Tuscany he is
perhaps the chief. It is no intellectual passion you find in that soft,
troubled work, where from every picture Lucrezia del Fede looks out at
you, posing as Madonna or Magdalen or just herself, and even so,
discontented, unhappy, unsatisfactory because she is too stupid to be
happy at all. If she were Andrea's tragedy, one might think that even
without her his life could scarcely have been different. If we compare,
here in the Pitti Gallery, the two pictures of the Annunciation from his
hand, we shall see how completely the enthusiasm of his early work is
wanting in his later pictures. Something, some divine energy, seems to
have gone out of his life, and ever after he is but trying to revive or
to counterfeit it. Now and then, as in the Disputa (172), which marks
the very zenith of his art, he is almost a great painter, but the
Madonna with six Saints (123), painted in 1524, is already full of
repetitions,--the kneeling figures in the foreground, for instance, that
we find again in the Deposition (58) painted in the same year. Nor in
the Assumption (225) painted in 1526, nor in the later picture (191) of
1531, is there any significance, energy, or beauty: they are
arrangements of draperies, splendid luxurious pictures without sincerity
or emotion. It is not fair to judge him by the St. John Baptist, which
has suffered too much from restoration to be any longer his work. Thus
it is at last as the painter of the Annunziata and the Scalzo that we
must think of him, which, full of grandiose and heavy forms and
draperies though they are, still please us better than anything else he
achieved, save the great Last Supper of S. Salvi and the portraits of
himself and his wife. As a Florentine painter he seems ever among
strangers: it is as an exiled Venetian, one who had been forced by some
irony of circumstances to forego his birthright in that invigorating and
worldly city, which might have revealed to him just the significance of
life which we miss in his pictures, that he appears to us; a failure
difficult to explain, a weak but beautiful nature spoiled by mediocrity.
Fra Bartolommeo was another Florentine who seems, for a moment at any
rate, to have been bewildered by the influence of Michelangelo, but as a
profound conviction saved him from insincerity, so his splendid
sensuality preserved his work from sentimentalism. Born about 1475 at
Savignano, not far from Prato, his father sent him to Florence, placing
him in the care of Cosimo Rosselli, according to Vasari, but more
probably, as we may think, under Piero di Cosimo. Here he seems to have
come under the influence of Leonardo, and to have been friends with
Mariotto Albertinelli. The great influence of his life, however, was Fra
Girolamo Savonarola, whom he would often go to S. Marco to hear.
Savonarola was preaching as ever against vanities,--that is to say,
pictures, statues, verses, books: things doubtless anathema to one whose
whole future depended upon the amount of interest he could awaken in
himself. At this time, it seems, Savonarola was asserting his conviction
that "in houses where young maidens dwelt it was dangerous and improper
to retain pictures wherein there were undraped figures." It seems to
have been the custom in Florence at the time of the Carnival to build
cabins of wood and furze, and on the night of Shrove Tuesday to set them
ablaze, while the people danced around them, joining hands, according to
ancient custom, amid laughter and songs. This Savonarola had denounced,
and, winning the ear of the people for the moment, he persuaded those
who were wont to dance to bring "pictures and works of sculpture, many
by the most excellent masters," and to cast them into the fire, with
books, musical instruments, and such. To this pile, Vasari tells us,
Bartolommeo brought all his studies and drawings which he had made from
the nude, and threw them into the flames; so also did Lorenzo di Credi
and many others, who were called Piagnoni, among them, no doubt, Sandro
Botticelli. The people soon tired, however, of their new vanity, as they
had done of the beautiful things they had destroyed at his bidding, and,
the party opposed to Savonarola growing dangerous, Bartolommeo with
others shut themselves up in S. Marco to guard Savonarola. Fra
Girolamo's excommunication, torture, and death, which followed soon
after, seem finally to have decided the gentle Bartolommeo to assume the
religious habit, which he did not long after at S. Domenico in Prato.
Later we find him back in Florence in the Convent of S. Marco, where he
is said to have met Raphael and to have learned much from him of the art
of perspective. However that may be, he continued to paint there in S.
Marco really--saving a journey to Rome where he came under the influence
of Michelangelo, a visit to S. Martino in Lucca, and his journey to
Venice in 1506--for the rest of his life, being buried there at last in
1517.
