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.
In the foregoing chapters I have not sought to write again the history of
art, so much as to keep in view the relation between Italian art and the
leading intellectual impulses of the Renaissance. In the masters of the
sixteenth century--Lionardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and the
Venetians--the force inherent in the Italian genius for painting reached
full development. What remained was but an after-bloom rapidly tending to
decadence. To surpass those men in their own line seemed impossible. What
they had achieved was so transcendent that imitation satisfied their
successors; and if they refused imitation, originality had to be sought by
deviating into extravagances. Meanwhile no new stock of thoughts had been
acquired; and students of history are now well aware that for really
great art ideas common to the nation are essential. The motives suggested
by mediaeval Christianity, after passing through successive stages of
treatment in the _quattrocento_, had received the grand and humane
handling of the golden age. The motives of revived paganism in like manner
were exhausted, and at this time the feeling for antiquity had lost its
primal freshness. It might seem superfluous to carry this inquiry further,
when we have thus confessedly attained the culminating point of painting.
Yet the sketch attempted in this volume would be incomplete and liable to
misinterpretation, if no account were taken of the legacy bequeathed to
the next generation by the great masters.
Lionardo da Vinci formed, as we have seen, a school at Milan. It was the
special good fortune of his pupils that what he actually accomplished,
bore no proportion to the suggestiveness of his teaching and the fertility
of his invention. Of finished work he left but little to the world; while
his sketches and designs, the teeming thoughts of his creative brain, were
an inestimable heritage. The whole of this rich legacy of masterpieces,
projected, but not executed, was characterised by a feeling for beauty
which has fallen to no other painter. When we examine the sketches in the
Royal Collection at Windsor, we perceive that the exceeding sense of
loveliness possessed by Lionardo could not have failed to animate his
pupils with a high spirit of art. At the same time the extraordinary
variety of his drawing--sometimes reminding us of German method, sometimes
modern in the manner of French and English draughtsmen--by turns bold and
delicate, broad and minute in detail--afforded to his school examples of
perfect treatment in a multiplicity of different styles. There was no
formality of fixed unalterable precedent in Lionardo, nothing for his
scholars to repeat with the monotony of mannerism.
It remained for his disciples, each in his own sphere, with inferior
powers and feebler intellect, to perpetuate the genius of their master.
Thus the spirit of Lionardo continued to live in Lombardy after he was
dead. There alone imitation was really fruitful, because it did not imply
mere copying. Instead of attempting to give a fresh and therefore a
strained turn to motives that had already received consummate treatment,
Lionardo's successors were able to execute what he had planned but had not
carried to completion. Nor was the prestige of his style so oppressive
through the mass of pictures painted by his hand as to check individuality
or to prevent the pupil from working out such portions of the master's
vein as suited his own talent. Each found enough suggested, but not used,
to give his special faculty free scope. This is in fact the reason why the
majority of pictures ascribed to Lionardo are really the production of his
school. They have the excellence of original work, but not such excellence
as Lionardo could have given them. Their completion is due, as searching
criticism proves, to lesser men; but the conception belongs to the
greatest.
Andrea Salaino, Marco d'Oggiono, Francesco Melzi, Giovanni Antonio
Beltraffio, and Cesare da Sesto, are all of them skilled workmen, losing
and finding their individuality, as just described, in the manner of their
master. Salaino brings exquisite delicacy of execution; d'Oggiono, wild
and bizarre beauty; Melzi, the refinements of a miniaturist; Beltraffio,
hard brilliancy of light and colour; Cesare da Sesto, somewhat of
effeminate sweetness; and thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend
themselves again in what is Lionardo's own. It is surely not without
significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in
the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover
of all things double-natured and twin-souled.
Two painters of the Lombard school, Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio
Ferrari, demand separate notice. Without Lionardo it is difficult to say
what Luini would have been: so thoroughly did he appropriate his teacher's
type of face, and, in oil-painting, his refinement. And yet Luini stands
on his own ground, in no sense an imitator, with a genius more simple and
idyllic than Da Vinci's. Little conception of his charm can be formed by
those who have not seen his frescoes in the Brera and S. Maurizio Maggiore
at Milan, in the church of the Angeli at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage
church of Saronno. To the circumstance of his having done his best work in
places hardly visited until of late years, may in part perhaps be
attributed the tardy recognition of a painter eminently fitted to be
popular. Luini was essentially a fresco-painter. None, perhaps, of all the
greatest Italian _frescanti_ realised a higher quality of brilliancy
without gaudiness, by the scale of colours he selected and by the purity
with which he used them in simple combinations. His frescoes are never
dull or heavy in tone, never glaring, never thin or chalky. He knew how to
render them both luminous and rich, without falling into the extremes that
render fresco-paintings often less attractive than oil-pictures. His
feeling for loveliness of form was original and exquisite. The joy of
youth found in Luini an interpreter only less powerful and even more
tender than in Raphael. While he shared with the Venetians their
sensibility to nature, he had none of their sensuousness or love of pomp.
In idyllic painting of a truly great type I know of nothing more
delightful than his figures of young musicians going to the marriage feast
of Mary, nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned and seated at
the foot of the cross.[389] The sentiment for naive and artless grace, so
fully possessed by Luini, gave freshness to his treatment of conventional
religious themes. Under his touch they appeal immediately to the most
untutored taste, without the aid of realistic or sensational effects. Even
S. Sebastian and S. Rocco, whom it is difficult to represent with any
novelty of attitude or expression, became for him the motives of fresh
poetry, unsought but truly felt.[390] Among all the Madonnas ever painted
his picture of Mary with the espalier of white roses, and another where
she holds the infant Christ to pluck a purple columbine, distinguish
themselves by this engaging spontaneity. The frescoes of the marriage of
the Virgin and of S. Catherine carried by angels to Mount Sinai might be
cited for the same quality of freshness and unstudied poetry.[391]
When the subject demanded the exercise of grave emotion, Luini rose to the
occasion without losing his simplicity. The "Martyrdom of S. Catherine"
and the fresco of Christ after the Flagellation are two masterpieces,
wherein the depths of pathos have been sounded, and not a single note of
discord is struck.[392] All harsh and disagreeable details are either
eliminated, or so softened that the general impression, as in Pergolese's
music, is one of profoundest and yet sweetest sorrow. Luini's genius was
not tragic. The nearest approach to a dramatic motive in his work is the
figure of the Magdalen kneeling before the cross, with her long yellow
hair streaming over her shoulders, and her arms thrown backwards in an
ecstasy of grief.[393] He did well to choose moments that stir tender
sympathy--the piety of deep and calm devotion. How truly he felt
them--more truly, I think, than Perugino in his best period--is proved by
the correspondence they awake in us. Like melodies, they create a mood in
the spectator.
What Luini did not learn from Lionardo, was the art of composition. Taken
one by one, the figures that make up his "Marriage of the Virgin" at
Saronno, are beautiful; but the whole picture is clumsily constructed; and
what is true of this, may be said of every painting in which he attempted
complicated grouping.[394] We feel him to be a great artist only where the
subject does not demand the symmetrical arrangement of many parts.
