CHAPTER I

RENAISSANCE IN ITALY

THE FINE ARTS

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

AUTHOR OF

"AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF DANTE", "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS"

AND "SKETCHES IN ITALY AND GREECE"

* * * * *

Dii Romae indigetes, Trojae tuque auctor, Apollo,

Unde genus nostrum coeli se tollit ad astra,

Hanc saltem auferri laudem prohibete Latinis:

Artibus emineat semper, studiisque Minervae,

Italia, et gentes doceat pulcherrima Roma;

Quandoquidem armorum penitus fortuna recessit,

Tanta Italos inter crevit discordia reges;

Ipsi nos inter saevos distringimus enses,

Nec patriam pudet externis aperire tyrannis

VIDA, _Poetica_, lib. ii.

* * * * *

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER & CO

1899

PREFACE[1]

This third volume of my book on the "Renaissance in Italy" does not

pretend to retrace the history of the Italian arts, but rather to define

their relation to the main movement of Renaissance culture. Keeping this,

the chief object of my whole work, steadily in view, I have tried to

explain the dependence of the arts on mediaeval Christianity at their

commencement, their gradual emancipation from ecclesiastical control, and

their final attainment of freedom at the moment when the classical revival

culminated.

Not to notice the mediaeval period in this evolution would be impossible;

since the revival of Sculpture and Painting at the end of the thirteenth

century was among the earliest signs of that new intellectual birth to

which we give the title of Renaissance. I have, therefore, had to deal at

some length with stages in the development of Architecture, Sculpture,

and Painting, which form a prelude to the proper age of my own history.

In studying the architectural branch of the subject, I have had recourse

to Fergusson's "Illustrated Handbook of Architecture," to Burckhardt's

"Cicerone," to Grüner's "Terra-Cotta Buildings of North Italy," to

Milizia's "Memorie degli Architetti," and to many illustrated works on

single buildings in Rome, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Venice. For the history

of Sculpture I have used Burckhardt's "Cicerone," and the two important

works of Charles C. Perkins, entitled "Tuscan Sculptors," and "Italian

Sculptors." Such books as "Le Tre Porte del Battistero di Firenze,"

Grüner's "Cathedral of Orvieto," and Lasinio's "Tabernacolo della Madonna

d'Orsammichele" have been helpful by their illustrations. For the history

of Painting I have made use principally of Vasari's "Vite de' più

eccellenti Pittori," &c., in Le Monnier's edition of Crowe and

Cavalcaselle's "History of Painting," of Burckhardt's "Cicerone," of

Rosini's illustrated "Storia della Pittura Italiana," of Rio's "L'Art

Chrétien," and of Henri Beyle's "Histoire de la Peinture en Italie." I

should, however, far exceed the limits of a preface were I to make a list

of all the books I have consulted with profit on the history of the arts

in Italy.

In this part of my work I feel that I owe less to reading than to

observation. I am not aware of having mentioned any important building,

statue, or picture which I have not had the opportunity of studying. What

I have written in this volume about the monuments of Italian art has

always been first noted face to face with the originals, and afterwards

corrected, modified, or confirmed in the course of subsequent journeys to

Italy. I know that this method of composition, if it has the merit of

freshness, entails some inequality of style and disproportion in the

distribution of materials. In the final preparation of my work for press I

have therefore endeavoured, as far as possible, to compensate this

disadvantage by adhering to the main motive of my subject--the

illustration of the Renaissance spirit as this was manifested in the Arts.

I must add, in conclusion, that Chapters VII. and IX. and Appendix II. are

in part reprinted from the "Westminster," the "Cornhill," and the

"Contemporary."

CLIFTON: _March_ 1877.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS

Art in Italy and Greece--The Leading Phase of Culture--Æsthetic Type of

Literature--Painting the Supreme Italian Art--Its Task in the

Renaissance--Christian and Classical Traditions--Sculpture for the

Ancients--Painting for the Romance Nations--Mediaeval Faith and

Superstition--The Promise of Painting--How far can the Figurative Arts

express Christian Ideas?--Greek and Christian Religion--Plastic Art

incapable of solving the Problem--A more Emotional Art needed--Place of

Sculpture in the Renaissance--Painting and Christian Story--Humanization

of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art--Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to

Art--Compromises effected by the Church--Fra Bartolommeo's S.

Sebastian--Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and

Philosophy--Recapitulation--Art in the end Paganises--Music--The Future of

Painting after the Renaissance.

CHAPTER II

ARCHITECTURE

Architecture of Mediaeval Italy--Milan, Genoa, Venice--The Despots as

Builders--Diversity of Styles--Local Influences--Lombard, Tuscan,

Romanesque, Gothic--Italian want of feeling for Gothic--Cathedrals of

Siena and Orvieto--Secular Buildings of the Middle Ages--Florence and

Venice--Private Palaces--Public Halls--Palazzo della Signoria at

Florence--Arnolfo di Cambio--S. Maria del Fiore--Brunelleschi's

Dome--Classical Revival in Architecture--Roman Ruins--Three Periods in

Renaissance Architecture--Their Characteristics--Brunelleschi

--Alberti--Palace-building--Michellozzo--Decorative Work of the

Revival--Bramante--Vitoni's Church of the Umiltà at Pistoja--Palazzo del

Te--Villa Farnesina--Sansovino at Venice--Michael Angelo--The Building of

S. Peter's--Palladio--The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza--Lombard

Architects--Theorists and Students of Vitruvius--Vignola and

Scamozzi--European Influence of the Palladian Style--Comparison of

Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.

CHAPTER III

SCULPTURE

Niccola Pisano--Obscurity of the Sources for a History of Early Italian

Sculpture--Vasari's Legend of Pisano--Deposition from the Cross at

Lucca--Study of Nature and the Antique--Sarcophagus at Pisa--Pisan

Pulpit--Niccola's School--Giovanni Pisano--Pulpit in S. Andrea at

Pistoja--Fragments of his work at Pisa--Tomb of Benedict XI. at

Perugia--Bas-reliefs at Orvieto--Andrea Pisano--Relation of Sculpture to

Painting--Giotto--Subordination of Sculpture to Architecture in

Italy--Pisano's Influence in Venice--Balduccio of Pisa--Orcagna--The

Tabernacle of Orsammichele--The Gates of the Florentine Baptistery

--Competition of Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Della Quercia--Comparison

of Ghiberti's and Brunelleschi's Trial-pieces--Comparison of Ghiberti

and Della Quercia--The Bas-reliefs of S. Petronio--Ghiberti's

Education--His Pictorial Style in Bas-relief--His Feeling for the

Antique--Donatello--Early Visit to Rome--Christian Subjects--Realistic

Treatment--S. George and David--Judith--Equestrian Statue of

Gattamelata--Influence of Donatello's Naturalism--Andrea Verocchio--His

David--Statue of Colleoni--Alessandro Leopardi--Lionardo's Statue of

Francesco Sforza--The Pollajuoli--Tombs of Sixtus IV. and Innocent

VIII.--Luca della Robbia--His Treatment of Glazed Earthenware--Agostino

di Duccio--The Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia--Antonio

Rossellino--Matteo Civitali--Mino da Fiesole--Benedetto da

Majano--Characteristics and Masterpieces of this Group--Sepulchral

Monuments--Andrea Contucci's Tombs in S. Maria del Popolo--Desiderio da

Settignano--Sculpture in S. Francesco at Rimini--Venetian

Sculpture--Verona--Guido Mazzoni of Modena--Certosa of Pavia--Colleoni

Chapel at Bergamo--Sansovino at Venice--Pagan Sculpture--Michael Angelo's

Scholars--Baccio Bandinelli--Bartolommeo Ammanati--Cellini--Gian

Bologna--Survey of the History of Renaissance Sculpture.