Six pictures from his hand hang to-day in the Pitti,--a Holy Family
(256), the beautiful Deposition (64), an Ecce Homo in fresco (377), the
Marriage of St. Catherine, painted in 1512 (208), a St. Mark, painted in
1514 (125), and Christ and the Four Evangelists, painted in 1516 (159).
The unpleasing "Madonna appearing to St. Bernard," painted in 1506, now
in the Accademia, was his first work after he became a friar.
Here, in the Pitti, Bartolommeo is not at his best; for his earlier and
more delicate manner, so full of charm and a sort of daintiness, one
must go to Lucca, where his picture of Madonna with St. Stephen and St.
John Baptist hangs in the Duomo. The grand and almost pompous works in
Florence, splendid though they may be in painting, in composition, in
colour, scarcely move us at all, so that it might almost seem that in
following Savonarola he lost not the world only but his art also, that
refined and delicate art which comes to us so gently in his earliest
pictures. Something passionate and pathetic, truly, may be found in the
Pietà here, together with a certain dramatic effectiveness that is rare
in his work. With what an effort, for instance, has St. John lifted the
body of his Master from the great cross in the background, how
passionately Mary Magdalen has flung herself at His feet; yet the
picture seems to be without any real significance, without spirituality
certainly, only another colossal group of figures that even Michelangelo
has refused to carve.
[Illustration: PIETÀ
_By Fra Bartolomeo. Pitti Gallery_
_Anderson_]
On coming to the work of Raphael, to the work of Titian, we find the
great treasure of the Pitti Gallery, beside which the rest is but a
background: it is for them really, after all, that we have come here.
Raphael Sanzio, the "most beloved name in the history of painting," was
born at Urbino in 1483. The pupil first of his father maybe, though
Giovanni died when his son was but eleven years old, and later of
Timoteo Viti, we hear of Raphael first in the bottega of the greatest of
the Umbrian painters, Perugino, at Perugia. Two works of Perugino hang
to-day in the Pitti Gallery, the Madonna and Child (219) and the
Entombment (164), painted in 1495, for the nuns of S. Chiara. Vasari has
much to say of the latter, relating how Francesco del Pugliare offered
to give them three times as much as they had paid Perugino for the
picture, and to cause another exactly like it to be executed for them by
the same hand; but they would not consent, because Pietro had told them
he did not think he could equal the one they possessed. It is really
Umbria itself we see in that lovely work, which has impressed
Bartolommeo so profoundly, the Lake of Trasimeno, surrounded by villages
that climb the hills just as Perugino has painted the little city in
this picture. And it is in this mystical and smiling country, where the
light is so soft and tender, softer than on any Tuscan hills, that the
most perfect if not the greatest painter of the Renaissance grew up.
You may find some memory of that beautiful land of hills and quiet
valleys even in his latest work, after he had learned from every master,
and summed up, as it were, the whole Renaissance in his achievement. But
in four pictures here in the Pitti, it is the influence of Florence you
find imposing itself upon the art of Umbria, transforming it,
strengthening it, and suggesting it may be, the way of advance.
Something of the art of Pietro you see in the portraits of Madallena
Doni (59), Angelo Doni (61), and La Donna Gravida (229), something so
akin to the Francesco delle Opere of the Uffizi that it would not be
surprising to find the Madallena Doni, at any rate, attributed to
Perugino. Yet superficial though they be in comparison with the later
portraits, they mark the patient endeavour of his work in Florence, the
realism that this city, so scornful of _forestieri_, was forcing upon
him as it had already done on Perugino, who in the Francesco, the
Bracessi, and the two monks of the Accademia, touches life itself,
perhaps, only there in all his work. It is the influence of Florence we
seem to find too in the simplicity of the Madonna del Granduca (178).