Gaudenzio Ferrari was a genius of a different order, more robust, more
varied, but less single-minded than Luini. His style reveals the
influences of a many-sided, ill-assimilated education; blending the
manners of Bramantino, Lionardo, and Raphael without proper fusion. Though
Ferrari travelled much, and learned his art in several schools, he, like
Luini, can only be studied in the Milanese district--at his birthplace
Varallo, at Saronno, Vercelli, and Milan. It is to be regretted that a
painter of such singular ability, almost unrivalled at moments in the
expression of intense feeling and the representation of energetic
movement, should have lacked a simpler training, or have been unable to
adopt a manner more uniform. There is a strength of wing in his
imaginative flight, a swiftness and impetuosity in his execution, and a
dramatic force in his conception, that almost justify Lomazzo's choice of
the eagle for his emblem. Yet he was unable to collect his powers, or to
rule them. The distractions of an age that had produced its masterpieces,
were too strong for him; and what he failed to find was balance. His
picture of the "Martyrdom of S. Catherine," where reminiscences of Raphael
and Lionardo mingle with the uncouth motives of an earlier style in a
medley without unity of composition or harmony of colouring, might be
chosen as a typical instance of great resources misapplied.[395]
The most pleasing of Ferrari's paintings are choirs of angels, sorrowing
or rejoicing, some of them exquisitely and originally beautiful, all
animated with unusual life, and poised upon wings powerful enough to bear
them--veritable "birds of God."[396] His dramatic scenes from sacred
history, rich in novel motives and exuberantly full of invention, crowd
the churches of Vercelli; while a whole epic of the Passion is painted in
fresco above the altar of S. Maria delle Grazie at Varallo, covering the
wall from basement to ceiling. The prodigality of power displayed by
Ferrari makes up for much of crudity in style and confusion in aim; nor
can we refuse the tribute of warmest admiration to a master, who, when the
schools of Rome and Florence were sinking into emptiness and bombast,
preserved the fire of feeling for serious themes. What was deadly in the
neo-paganism of the Renaissance--its frivolity and worldliness, corroding
the very sources of belief in men who made of art a decoration for their
sensuous existence--had not penetrated to those Lombard valleys where
Ferrari and Luini worked. There the devotion of the Sacri Monti still
maintained an intelligence between the people and the artist, far more
fruitful of results to painting than the patronage of splendour-loving
cardinals and nobles.[397]
Passing from Lionardo to Raphael, we find exactly the reverse of what has
hitherto been noticed. Raphael worked out the mine of his own thought so
thoroughly--so completely exhausted the motives of his invention, and
carried his style to such perfection--that he left nothing unused for his
followers. We have seen that he formed a school of subordinates in Rome
who executed his later frescoes after his designs. Some of these men have
names that can be mentioned--Giulio Romano, of whom more hereafter; Perino
del Vaga, the decorator of Genoese palaces in a style of overblown but
gorgeous Raphaelism; Andrea Sabbatini, who carried the Roman tradition
down to Naples; Francesco Penni, Giovanni da Udine, and Polidoro da
Caravaggio. Their work, even while superintended by Raphael himself, began
to show the signs of decadence. In his Roman manner the dramatic element
was conspicuous; and to carry dramatic painting beyond the limits of good
style in art is unfortunately easy. The Hall of Constantine, left
unfinished at his death, still further proved how little his pupils could
do without him.[398] When Raphael died, the breath whose might sustained
and made them potent, ceased. For all the higher purposes of genuine art,
inspiration passed from them as colour fades from eastern clouds at
sunset, suddenly.
It has been customary to account for this rapid decline of the Roman
school by referring to the sack of Rome in 1527. No doubt the artists
suffered at that moment at least as severely as the scholars; their
dispersion broke up a band of eminent painters, who might in combination
and competition have still achieved great things. Yet the secret of their
subsequent failure lay far deeper; partly in the full development of their
master's style, already described; and partly in the social conditions of
Rome itself. Patrons, stimulated by the example of the Popes, desired vast
decorative works; but they expected these to be performed rapidly and at a
cheap rate. Painters, familiarised with the execution of such
undertakings, forgot that hitherto the conception had been not theirs but
Raphael's. Mistaking hand-work for brain-work, they audaciously accepted
commissions that would have taxed the powers of the master himself.
Meanwhile moral earnestness and technical conscientiousness were both
extinct. The patrons required show and sensual magnificence far more than
thought and substance. They were not, therefore, deterred by the vacuity
and poor conceptive faculty of the artists from employing them. What the
age demanded was a sumptuous parade of superficial ornament, and this the
pupils of Raphael felt competent to supply without much effort. The result
was that painters who under favourable circumstances might have done some
meritorious work, became mere journeymen contented with the soulless
insincerity of cheap effects. Giulio Romano alone, by dint of robust
energy and lurid fire of fancy flickering amid the smoke of his coarser
nature, achieved a triumph in this line of labour. His Palazzo del Te will
always remain the monument of a specific moment in Renaissance history,
since it is adequate to the intellectual conditions of a race demoralised
but living still with largeness and a sense of grandeur.
Michael Angelo formed no school in the strict sense of the word. Yet his
influence was not the less felt on that account, nor less powerful than
Raphael's in the same direction. During his manhood the painters Sebastian
del Piombo, Marcello Venusti, and Daniele da Volterra, had endeavoured to
add the charm of oil-colouring to his designs; and long before his death,
the seduction of his mighty mannerism had begun to exercise a fatal charm
for all the schools of Italy. Painters incapable of fathoming his
intention, unsympathetic to his rare type of intellect, and gifted with
less than a tithe of his native force, set themselves to reproduce
whatever may be justly censured in his works. To heighten and enlarge
their style was reckoned a chief duty of aspiring craftsmen; and it was
thought that recipes for attaining to this final perfection of the modern
arts might be extracted without trouble from Michael Angelo's
masterpieces. Unluckily, in proportion as his fame increased, his
peculiarities grew with the advance of age more manneristic and defined;
so that his imitators fixed precisely upon that which sober critics now
regard as a deduction from his greatness. They failed to perceive that he
owed his grandeur to his personality; and that the audacities which
fascinated them, became mere whimsical extravagances when severed from his
_terribilità_ and sombre simplicity of impassioned thought. His power and
his spirit were alike unique and uncommunicable, while the admiration of
his youthful worshippers betrayed them into imitating the externals of a
style that was rapidly losing spontaneity and sense of beauty. Therefore
they fancied they were treading in his footsteps and using the grand
manner when they covered church-roofs and canvases with sprawling figures
in distorted attitudes. Instead of studying nature, they studied Michael
Angelo's cartoons, exaggerating by their unintelligent discipleship his
wilfulness and arbitrary choice of form.