CHAPTER IV

PAINTING

Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy--Florence and Venice

--Classification by Schools--Stages in the Evolution of Painting--Cimabue

--The Rucellai Madonna--Giotto--His widespread Activity--The Scope of his

Art--Vitality--Composition--Colour--Naturalism--Healthiness--Frescoes at

Assisi and Padua--Legend of S. Francis--The Giotteschi--Pictures of the

Last Judgment--Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel--Ambrogio Lorenzetti at

Pisa--Dogmatic Theology--Cappella degli Spagnuoli--Traini's "Triumph,

of S. Thomas Aquinas"--Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco--Sala della

Pace at Siena--Religious Art in Siena and Perugia--The Relation of the

Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance.

CHAPTER V

PAINTING

Mediaeval Motives exhausted--New Impulse toward Technical

Perfection--Naturalists in Painting--Intermediate Achievement needed

for the Great Age of Art--Positive Spirit of the Fifteenth

Century--Masaccio--The Modern Manner--Paolo Uccello--Perspective--Realistic

Painters--The Model--Piero della Francesca--His Study of Form--Resurrection

at Borgo San Sepolcro--Melozzo da Forli--Squarcione at Padua--Gentile da

Fabriano--Fra Angelico--Benozzo Gozzoli--His Decorative Style--Lippo

Lippi--Frescoes at Prato and Spoleto--Filippino Lippi--Sandro

Botticelli--His Value for the Student of Renaissance Fancy--His Feeling

for Mythology--Piero di Cosimo--Domenico Ghirlandajo--In what sense he

sums up the Age--Prosaic Spirit--Florence hitherto supreme in

Painting--Extension of Art Activity throughout Italy--Medicean Patronage.

CHAPTER VI

PAINTING

Two Periods in the True Renaissance--Andrea Mantegna--His Statuesque

Design--His Naturalism--Roman Inspiration--Triumph of Julius

Caesar--Bas-reliefs--Luca Signorelli--The Precursor of Michael

Angelo--Anatomical Studies--Sense of Beauty--The Chapel of S. Brizio at

Orvieto--Its Arabesques and Medallions--Degrees in his Ideal--Enthusiasm

for Organic Life--Mode of treating Classical Subjects--Perugino--His

Pietistic Style--His Formalism--The Psychological Problem of his

Life--Perugino's Pupils--Pinturicchio--At Spello and Siena--Francia--Fra

Bartolommeo--Transition to the Golden Age--Lionardo da Vinci--The Magician

of the Renaissance--Raphael--The Melodist--Correggio--The Faun--Michael

Angelo--The Prophet.

CHAPTER VII

VENETIAN PAINTING

Painting bloomed late in Venice--Conditions offered by Venice to

Art--Shelley and Pietro Aretino--Political Circumstances of

Venice--Comparison with Florence--The Ducal Palace--Art regarded as an

adjunct to State Pageantry--Myth of Venezia--Heroic Deeds of

Venice--Tintoretto's Paradise and Guardi's Picture of a Ball--Early

Venetian Masters of Murano--Gian Bellini--Carpaccio's Little Angels--The

Madonna of S. Zaccaria--Giorgione--Allegory, Idyll, Expression of

Emotion--The Monk at the Clavichord--Titian, Tintoret, and

Veronese--Tintoretto's Attempt to dramatise Venetian Art--Veronese's

Mundane Splendour--Titian's Sophoclean Harmony--Their Schools--Further

Characteristics of Veronese--of Tintoretto--His Imaginative

Energy--Predominant Poetry--Titian's Perfection of Balance--Assumption of

Madonna--Spirit common to the great Venetians.

CHAPTER VIII

LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO

Contrast of Michael Angelo and Cellini--Parentage and Boyhood of Michael

Angelo--Work with Ghirlandajo--Gardens of S. Marco--The Medicean

Circle--Early Essays in Sculpture--Visit to Bologna--First Visit to

Rome--The Pietà of S. Peter's--Michael Angelo as a Patriot and a friend of

the Medici--Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa--Michael Angelo and Julius

II.--The Tragedy of the Tomb--Design for the Pope's Mausoleum--Visit to

Carrara--Flight from Rome--Michael Angelo at Bologna--Bronze Statue of

Julius--Return to Rome--Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel--Greek and Modern

Art--Raphael--Michael Angelo and Leo X.--S. Lorenzo--The new

Sacristy--Circumstances under which it was designed and partly

finished--Meaning of the Allegories--Incomplete state of Michael Angelo's

Marbles--Paul III.--The "Last Judgment"--Critiques of Contemporaries--The

Dome of S. Peter's--Vittoria Colonna--Tommaso Cavalieri--Personal Habits

of Michael Angelo--His Emotional Nature--Last Illness.

CHAPTER IX

LIFE OF BENVENUTO CELLINI

His Fame--His Autobiography--Its Value for the Student of History,

Manners, and Character in the Renaissance--Birth, Parentage, and

Boyhood--Flute-playing--Apprenticeship to Marcone--Wanderjahr--The

Goldsmith's Trade at Florence--Torrigiani and England--Cellini leaves

Florence for Rome--Quarrel with the Guasconti--Homicidal Fury--Cellini a

Law to Himself--Three Periods in his Manhood--Life in Rome--Diego at the

Banquet--Renaissance Feeling for Physical Beauty--Sack of Rome--Miracles

in Cellini's Life--His Affections--Murder of his Brother's

Assassin--Sanctuary--Pardon and Absolution--Incantation in the

Colosseum--First Visit to France--Adventures on the Way--Accused of

stealing Crown Jewels in Rome--Imprisonment in the Castle of S.

Angelo--The Governor--Cellini's Escape--His Visions--The Nature of his

Religion--Second Visit to France--The Wandering Court--Le Petit

Nesle--Cellini in the French Law Courts--Scene at Fontainebleau--Return to

Florence--Cosimo de' Medici as a Patron--Intrigues of a Petty

Court--Bandinelli--The Duchess--Statue of Perseus--End of Cellini's

Life--Cellini and Machiavelli.

