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.
After the splendid outburst of painting in the first half of the
fourteenth century, there came a lull. The thoughts and sentiments of
mediaeval Italy had been now set forth in art. The sincere and simple style
of Giotto was worked out. But the new culture of the Revival had not as
yet sufficiently penetrated the Italians for the painters to express it;
nor had they mastered the technicalities of their craft in such a manner
as to render the delineation of more complex forms of beauty possible. The
years between 1400 and 1470 may be roughly marked out as the second period
of great, activity in painting. At this time sculpture, under the hands of
Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia, had reached a higher point
than the sister art. The debt the sculptors owed to Giotto, they now
repaid in full measure to his successors, in obedience to the law whereby
sculpture, though subordinated, as in Italy, to painting, is more
precocious in its evolution. One of the most marked features of this
period was the progress in the art of design, due to bronze modelling and
bas-relief; for the painters, labouring in the workshops of the goldsmiths
and the stone-carvers, learned how to study the articulation of the human
body, to imitate the nude, and to aim by means of graduated light and dark
at rendering the effect of roundness in their drawing. The laws of
perspective and foreshortening were worked out by Paolo Uccello and
Brunelleschi. New methods of colouring were attempted by the Peselli and
the Pollajuoli. Abandoning the conventional treatment of religious themes,
the artists began to take delight in motives drawn from everyday
experience. It became the fashion to introduce contemporary costumes,
striking portraits, and familiar incidents into sacred subjects, so that
many pictures of this period, though worthless to the student of religious
art, are interesting for their illustration of Florentine custom and
character. At the same time the painters began to imitate landscape and
architecture, loading the background of their frescoes with pompous vistas
of palaces and city towers, or subordinating their figures to fantastic
scenery of wood and rock and seashore. Many were naturalists, delighting,
like Gentile da Fabriano, in the delineation of field flowers and living
creatures, or, like Piero di Cosimo, in the portrayal of things rare and
curious. Gardens please their eyes, and birds and beasts and insects.
Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance, were painted by Paolo
Uccello. Others, again, abandoned the old ground of Christian story for
the tales of Greece and Rome; and not the least charming products of the
time are antique motives treated with the freshness of romantic feeling.
We look in vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters: that stage
of thought has been traversed, and a new cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful,
idyllic, corresponding to Boiardo's episodes rather than to Dante's
vision, opens for the artist. Instead of seeking to set forth vast
subjects with the equality of mediocrity, like the Gaddi, or to invent
architectonic compositions embracing the whole culture of their age, like
the Lorenzetti, the painters were now bent upon realising some special
quality of beauty, expressing some fantastic motive, or solving some
technical problem of peculiar difficulty. They had, in fact, outgrown the
childhood of their art; and while they had not yet attained to mastery,
had abandoned the impossible task of making it the medium of universal
expression. In this way the manifold efforts of the workers in the first
half of the fifteenth century prepared the ground for the great painters
of the Golden Age. It remained for Raphael and his contemporaries to
achieve the final synthesis of art in masterpieces of consummate beauty.
But this they could not have done without the aid of those innumerable
intermediate labourers, whose productions occupy in art the place of
Bacon's _media axiomata_ in science. Remembering this, we ought not to
complain that the purpose of painting at this epoch was divided, or that
its achievements were imperfect. The whole intellectual conditions of the
country were those of growth, experiment, preparation, and acquisition,
rather than of full accomplishment. What happened in the field of
painting, was happening also in the field of scholarship; and we have good
reason to be thankful that by the very nature of the arts, these tentative
endeavours have a more enduring charm than the dull tomes of contemporary
students. Nor, again, is it rational to regret that painting, having
started with the sincere desire of expressing the hopes and fears that
agitate the soul of man, and raise him to a spiritual region, should now
be occupied with lessons in perspective and anatomy. In the twofold
process of discovering the world and man, this dry ground had inevitably
to be explored, and its exploration could not fail to cost the sacrifice
of much that was impassioned and imaginative in the earlier and less
scientific age of art.[161] The spirit of Cosimo de' Medici, almost
cynical in its positivism, the spirit of Sixtus IV., almost godless in its
egotism, were abroad in Italy at this period;[162] indeed, the fifteenth
century presents at large a spectacle of prosaic worldliness and unideal
aims. Yet the work done by the artists was the best work of the epoch, far
more fruitful of results and far more permanently valuable than that of
Filelfo inveighing in filthy satires against his personal foes, or of
Beccadelli endeavouring to inoculate modern literature with the virus of
pagan vices. Petrarch in the fourteenth century had preached the evangel
of humanism; Giotto in the fourteenth century had given life to painting.
The students of the fifteenth, though their spirit was so much baser and
less large than Petrarch's, were following in the path marked out for them
and leading forward to Erasmus. The painters of the fifteenth, though they
lacked the unity of aim and freshness of their master, were learning what
was needful for the crowning and fulfilment of his labours on a loftier
stage.
Foremost among the pioneers of Renaissance-painting, towering above them
all by head and shoulders, like Saul among the tribes of Israel, stands
Masaccio.[163] The Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, painted in
fresco almost entirely by his hand, was the school where all succeeding
artists studied, and whence Raphael deigned to borrow the composition and
the figures of a portion of his Cartoons. The "Legend of S. Catherine,"
painted by Masaccio in 8. Clemente at Rome, though an earlier work, is
scarcely less remarkable as evidence that a new age had begun for art. In
his frescoes the qualities essential to the style of the Renaissance--what
Vasari calls the modern manner--appear precociously full-formed. Besides
life and nature they have dignity and breadth, the grand and heightened
manner of emancipated art. Masaccio is not inferior to Giotto in his power
of telling a story with simplicity; but he understands the value of
perspective for realising the circumstances of the scene depicted. His
august groups of the Apostles are surrounded by landscape tranquillising
to the sense and pleasant to the eye. Mountain-lines and distant horizons
lend space and largeness to his compositions, and the figures of his men
and women move freely in a world prepared for them. In Masaccio's
management of drapery we discern the influence of plastic art; without
concealing the limbs, which are always modelled with a freedom that
suggests the power of movement even in stationary attitudes, the
voluminous folds and broad masses of powerfully coloured raiment invest
his forms with a nobility unknown before in painting. His power of
representing the nude is not less remarkable. But what above all else
renders his style attractive is the sense of aërial space. For the first
time in art the forms of living persons are shown moving in a transparent
medium of light, graduated according to degrees of distance, and
harmonised by tones that indicate an atmospheric unity. In comparing
Masaccio with Giotto we must admit that, with so much gained, something
has been sacrificed. Giotto succeeded in presenting the idea, the feeling,
the pith of the event, and pierced at once to the very ground-root of
imagination. Masaccio thinks over-much, perhaps, of external form, and is
intent on air-effects and colouring. He realises the phenomenal truth with
a largeness and a dignity peculiar to himself. But we ask whether he was
capable of bringing close to our hearts the secret and the soul of
spiritual things. Has not art beneath his touch become more scenic, losing
thereby somewhat of dramatic poignancy?