Vasari's and Cellini's criticisms of a master they both honestly revered,
may suffice to illustrate the false method adopted by these mimics of
Michael Angelo's ideal. To charge him with faults proceeding from the
weakness and blindness of the decadence--the faults of men too blind to
read his art aright, too weak to stand on their own feet without
him--would be either stupid or malicious. If at the close of the sixteenth
century the mannerists sought to startle and entrance the world by empty
exhibitions of muscular anatomy misunderstood, and by a braggadocio
display of meaningless effects--crowding their compositions with studies
from the nude, and painting agitated groups without a discernible cause
for agitation--the crime surely lay with the patrons who liked such
decoration, and with the journeymen who provided it. Michael Angelo
himself always made his manner serve his thought. We may fail to
appreciate his manner and may be incapable of comprehending his thought;
but only insincere or conceited critics will venture to gauge the latter
by what they feel to be displeasing in the former. What seems lawless in
him, follows the law of a profound and peculiar genius, with which,
whether we like it or not, we must reckon. His imitators were devoid of
thought and too indifferent to question whether there was any law to be
obeyed. Like the jackass in the fable, they put on the dead lion's skin of
his manner, and brayed beneath it, thinking they could roar.
Correggio, again, though he can hardly be said to have founded a school,
was destined to exercise wide and perilous influence over a host of
manneristic imitators. Francesco Mazzola, called Il Parmigianino, followed
him so closely that his frescoes at Parma are hardly distinguishable from
the master's; while Federigo Baroccio at Urbino endeavoured to preserve
the sensuous and almost childish sweetness of his style in its
integrity.[399] But the real attraction of Correggio was only felt when
the new _barocco_ architecture called for a new kind of decoration. Every
cupola throughout the length and breadth of Italy began then to be
painted with rolling clouds and lolling angels. What the wits of Parma had
once stigmatised as a _ragoût_ of frogs, now seemed the only possible
expression for celestial ecstasy; and to delineate the joy of heaven upon
those multitudes of domes and semi-domes was a point of religious
etiquette. False lights, dubious foreshortenings, shallow colourings,
ill-studied forms, and motiveless agitation suited the taste that cared
for gaudy brightness and sensational effects. The painters, for their
part, found it convenient to adopt a mannerism that enabled them to
conceal the difficult parts of the figure in feather beds of vapour,
requiring neither effort of conception nor expenditure of labour on
drawing and composition. At the same time, the Caracci made Correggio's
style the object of more serious study; and the history of Bolognese
painting shows what was to be derived from this master by intelligent and
conscientious workmen.
Hitherto, I have had principally to record the errors of artists copying
the external qualities of their great predecessors. It is refreshing to
turn from the _epigoni_ of the so-called Roman school to masters in whom
the flame of the Renaissance still burned brightly. Andrea del Sarto, the
pupil of Piero di Cosimo, but more nearly related in style to Fra
Bartolommeo than to any other of the elder masters, was himself a
contemporary of Raphael and Correggio. Yet he must be noticed here;
because he gave new qualities to the art of Tuscany, and formed a
tradition decisive for the subsequent history of Florentine painting. To
make a just estimate of his achievement is a task of no small difficulty.
The Italians called him "il pittore senza errori," or the faultless
painter. What they meant by this must have been that in all the technical
requirements of art, in drawing, composition, handling of fresco and oils,
disposition of draperies, and feeling for light and shadow, he was above
criticism. As a colourist he went further and produced more beautiful
effects than any Florentine before him. His silver-grey harmonies and
liquid blendings of hues cool, yet lustrous, have a charm peculiar to
himself alone. We find the like nowhere else in Italy. And yet Andrea del
Sarto cannot take rank among the greatest Renaissance painters. What he
lacked was precisely the most precious gift--inspiration, depth of
emotion, energy of thought. We are apt to feel that even his best pictures
were designed with a view to solving an aesthetic problem. Very few have
the poetic charm belonging to the "S. John" of the Pitti or the "Madonna"
of the Tribune. Beautiful as are many of his types, like the Magdalen in
the large picture of the "Pietà"[400] we can never be sure that he will
not break the spell by forms of almost vulgar mediocrity. The story that
his wife, a worthless woman, sat for his Madonnas, and the legends of his
working for money to meet pressing needs, seem justified by numbers of his
paintings, faulty in their faultlessness and want of spirit. Still, after
making these deductions, we must allow that Andrea del Sarto not
unworthily represents the golden age at Florence. There is no affectation,
no false taste, no trickery in his style. His workmanship is always solid;
his hand unerring. If Nature denied him the soul of a poet, and the stern
will needed for escaping from the sordid circumstances of his life, she
gave him some of the highest qualities a painter can desire--qualities of
strength, tranquillity, and thoroughness, that in the decline of the
century ceased to exist outside Venice.
Among Del Sarto's followers it will be enough to mention Franciabigio,
Vasari's favourite in fresco painting, Rosso de' Rossi, who carried the
Florentine manner into France, and Pontormo, the masterly painter of
portraits.[401] In the historical pictures of these men, whether sacred
or secular, it is clear how much was done for Florentine art by Fra
Bartolommeo and Del Sarto independently of Michael Angelo and Lionardo.
Angelo Bronzino, the pupil of Pontormo, is chiefly valuable for his
portraits. Hard and cold, yet obviously true to life, they form a gallery
of great interest for the historian of Duke Cosimo's reign. His frescoes
and allegories illustrate the defects that have been pointed out in those
of Raphael's and Buonarroti's imitators.[402] Want of thought and feeling,
combined with the presumptuous treatment of colossal and imaginative
subjects, renders these compositions inexpressibly chilling. The
psychologist, who may have read a poem from Bronzino's pen, will be
inclined to wonder how far this barren art was not connected with personal
corruption.[403] Such speculations are, however, apt to be misleading.
Siena, after a long period of inactivity, received a fresh impulse at the
same time as Florence. Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, or Razzi, called Il Sodoma,
was born at Vercelli about 1477. He studied in his youth under Lionardo da
Vinci, training his own exquisite sense of natural beauty in that
scientific school. From Milan, after a certain interval of time, he
removed to Rome, where he became a friend and follower of Raphael. These
double influences determined a style that never lost its own originality.
With what delicacy and _naïveté_, almost like a second Luini, but with
more of humour and sensuousness, he approached historic themes, may be
seen in his frescoes at Monte Oliveto.[404] They were executed before his
Roman visit, and show the facility of a most graceful improvisatore. One
painting representing the "Temptation of Monks by Dancing Women" carries
the melody of fluent lines and the seduction of fair girlish faces into a
region of pure poetry. These frescoes are superior to Sodoma's work in the
Farnesina. Impressed, as all artists were, by the monumental character of
Borne, and fired by Raphael's example, he tried to abandon his sketchy and
idyllic style for one of greater majesty and fulness. The delicious
freshness of his earlier manner was sacrificed; but his best efforts to
produce a grandiose composition ended in a confusion of individually
beautiful but ill-assorted motives. Like Luini, Sodoma was never
successful in pictures requiring combination and arrangement. He lacked
some sense of symmetry and sought to achieve massiveness by crowding
figures in a given space. When we compare his group of "S. Catherine
Fainting under the Stigmata" with the medley of agitated forms that make
up his picture of the same saint at Tuldo's execution, we see plainly that
he ought to have confined himself to the expression of very simple
themes.[405] The former is incomparable for its sweetness; the latter is
indistinct and wearying, in spite of many details that adorn it. Gifted
with an exquisite feeling for the beauty of the human body, Sodoma
excelled himself when he was contented with a single figure. His "S.