CHAPTER X

THE EPIGONI

Full Development and Decline of Painting--Exhaustion of the old

Motives--Relation of Lionardo to his Pupils--His Legacy to the

Lombard School--Bernardino Luini--Gaudenzio Ferrari--The Devotion

of the Sacri Monti--The School of Raphael--Nothing left but

Imitation--Unwholesome Influences of Rome--Giulio Romano--Michael

Angelesque Mannerists--Misconception of Michael Angelo--Correggio founds

no School--Parmigianino--Macchinisti--The Bolognese--After-growth of Art in

Florence--Andrea del Sarto--His Followers--Pontormo--Bronzino--Revival of

Painting in Siena--Sodoma--His Influence on Pacchia, Beccafumi,

Peruzzi--Garofalo and Dosso Dossi at Ferrari--The Campi at

Cremona--Brescia and Bergamo--The Decadence in the second half of the

Sixteenth Century--The Counter-Reformation--Extinction of the Renaissance

Impulse.

APPENDICES

I.--The Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello

II.--Michael Angelo's Sonnets

III.--Chronological Tables

FOOTNOTES:

[1] To the original edition of this volume.

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS

Art in Italy and Greece--The Leading Phase of Culture--Æsthetic Type of

Literature--Painting the Supreme Italian Art--Its Task in the

Renaissance--Christian and Classical Traditions--Sculpture for the

Ancients--Painting for the Romance Nations--Mediaeval Faith and

Superstition--The Promise of Painting--How far can the Figurative Arts

express Christian Ideas?--Greek and Christian Religion--Plastic Art

incapable of solving the Problem--A more Emotional Art needed--Place of

Sculpture in the Renaissance--Painting and Christian Story--Humanization

of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art--Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to

Art--Compromises effected by the Church--Fra Bartolommeo's S.

Sebastian--Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and

Philosophy--Recapitulation--Art in the end Paganises--Music--The Future of

Painting after the Renaissance.

It has been granted only to two nations, the Greeks and the Italians, and

to the latter only at the time of the Renaissance, to invest every phase

and variety of intellectual energy with the form of art. Nothing notable

was produced in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries

that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art. If the methods of

science may be truly said to regulate our modes of thinking at the present

time, it is no less true that, during the Renaissance, art exercised a

like controlling influence. Not only was each department of the fine arts

practised with singular success; not only was the national genius to a

very large extent absorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture; but

the aesthetic impulse was more subtly and widely diffused than this alone

would imply. It possessed the Italians in the very centre of their

intellectual vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifestations

of their thought and feeling, so that even their shortcomings may be

ascribed in a great measure to their inability to quit the aesthetic point

of view.

We see this in their literature. It is probable that none but artistic

natures will ever render full justice to the poetry of the Renaissance.

Critics endowed with a less lively sensibility to beauty of outline and to

harmony of form than the Italians, complain that their poetry lacks

substantial qualities; nor is it except by long familiarity with the

plastic arts of their contemporaries that we come to understand the ground

assumed by Ariosto and Poliziano. We then perceive that these poets were

not so much unable as instinctively unwilling to go beyond a certain

circle of effects. They subordinated their work to the ideal of their age,

and that ideal was one to which a painter rather than a poet might

successfully aspire. A succession of pictures, harmoniously composed and

delicately toned to please the mental eye, satisfied the taste of the

Italians. But, however exquisite in design, rich in colour, and complete

in execution this literary work may be, it strikes a Northern student as

wanting in the highest elements of genius--sublimity of imagination,

dramatic passion, energy and earnestness of purpose. In like manner, he

finds it hard to appreciate those didactic compositions on trifling or

prosaic themes, which delighted the Italians for the very reason that

their workmanship surpassed their matter. These defects, as we judge them,

are still more apparent in the graver branches of literature. In an essay

or a treatise we do not so much care for well-balanced disposition of

parts or beautifully rounded periods, though elegance may be thought

essential to classic masterpieces, as for weighty matter and trenchant

observations. Having the latter, we can dispense at need with the former.

The Italians of the Renaissance, under the sway of the fine arts, sought

after form, and satisfied themselves with rhetoric. Therefore we condemn

their moral disquisitions and their criticisms as the flimsy playthings of

intellectual voluptuaries. Yet the right way of doing justice to these

stylistic trifles is to regard them as products of an all-embracing genius

for art, in a people whose most serious enthusiasms were aesthetic.

The speech of the Italians at that epoch, their social habits, their ideal

of manners, their standard of morality, the estimate they formed of men,

were alike conditioned and qualified by art. It was an age of splendid

ceremonies and magnificent parade, when the furniture of houses, the

armour of soldiers, the dress of citizens, the pomp of war, and the

pageantry of festival were invariably and inevitably beautiful. On the

meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and platters, door-panels and

chimney-pieces, coverlets for beds and lids of linen-chests, a wealth of

artistic invention was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less skilled

in technical details than distinguished by rare taste. From the Pope upon

S. Peter's chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every

Italian was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, without

which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied. During that

period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with

an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for producing it in

every conceivable form. As we travel through Italy at the present day,

when "time, war, pillage, and purchase" have done their worst to denude

the country of its treasures, we still marvel at the incomparable and

countless beauties stored in every burgh and hamlet. Pacing the picture

galleries of Northern Europe, the country seats of English nobles, and the

palaces of Spain, the same reflection is still forced upon us: how could

Italy have done what she achieved within so short a space of time? What

must the houses and the churches once have been, from which these spoils

were taken, but which still remain so rich in masterpieces?

Psychologically to explain this universal capacity for the fine arts in

the nation at this epoch, is perhaps impossible. Yet the fact remains,

that he who would comprehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study

their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the

labyrinthine windings of national character. He must learn to recognise

that herein lay the sources of their intellectual strength as well as the

secret of their intellectual weakness.

It lies beyond the scope of this work to embrace in one inquiry the

different forms of art in Italy, or to analyse the connection of the

aesthetic instinct with the manifold manifestations of the Renaissance.

Even the narrower task to which I must confine myself, is too vast for the

limits I am forced to impose upon its treatment. I intend to deal with

Italian painting as the one complete product which remains from the

achievements of this period, touching upon sculpture and architecture more

superficially. Not only is painting the art in which the Italians among

all the nations of the modern world stand unapproachably alone, but it is

also the one that best enables us to gauge their genius at the time when

they impressed their culture on the rest of Europe. In the history of the

Italian intellect painting takes the same rank as that of sculpture in the

Greek. Before beginning, however, to trace the course of Italian art, it

will be necessary to discuss some preliminary questions, important for a

right understanding of the relations assumed by painting to the thoughts

of the Renaissance, and for explaining its superiority over the sister art

of sculpture in that age. This I feel the more bound to do because it is

my object in this volume to treat of art with special reference to the

general culture of the nation.

What, let us ask in the first place, was the task appointed for the fine

arts on the threshold of the modern world? They had, before all things, to

give form to the ideas evolved by Christianity, and to embody a class of

emotions unknown to the ancients.[2] The inheritance of the Middle Ages

had to be appropriated and expressed. In the course of performing this

work, the painters helped to humanise religion, and revealed the dignity

and beauty of the body of man. Next, in the fifteenth century, the riches

of classic culture were discovered, and art was called upon to aid in the

interpretation of the ancient to the modern mind. The problem was no

longer simple. Christian and pagan traditions came into close contact, and

contended for the empire of the newly liberated intellect. During this

struggle the arts, true to their own principles, eliminated from both

traditions the more strictly human elements, and expressed them in

beautiful form to the imagination and the senses. The brush of the same

painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of

Calvary. Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and undeterred by

the dread of encouraging pagan sensuality, the artists wrought out their

modern ideal of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hellenic

legend. Before the force of painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed

the whole cycle of thoughts and feelings that form the content of the

modern mind. Throughout this performance, art proved itself a powerful

co-agent in the emancipation of the intellect; the impartiality wherewith

its methods were applied to subjects sacred and profane, the emphasis laid

upon physical strength and beauty as good things and desirable, the

subordination of classical and mediaeval myths to one aesthetic law of

loveliness, all tended to withdraw attention from the differences between

paganism and Christianity, and to fix it on the goodliness of that

humanity wherein both find their harmony.