Here is a picture certainly in the manner of Perugino, but with
something lost, some light, some beatitude, yet with something gained
also, if only in a certain measure of restraint, a real simplicity that
is foreign to that master. And then, if we compare it with the Madonna
della Sedia (151), which is said to have been painted on the lid of a
wine cask, we shall find, I think, that however many new secrets he may
learn Raphael never forgot a lesson. It is Perugino who has taught him
to compose so perfectly, that the space, small or large, of the picture
itself becomes a means of beauty. How perfectly he has placed Madonna
with her little Son, and St. John praying beside them, so that until you
begin to take thought you are not aware how difficult that composition
must have been, and indeed you never remember how small that _tondo_
really is. How eagerly these easel pictures of Madonna have been loved,
and yet to-day how little they mean to us; some virtue seems to have
gone out of them, so that they move us no longer, and we are indeed a
little impatient at their fame, and ready to accuse Raphael of I know
not what insincerity or dreadful facility. Yet we have only to look at
the portraits to know we are face to face with one of the greatest and
most universal of painters. Consider, then, La Donna Velata (245), or
the Pope Julius II (79), or the Leo X with the two Cardinals (40), how
splendid they are, how absolutely characterised and full of life, life
seen in the tranquillity of the artist, who has understood everything,
and with whom truth has become beauty. In the Leo X with the Cardinals,
Giulio de' Medici and Lorenzo dei Rossi, how tactfully Raphael has
contrived the light and shadow so that the fat heavy face of the Pope is
not over emphasised, and you discern perfectly the beauty of the head,
the delicacy of the nostrils, the clever, sensual, pathetic, witty
mouth. And the hands seem to be about to move, to be a little tremulous
with life, to be on the verge of a gesture, to have only just become
motionless on the edge of the book. It is in these portraits that the
art of Raphael is at its greatest, becomes universal, achieves
immortality.
There remains to be considered the splendid ever-living work of Titian.
The early work of the greatest painter of Italy, of the world, greatest
in the variety, number, and splendour of his pictures, is represented in
the Pitti, happily enough by one of the most lovely of all Italian
paintings, the Concert (185), so long given to Giorgone. A monk in cowl
and tonsure touches the keys of a harpsichord, while beside him stands
an older man, a clerk and perhaps a monk too, who grasps the handle of a
viol; in the background, a youthful, ambiguous figure, with a cap and
plume, waits, perhaps on some interval, to begin a song. Yet, indeed,
that is not the picture, which, whatever its subject may be, would seem
to be more expressive than any other in the world. Some great joy, some
great sorrow, seems about to declare itself. What music does he hear,
that monk with the beautiful sensitive hands, who turns away towards his
companion? Something has awakened in his soul, and he is transfigured.
Perhaps for the first time, in some rhythm of the music, he has
understood everything, the beauty of life which passeth like a sunshine,
now that it is too late, that his youth is over and middle age is upon
him. His companion, on the threshold of old age, divines his trouble and
lays a hand on his shoulder quietly, as though to still the tumult of
his heart. Like a vision youth itself, ambiguous, about to possess
everything, waits, like a stranger, as though invoked by the music, on
an interval that will never come again, that is already passed.
If Titian is really the sole painter of this picture, how loyal he has
been to his friend, to that new spirit which lighted Venetian art as the
sun makes beautiful the world. But indeed one might think that, even
with Morelli, Crowe, and Cavalcaselle, and Berenson against us, not to
name others who have done much for the history of painting in Italy, we
might still believe, not altogether without reason, that Giorgone had
some part in the Concert, which, after all, passed as his altogether for
two hundred and fifty years; was bought, indeed, as his in 1654, only
seventy-eight years after Titian's death, by Cardinal Leopoldo de'
Medici from Paolo del Sera, the Florentine collector in Venice. That
figure of a youth, ambiguous in its beauty--could any other hand than
Giorgone's have painted it; does it ever appear in Titian's innumerable
masterpieces at all? Dying as he did at the age of thirty-three,
Giorgone must have left many pictures unfinished, which Titian, his
friend and disciple almost, may well have completed, and even signed, in
an age when works, almost wholly untouched by a master, were certainly
sold as his.
Titian's other pictures here, with the exception of the Head of Christ
(228) and the Magdalen (67), are portraits, all, save the so-called
Tommaso Mosti, painted certainly before 1526, of his great middle
period. The Magdalen comes from Urbino, where Vasari saw it in the
Guardaroba of the great palace. The quality of the picture is one of
sheer colour; there is here no other "subject" than a beautiful nude
woman,--it is called a Magdalen because it is not called a Venus.
Consider, then, the harmony of the gold hair and the fair flesh and the
blue of the sky: it is a harmony in gold and rose and blue.