Sebastian," notwithstanding its wan and faded colouring, is still the very
best that has been painted.[406] Suffering, refined and spiritual, without
contortion or spasm, could not be presented with more pathos in a form of
more surpassing loveliness. This is a truly demonic picture in the
fascination it exercises and the memory it leaves upon the mind. Part of
its unanalysable charm may be due to the bold thought of combining the
beauty of a Greek Hylas with the Christian sentiment of martyrdom. Only
the Renaissance could have produced a hybrid so successful, because so
deeply felt.
Sodoma's influence at Siena, where he lived a picturesque life, delighting
in his horses and surrounding himself with strange four-footed pets of all
sorts, soon produced a school of worthy masters. Girolamo del Pacchia,
Domenico Beccafumi, and Baldassare Peruzzi, though they owed much to the
stimulus of his example, followed him in no servile spirit. Indeed, it may
be said that Pacchia's paintings in the Oratory of S. Bernardino, though
they lacked his siren beauty, are more powerfully composed; while
Peruzzi's fresco of "Augustus and the Sibyl," in the church of
Fontegiusta, has a monumental dignity unknown to Sodoma. Beccafumi is apt
to leave the spectator of his paintings cold. From inventive powers so
rich and technical excellence so thorough, we demand more than he can
give, and are therefore disappointed. His most interesting picture at
Siena is the "Stigmatisation of S. Catherine," famous for its mastery of
graduated whites. Much of the paved work of the Duomo is attributed to his
design. Both Beccafumi and Peruzzi felt the cold and manneristic Roman
style of rhetoric injuriously.
To mention the remaining schools of Italy in detail would be superfluous.
True art still flourished at Ferrara, where Garofalo endeavoured to carry
on the Roman manner of Raphael without the necessary strength or ideality,
but also without the soulless insincerity of the mannerists. His best
quality was colouring, gemlike and rich; but this found little scope for
exercise in the dry and laboured style he affected. Dosso Dossi fared
better, perhaps through having never experienced the seductions of Rome.
His glowing colour and quaint fancy give the attraction of romance to
many of his pictures. The "Circe," for example, of the Borghese Palace, is
worthy to rank with the best Renaissance work. It is perfectly original,
not even suggesting the influence of Venice by its deep and lustrous hues.
No painting is more fit to illustrate the "Orlando Innamorato." Just so,
we feel in looking at it, did Dragontina show herself to Boiardo's fancy.
Ariosto's Alcina belongs to a different family of magnificent witches.
Cremona, at this epoch, had a school of painters, influenced almost
equally by the Venetians, the Milanese, and the Roman mannerists. The
Campi family covered those grave Lombard vaults with stucco, fresco, and
gilding in a style only just removed from the _barocco_.[407] Brescia and
Bergamo remained within the influence of Venice, producing work of nearly
first-rate quality in Moretto, Romanino, and Lorenzo Lotto. Moroni, the
pupil of Moretto, was destined to become one of the most powerful
character painters of the modern world, and to enrich the studies of
historians and artists with a series of portraits impressive by their
fidelity to the spirit of the sixteenth century at its conclusion. Venice
herself at this period was still producing masterpieces of the genuine
Renaissance. But the decline into mannerism, caused by circumstances
similar to those of Rome, was not far distant.
It may seem strange to those who have visited the picture galleries of
Italy, and have noticed how very large a number of the painters flourished
after 1550, that I should have persistently spoken of the last half of the
sixteenth century as a period of decadence. This it was, however, in a
deep and true sense of the word. The force of the Renaissance was
exhausted, and a time of relaxation had to be passed through, before the
reaction known as the Counter-Reformation could make itself felt in art.
Then, and not till then, a new spiritual impulse produced a new style.
This secondary growth of painting began to flourish at Bologna in
accordance with fresh laws of taste. Religious sentiments of a different
order had to be expressed; society had undergone a change, and the arts
were governed by a genuine, if far inferior, inspiration. Meanwhile, the
Renaissance, so far as Italy is concerned, was ended.
It is one of the sad features of this subject, that each section has to
end in lamentation. Servitude in the sphere of politics; literary
feebleness in scholarship; decadence in art:--to shun these conclusions is
impossible. He who has undertaken to describe the parabola of a
projectile, cannot be satisfied with tracing its gradual rise and
determining its culmination. He must follow its spent force, and watch it
slowly sink with ever dwindling impetus to earth. Intellectual movements,
when we isolate them in a special country, observing the causes that set
them in motion and calculating their retarding influences, may, not
unreasonably, be compared to the parabola of a projectile. To shrink from
studying the decline of mental vigour in Italy upon the close of the
Renaissance, would be therefore weak; though the task of tracing the
impulse communicated by her previous energy to other nations, and their
stirring under a like movement, might be more agreeable.
FOOTNOTES:
[389] Frescoes in the Brera and at Lugano.
[390] S. Maurizio, on the Screen, inner church. Lugano in the Angeli.
[391] In the Brera. See also the Madonna, with Infant Christ, S. John,
and a Lamb, at Lugano.
[392] Side chapel of S. Maurizio at Milan. These frescoes are, in my
opinion, Luini's very best. The whole church is a wonderful monument of
Lombard art.
[393] "Crucifixion" at Lugano.
[394] See, for example, the oil-paintings in the cathedral of Como, so
fascinating in their details, so lame in composition.
[395] In the Brera.
[396] Frescoes at Saronno and in the Sacro Monte at Varallo.
[397] The whole lake-district of Italy, where the valleys of Monte Rosa
and the Simplon descend upon the plain of Lombardy, is rich in works of
this school. At Luino and Lugano, on the island of San Giulio, and in the
hill-set chapels of the Val Sesia, may be found traces of frescoes of
incomparable beauty. One of these sites deserves special mention. Just at
the point where the pathway of the Colma leaves the chestnut groves and
meadows to join the road leading to Varallo, there stands a little
chapel, with an open loggia of round Renaissance arches, designed and
painted, according to tradition, by Ferrari, and without doubt
representative of his manner. The harmony between its colours, so mellow
in their ruin, its graceful arcades and quiet roofing, and the glowing
tones of those granite mountains, with their wealth of vineyards, and
their forests of immemorial chestnut trees, is perfect beyond words.
[398] This, the last of the Stanze, was only in part designed by Raphael.
In spite of what I have said above, the "Battle of Constantine," planned
by Raphael, and executed by Giulio, is a grand example of a pupil's power
to carry out his master's scheme.
[399] Baroccio had great authority at Florence in the seventeenth
century, when the cult of Correggio had overspread all Italy.
[400] Pitti Palace.
[401] Franciabigio's and Rosso's frescoes stand beside Del Sarto's in the
atrium of the Annunziata at Florence. Pontormo's portraits of Cosimo and
Lorenzo de' Medici in the Uffizzi, though painted from busts and
medallions, have a real historical value.