This being in general the task assigned to art in the Renaissance, we may

next inquire what constituted the specific quality of modern as

distinguished from antique feeling, and why painting could not fail to

take the first place among modern arts. In other words, how was it that,

while sculpture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, painting

became the distinguishing fine art of the modern era? No true form of

figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting.

The latter took up the work of investing thought with sensible shape from

the dead hands of the former. Nor had the tradition that connected art

with religion been interrupted, although a new cycle of religious ideas

had been substituted for the old ones. The late Roman and Byzantine

manners, through which the vital energies of the Athenian genius dwindled

into barren formalism, still lingered, giving crude and lifeless form to

Christian conceptions. But the thinking and feeling subject, meanwhile,

had undergone a change so all-important that it now imperatively required

fresh channels for its self-expression. It was destined to find these, not

as of old in sculpture, but in painting.

During the interval between the closing of the ancient and the opening of

the modern age, the faith of Christians had attached itself to symbols and

material objects little better than fetishes. The host, the relic, the

wonder-working shrine, things endowed with a mysterious potency, evoked

the yearning and the awe of medieval multitudes. To such concrete

actualities the worshippers referred their sense of the invisible

divinity. The earth of Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre, the House of Loreto,

the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, aroused their deepest sentiments of aweful

adoration. Like Thomas, they could not be contented with believing; they

must also touch and handle. At the same time, in apparent

contradistinction to this demand for things of sense as signs of

super-sensual power, the claims of dogma on the intellect grew more

imperious, and mysticism opened for the dreaming soul a realm of spiritual

rapture. For the figurative arts there was no true place in either of

these regions. Painting and sculpture were alike alien to the grosser

superstitions, the scholastic subtleties, and the ecstatic trances of the

Middle Ages; nor had they anything in common with the logic of theology.

Votaries who kissed a fragment of the cross with passion, could have found

but little to satisfy their ardour in pictures painted by a man of genius.

A formless wooden idol, endowed with the virtue of curing disease, charmed

the pilgrim more than a statue noticeable only for its beauty or its truth

to life. We all know that _wunderthätige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte

Gemälde_. In architecture alone, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, their

vague but potent feelings of infinity, their yearning towards a deity

invisible, but localised in holy things and places, found artistic

outlet. Therefore architecture was essentially a medieval art. The rise of

sculpture and painting indicated the quickening to life of new faculties,

fresh intellectual interests, and a novel way of apprehending the old

substance of religious feeling; for comprehension of these arts implies

delight in things of beauty for their own sake, a sympathetic attitude

towards the world of sense, a new freedom of the mind produced by the

regeneration of society through love.

The mediaeval faiths were still vivid when the first Italian painters began

their work, and the sincere endeavour of these men was to set forth in

beautiful and worthy form the truths of Christianity. The eyes of the

worshipper should no longer have a mere stock or stone to contemplate: his

imagination should be helped by the dramatic presentation of the scenes of

sacred history, and his devotion be quickened by lively images of the

passion of our Lord. Spirit should converse with spirit, through no veil

of symbol, but through the transparent medium of art, itself instinct with

inbreathed life and radiant with ideal beauty. The body and the soul,

moreover, should be reconciled; and God's likeness should be once more

acknowledged in the features and the limbs of man. Such was the promise of

art; and this promise was in a great measure fulfilled by the painting of

the fourteenth century. Men ceased to worship their God in the holiness of

ugliness; and a great city called its street Glad on the birthday-festival

of the first picture investing religious emotion with aesthetic charm. But

in making good the promise they had given, it was needful for the arts on

the one hand to enter a region not wholly their own--the region of

abstractions and of mystical conceptions; and on the other to create a

world of sensuous delightfulness, wherein the spiritual element was

materialised to the injury of its own essential quality. Spirit, indeed,

spake to spirit, so far as the religious content was concerned; but flesh

spake also to flesh in the aesthetic form. The incarnation promised by the

arts involved a corresponding sensuousness. Heaven was brought down to

earth, but at the cost of making men believe that earth itself was

heavenly.

At this point the subject of our inquiry naturally divides into two main

questions. The first concerns the form of figurative art specially adapted

to the requirements of religious thought in the fourteenth century. The

second treats of the effect resulting both to art and religion from the

expression of mystical and theological conceptions in plastic form.

When we consider the nature of the ideas assimilated in the Middle Ages by

the human mind, it is clear that art, in order to set them forth, demanded

a language the Greeks had never greatly needed, and had therefore never

fully learned. To over-estimate the difference from an aesthetic point of

view between the religious notions of the Greeks and those which

Christianity had made essential, would be difficult. Faith, hope, and

charity; humility, endurance, suffering; the Resurrection and the

Judgment; the Pall and the Redemption; Heaven and Hell; the height and

depth of man's mixed nature; the drama of human destiny before the throne

of God: into the sphere of thoughts like these, vivid and solemn,

transcending the region of sense and corporeity, carrying the mind away to

an ideal world, where the things of this earth obtained a new reality by

virtue of their relation to an invisible and infinite Beyond, the modern

arts in their infancy were thrust. There was nothing finite here or

tangible, no gladness in the beauty of girlish foreheads or the swiftness

of a young man's limbs, no simple idealisation of natural delightfulness.

The human body, which the figurative arts must needs use as the vehicle of

their expression, had ceased to have a value in and for itself, had ceased

to be the true and adequate investiture of thoughts demanded from the

artist. At best it could be taken only as the symbol of some inner

meaning, the shrine of an indwelling spirit nobler than itself; just as a

lamp of alabaster owes its beauty and its worth to the flame it more than

half conceals, the light transmitted through its scarce transparent walls.

In ancient art those moral and spiritual qualities which the Greeks

recognised as truly human and therefore divine, allowed themselves to be

incarnated in well-selected types of physical perfection. The deities of

the Greek mythology were limited to the conditions of natural existence:

they were men and women of a larger mould and freer personality; less

complex, inasmuch as each completed some one attribute; less thwarted in

activity, inasmuch as no limit was assigned to exercise of power. The

passions and the faculties of man, analysed by unconscious psychology, and

deified by religious fancy, were invested by sculpture with appropriate

forms, the tact of the artist selecting corporeal qualities fitted to

impersonate the special character of each divinity. Nor was it possible

that, the gods and goddesses being what they were, exact analogues should

not be found for them in idealised humanity. In a Greek statue there was

enough soul to characterise the beauty of the body, to render her due meed

of wisdom to Pallas, to distinguish the swiftness of Hermes from the

strength of Heracles, or to contrast the virginal grace of Artemis with

the abundance of Aphrodite's charms. At the same time the spirituality

that gave its character to each Greek deity, was not such that, even in

thought, it could be dissociated from corporeal form. The Greeks thought

their gods as incarnate persons; and all the artist had to see to, was

that this incarnate personality should be impressive in his marble.