Born in 1402, Masaccio left Florence in 1429 for Rome, and was not heard
of by his family again. Thus perished, at the early age of twenty-seven, a
painter whose work reveals not only the originality of real creative
genius, but a maturity that moves our wonder. What might he not have done
if he had lived? Between his style in the Brancacci chapel and that of
Raphael in the Vatican there seems to be but a narrow gap, which might
perchance have been passed over by this man, if death had spared him.
Masaccio can by no means be taken as a fair instance of the painters of
his age. Gifted with exceptional powers, he overleaped the difficulties of
his art, and arrived intuitively at results whereof as yet no scientific
certainty had been secured. His contemporaries applied humbler talents to
severe study, and wrought out by patient industry those principles which
Masaccio had divined. Their work is therefore at the same time more
archaic and more pedantic, judged by modern standards. It is difficult to
imagine a style of painting less attractive than that of Paolo
Uccello.[164] Yet his fresco of the "Deluge" in the cloisters of S. Maria
Novella, and his battlepieces--one of which may be seen in the National
Gallery--taught nearly all that painters needed of perspective. The lesson
was conveyed in hard, dry, uncouth diagrams, ill-coloured and deficient in
the quality of animation. At this period the painters, like the sculptors,
were trained as goldsmiths, and Paolo had been a craftsman of that guild
before he gave his whole mind to the study of linear perspective and the
drawing of animals. The precision required in this trade forced artists
to study the modelling of the human form, and promoted that crude
naturalism which has been charged against their pictures. Carefully to
observe, minutely to imitate some actual person--the Sandro of your
workshop or the Cecco from the marketplace--became the pride of painters.
No longer fascinated by the dreams of mediaeval mysticism, and unable for
the moment to invest ideals of the fancy with reality, they meanwhile made
the great discovery that the body of a man is a miracle of beauty, each
limb a divine wonder, each muscle a joy as great as sight of stars or
flowers. Much that is repulsive in the pictures of the Pollajuoli and
Andrea del Castagno, the leaders in this branch of realism, is due to
admiration for the newly studied mechanism of the human form. They seem to
have cared but little to select their types or to accentuate expression,
so long as they were able to portray the man before them with
fidelity.[165] The comeliness of average humanity was enough for them; the
difficulties of reproducing what they saw, exhausted their force. Thus the
master-works on which they staked their reputation show them emulous of
fame as craftsmen, while only here and there, in minor paintings for the
most part, the poet that was in them sees the light. Brunelleschi told
Donatello the truth when he said that his Christ was a crucified
_contadino_. Intent on mastering the art of modelling, and determined
above all things to be accurate, the sculptor had forgotten that something
more was wanted in a crucifix than the careful study of a robust
peasant-boy.
A story of a somewhat later date still further illustrates the dependence
of the work of art upon the model in Renaissance Florence. Jacopo
Sansovino made the statue of a youthful "Bacchus" in close imitation of a
lad called Pippo Fabro. Posing for hours together naked in a cold studio,
Pippo fell into ill health, and finally went mad. In his madness he
frequently assumed the attitude of the "Bacchus" to which his life had
been sacrificed, and which is now his portrait. The legend of the painter
who kept his model on a cross in order that he might the more minutely
represent the agonies of death by crucifixion, is but a mythus of the
realistic method carried to its logical extremity.
Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San Sepolcro, and a pupil of
Domenico Veneziano, must be placed among the painters of this period who
advanced their art by scientific study. He carried the principles of
correct drawing and solid modelling as far as it is possible for the
genius of man to do, and composed a treatise on perspective in the vulgar
tongue. But these are not his only titles to fame. By dignity of
portraiture, by loftiness of style, and by a certain poetical solemnity of
imagination, he raised himself above the level of the mass of his
contemporaries. Those who have once seen his fresco of the "Resurrection"
in the hall of the Compagnia della Misericordia at Borgo San Sepolcro,
will never forget the deep impression of solitude and aloofness from all
earthly things produced by it. It is not so much the admirable grouping
and masterly drawing of the four sleeping soldiers, or even the majestic
type of the Christ emergent without effort from the grave, as the
communication of a mood felt by the painter and instilled into our souls,
that makes this by far the grandest, most poetic, and most awe-inspiring
picture of the Resurrection. The landscape is simple and severe, with the
cold light upon it of the dawn before the sun is risen. The drapery of the
ascending Christ is tinged with auroral colours like the earliest clouds
of morning; and His level eyes, with the mystery of the slumber of the
grave still upon them, seem gazing, far beyond our scope of vision, into
the region of the eternal and illimitable. Thus, with Piero for
mystagogue, we enter an inner shrine of deep religious revelation. The
same high imaginative faculty marks the fresco of the "Dream of
Constantine" in S. Francesco at Arezzo, where, it may be said in passing,
the student of art must learn to estimate what Piero could do in the way
of accurate foreshortening, powerful delineation of solid bodies, and
noble treatment of drapery.[166] To Piero, again, we owe most precious
portraits of two Italian princes, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and
Federigo of Urbino, masterpieces[167] of fidelity to nature and sound
workmanship.
In addition to the many great paintings that command our admiration, Piero
claims honour as the teacher of Melozzo da Forli and of Luca Signorelli.
Little is left to show the greatness of Melozzo; but the frescoes
preserved in the Quirinal are enough to prove that he continued the grave
and lofty manner of his master.[168] Signorelli bears a name illustrious
in the first rank of Italian painters; and to speak of him will be soon my
duty. It was the special merit of these artists to elevate the ideal of
form and to seek after sublimity, without departing from the path of
conscientious labour, in an age preoccupied on the one hand with
technicality and naturalism, on the other with decorative prettiness and
pietism.