[402] The "Christ in Limbo" in S. Lorenzo at Florence, and the detestable
picture of "Time, Beauty, Love, and Folly," in our National Gallery.
[403] _Opere Burlesche_, vol. iii. pp. 39-46.
[404] Near Siena. These pictures are a series of twenty-four subjects
from the life of S. Benedict.
[405] In the church of S. Domenico, Siena.
[406] In the Uffizzi. See also Sodoma's "Sacrifice of Isaac" in the
cathedral of Pisa, and the "Christ Bound to the Pillar" in the Academy at
Siena.
[407] The church of S. Sigismondo, outside Cremona, is very interesting
for the unity of style in its architecture and decoration.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
_The Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello_
Having tried to characterise Niccola Pisano's relation to early Italian
art in the second chapter of this volume, I adverted to the recent doubts
which have been thrown by very competent authorities upon Vasari's legend
of this master. Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, while discussing the
question of his birthplace and his early training, observe, what is no
doubt true, that there are no traces of good sculpture in Pisa antecedent
to the Baptistery pulpit of 1260, and remark that for such a phenomenon as
the sudden appearance of this masterpiece it is needful to seek some
antecedents elsewhere.[408] This leads them to ask whether Niccola did not
owe his origin and education to some other part of Italy. Finding at
Ravello, near Amain, a pulpit sculptured in 1272 by Niccola di Bartolommeo
da Foggia, they suggest that a school of stone-carvers may have flourished
at Foggia, and that Niccola Pisano, in spite of his signing himself
_Pisanus_ on the Baptistery pulpit, may have been an Apulian trained in
that school. The arguments adduced in favour of that hypothesis are that
Niccola's father, though commonly believed to have been Ser Pietro da
Siena, was perhaps called Pietro di Apulia,[409] and that meritorious
artists certainly existed at Foggia and Trani. Yet the resemblance of
style between the pulpits at Ravello [1272] and Pisa [1260], if that
indeed exists (whereof hereafter more must be said), might be used to
prove that Niccola da Foggia learned his art from Niccola Pisano, instead
of the contrary; nor again, supposing the Apulian school to have
flourished before 1260, is it inconsistent with the tradition of Niccola's
life that he should have learned the sculptor's craft while working in his
youth at Naples. For the rest, Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle dismiss the
story of Pisano's studying the antique bas-reliefs at Pisa with
contempt;[410] but they omit to notice the actual transcripts from those
marbles introduced into his first pulpit. Again, they assume that the
lunette at Lucca was one of his latest works, giving precedence to the
pulpits of Pisa and Siena and the fountain of Perugia. A comparison of
style no doubt renders this view plausible; for the lunette at Lucca is
superior to any other of Pisano's works as a composition.
The full discussion of these points is rendered impossible by the want of
contemporary information, and each student must, therefore, remain
contented with his own hypothesis. Yet something can be said with regard
to the Ravello pulpit that plays so important a part in the argument of
the learned historians of Italian painting. Unless a strong similarity
between it and Pisano's pulpits can be proved, their hypothesis carries
with it no persuasion.
The pulpit in the cathedral of Ravello is formed like an ambo of the
antique type. That is to say, it is a long parallelogram with flat sides,
raised upon pillars, and approached by a flight of steps. These steps are
enclosed within richly-ornamented walls, and stand distinct from the
pulpit; a short bridge connects the two. The six pillars supporting the
ambo itself are slender twisted columns with classic capitals. Three rest
on lions, three on lionesses, admirably carved in different attitudes. A
small projection on the north side of the pulpit sustains an eagle
standing on a pillar, and spreading out his wings to bear an open book. On
the arch over the entrance to the staircase projects the head of
Sigelgaita, wife of Niccola Rufolo, the donor of the pulpit to the church,
sculptured in the style of the Roman decadence, between two profile
medallions in low relief.[411] The material of the whole is fair white
marble, enriched with mosaics, and wrought into beautiful scroll-work of
acanthus leaves and other Romanesque adornments. An inscription, "_Ego
Magister Nicolaus de Bartholomeo de Fogia Marmorarius hoc opus feci_;" and
another, "_Lapsis millenis bis centum bisque trigenis XPI. bissenis annis
ab origine plenis_," indicate the artist's name and the date of the work.
It is difficult to understand how anyone could trace such a resemblance
between this rectangular ambo and the hexagonal structure in the Pisan
Baptistery as would justify them in asserting both to be the products of
the same school. The pulpit of Niccola da Foggia does not materially
differ from other ambones in Italy--from several, for instance, in Amalfi
and Ravello; while the distinctive features of Niccola Pisano's work--the
combination of classically studied bas-reliefs with Gothic principles of
construction, the feeling for artistic unity in the composition of groups,
the mastery over plastic form, and the detached allegorical figures--are
noticeable only by their total absence from it. What is left by way of
similarity is a sculpturesque refinement in Sigelgaita's portrait, not
unworthy of Pisano's own chisel. This, however, is but a slender point
whereon to base so large a pyramid of pure conjecture. Surely we must look
elsewhere than at Ravello or at Foggia for the origin of Niccola Pisano.
Why then should we reject tradition in this instance? Messrs. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle reply; because the sculpture of no Tuscan city before his
period is good enough to have led up to him. Yet this may be contested;
and at all events it will not be easy to prove from the Ravello head of
Sigelgaita that a more advanced school existed in the south. The fact is
that the art of the stone-carvers or _marmorarii_ had never entirely died
out since the days of Roman greatness; nor was Niccola without respectable
predecessors in the very town of Lucca, where he produced the first
masterpiece of modern sculpture. The circular font of S. Frediano, for
example, carved with figures in high relief by a certain Robertus of the
twelfth century, combines the Romanesque mannerism with the _naïveté_ of
mediaeval fancy. I might point in particular to two knights seated on one
horse in what I take to be the company of Pharaoh crossing the Red Sea, as
an instance of a successful attempt to escape from the formalism of a
decayed style. At the same time the general effect of the embossed work of
this font is fine; nor do we fail to perceive that the artist retained
some portion of the classic feeling for grandiose and monumental
composition. Far less noteworthy, yet still not utterly despicable, is
the bas-relief of Biduinus over the side-door of S. Salvatore at Lucca.
What Niccola added of indefeasibly his own to the style of these
continuators of a dead tradition, was feeling for the beauty of classical
work in a good age, and through that feeling a more perfect sympathy with
nature. It is just at this point that the old tale about the sarcophagus
of the Countess Beatrice conveys not only the letter but the spirit of the
fact. Niccola's genius, no less vivid and life-giving than that of Giotto,
infused into the hard and formal manner of his immediate predecessors true
nature and true art. Between the bas-relief of S. Salvatore and the
bas-relief over the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, there is indeed a
broad gulf, yet such as might have been passed at one bound by a master
into whose soul the beauty of a fragment of Greek art had sunk, and who
had received at his birth the gift of a creative genius.
FOOTNOTES:
[408] _History of Painting in Italy_, vol. i. chap. iv.
[409] _Loc. cit_. p. 127, note.
[410] _Loc. cit._ p. 127.