Christianity, on the other hand, made the moral and spiritual nature of

man all-essential. It sprang from an earlier religion, that judged it

impious to give any form to God. The body and its terrestrial activity

occupied but a subordinate position in its system. It was the life of the

soul, separable from this frame of flesh, and destined to endure when

earth and all that it contains had ended--a life that upon this planet was

continued conflict and aspiring struggle--which the arts, insofar as they

became its instrument, were called upon to illustrate. It was the worship

of a Deity, all spirit, to be sought on no one sacred hill, to be adored

in no transcendent shape, that they were bound to heighten. The most

highly prized among the Christian virtues had no necessary connection with

beauty of feature or strength of limb. Such beauty and such strength at

any rate were accidental, not essential. A Greek faun could not but be

graceful; a Greek hero was of necessity vigorous. But S. Stephen might be

steadfast to the death without physical charm; S. Anthony might put to

flight the devils of the flesh without muscular force. It is clear that

the radiant physical perfection proper to the deities of Greek sculpture

was not sufficient in this sphere.

Again, the most stirring episodes of the Christian mythology involved pain

and perturbation of the spirit; the victories of the Christian athletes

were won in conflicts carried on within their hearts and souls--"For we

wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and

powers," demoniac leaders of spiritual legions. It is, therefore, no less

clear that the tranquillity and serenity of the Hellenic ideal, so

necessary to consummate sculpture, was here out of place. How could the

Last Judgment, that day of wrath, when every soul, however insignificant

on earth, will play the first part for one moment in an awful tragedy, be

properly expressed in plastic form, harmonious and pleasing? And supposing

that the artist should abandon the attempt to exclude ugliness and

discord, pain and confusion, from his representation of the _Dies Irae_,

how could he succeed in setting forth by the sole medium of the human

body the anxiety and anguish of the soul at such a time? The physical

form, instead of being adequate to the ideas expressed, and therefore

helpful to the artist, is a positive embarrassment, a source of weakness.

The most powerful pictorial or sculpturesque delineation of the Judgment,

when compared with the pangs inflicted on the spirit by a guilty

conscience, pangs whereof words may render some account, but which can

find no analogue in writhings of the limbs or face, must of necessity be

found a failure. Still more impossible, if we pursue this train of thought

into another region, is it for the figurative arts to approach the

Christian conception of God in His omnipotence and unity. Christ Himself,

the central figure of the Christian universe, the desired of all nations,

in whom the Deity assumed a human form and dwelt with men, is no fit

subject for such art at any rate as the Greeks had perfected. The fact of

His incarnation brought Him indeed within the proper sphere of the fine

arts; but the religious idea which He represents removed Him beyond the

reach of sculpture. This is an all-important consideration. It is to this

that our whole argument is tending. Therefore to enlarge upon this point

will not be useless.

Christ is specially adored in His last act of love on Calvary; and how

impossible it is to set that forth consistently with the requirements of

strictly plastic art, may be gathered by comparing the passion of S.

Bernard's Hymn to our Lord upon the Cross with all that Winckelmann and

Hegel have so truly said about the restrained expression, dignified

generality, and harmonious beauty essential to sculpture. It is the

negation of tranquillity, the excess of feeling, the absence of

comeliness, the contrast between visible weakness and invisible

omnipotence, the physical humiliation voluntarily suffered by Him that

"ruled over all the angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven, whose

feet were clothed with stars"--it is all this that gives their force and

pathos to these stanzas:

Omnis vigor atque viror

Hinc recessit; non admiror:

Mors apparet in inspectu,

Totus pendens in defectu,

Attritus aegrâ macie.

Sic affectus, sic despectus,

Propter me sic interfectus,

Peccatori tam indigno

Cum amoris in te signo

Appare clarâ facie[3].

We have never heard that Pheidias or Praxiteles chose Prometheus upon

Caucasus for the supreme display of his artistic skill; and even the

anguish expressed in the group of the Laocoon is justly thought to violate

the laws of antique sculpture. Yet here was a greater than Prometheus--one

who had suffered more, and on whose suffering the salvation of the human

race depended, to exclude whom from the sphere of representation in art

was the same as confessing the utter impotence of art to grasp the vital

thought of modern faith. It is clear that the muses of the new age had to

haunt Calvary instead of Helicon, slaking their thirst at no Castalian

spring, but at the fount of tears outpoured by all creation for a stricken

God. What Hellas had achieved supplied no norm or method for the arts in

this new service.

From what has hitherto been advanced, we may assert with confidence that,

if the arts were to play an important part in Christian culture, an art

was imperatively demanded that should be at home in the sphere of intense

feeling, that should treat the body as the interpreter and symbol of the

soul, and should not shrink from pain and passion. How far the fine arts

were at all qualified to express the essential thoughts of Christianity--a

doubt suggested in the foregoing paragraphs--and how far, through their

proved inadequacy to perform this task completely, they weakened the hold

of mediaeval faiths upon the modern mind, are questions to be raised

hereafter. For the present it is enough to affirm that, least of all the

arts, could sculpture, with its essential repose and its dependence on

corporeal conditions, solve the problem. Sculpture had suited the

requirements of Greek thought. It belonged by right to men who not

unwillingly accepted the life of this world as final, and who worshipped

in their deities the incarnate personality of man made perfect. But it

could not express the cycle of Christian ideas. The desire of a better

world, the fear of a worse; the sense of sin referred to physical

appetites, and the corresponding mortification of the flesh; hope,

ecstasy, and penitence and prayer; all these imply contempt or hatred for

the body, suggest notions too spiritual to be conveyed by the rounded

contours of beautiful limbs, too full of struggle for statuesque

tranquillity. The new element needed a more elastic medium of expression.

Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive

and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had

somehow to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its supremacy.

Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from dependence on

the body in the fulness of its physical proportions. It touches our

sensibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, and more

multiform. Colour and shadow, aërial perspective and complicated grouping,

denied to sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, have their

own significance, their real relation to feelings vaguer, but not less

potent, than those which find expression in the simple human form. To

painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal

movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensible by

sculpture. All that drapery by its partial concealment of the form it

clothes, and landscape by its sympathies with human sentiment, may supply

to enhance the passion of the spectator, pertains to painting. This art,

therefore, owing to the greater variety of means at its disposal, and its

greater adequacy to express emotion, became the paramount Italian art.

To sculpture in the Renaissance, shorn of the divine right to create gods

and heroes, was left the narrower field of decoration, portraiture, and

sepulchral monuments. In the last of these departments it found the

noblest scope for its activity; for beyond the grave, according to

Christian belief, the account of the striving, hoping, and resisting soul

is settled. The corpse upon the bier may bear the stamp of spiritual

character impressed on it in life; but the spirit, with its struggle and

its passion, has escaped as from a prison-house, and flown else-whither.