While the Florentine and Umbro-Tuscan masters were perfecting the arts of
accurate design, a similar direction toward scientific studies was given
to the painters of Northern Italy at Padua. Michael Savonarola, writing
his panegyric of Padua about 1440, expressly mentions Perspective as a
branch of philosophy taught in the high school;[169] and the influence of
Francesco Squarcione, though exaggerated by Vasari, was not
inconsiderable. This man, who began life as a tailor or embroiderer, was
early interested in the fine arts. Like Ciriac of Ancona, he had a taste
for travel and collection,[170] visiting the sacred soil of Greece and
sojourning in divers towns of Italy, everywhere making drawings, copying
pictures, taking casts from statues, and amassing memoranda on the relics
of antiquity as well as on the methods practised by contemporary painters.
Equipped with these aids to study, Squarcione returned to Padua, his
native place, where he opened a kind of school for painters. It is clear
that he was himself less an artist than an amateur of painting, with a
turn for teaching, and a conviction, based upon the humanistic instincts
of his age, that the right way of learning was by imitation of the
antique. During the course of his career he is said to have taught no less
than 137 pupils, training his apprentices by the exhibition of casts and
drawings, and giving them instruction in the science of perspective.[171]
From his studio issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna, whose life-work, one of
the most weighty moments in the history of modern art, will be noticed at
length in the next chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that
through Squarcione the scientific and humanistic movement of the fifteenth
century was communicated to the art of Northern Italy. There, as at
Florence, painting was separated from ecclesiastical tradition, and a new
starting-point was sought in the study of mathematical principles, and
the striving after form for its own sake.
Without attempting the detailed history of painting in this period of
divided energy and diverse effort, it is needful here to turn aside and
notice those masters of the fifteenth century who remained comparatively
uninfluenced by the scholastic studies of their contemporaries. Of these,
the earliest and most notable was Gentile da Fabriano, the last great
painter of the Gubbian school.[172] In the predella of his masterpiece at
Florence there is a little panel, which attracts attention as one of the
earliest attempts to represent a sunrise. The sun has just appeared above
one of those bare sweeping hill-sides so characteristic of Central Italian
landscape. Part of the country lies untouched by morning, cold and grey:
the rest is silvered with the level light, falling sideways on the
burnished leaves and red fruit of the orange trees, and casting shadows
from olive branches on the furrows of a new-ploughed field. Along the road
journey Joseph and Mary and the infant Christ, so that you may call this
little landscape a "Flight into Egypt," if you choose. Gentile, with all
his Umbrian pietism, was a painter for whom the fair sights of the earth
had exquisite value. The rich costumes of the Eastern kings, their train
of servants, their hawks and horses, hounds and monkeys, are painted by
him with scrupulous fidelity; and nothing can be more true to nature than
the wild flowers he has copied in the framework of this picture. Yet we
perceive that, though he felt in his own way the naturalistic impulse of
the age, he had scarcely anything in common with masters like Uccello or
Verocchio.
Still less had Fra Angelico. Of all the painters of this period he most
successfully resisted the persuasions of the Renaissance, and perfected an
art that owed little to sympathy with the external world. He thought it a
sin to study or to imitate the naked form, and his most beautiful faces
seem copied from angels seen in visions, not from any sons of men. While
the artists around him were absorbed in mastering the laws of geometry and
anatomy, Fra Angelico sought to express the inner life of the adoring
soul. Only just so much of realism, whether in the drawing of the body and
its drapery, or in the landscape background, as seemed necessary for
suggesting the emotion or for setting forth the story, found its way into
his pictures. The message they convey might have been told almost as
perfectly upon the lute or viol. His world is a strange one--a world not
of hills and fields and flowers and men of flesh and blood, but one where
the people are embodied ecstasies, the colours tints from evening clouds
or apocalyptic jewels, the scenery a flood of light or a background of
illuminated gold. His mystic gardens, where the ransomed souls embrace,
and dance with angels on the lawns outside the City of the Lamb, are such
as were never trodden by the foot of man in any paradise of earth.
Criticism has a hard task in attempting to discern the merit of the
several painters of this time. It is clear that we must look not to Fra
Angelico but to Masaccio for the progressive forces that were carrying art
forward to complete accomplishment. Yet the charm of Masaccio is as
nothing in comparison with that which holds us spell-bound before the
sacred and impassioned reveries of the Fiesolan monk. Masaccio had
inestimable value for his contemporaries. Fra Angelico, now that we know
all Masaccio can teach, has a quality so unique that we return again and
again to the contemplation of his visions. Thus it often happens that we
are tempted to exaggerate the historical importance of one painter
because he touches us by some peculiar quality, and to over-estimate the
intrinsic value of another because he was a motive power in his own age.
Both these temptations should be resolutely resisted by the student who is
capable of discerning different kinds of excellence and diverse titles to
affectionate remembrance. Tracing the history of Italian painting is like
pursuing a journey down an ever-broadening river, whose affluents are
Giotto and Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, and Mantegna. We have to
turn aside and land upon the shore, in order to visit the
heaven-reflecting lakelet, self-encompassed and secluded, called Angelico.
Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico, but in no sense the
continuator of his tradition, exhibits the blending of several styles by a
genius of less creative than assimilative force. That he was keenly
interested in the problems of perspective and foreshortening, and that
none of the knowledge collected by his fellow-workers had escaped him, is
sufficiently proved by his frescoes at Pisa. His compositions are rich in
architectural details, not always chosen with pure taste, but painted with
an almost infantine delight in the magnificence of buildings. Quaint birds
and beasts and reptiles crowd his landscapes; while his imagination runs
riot in rocks and rivers, trees of all variety, and rustic incidents
adopted from real life. At the same time he felt an enjoyment like that of
Gentile da Fabriano in depicting the pomp and circumstance of pageantry,
and no Florentine of the fifteenth century was more fond of assembling the
personages of contemporary history in groups.[173] Thus he showed himself
sensitive to the chief influences of the earlier Renaissance, and combined
the scientific and naturalistic tendencies of his age in a manner not
devoid of native poetry. What he lacked was depth of feeling, the sense
of noble form, the originative force of a great mind. His poetry of
invention, though copious and varied, owed its charm to the unstudied
grace of improvisation, and he often undertook subjects where his idyllic
rather than dramatic genius failed to sustain him. It is difficult, for
instance, to comprehend how M. Rio could devote two pages to Gozzoli's
"Destruction of Sodom," so comparatively unimpressive in spite of its
aggregated incidents, when he passes by the "Fulminati" of Signorelli, so
tragic in its terrible simplicity, with a word.[174]
This painter's marvellous rapidity of execution enabled him to produce an
almost countless series of decorative works. The best of these are the
frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, of the Riccardi Palace of Florence, of
San Gemignano, and of Montefalco. It has been well said of Gozzoli that,
though he attempted grand subjects on a large scale, he could not rise
above the limitations of a style better adapted to the decoration of
_cassoni_ than to fresco.[175] Yet within the range of his own powers
there are few more fascinating painters. His feeling for fresh nature--for
hunters in the woods at night or dawn, for vintage-gatherers among their
grapes, for festival troops of cavaliers and pages, and for the
marriage-dances of young men and maidens--yields a delightful gladness to
compositions lacking the simplicity of Giotto and the dignity of
Masaccio.[176] No one knew better how to sketch the quarrels of little
boys in their nursery, or the laughter of serving-women, or children
carrying their books to school;[177] and when the idyllic genius of the
man was applied to graver themes, his fancy supplied him with multitudes
of angels waving rainbow-coloured wings above fair mortal faces. Bevies of
them nestle like pigeons on the penthouse of the hut of Bethlehem, or
crowd together round the infant Christ.[178]
From these observations on the style of Benozzo Gozzoli it will be seen
that in the evolution of Renaissance culture he may be compared with the
romantic poets for whom the cheerfulness of nature and the joy that comes
to men from living in a many-coloured world of inexhaustible delight were
sufficient sources of inspiration. It should be mentioned lastly that he
enjoyed the patronage and friendship of the Medicean princes.
Another painter favoured by the Medici was Fra Filippo Lippi, whose life
and art-work were alike the deviation of a pleasure-loving temperament
from its natural sphere into the service of the Church. Left an orphan at
the age of two years, he was brought up by an aunt, who placed him, as a
boy of eight, in the convent of the Carmine at Florence. For monastic
duties he had no vocation, and the irregularities of his behaviour caused
scandal even in that age of cynical indulgence. It can scarcely be doubted
that the schism between his practice and profession served to debase and
vulgarise a genius of fine imaginative quality, while the uncongenial work
of decorating choirs and painting altar-pieces limed the wings of his
swift spirit with the dulness of routine that savoured of hypocrisy. Bound
down to sacred subjects, he was too apt to make angels out of
street-urchins, and to paint the portraits of his peasant-loves for
Virgins.[179] His delicate sense of natural beauty gave peculiar charm to
this false treatment of religious themes. Nothing, for example, can be
more attractive than the rows of angels bearing lilies in his "Coronation
of the Virgin;"[180] and yet, when we regard them closely, we find that
they have no celestial quality of form or feature. Their grace is earthly,
and the spirit breathed upon the picture is the loveliness of colour,
quiet and yet glowing--blending delicate blues and greens with whiteness
purged of glare. The beauties as well as the defects of such compositions
make us regret that Fra Filippo never found a more congenial sphere for
his imagination. As a painter of subjects half-humorous and half-pathetic,
or as the illustrator of romantic stories, we fancy that he might have won
fame rivalled only by the greatest colourists. One such picture it was
granted him to paint, and this is his masterpiece. In the prime of life he
was commissioned to decorate the choir of the cathedral at Prato with the
legends of S. John Baptist and S. Stephen. All of these frescoes are
noteworthy for their firm grasp upon reality in the portraits of
Florentine worthies, and for the harmonious disposition of the groups; but
the scene of Salome dancing before Herod is the best for its poetic
feeling. Her movement across the floor before the tyrant and his guests at
table, the quaint fluttering of her drapery, the well-bred admiration of
the spectators, their horror when she brings the Baptist's head to
Herodias, and the weak face of the half-remorseful Herod are expressed
with a dramatic power that shows the genius of a poet painter. And even
more lovely than Salome are a pair of girls locked in each other's arms
close by Herodias on the daïs. A natural and spontaneous melody, not only
in the suggested movements of this scene, but also in the colouring,
choice of form, and treatment of drapery, makes it one of the most musical
of pictures ever painted.
Fra Filippo was not so successful in the choir of the cathedral at
Spoleto, where he undertook; to paint scenes from the life of the Virgin.
Yet those who have not examined these frescoes, ruinous in their decay and
spoiled by stupid restoration, can form no just notion of the latent
capacity of this great master. The whole of the half-dome above the
tribune is filled with, a "Coronation of Madonna." A circular rainbow
surrounds both her and Christ. She is kneeling with fiery rays around her,
glorified by her assumption into heaven. Christ is enthroned, and at His
side stands a seat prepared for His mother, as soon as the crown that He
is placing on her head shall have made her Queen. From the outer courts of
heaven, thronged with multitudes of celestial beings, angels are crowding
in, breaking the lines of the prismatic aureole, as though the ardour of
their joy could scarcely be repressed; while the everlasting light of God
sheds radiance from above, and far below, lies earth with diminished sun
and moon. The boldness of conception in this singular fresco reveals a
genius capable of grappling with such problems as Tintoretto solved. Fra
Filippo died at Spoleto, and left his work unfinished, to the care of his
assistant, the Fra Diamante. Over his tomb Lorenzo de' Medici caused a
monument to be erected, and Poliziano wrote Latin couplets to commemorate
the fame of a painter highly prized by his patrons.
The space devoted in these pages to Fra Lippo Lippi is justified not only
by the excellence of his own work, but also by the influence he exercised
over two of the best Florentine painters of the fifteenth century. Whether
Filippino Lippi was in truth his son by Lucrezia Buti, a novice he is said
to have carried from her cloister in Prato, has been called in question
by recent critics; but they adduce no positive arguments for discrediting
the story of Vasari.[181] There can, however, be no doubt that to the
Frate, whether he was his father or only his teacher, Filippino owed his
style. His greatest works were painted in continuation of Masaccio's
frescoes in the Carmine at Florence. It is the best warrant of their
excellence that we feel them worthy to hold the place they do, and that
Raphael transferred one of their motives, the figure of S. Paul addressing
S. Peter in prison, to his cartoon of "Mars' Hill." That he was not so
accomplished as Masaccio in the art of composition, that his scale of
colour is less pleasing, and that his style in general lacks the elevation
of his mighty predecessor, is not sufficient to place him in any position
of humiliating inferiority.[182] What above all things interests the
student of the Renaissance in Filippino's work, is the powerful action of
revived classicism on his manner. This can be traced better in the Caraffa
Chapel of S. Maria sopra Minerva at Rome and in the Strozzi Chapel of S.