The earliest of the great portraits is the Ippolito de' Medici (201); it
was painted in Venice in October 1532.[127] Vasari saw this picture in
the Guardaroba of Cosimo I. It is a half-length portrait of a
distinguished man, still very young, that we see. The Cardinal is not
dressed as a Churchman, but as a grandee of Hungary. In the sad and
cunning face we seem to foresee the fate that awaited him at Gaeta
scarcely three years later, where he was imprisoned and poisoned. The
beautiful dull red of the tunic reminds one of the unforgetable red of
the cloth on the table beside which Philip II stands in the picture in
the Prado. From this profound and almost touching portrait we come to
the joy of the Bella (18). It is a hymn to Physical Beauty. There is
nothing in the world more splendid or more glad than this portrait,
perhaps of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino. How often Titian has
painted her!--once as it might seem as the Venus of the Tribune (1117),
and again in her own character in the portrait now in the Uffizi (599),
where certainly she is not so fair as she we see here as Bella and there
as Venus. If this, indeed, be the Duchess of Urbino, then the Venus is
also her portrait, for the Bella is described in the list of fine
pictures which were brought to Florence in 1631 as a portrait of the
same person we know as the Venus of the Tribune. But the first we hear
of the Bella is in a letter of the Duke of Urbino in 1536, while the
portrait in the Uffizi of Eleonora Gonzaga was painted in Venice in that
year; and since the Duchess is certainly an older woman than the Bella,
we must conclude either that the Bella was painted many years earlier,
which seems impossible, or that it is not a portrait of Eleonora
Gonzaga. And, indeed, the latter conclusion seems likely, for who can
believe that the Duke would have cared for a nude portrait of his wife
as Venus? It seems probable that the Bella is a portrait of his mistress
rather than his wife, a mistress whom, since she was so fair, he did not
scruple to ask Titian to paint as Venus herself. A harmony in blue and
gold, Dr. Gronau calls the picture; adding that, "in spite of its faults
or of the restorations which have made it a mere shadow of its former
splendour, it remains an immortal example of what the art of the
Renaissance at its zenith regarded as the ideal of feminine beauty."
If it is beauty and joy we find in the Bella, it is a profound force and
confidence that we come upon in the portrait of Aretino painted before
1545,--and life above all. Here is one of the greatest blackguards of
history, the "Scourge of Princes," the blackmailer of Popes, the
sensualist of the Sonnetti Lussuriosi, the witty author of the
_Ragionamenti_. We seem to see his vulgarity, his immense ability, his
splendour, and his baseness, and to understand why Titian was wise
enough to take him for his friend. What energy, almost bestial in its
brutality, you find in those coarse features and over-eloquent lips, and
yet the head is powerful, really intellectual too, though without any
delicacy or fineness. Aretino himself presented this portrait to Cosimo
I in October 1545, inexplicably explaining that the rendering of the
dress was not perfect.[128]
In another portrait of about the same time, the Young Englishman (92),
we have Titian at his best. The extraordinarily beautiful English face,
fulfilled with some incalculable romance, is to me at least by far the
most delightful portrait in Florence. One seems to understand England,
her charm, her fascination, her extraordinary pride and persistence, in
looking at this picture of one of her sons. All the tragedy of her
kings, the adventure to be met with on her seas, the beauty and culture
of Oxford, and the serenity of her country places, come back to one
fresh and unsullied by memories of the defiling and trumpery cities
that so lately have begun to destroy her. Who this beautiful figure may
be we know not, nor, indeed, where the picture may have come from; for
if it comes from Urbino it is not well described in the inventory of
1631.
After looking upon such a work as this, the Philip II (200), fine though
it is, and only less splendid than the Madrid picture, the Portrait of a
Man (215), both painted in Augsburg in 1548, and even the lovely
portrait of Giulia Varana, Duchess of Urbino, in the royal apartments,
seem to lose something of their splendour. Yet if we compare them with
the work of Raphael or Tintoretto, they assuredly possess an energy and
a vitality that even those masters were seldom able to express. For
Titian seems to have created life with something of the ease and
facility of a natural force; to have desired always Beauty as the only
perfect flower of life; and while he was not content with the mere
truth, and never with beauty divorced from life, he has created life in
such abundance that his work may well be larger than the achievement of
any two other men, even the greatest in painting; yet in his work, in
the work that is really his, you will find nothing that is not living,
nothing that is not an impassioned gesture reaching above and beyond our
vision into the realm of that force which seems to be eternal.