The body of the dead man, for whom this world is over, and who sleeps in

peace, awaiting resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around whose

tomb watch sympathising angels or contemplative genii, was, therefore, the

proper subject for the highest Christian sculpture. Here, if anywhere, the

right emotion could be adequately expressed in stone, and the moulded form

be made the symbol of repose, expectant of restored activity. The greatest

sculptor of the modern age was essentially a poet of Death.

Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned and insisted on, was the

art demanded by the modern intellect upon its emergence from the stillness

of the Middle Ages. The problem, however, even for the art of painting was

not simple. The painters, following the masters of mosaic, began by

setting forth the history, mythology, and legends of the Christian Church

in imagery freer and more beautiful than lay within the scope of treatment

by Romanesque or Byzantine art. So far their task was comparatively easy;

for the idyllic grace of maternal love in the Madonna, the pathetic

incidents of martyrdom, the courage of confessors, the ecstasies of

celestial joy in redeemed souls, the loveliness of a pure life in modest

virgins, and the dramatic episodes of sacred story, furnish a multitude of

motives admirably pictorial. There was, therefore, no great obstacle upon

the threshold, so long as artists gave their willing service to the

Church. Yet, looking back upon this phase of painting, we are able to

perceive that already the adaptation of art to Christian dogma entailed

concessions on both sides. Much, on the one hand, had to be omitted from

the programme offered to artistic treatment, for the reason that the fine

arts could not deal with it at all. Much, on the other hand, had to be

expressed by means which painting in a state of perfect freedom would

repudiate. Allegorical symbols, like Prudence with two faces, and painful

episodes of agony and anguish, marred her work of beauty. There was

consequently a double compromise, involving a double sacrifice of

something precious. The faith suffered by having its mysteries brought

into the light of day, incarnated in form, and humanised. Art suffered by

being forced to render intellectual abstractions to the eye through

figured symbols.

As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the proper end of art, became

more rightly understood, the painters found that their craft was worthy of

being made an end in itself, and that the actualities of life observed

around them had claims upon their genius no less weighty than dogmatic

mysteries. The subjects they had striven at first to realise with all

simplicity now became little better than vehicles for the display of

sensuous beauty, science, and mundane pageantry. The human body received

separate and independent study, as a thing in itself incomparably

beautiful, commanding more powerful emotions by its magic than aught else

that sways the soul. At the same time the external world, with all its

wealth of animal and vegetable life, together with the works of human

ingenuity in costly clothing and superb buildings, was seen to be in every

detail worthy of most patient imitation. Anatomy and perspective taxed the

understanding of the artist, whose whole force was no longer devoted to

the task of bringing religious ideas within the limits of the

representable. Next, when the classical revival came into play, the arts,

in obedience to the spirit of the age, left the sphere of sacred subjects,

and employed their full-grown faculties in the domain of myths and Pagan

fancies. In this way painting may truly be said to have opened the new era

of culture, and to have first manifested the freedom of the modern mind.

When Luca Signorelli drew naked young men for a background to his picture

of Madonna and the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of

the attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the whole

range of human interests. Standing before this picture in the Uffizzi, we

feel that the Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas with

aesthetic beauty, had encouraged a power antagonistic to her own, a power

that liberated the spirit she sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the

earthly paradise from which monasticism had expelled it.

Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult problem of

the relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would be to shrink from the

most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the

Renaissance. On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my

conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages--the Jews, the

iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors--were

justified in their mistrust of plastic art. The spirit of Christianity and

the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral,

but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations[4]. It is

always bringing us back to the dear life of earth, from which the faith

would sever us. It is always reminding us of the body which piety bids us

to forget. Painters and sculptors glorify that which saints and ascetics

have mortified. The masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example,

lead the soul away from compunction, away from penitence, away from

worship even, to dwell on the delight of youthful faces, blooming colour,

graceful movement, delicate emotion[5]. Nor is this all: religious motives

may be misused for what is worse than merely sensuous suggestiveness. The

masterpieces of the Bolognese and Neapolitan painters, while they pretend

to quicken compassion for martyrs in their agony, pander to a bestial

blood-lust lurking in the darkest chambers of the soul[6]. Therefore it is

that piety, whether the piety of monastic Italy or of Puritan England,

turns from these aesthetic triumphs as from something alien to itself. When

the worshipper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite,

ineffable, unrealised, how can he endure the contact of those splendid

forms, in which the lust of the eye and the pride of life, professing to

subserve devotion, remind him rudely of the goodliness of sensual

existence? Art, by magnifying human beauty, contradicts these Pauline

maxims: "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain;" "Set your

affections on things above, not on things on earth;" "Your life is hid

with Christ in God." The sublimity and elevation it gives to carnal

loveliness are themselves hostile to the spirit that holds no truce or

compromise of traffic with the flesh. As displayed in its most perfect

phases, in Greek sculpture and Venetian painting, art dignifies the actual

mundane life of man; but Christ, in the language of uncompromising piety,

means everything most alien to this mundane life--self-denial, abstinence

from fleshly pleasure, the waiting for true bliss beyond the grave,

seclusion even from social and domestic ties. "He that loveth father and

mother more than me, is not worthy of me," "He that taketh not his cross

and followeth me, is not worthy of me." It is needful to insist upon these

extremest sentences of the New Testament, because upon them was based the

religious practice of the Middle Ages, more sincere in their determination

to fulfil the letter and embrace the spirit of the Gospel than any

succeeding age has been.[7]

If, then, there really exists this antagonism between fine art glorifying

human life and piety contemning it, how came it, we may ask, that even in

the Middle Ages the Church hailed art as her coadjutor? The answer lies in

this, that the Church has always compromised. The movement of the modern

world, upon the close of the Middle Ages, offered the Church a compromise,

which it would have been difficult to refuse, and in which she perceived

art first no peril to her dogmas. When the conflict of the first few

centuries of Christianity had ended in her triumph, she began to mediate

between asceticism and the world. Intent on absorbing all existent

elements of life and power, she conformed her system to the Roman type,

established her service in basilicas and Pagan temples, adopted portions

of the antique ritual, and converted local genii into saints. At the same

time she utilised the spiritual forces of monasticism, and turned the

mystic impulse of ecstatics to account. The Orders of the Preachers and

the Begging Friars became her militia and police; the mystery of Christ's

presence in the Eucharist was made an engine of the priesthood; the dreams

of Paradise and Purgatory gave value to her pardons, interdictions,

jubilees, indulgences, and curses. In the Church the spirit of the

cloister and the spirit of the world found neutral ground, and to the

practical accommodation between these hostile elements she owed her wide

supremacy. The Christianity she formed and propagated was different from

that of the New Testament, inasmuch as it had taken up into itself a mass

of mythological anthropomorphic elements. Thus transmuted and

materialised, thus accepted by the vivid faith of an unquestioning

populace, Christianity offered a proper medium for artistic activity. The

whole first period of Italian painting was occupied with the endeavour to

set forth in form and colour the popular conceptions of a faith at once

unphilosophical and unspiritual, beautiful and fit for art by reason of

the human elements it had assumed into its substance. It was natural,

therefore, that the Church should show herself indulgent to the arts,

which were effecting in their own sphere what she had previously

accomplished, though purists and ascetics, holding fast by the original

spirit of their creed, might remain irreconcilably antagonistic to their

influence. The Reformation, on the contrary, rejecting the whole mass of

compromises sanctioned by the Church, and returning to the elemental

principles of the faith, was no less naturally opposed to fine arts,

which, after giving sensuous form to Catholic mythology, had recently

attained to liberty and brought again the gods of Greece.