[411] Mr. Perkins, following the suggestion of Panza, in his _Istoria
dell' Antica Republica d'Amalfi_, is inclined to think that this head
represents, not Sigelgaita, but Joanna II. of Naples, and is therefore
more than a century later in date than the pulpit. See _Italian
Sculptors_, p. 51.
APPENDIX II
_Michael Angelo's Sonnets_
After the death of Michael Angelo, the manuscripts of his sonnets,
madrigals, and other poems, written at various periods of his life, and
well known to his intimate friends, passed into the hands of his nephew,
Lionardo Buonarroti. From Lionardo they descended to his son, Michael
Angelo, who was himself a poet of some mark. This grand-nephew of the
sculptor prepared them for the press, and gave them to the world in 1623.
On his redaction the commonly received version of the poems rested until
1863, when Signor Cesare Guasti of Florence, having gained access to the
original manuscripts, published a critical edition, preserving every
peculiarity of the autograph, and adding a prose paraphrase for the
explanation of the text.
The younger Michael Angelo, working in an age of literary pedantry and
moral prudery, fancied that it was his duty to refine the style of his
great ancestor, and to remove allusions open to ignorant misconstruction.
Instead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems,
he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear away their
obscurity, to amplify, transpose, and mutilate according to his own ideas
of syntax, taste, and rhetoric. On the Dantesque ruggedness of Michael
Angelo he engrafted the prettiness of the seventeenth Petrarchisti; and
where he thought the morality of the poems was questionable, especially in
the case of those addressed to Cavalieri, he did not hesitate to introduce
such alterations as destroyed their obvious intention. In order to
understand the effect of this method, it is only necessary to compare the
autograph as printed by Guasti with the version of 1623. In Sonnet xxxi.,
for example, the two copies agree in only one line, while the remaining
thirteen are distorted and adorned with superfluous conceits by the
over-scrupulous but not too conscientious editor of 1623.[412]
Michael Angelo's poems, even after his grand-nephew had tried to reduce
them to lucidity and order, have always been considered obscure and
crabbed. Nor can it be pretended that they gain in smoothness and
clearness by the restoration of the true readings. On the contrary,
instances of defective grammar, harsh elisions, strained metaphors, and
incomplete expressions are multiplied. The difficulty of comprehending the
sense is rather increased than diminished, and the obstacles to a
translator become still more insurmountable than Wordsworth found
them.[413] This being undoubtedly the case, the value of Guasti's edition
for students of Michael Angelo is nevertheless inestimable. We read now
for the first time what the greatest man of the sixteenth century actually
wrote, and are able to enter, without the interference of a fictitious
veil, into the shrine of his own thought and feeling. His sonnets form the
best commentary on Michael Angelo's solitary life and on his sublime ideal
of art. This reflection has guided me in the choice of those now offered
in English, as an illustration of the chapter in this volume devoted to
their author's biography.
Though the dates of Michael Angelo's compositions are conjectural, it may
be assumed that the two sonnets on Dante were written when he was himself
in exile. We know that, while sojourning in the house of Gian Francesco
Aldovrandini at Bologna, he used to spend a portion of his time in reading
Dante aloud to his protector;[414] and the indignation expressed against
Florence, then as ever fickle and ungrateful, the _gente avara, invidiosa,
e superba_, to use Dante's own words, seems proper to a period of just
resentment. Still there is no certainty that they belong to 1495; for
throughout his long life Michael Angelo was occupied with Dante. A story
told of him in 1506, together with the dialogues reported by Donato
Giannotti, prove that he was regarded by his fellow-citizens as an
authority upon the meaning of the "Divine Comedy."[415] In 1518, when the
Florentine Academy petitioned Leo X. to transport the bones of Dante from
Ravenna to Florence, Michael Angelo subscribed the document and offered to
erect a statue worthy of the poet.[416] How deeply the study of Dante
influenced his art, appears not only in the lower part of the "Last
Judgment:" we feel that source of stern and lofty inspiration in his style
at large; nor can we reckon what the world lost when his volume of
drawings in illustration of the "Divine Comedy" perished at sea.[417] The
two following sonnets, therefore, whenever written, may be taken as
expressing his settled feeling about the first and greatest of Italian
poets:[418]--
DAL CIEL DISCESE
From heaven his spirit came, and robed in clay
The realms of justice and of mercy trod,
Then rose a living man to gaze on God,
That he might make the truth as clear as day.
For that pure star that brightened with his ray
The ill-deserving nest where I was born,
The whole wide world would be a prize to scorn;
None but his Maker can due guerdon pay.
I speak of Dante, whose high work remains
Unknown, unhonoured by that thankless brood,
Who only to just men deny their wage.
Were I but he! Born for like lingering pains,
Against his exile coupled with his good
I'd gladly change the world's best heritage!
QUANTE DIRNI SI DE'
No tongue can tell of him what should be told,
For on blind eyes his splendour shines too strong;
'Twere easier to blame those who wrought him wrong,
Than sound his least praise with a mouth of gold.
He to explore the place of pain was bold,
Then soared to God, to teach our souls by song;
The gates heaven oped to bear his feet along,
Against his just desire his country rolled.
Thankless I call her, and to her own pain
The nurse of fell mischance; for sign take this,
That ever to the best she deals more scorn:
Among a thousand proofs let one remain;
Though ne'er was fortune more unjust than his,
His equal or his better ne'er was born.
About the date of the two next sonnets there is less doubt. The first was
clearly written when Michael Angelo was smarting under a sense of the
ill-treatment he received from Julius. The second, composed at Rome, is
interesting as the only proof we possess of the impression made upon his
mind by the anomalies of the Papal rule. Here, in the capital of
Christendom, he writes, holy things are sold for money to be used in
warfare, and the pontiff, _quel nel manto_, paralyses the powers of the
sculptor by refusing him employment.[419]
SIGNOR, SE VERO È
My Lord! if ever ancient saw spake sooth,
Hear this which saith: Who can, doth never will.
Lo! thou hast lent thine ear to fables still,
Rewarding those who hate the name of truth.
I am thy drudge and have been from my youth--
Thine, like the rays which the sun's circle fill;
Yet of my dear time's waste thou think'st no ills
The more I toil, the less I move thy ruth.
Once 'twas my hope to raise me by thy height;
But 'tis the balance and the powerful sword
Of Justice, not false Echo, that we need.
Heaven, as it seems, plants virtue in despite
Here on the earth, if this be our reward--
To seek for fruit on trees too dry to breed.
QUA SI FA ELMI
Here helms and swords are made of chalices:
The blood of Christ is sold so much the quart:
His cross and thorns are spears and shields; and short
Must be the time ere even his patience cease.
Nay let Him come no more to raise the fees
Of fraud and sacrilege beyond report!
For Rome still slays and sells Him at the court,
Where paths are closed to virtue's fair increase.
Now were fit time for me to scrape a treasure,
Seeing that work and gain are gone; while he
Who wears the robe, is my Medusa still.
Perchance in heaven poverty is a pleasure:
But of that better life what hope have we,
When the blessed banner leads to nought but ill?