Maria Novella at Florence than in the Carmine. The "Triumph of S. Thomas
Aquinas" and the "Miracle of S. John" are remarkable for an almost
insolent display of Roman antiquities--not studied, it need scarcely be
observed, with the scientific accuracy of Alma Tadema--for such science
was non-existent in the fifteenth century--but paraded with a kind of
passion. To this delight in antique details Filippino added violent
gestures, strange attitudes, and affected draperies, producing a general
result impressive through the artist's energy, but quaint and
unattractive.
Sandro Botticelli, the other disciple of Fra Lippo, bears a name of
greater mark. He is one of those artists, much respected in their own
days, who suffered eclipse from the superior splendour of immediate
successors, and to whom, through sympathy stimulated by prolonged study of
the fifteenth century, we have of late paid tardy and perhaps exaggerated
honours.[183] His fellow-workers seem to have admired him as an able
draughtsman gifted with a rare if whimsical imagination; but no one
recognised in him a leader of his age. For us he has an almost unique
value as representing the interminglement of antique and modern fancy at a
moment of transition, as embodying in some of his pictures the subtlest
thought and feeling of men for whom the classic myths were beginning to
live once more, while new guesses were timidly hazarded in the sphere of
orthodoxy.[184] Self-confident sensuality had not as yet encouraged
painters to substitute a florid rhetoric for the travail of their brain;
nor was enough known about antiquity to make the servile imitation of
Greek or Roman fragments possible. Yet scholarship had already introduced
a novel element into the culture of the nation. It was no doubt with a
kind of wonder that the artists heard of Fauns and Sylvans, and the birth
of Aphrodite from the waves. Such fables took deep hold upon their fancy,
stirring them to strange and delicate creations, the offspring of their
own thought, and no mere copies of marbles seen in statue galleries. The
very imperfection of these pictures lends a value to them in the eyes of
the student, by helping him to comprehend exactly how the revelations of
the humanists affected the artistic sense of Italy.
In the mythological work of Botticelli there is always an element of
allegory, recalling the Middle Ages and rendering it far truer to the
feelings of the fifteenth century than to the myths it illustrates. His
painting of the "Spring," suggested by a passage from Lucretius,[185] is
exquisitely poetic; and yet the true spirit of the Latin verse has not
been seized--to have done that would have taxed the energies of
Titian--but something special to the artist and significant for Medicean
scholarship has been added. There is none of the Roman largeness and
freedom in its style; Venus and her Graces are even melancholy, and their
movements savour of affectation. This combination or confusion of artistic
impulses in Botticelli, this treatment of pagan themes in the spirit of
mediaeval mysticism, sometimes ended in grotesqueness. It might suffice to
cite the pregnant "Aphrodite" in the National Gallery, if the "Mars and
Venus" in the same collection were not even a more striking instance. Mars
is a young Florentine, whose throat and chest are beautifully studied from
the life, but whose legs and belly, belonging no doubt to the same model,
fall far short of heroic form. He lies fast asleep with the corners of his
mouth drawn down, as though he were about to snore. Opposite there sits a
woman, weary and wan, draped from neck to foot in the thin raiment
Botticelli loved. Four little goat-footed Cupids playing with the armour
of the sleeping lad complete the composition. These wanton loves are
admirably conceived and exquisitely drawn; nor indeed can any drawing
exceed in beauty the line that leads from the flank along the ribs and arm
of Mars up to his lifted elbow. The whole design, like one of Piero di
Cosimo's pictures in another key, leaves a strong impression on the mind,
due partly to the oddity of treatment, partly to the careful work
displayed, and partly to the individuality of the artist. It gives us keen
pleasure to feel exactly how a painter like Botticelli applied the dry
naturalism of the early Florentine Renaissance, as well as his own
original imagination, to a subject he imperfectly realised. Yet are we
right in assuming that he meant the female figure in this group for
Aphrodite, the sleeping man for Ares? A Greek or a Roman would have
rejected this picture as false to the mythus of Mars and Venus; and
whether Botticelli wished to be less descriptive than emblematic, might be
fairly questioned. The face and attitude of that unseductive Venus, wide
awake and melancholy, opposite her snoring lover, seems to symbolise the
indignities which women may have to endure from insolent and sottish boys
with only youth to recommend them. This interpretation, however, sounds
like satire. We are left to conjecture whether Botticelli designed his
composition for an allegory of intemperance, the so-called Venus typifying
some moral quality.
Botticelli's "Birth of Aphrodite" expresses this transient moment in the
history of the Renaissance with more felicity. It would be impossible for
any painter to design a more exquisitely outlined figure than that of his
Venus, who, with no covering but her golden hair, is wafted to the shore
by zephyrs. Roses fall upon the ruffled waves, and the young gods of the
air twine hands and feet together as they float. In the picture of
"Spring" there is the same choice of form, the same purity of line, the
same rare interlacement in the limbs. It would seem as though Botticelli
intended every articulation of the body to express some meaning, and this,
though it enhances the value of his work for sympathetic students, often
leads him to the verge of affectation. Nothing but a touch of affectation
in the twined fingers of Raphael and Tobias impairs the beauty of one of
Botticelli's best pictures at Turin. We feel the same discord looking at
them as we do while reading the occasional _concetti_ in Petrarch; and all
the more in each case does the discord pain us because we know that it
results from their specific quality carried to excess.
Botticelli's sensibility to the refinements of drawing gave peculiar
character to all his work. Attention has frequently been called to the
beauty of his roses.[186] Every curl in their frail petals is rendered
with as much care as though they were the hands or feet of Graces. Nor is
it, perhaps, a mere fancy to imagine that the corolla of an open rose
suggested to Botticelli's mind the composition of his best-known picture,
the circular "Coronation of the Virgin" in the Uffizzi. That masterpiece
combines all Botticelli's best qualities. For rare distinction of beauty
in the faces it is unique, while the mystic calm and resignation, so
misplaced in his Aphrodites, find a meaning here[187]. There is only one
other picture in Italy, a "Madonna and Child with S. Catherine" in a
landscape by Boccaccino da Cremona, that in any degree rivals the peculiar
beauty of its types[188].