A single illustration might be selected from the annals of Italian

painting to prove how difficult even the holiest-minded and most earnest

painter found it to effect the proper junction between plastic beauty and

pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo, the disciple of Savonarola, painted a

Sebastian in the cloister of S. Marco, where it remained until the

Dominican confessors became aware, through the avowals of female

penitents, that this picture was a stumbling-block and snare to souls. It

was then removed, and what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra

Bartolommeo undoubtedly intended this ideal portrait of the martyr to be

edifying. S. Sebastian was to stand before the world as the young man,

strong and beautiful, who endured to the end and won the crown of

martyrdom. No other ideas but those of heroism, constancy, or faith were

meant to be expressed; but the painter's art demanded that their

expression should be eminently beautiful, and the beautiful body of the

young man distracted attention from his spiritual virtues to his physical

perfections. A similar maladjustment of the means of plastic art to the

purposes of religion would have been impossible in Hellas, where the

temples of Eros and of Phoebus stood side by side; but in Christian

Florence the craftsman's skill sowed seeds of discord in the souls of the

devout[8].

This story is but a coarse instance of the separation between piety and

plastic art. In truth, the difficulty of uniting them in such a way that

the latter shall enforce the former, lies far deeper than its powers of

illustration reach. Religion has its proper end in contemplation and in

conduct. Art aims at presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and

feelings with a view to intellectual enjoyment. Now, many thoughts are

incapable of sensuous embodiment; they appear as abstractions to the

philosophical intellect or as dogmas to the theological understanding. To

effect an alliance between art and philosophy or art and theology in the

specific region of either religion or speculation is, therefore, an

impossibility. In like manner there are many feelings which cannot

properly assume a sensuous form; and these are precisely religious

feelings, in which the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual world

behind, to seek her freedom in a spiritual region.[9] Yet, while we

recognise the truth of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to

maintain that, until they are brought into close and inconvenient contact,

there is direct hostility between religion and the arts. The sphere of the

two is separate; their aims are distinct; they must be allowed to perfect

themselves, each after its own fashion. In the large philosophy of human

nature, represented by Goethe's famous motto, there is room for both,

because those who embrace it bend their natures neither wholly to the

pietism of the cloister nor to the sensuality of art. They find the

meeting-point of art and of religion in their own humanity, and perceive

that the antagonism of the two begins when art is set to do work alien to

its nature, and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.

At the risk of repetition I must now resume the points I have attempted to

establish in this chapter. As in ancient Greece, so also in Renaissance

Italy, the fine arts assumed the first place in the intellectual culture

of the nation. But the thought and feeling of the modern world required an

aesthetic medium more capable of expressing emotion in its intensity,

variety, and subtlety than sculpture. Therefore painting was the art of

arts for Italy. Yet even painting, notwithstanding the range and wealth of

its resources, could not deal with the motives of Christianity so

successfully as sculpture with the myths of Paganism. The religion it

interpreted transcended the actual conditions of humanity, while art is

bound down by its nature to the limitations of the world we live in. The

Church imagined art would help her; and within a certain sphere of

subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and the lives of

saints, by creating new types of serene beauty and pure joy, by giving

form to angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and

pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion,

painting lent efficient aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very

pith and kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising

purists. Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of

riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of enforcing

mysticism and asceticism, it really restored to humanity the sense of its

own dignity and beauty, and helped to proved the untenability of the

mediaeval standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and,

what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness

from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty

of contemplation.

The first step in the emancipation of the modern mind was taken thus by

art, proclaiming to men the glad tidings of their goodliness and greatness

in a world of manifold enjoyment created for their use. Whatever painting

touched, became by that touch human; piety, at the lure of art, folded her

soaring wings and rested on the genial earth. This the Church had not

foreseen. Because the freedom of the human spirit expressed itself in

painting only under visible images, and not, like heresy, in abstract

sentences; because this art sufficed for Mariolatry and confirmed the cult

of local saints; because its sensuousness was not at variance with a

creed that had been deeply sensualised--the painters were allowed to run

their course unchecked. Then came a second stage in their development of

art. By placing the end of their endeavour in technical excellence and

anatomical accuracy, they began to make representation an object in

itself, independently of its spiritual significance. Next, under the

influence of the classical revival, they brought home again the old powers

of the earth--Aphrodite and Galatea and the Loves, Adonis and Narcissus

and the Graces, Phoebus and Daphne and Aurora, Pan and the Fauns, and the

Nymphs of the woods and the waves.

When these dead deities rose from their sepulchres to sway the hearts of

men in the new age, it was found that something had been taken from their

ancient bloom of innocence, something had been added of emotional

intensity. Italian art recognised their claim to stand beside Madonna and

the Saints in the Pantheon of humane culture; but the painters re-made

them in accordance with the modern spirit. This slight touch of

transformation proved that, though they were no longer objects of

religious devotion, they still preserved a vital meaning for an altered

age. Having personified for the antique world qualities which, though

suppressed and ignored by militant and mediaeval Christianity, were

strictly human, the Hellenic deities still signified those qualities for

modern Europe, now at length re-fortified by contact with the ancient

mind. For it is needful to remember that in all movements of the

Renaissance we ever find a return in all sincerity and faith to the glory

and gladness of nature, whether in the world without or in the soul of

man. To apprehend that glory and that gladness with the pure and primitive

perceptions of the early mythopoets, was not given to the men of the new

world. Yet they did what in them lay, with senses sophisticated by many

centuries of subtlest warping, to replace the first, free joy of kinship

with primeval things. For the painters, far more than for the poets of

the sixteenth century, it was possible to reproduce a thousand forms of

beauty, each attesting to the delightfulness of physical existence, to the

inalienable rights of natural desire, and to the participation of mankind

in pleasures held in common by us with the powers of earth and sea and

air.

It is wonderful to watch the blending of elder and of younger forces in

this process. The old gods lent a portion of their charm even to Christian

mythology, and showered their beauty-bloom on saints who died renouncing

them. Sodoma's Sebastian is but Hyacinth or Hylas, transpierced with

arrows, so that pain and martyrdom add pathos to his poetry of

youthfulness. Lionardo's S. John is a Faun of the forest, ivy-crowned and

laughing, on whose lips the word "Repent" would be a gleeful paradox. For

the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman martyrs and Olympian

deities--the heroes of the _Acta Sanctorum_, and the heroes of Greek

romance--were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the

beautiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent fragrance was educed

from these apparently diverse blossoms by their interminglement and

fusion--how the high-wrought sensibilities of the Christian were added to

the clear and radiant fancies of the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness

of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic

faith--remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to

scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not

a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from

Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art

of the Renaissance.