A third sonnet of this period is intended to be half burlesque, and,
therefore, is composed _a coda_, as the Italians describe the lengthened
form of the conclusion. It was written while Michael Angelo was painting
the roof of the Sistine, and was sent to his friend Giovanni da Pistoja.
The effect of this work, as Vasari tells us, on his eyesight was so
injurious, that, for some time after its completion, he could only read by
placing the book or manuscript above his head and looking up.[420]
I' HO GIÀ FATTO UN GOZZO
I've grown a goitre by dwelling in this den--
As cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,
Or in what other land they hap to be--
Which drives the belly close beneath the chin:
My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in,
Fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly
Grows like a harp: a rich embroidery
Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.
My loins into my paunch like levers grind;
My buttock like a crupper bears my weight;
My feet unguided wander to and fro;
In front my skin grows loose and long; behind,
By bending it becomes more taut and strait;
Backward I strain me like a Syrian bow:
Whence false and quaint, I know,
Must be the fruit of squinting brain and eye;
For ill can aim the gun that bends awry.
Come then, Giovanni, try
To succour my dead pictures and my fame;
Since foul I fare and painting is my shame.
The majority of the sonnets are devoted to love and beauty, conceived in
the spirit of exalted Platonism. They are supposed to have been written in
the latter period of his life, when he was about sixty years of age; and
though we do not know for certain to whom they were in every case
addressed, they may be used in confirmation of what I have said about his
admiration for Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso Cavalieri.[421] The following,
with its somewhat obscure adaptation of a Platonic theory of creation to
his own art, was probably composed soon after Vittoria Colonna's
death.[422]
SE 'L MIO ROZZO MARTELLO
When my rude hammer to the stubborn stone
Gives human shape, now that, now this, at will,
Following his hand who wields and guides it still,
It moves upon another's feet alone.
But He who dwells in heaven all things doth fill
With beauty by pure motions of his own;
And since tools fashion tools which else were none,
His life makes all that lives with living skill.
Now, for that every stroke excels the more
The closer to the forge it still ascend,
Her soul that quickened mine hath sought the skies:
Wherefore I find my toil will never end,
If God, the great artificer, denies
That tool which was my only aid before.
The next is peculiarly valuable, as proving with what intense and
religious fervour Michael Angelo addressed himself to the worship of
intellectual beauty. He alone, in that age of sensuality and animalism,
pierced through the form of flesh and sought the divine idea it
imprisoned:[423]--
PER RITORNAR LÀ
As one who will reseek her home of light,
Thy form immortal to this prison-house
Descended, like an angel piteous,
To heal all hearts and make the whole world bright.
'Tis this that thralls my heart in love's delight,
Not thy clear face of beauty glorious;
For he who harbours virtue, still will choose
To love what neither years nor death can blight.
So fares it ever with things high and rare,
Wrought in the sweat of nature; heaven above
Showers on their birth the blessings of her prime;
Nor hath God deigned to show Himself elsewhere
More clearly than in human forms sublime;
Which, since they image Him, compel my love.
The same Platonic theme is slightly varied in the two following
sonnets:[424]--
SPIRTO BEN NATO
Choice soul, in whom, as in a glass, we see,
Mirrored in thy pure form and delicate,
What beauties heaven and nature can create,
The paragon of all their works to be!
Fair soul, in whom love, pity, piety,
Have found a home, as from thy outward state
We clearly read, and are so rare and great
That they adorn none other like to thee!
Love takes me captive; beauty binds my soul;
Pity and mercy with their gentle eyes
Wake in my heart a hope that cannot cheat.
What law, what destiny, what fell control,
What cruelty, or late or soon, denies
That death should spare perfection so complete?
DAI DOLCE PIANTO
From sweet laments to bitter joys, from peace
Eternal to a brief and hollow truce,
How have I fallen!--when 'tis truth we lose,
Mere sense survives our reason's dear decease.
I know not if my heart bred this disease,
That still more pleasing grows with growing use;
Or else thy face, thine eyes, in which the hues
And fires of Paradise dart ecstasies.
Thy beauty is no mortal thing; 'twas sent
From heaven on high to make our earth divine:
Wherefore, though wasting, burning, I'm content;
For in thy sight what could I do but pine?
If God Himself thus rules my destiny,
Who, when I die, can lay the blame on thee?
The next is saddened by old age and death. Love has yielded to piety, and
is only remembered as what used to be. Yet in form and feeling this is
quite one of the most beautiful in the series supposed to refer to
Vittoria Colonna:[425]--
TORNAMI AL TEMPO
Bring back the time when blind desire ran free,
With bit and rein too loose to curb his flight;
Give back the buried face, once angel-bright,
That hides in earth all comely things from me;
Bring back those journeys ta'en so toilsomely,
So toilsome-slow to him whose hairs are white;
Those tears and flames that in one breast unite;
If thou wilt once more take thy fill of me!
Yet Love! Suppose it true that thou dost thrive
Only on bitter honey-dews of tears,
Small profit hast thou of a weak old man.
My soul that toward the other shore doth strive,
Wards off thy darts with shafts of holier fears;
And fire feeds ill on brands no breath can fan.
After this it only remains to quote the celebrated sonnet used by Varchi
for his dissertation, the best known of all Michael Angelo's poems.[426]
The thought is this: just as a sculptor hews from a block of marble the
form that lies concealed within, so the lover has to extract from his
lady's heart the life or death of his soul,
NON HA L'OTTIMO ARTISTA
The best of artists hath no thought to show
Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
Doth not include: to break the marble spell
Is all the hand that serves the brain can do.
The ill I shun, the good I seek, even so
In thee, fair lady, proud, ineffable,
Lies hidden: but the art I wield so well
Works adverse to my wish, and lays me low.
Therefore not love, nor thy transcendent face,
Nor cruelty, nor fortune, nor disdain,
Cause my mischance, nor fate, nor destiny:
Since in thy heart thou carriest death and grace
Enclosed together, and my worthless brain
Can draw forth only death to feed on me.
The fire of youth was not extinct, we feel, after reading these last
sonnets. There is, indeed, an almost pathetic intensity of passion in the
recurrence of Michael Angelo's thoughts to a sublime love on the verge of
the grave. Not less important in their bearing on his state of feeling are
the sonnets addressed to Cavalieri; and though his modern editor shrinks
from putting a literal interpretation upon them, I am convinced that we
must accept them simply as an expression of the artist's homage for the
worth and beauty of an excellent young man. The two sonnets I intend to
quote next[427] were written, according to Varchi's direct testimony, for
Tommaso Cavalieri, "in whom"--the words are Varchi's--"I discovered,
besides incomparable personal beauty, so much charm of nature, such
excellent abilities, and such a graceful manner, that he deserved, and
still deserves, to be the better loved the more he is known." The play of
words upon Cavalieri's name in the last line of the first sonnet, the
evidence of Varchi, and the indirect witness of Condivi, together with
Michael Angelo's own letters,[428] are sufficient in my judgment to
warrant the explanation I have given above. Nor do I think that the doubts
expressed by Guasti about the intention of the sonnets,[429] or Gotti's
curious theory that the letters, though addressed to Cavalieri, were meant
for Vittoria Colonna,[430] are much more honourable to Michael Angelo's
reputation than the garbling process whereby the verses were rendered
unintelligible in the edition of 1623.