Sandro Botticelli was not a great painter in the same sense as Andrea
Mantegna. But he was a true poet within the limits of a certain sphere. We
have to seek his parallel among the verse-writers rather than the artists
of his day. Some of the stanzas of Poliziano and Boiardo, in particular,
might have been written to explain his pictures, or his pictures might
have been painted to illustrate their verses[189]. In both Poliziano and
Boiardo we find the same touch upon antique things as in Botticelli; and
this makes him serviceable almost above all painters to the readers of
Renaissance poetry.
The name of Piero di Cosimo has been mentioned incidentally in connection
with that of Botticelli; and though his life exceeds the limits assigned
for this chapter, so many links unite him to the class of painters I have
been discussing, that I can find no better place to speak of him than
this. His biography forms one of the most amusing chapters in Vasari, who
has taken great delight in noting Piero's quaint humours and eccentric
habits, and whose description of a Carnival triumph devised by him is one
of our most precious documents in illustration of Renaissance
pageantry.[190] The point that connects him with Botticelli is the
romantic treatment of classical mythology, best exemplified in his
pictures of the tale of Perseus and Andromeda.[191] Piero was by nature
and employment a decorative painter; the construction of cars for
pageants, and the adornment of dwelling rooms and marriage chests,
affected his whole style, rendering it less independent and more quaint
than that of Botticelli. Landscape occupies the main part of his
compositions, made up by a strange amalgam of the most eccentric
details--rocks toppling over blue bays, sea-caverns, and fantastic
mountain ranges. Groups of little figures disposed upon these spaces tell
the story, and the best invention of the artist is lavished on the form of
monstrous creatures like the dragon slain by Perseus. There is no attempt
to treat the classic subject in a classic spirit: to do that, and to fail
in doing it, remained for Cellini.[192] We have, on the contrary, before
us an image of the orc, as it appeared to Ariosto's fancy--a creature
borrowed from romance and made to play its part in a Greek myth. The same
criticism applies to Piero's picture of the murdered Procris watched by a
Satyr of the woodland.[193] In creating his Satyr the painter has not had
recourse to any antique bas-relief, but has imagined for himself a being
half human, half bestial, and yet wholly real; nor has he portrayed in
Procris a nymph of Greek form, but a girl of Florence. The strange animals
and gaudy flowers introduced into the landscape background further remove
the subject from the sphere of classic treatment. Florentine realism and
quaint fancy being thus curiously blended, the artistic result may be
profitably studied for the light it throws upon the so-called Paganism of
the earlier Renaissance. Fancy at that moment was more free than when
superior knowledge of antiquity had created a demand for reproductive art,
and when the painters thought less of the meaning of the fable for
themselves than of its capability of being used as a machine for the
display of erudition.
It remains to speak of the painter who closes and at the same time gathers
up the whole tradition of this period. Domenico Ghirlandajo deserves this
place of honour not because he had the keenest intuitions, the deepest
thought, the strongest passion, the subtlest fancy, the loftiest
imagination--for in all these points he was excelled by some one or other
of his contemporaries or predecessors--but because his intellect was the
most comprehensive and his mastery of art the most complete. His life
lasted from 1449 to 1498, and he did not distinguish himself as a painter
till he was past thirty.[194] Therefore he does not properly fall within
the limit of 1470, assigned roughly to this age of transition in
painting. But in style and spirit he belonged to it, resuming in his own
work the qualities we find scattered through the minor artists of the
fifteenth century, and giving them the unity of fusion in a large and
lucid manner. Like the painters hitherto discussed, he was working toward
the full Renaissance; yet he reached it neither in ideality nor in
freedom. His art is the art of the understanding only; and to this the
masters of the golden age added radiance, sublimity, grace,
passion--qualities of the imagination beyond the scope of men like
Ghirlandajo.
It is almost with reluctance that a critic feels obliged to name this
powerful but prosaic painter as the Giotto of the fifteenth century in
Florence, the tutelary angel of an age inaugurated by Masaccio. He was a
consummate master of the science collected by his predecessors. No one
surpassed him in the use of fresco. His orderly composition, in the
distribution of figures and the use of architectural accessories, is
worthy of all praise; his portraiture is dignified and powerful;[195] his
choice of form and treatment of drapery, noble. Yet we cannot help noting
his deficiency in the finer sense of beauty, the absence of poetic
inspiration or feeling in his work, the commonplaceness of his colour, and
his wearisome reiteration of calculated effects. He never arrests
attention by sallies of originality, or charms us by the delicacies of
suggestive fancy. He is always at the level of his own achievement, so
that in the end we are as tired with able Ghirlandajo as the men of Athens
with just Aristides. Who, however, but Ghirlandajo could have composed the
frescoes of "S. Fina" at S. Gemignano, the fresco of the "Death of S.
Francis" in S. Trinità at Florence, or that again of the "Birth of the
Virgin" in S. Maria Novella? There is something irritating in pure common
sense imported into art, and Ghirlandajo's masterpieces are the apotheosis
of that quality. How correct, how judicious, how sagacious, how
mathematically ordered! we exclaim; but we gaze without emotion, and we
turn away without regret. It does not vex us to read how Ghirlandajo used
to scold his prentices for neglecting trivial orders that would fill his
purse with money. Similar traits of character pain us with a sense of
impropriety in Perugino. They harmonise with all we feel about the work of
Ghirlandajo. It is bitter mortification to know that Michael Angelo never
found space or time sufficient for his vast designs in sculpture. It is a
positive relief to think that Ghirlandajo sighed in vain to have the
circuit of the walls of Florence given him to paint. How he would have
covered them with compositions, stately, flowing, easy, sober, and
incapable of stirring any feeling in the soul!
Though Ghirlandajo lacked almost every true poetic quality, he combined
the art of distributing figures in a given space, with perspective, fair
knowledge of the nude, and truth to nature, in greater perfection than any
other single painter of the age he represents; and since these were
precisely the gifts of that age to the great Renaissance masters, we
accord to him the place of historical honour. It should be added that,
like almost all the artists of this epoch, he handled sacred and profane,
ancient and modern, subjects in the same style, introducing contemporary
customs and costumes. His pictures are therefore valuable for their
portraits and their illustration of Florentine life. Fresco was his
favourite vehicle; and in this preference he showed himself a true master
of the school of Florence: but he is said to have maintained that mosaic,
as more durable, was superior to wall-painting. This saying, if it be
authentic, justifies our criticism of his cold achievement as a painter.