Having co-ordinated the Christian and Pagan traditions in its work of

beauty, painting could advance no farther. The stock of its sustaining

motives was exhausted. A problem that preoccupied the minds of thinking

men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human

culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical. Without being as conscious

of their hostility as we are, men felt that the Pagan ideal was opposed to

the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be

effected. Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for

the modern synthesis. All that aesthetic handling, in this region more

precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do

towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts.

Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony than

philosophy in the writings of Pico and Ficino. A new Catholicity, a

cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was manifested in his pictures.

It lay outside his power, or that of any other artist, to do more than to

extract from both revelations the elements of plastic beauty they

contained, and to show how freely he could use them for a common purpose.

Nothing but the scientific method can in the long run enable us to reach

that further point, outside both Christianity and Paganism, at which the

classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored

to the conscience educated by the Gospel. This, perchance, is the

religion, still unborn or undeveloped, whereof Joachim of Flora dimly

prophesied when he said that the kingdom of the Father was past, the

kingdom of the Son was passing, and the kingdom of the Spirit was to be.

The essence of it is contained in the whole growth to usward of the human

mind; and though a creed so highly intellectualised as that will be, can

never receive adequate expression from the figurative arts, still the

painting of the sixteenth century forms for it, as it were, a not unworthy

vestibule. It does so, because it first succeeded in humanising the

religion of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming the true value of antique

paganism for the modern mind, and in making both subserve the purposes of

free and unimpeded art.

Meanwhile, at the moment when painting was about to be exhausted, a new

art had arisen, for which it remained, within the aesthetic sphere, to

achieve much that painting could not do. When the cycle of Christian ideas

had been accomplished by the painters, and when the first passion for

antiquity had been satisfied, it was given at last to Music to express the

soul in all its manifold feeling and complexity of movement. In music we

see the point of departure where art leaves the domain of myths, Christian

as well as Pagan, and occupies itself with the emotional activity of man

alone, and for its own sake. Melody and harmony, disconnected from words,

are capable of receiving most varied interpretations, so that the same

combinations of sound express the ecstasies of earthly and of heavenly

love, conveying to the mind of the hearer only that element of pure

passion which is the primitive and natural ground-material of either. They

give distinct form to moods of feeling as yet undetermined; or, as the

Italians put it, _la musica è il lamento dell' amore o la preghiera a gli

dei_. This, combined with its independence of all corporeal conditions,

fenders music the true exponent of the spirit in its freedom, and

therefore the essentially modern art.

For Painting, after the great work accomplished during the Renaissance,

when the painters ran through the whole domain of thought within the scope

of that age, there only remained portraiture, history, dramatic incident,

landscape, _genre_, still life, and animals. In these spheres the art is

still exercised, and much good work, undoubtedly, is annually produced by

European painters. But painting has lost its hold upon the centre of our

intellectual activity. It can no longer give form to the ideas that at the

present epoch rule the modern world. These ideas are too abstract, too

much a matter of the understanding, to be successfully handled by the

figurative arts; and it cannot be too often or too emphatically stated

that these arts produce nothing really great and universal in relation to

the spirit of their century, except by a process analogous to the

mythopoetic. With conceptions incapable of being sensuously apprehended,

with ideas that lose their value when they are incarnated, they have no

power to deal. As meteors become luminous by traversing the grosser

element of our terrestrial atmosphere, so the thoughts that art employs

must needs immerse themselves in sensuousness. They must be of a nature to

gain rather than to suffer by such immersion; and they must make a direct

appeal to minds habitually apt to think in metaphors and myths. Of this

sort are all religious ideas at a certain stage of their development, and

this attitude at certain moments of history is adopted by the popular

consciousness. We have so far outgrown it, have so completely exchanged

mythology for curiosity, and metaphor for science, that the necessary

conditions for great art are wanting. Our deepest thoughts about the world

and God are incapable of personification by any aesthetic process; they

never enter that atmosphere wherein alone they could become through fine

art luminous. For the painter, who is the form-giver, they have ceased to

be shining stars, and are seen as opaque stones; and though divinity be in

them, it is a deity that refuses the investiture of form.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] It may fairly be questioned whether that necessary connection between

art and religion, which is commonly taken for granted, does in truth

exist; in other words, whether great art might not flourish without any

religious content. This, however, is a speculative problem, for present

and the future rather than the past. Historically, it has always been

found that the arts in their origin are dependent on religion. Nor is the

reason far to seek. Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is

the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt and

apprehended by the imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing

glorification of humanity only exists for simple and unsophisticated

societies in the form of religion. Religion is the universal poetry which

all possess; and the artist, dealing with the mythology of his national

belief, feels himself in vital sympathy with the imagination of the men

for whom he works. More than the painter is required for the creation of

great painting, and more than the poet for the exhibition of immortal

verse. Painters are but the hands, and poets but the voices, whereby

peoples express their accumulated thoughts and permanent emotions. Behind

them crowd the generations of the myth-makers; and around them floats the

vital atmosphere of enthusiasms on which their own souls and the souls of

their brethren have been nourished.

[3]

All Thy strength and bloom are faded:

Who hath thus Thy state degraded?

Death upon Thy form is written;

See the wan worn limbs, the smitten

Breast upon the cruel tree!

Thus despised and desecrated,

Thus in dying desolated,

Slain for me, of sinners vilest,

Loving Lord, on me Thou smilest:

Shine, bright face, and strengthen me!

[4] I am aware that many of my readers will demur that I am confounding

Christianity with ascetic or monastic Christianity; yet I cannot read the

New Testament, the _Imitatio Christi_, the _Confessions_ of S. Augustine,

and the _Pilgrim's Progress_ without feeling that Christianity in its

origin, and as understood by its chief champions, was and is ascetic. Of

this Christianity I therefore speak, not of the philosophised

Christianity, which is reasonably regarded with suspicion by the orthodox

and the uncompromising. It was, moreover, with Christianity of this

primitive type that the arts came first into collision.

[5] Titian's "Assumption of the Virgin" at Venice, Correggio's

"Coronation of the Virgin" at Parma.

[6] Domenichino, Guido, Ribera, Salvator Rosa.

[7] Not to quote again the _Imitatio Christi,_ it is enough to allude to

S. Francis as shown in the _Fioretti_.

[8] The difficulty of combining the true spirit of piety with the ideal

of natural beauty in art was strongly felt by Savonarola. Rio (_L'Art

chrétien_, vol. ii. pp. 422-426) has written eloquently on this subject,

but without making it plain how Savonarola's condemnation of life studies

from the nude could possibly have been other than an obstacle to the

liberal and scientific prosecution of the art of painting.

[9] See Rio, _L'Art chrétien,_ vol. ii. chap. xi. pp. 319-327, for an

ingenious defence of mystic art. The tales he tells of Bernardino da

Siena and the blessed Umiliana will not win the sympathy of Teutonic

Christians, who must believe that semi-sensuous, semi-pious raptures,

like those described by S. Catherine of Siena and S. Theresa, have

something in them psychologically morbid.