Reviewing the ground traversed in this and the last chapter, we find that
the painting of Tuscany, and in particular the Florentine section of it,
has absorbed attention. It is characteristic of the next age that other
districts of Italy began to contribute their important quota to the
general culture of the nation. The force generated in Tuscany expanded and
dilated till every section of the country took part in the movement which
Florence had been first to propagate. What was happening in scholarship
began to manifest itself in art, for the same law of growth and
distribution affected both alike; and thus the local differences of the
Italians were to some extent abolished. The nation, never destined to
acquire political union in the Renaissance, possessed at last an
intellectual unity in its painters and its students, which justifies our
speaking of the great men of the golden period as Italians and not as
citizens of such or such a burgh. In the Middle Ages United Italy was an
Idea to theorists like Dante, who dreamed for her an actual supremacy
beneath her Emperor's sway in Rome. The reasoning to which they trusted
proved fallacious, and their hopes were quenched. Instead of the political
empire of the "De Monarchiâ," a spiritual empire had been created, and the
Italians were never more powerful in Europe than when their sacred city
was being plundered by the imperial bandits in 1527. It is necessary, at
the risk of some repetition, to keep this point before the reader, if only
as an apology for the method of treatment to be followed in the next
chapter, where the painters of the mid-Renaissance period will be reviewed
less in relation to their schools and cities than as representatives of
the Italian spirit.
Since the intellectual unity gained by the Italians in the age of the
Renaissance was chiefly due to the Florentines, it is a matter of some
moment to reconsider the direct influences brought to bear upon the arts
in Florence during the fifteenth century. I have chosen Ghirlandajo as the
representative of painting in that period. I have also expressed the
opinion that his style is singularly cold and prosaic, and have hinted
that this prosaic and cold quality was caused by a defect of emotional
enthusiasm, by preoccupation with finite aims. Herein Ghirlandajo did but
reflect the temper of his age--that temper which Cosimo de' Medici, the
greatest patron of both art and scholarship in Florence before 1470,
represented in his life and in his public policy. It concerns us,
therefore, to take into account the nature of the patronage extended by
the Medici to art. Excessive praise and blame have been showered upon
these burgher princes in almost equal quantities; so that, if we were to
place Roscoe and Rio, as the representatives of conflicting views, in the
scales together, they would balance each other, and leave the index
quivering. This bare statement warns the critic to be cautious, and
inclines him to accept the intermediate conclusion that neither the Medici
nor the artists could escape the conditions of their century. It is
specially argued on the one hand against the Medici that they encouraged a
sensual and worldly style of art, employing the painters to decorate their
palaces with nude figures, and luring them away from sacred to profane
subjects. Yet Cosimo gave orders to Donatello for his "David" and his
"Judith," employed Michellozzo and Brunelleschi to build him convents and
churches, and filled the library of S. Marco, where Fra Angelico was
painting, with a priceless collection of MSS. His own private chapel was
decorated by Benozza Gozzoli. Fra Lippo Lippi and Michael Angelo
Buonarroti were the house-friends of Lorenzo de' Medici. Leo Battista
Alberti was a member of his philosophical society. The only great
Florentine artist who did not stand in cordial relations to the Medicean
circle, was Lionardo da Vinci. This sufficiently shows that the Medicean
patronage was commensurate with the best products of Florentine genius;
nor would it be easy to demonstrate that encouragement, so largely
exhibited and so intelligently used, could have been in the main injurious
to the arts.
There is, however, a truth in the old grudge against the Medicean princes.
They enslaved Florence; and even painting was not slow to suffer from the
stifling atmosphere of tyranny. Lorenzo deliberately set himself to
enfeeble the people by luxury, partly because he liked voluptuous living,
partly because he aimed at popularity, and partly because it was his
interest to enervate republican virtues. The arts used for the purposes of
decoration in triumphs and carnival shows became the instruments of
careless pleasure; and there is no doubt that even earnest painters lent
their powers with no ill-will and no bad conscience to the service of
lascivious patrons. "Per la città, in diverse case, fece tondi di sua mano
e femmine ignude assai," says Vasari about Sandro Botticelli, who
afterwards became a Piagnone and refused to touch a pencil.[196] We may,
therefore, reasonably concede that if the Medici had never taken hold on
Florence, or if the spirit of the times had made them other than they were
in loftiness of aim and nobleness of heart, the arts of Italy in the
Renaissance might have shown less of worldliness and materialism. It was
against the demoralisation of society by paganism, as against the
enslavement of Florence by her tyrants, that Savonarola strove; and since
the Medici were the leaders of the classical revival, as well as the
despots of the dying commonwealth, they justly bear the lion's share of
that blame which fell in general upon the vices of their age denounced by
the prophet of S. Marco. We may regard it either as a singular misfortune
for Italy or as the strongest sign of deep-seated Italian corruption, that
the most brilliant leaders of culture both at Florence and at
Rome--Cosimo, Lorenzo, and Giovanni de' Medici--promoted rather than
checked the debasing influences of the Renaissance, and added the weight
of their authority to the popular craving for sensuous amusement.
Meanwhile, what was truly great and noble in Renaissance Italy, found its
proper home in Florence; where the spirit of freedom, if only as an idea,
still ruled; where the populace was still capable of being stirred to
super-sensual enthusiasm; and where the flame of the modern intellect
burned with its purest, whitest lustre.
FOOTNOTES:
[161] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 12.
[162] See Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, pp. 122-129.
[163] His real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, of the family of
Scheggia. Masaccio means in Tuscan, "Great hulking Tom," just as
Masolino, his supposed master and fellow-worker, means "Pretty little
Tom." Masolino was Tommaso di Cristofero Fini, born in 1384 in S. Croce.
It is now thought that we have but little of his authentic work except
the frescoes at Castiglione di Olona, near Milan. Masaccio was born at
San Giovanni, in the upper valley of the Arno, in 1402. He died at Borne
in 1429.
[164] His family name was Doni. He was born about 1396, and died at the
age of about 73. He got his name Uccello from his partiality for painting
birds, it is said.
[165] See above, Chapter III, Andrea Verocchio, for what has been said
about Verocchio's "David."
[166] A drawing made in red chalk for this "Dream of Constantine" has
been published in facsimile by Ottley, in his _Italian School of Design_.
He wrongly attributes it, however, to Giorgione, and calls it a "Subject
Unknown."
[167] The one in S. Francesco at Rimini, the other in the Uffizzi.
[168] Two angels have recently been published by the Arundel Society who
have also copied Melozzo's wall-painting of Sixtus IV. in the Vatican. It
is probable that the picture in the Royal Collection at Windsor, of Duke
Frederick of Urbino listening to the lecture of a Humanist, is also a
work of Melozzo's, much spoiled by re-painting. See Vol. II., _Revival of
Learning_, p. 220.
[169] Muratori, vol. xxiv. 1181.
[170] For Ciriac of Ancona, see Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, p. 113.
[171] The services rendered by Squarcione to art have been thoroughly
discussed by Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Painting in North Italy_,
vol. i. chap. 2. I cannot but think that they underrate the importance of
his school.
[172] He was born between 1360 and 1370, and he settled at Florence about
1422, where he opened a _bottega_ in S. Trinità. In 1423 he painted his
masterpiece, the "Adoration of the Magi," now exhibited in the Florentine
Academy of Arts.
[173] See, for instance, the valuable portraits of the Medicean family
with Picino and Poliziano, in the fresco of the "Tower of Babel" at Pisa.
[174] _L'Art Chrétien_, vol. ii. p. 397.
[175] The same remark might be made about the Venetian Bonifazio. It is
remarkable that the "Adoration of the Magi" was always a favourite
subject with painters of this calibre.
[176] I may refer to the picture of the hunters in the Taylor Gallery at
Oxford, the "Vintage of Noah" at Pisa, the attendants of the Magi in the
Riccardi Palace, and the _Carola_ in the "Marriage of Jacob and Rachel"
at Pisa.
[177] "Stories of Isaac and Ishmael and of Jacob and Esau" at Pisa, and
"Story of S. Augustine" at San Gemignano. Nothing can be prettier than
the school children in the latter series. The group of the little boy,
horsed upon a bigger boy's back for a whipping, is one of the most
natural episodes in painting.
[178] Riccardi Chapel.
[179] For an example, the picture of Madonna worshipping the infant
Christ upheld by two little angels in the Uffizzi.
[180] In the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence.
[181] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. chap. 19. Nothing was more common
in the practice of Italian arts than for pupils to take their names from
their masters, in the same way as they took them from their fathers, by
the prefix _di_ or otherwise.
[182] The most simply beautiful of Filippino's pictures is the
oil-painting in the Badia at Florence, which represents Madonna attended
by angels dictating the story of her life to S. Bernard. In this most
lovely religious picture Filippino comes into direct competition with
Perugino (see the same subject at Munich), without suffering by the
contrast. The type of Our lady, striven after by Botticelli and other
masters of his way of feeling, seems to me more thoroughly attained by
Filippino than by any of his fellow-workers. She is a woman acquainted
with grief and nowise distinguished by the radiance of her beauty among
the daughters of earth. It is measureless love for the mother of his Lord
that makes S. Bernard bow before her with eyes of wistful adoration and
hushed reverence.
[183] The study of the fine arts offers few subjects of more curious
interest than the vicissitudes through which painters of the type of
Botticelli, not absolutely and confessedly in the first rank, but
attractive by reason of their relation to the spirit of their age, and of
the seal of _intimité_ set upon their work have passed. In the last
century and the beginning of this, our present preoccupation with
Botticelli would have passed for a mild lunacy, because he has none of
the qualities then most in vogue and most enthusiastically studied, and
because the moment in the history of culture he so faithfully represents,
was then but little understood. The prophecy of Mr. Ruskin, the
tendencies of our best contemporary art in Mr. Burne Jones's painting,
the specific note of our recent fashionable poetry, and, more than all,
our delight in the delicately poised psychological problems of the middle
Renaissance, have evoked a kind of hero-worship for this excellent artist
and true poet.
[184] A friend, writing to me from Italy, speaks thus of Botticelli, and
of the painters associated with him: "When I ask myself what it is I find
fascinating in him--for instance, which of his pictures, or what element
in them--I am forced to admit that it is the touch of paganism in him,
the fairy-story element, _the echo of a beautiful lapsed mythology which
he has found the means of transmitting._" The words I have printed in
italics seem to me very true. At the same time we must bear in mind that
the scientific investigation of nature had not in the fifteenth century
begun to stand between the sympathetic intellect and the outer world.
There was still the possibility of that "lapsed mythology," the dream of
poets and the delight of artists, seeming positively the best form of
expression for sentiments aroused by nature.
[185] _De Rerum Naturâ_, lib. v. 737.
[186] The rose-tree background in a Madonna belonging to Lord Elcho is a
charming instance of the value given to flowers by careful treatment.
[187] I cannot bring myself to accept Mr. Pater's reading of the
Madonna's expression. It seems to me that Botticelli meant to portray the
mingled awe and tranquillity of a mortal mother chosen for the Son of
God. He appears to have sometimes aimed at conveying more than painting
can compass; and, since he had not Lionardo's genius, he gives sadness,
mournfulness, or discontent, for some more subtle mood. Next to the
Madonna of the Uffizzi, Botticelli's loveliest religious picture to my
mind is the "Nativity" belonging to Mr. Fuller Maitland. Poetic
imagination in a painter has produced nothing more graceful and more
tender than the dance of angels in the air above, and the embracement of
the angels and the shepherds on the lawns below.
[188] In the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice. I do not mention this
picture as a complete pendant to Botticelli's famous _tondo_. The faces
of S. Catherine and Madonna, however, have something of the rarity that
is so striking in that work.
[189] I might mention stanzas 122-124 of Poliziano's _Giostra_,
describing Venus in the lap of Mars; or stanzas 99-107, describing the
birth of Venus; and from Boiardo's _Orlando Innamorato_, I might quote
the episode of Rinaldo's punishment by Love (lib. ii. canto xv. 43), or
the tale of Silvanella and Narcissus (lib. ii. canto xvii. 49).
[190] I hope to make use of this passage in a future section of my work
on the Italian Poetry of the Renaissance. Therefore I pass by this
portion of Piero's art-work now.
[191] Uffizzi Gallery.
[192] See the bas-relief upon the pedestal of his "Perseus" in the Loggia
de' Lanzi.
[193] In the National Gallery.
[194] His family name was Domenico di Currado di Doffo Bigordi. He
probably worked during his youth and early manhood as a goldsmith and got
his artist's name from the trade of making golden chaplets for the
Florentine women. See Vasari, vol. v. p. 66.
[195] What, after all, remains the grandest quality of Ghirlandajo is his
powerful drawing of characteristic heads. They are as various as they are
vigorous. What a nation of strong men must the Florentines have been, we
feel while gazing at his frescoes.
[196] In many houses he painted roundels with his own hand, and of naked
women plenty.