A CHE PIÙ DEBB' IO
Why should I seek to ease intense desire
With still more tears and windy words of grief,
When heaven, or late or soon, sends no relief
To souls whom love hath robed around with fire?
Why need my aching heart to death aspire
When all must die? Nay, death beyond belief
Unto these eyes would be both sweet and brief,
Since in my sum of woes all joys expire!
Therefore because I cannot shun the blow
I rather seek, say who must rule my breast,
Gliding between her gladness and her woe?
If only chains and bands can make me blest,
No marvel if alone and bare I go
An armed Knight's captive and slave confessed.
VEGGIO CO' BEI VOSTRI OCCHI
With your fair eyes a charming light I see,
For which my own blind eyes would peer in vain;
Stayed by your feet the burden I sustain
Which my lame feet find all too strong for me;
Wingless upon your pinions forth I fly;
Heavenward your spirit stirreth me to strain;
E'en as you will, I blush and blanch again,
Freeze in the sun, burn 'neath a frosty sky.
Your will includes and is the lord of mine;
Life to my thoughts within your heart is given;
My words begin to breathe upon your breath:
Like to the moon am I, that cannot shine
Alone; for lo! our eyes see nought in heaven
Save what the living sun illumineth.
Whether we are justified in assigning the following pair to the Cavalieri
series is more doubtful. They seem, however, to proceed from a similar
mood of the poet's mind.[431]
S' UN CASTO AMOR
If love be chaste, if virtue conquer ill,
If fortune bind both lovers in one bond,
If either at the other's grief despond,
If both be governed by one life, one will;
If in two bodies one soul triumph still,
Raising the twain from earth to heaven beyond,
If love with one blow and one golden wand
Have power both smitten breasts to pierce and thrill;
If each the other love, himself foregoing,
With such delight, such savour, and so well,
That both to one sole end their wills combine;
If thousands of these thoughts all thought outgoing
Fail the least part of their firm love to tell;
Say, can mere angry spite this knot untwine?
COLUI CHE FECE
He who ordained, when first the world began,
Time that was not before creation's hour,
Divided it, and gave the sun's high power
To rule the one, the moon the other span:
Thence fate and changeful chance and fortune's ban
Did in one moment down on mortals shower:
To me they portioned darkness for a dower;
Dark hath my lot been since I was a man.
Myself am ever mine own counterfeit;
And as deep night grows still more dim and dun,
So still of more mis-doing must I rue:
Meanwhile this solace to my soul is sweet,
That my black night doth make more clear the sun
Which at your birth was given to wait on you.
A sonnet written for Luigi del Riccio, on the death of his friend Cecchino
Bracci, is curious on account of its conceit.[432] Michael Angelo says:
"Cecchino, whom you loved, is dead; and if I am to make his portrait, I
can only do so by drawing you, in whom he still lives." Here, again, we
trace the Platonic conception of love as nothing if not spiritual, and of
beauty as a form that finds its immortality within the lover's soul. This
Cecchino was a boy who died at the age of seventeen. Michael Angelo wrote
his epicedion in several centuries of verses, distributed among his
friends in the form of what he terms _polizzini_, as though they were
trifles.
A PENA PRIMA
Scarce had I seen for the first time his eyes
Which to thy living eyes are life and light,
When closed at last in death's injurious night
He opened them on God in Paradise.
I know it and I weep, too late made wise:
Yet was the fault not mine; for death's fell spite
Robbed my desire of that supreme delight,
Which in thy better memory never dies.
Therefore, Luigi, if the task be mine
To make unique Cecchino smile in stone
For ever, now that earth hath made him dim,
If the beloved within the lover shine,
Since art without him cannot work alone,
Thee must I carve to tell the world of him.
In contrast with the philosophical obscurity of many of the sonnets
hitherto quoted, I place the following address to Night--one, certainly,
of Michael Angelo's most beautiful and characteristic compositions, as it
is also the most transparent in style[433]:--
O NOTT', O DOLCE TEMPO
O night, O sweet though sombre span of time!--
All things find rest upon their journey's end--
Whoso hath praised thee, well doth apprehend;
And whoso honours thee, hath wisdom's prime.
Our cares thou canst to quietude sublime,
For dews and darkness are of peace the friend;
Often by thee in dreams upborne I wend
From earth to heaven, where yet I hope to climb.
Thou shade of Death, through whom the soul at length
Shuns pain and sadness hostile to the heart,
Whom mourners find their last and sure relief!
Thou dost restore our suffering flesh to strength,
Driest our tears, assuagest every smart,
Purging the spirits of the pure from grief.
The religious sonnets have been reserved to the last. These were composed
in old age, when the early impressions of Savonarola's teaching revived,
and when Michael Angelo had grown to regard even his art and the beauty he
had loved go purely, as a snare. If we did not bear in mind the piety
expressed throughout his correspondence, their ascetic tone, and the
remorse they seem to indicate, would convey a painful sense of
cheerlessness and disappointment. As it is, they strike me as the natural
utterance of a profoundly devout and somewhat melancholy man, in whom
religion has survived all other interests, and who, reviewing his past
life of fame and toil, finds that the sole reality is God. The two first
of these compositions are addressed to Giorgio Vasari.[434]
GIUNIO È GIÀ
Now hath my life across a stormy sea
Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all
Are bidden ere the final judgment fall,
Of good or evil deeds to pay the fee.
Now know I well how that fond phantasy
Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
Is that which all men seek unwillingly.
Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed,
What are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
My soul that turns to His great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.
LE FAVOLE DEL MONDO
The fables of the world have filched away
The time I had for thinking upon God;
His grace lies buried deep 'neath oblivion's sod,
Whence springs an evil-crop of sins alway.
What makes another wise, leads me astray,
Slow to discern the bad path I have trod:
Hope fades; but still desire ascends that God
May free me from self-love, my sure decay.
Shorten half-way my road to heaven from earth?
Dear Lord, I cannot even half-way rise,
Unless Thou help me on this pilgrimage:
Teach me to hate the world so little worth,
And all the lovely things I once did prize;
That endless life, not death, may be my wage.
The same note is struck in the following, which breathes the spirit of a
Penitential Psalm:[435]--
CARICO D' ANNI
Burdened with years and full of sinfulness,
With evil custom grown inveterate,
Both deaths I dread that close before me wait,
Yet feed my heart on poisonous thoughts no less.
No strength I find in mine own feebleness
To change or life or love or use or fate,
Unless Thy heavenly guidance come, though late,
Which only helps and stays our nothingness.
'Tis not enough, dear Lord, to make me yearn
For that celestial home, where yet my soul
May be new made, and not, as erst, of nought:
Nay, ere Thou strip her mortal vestment, turn
My steps toward the steep ascent, that whole
And pure before Thy face she may be brought.
In reading the two next, we may remember that, at the end of his life,
Michael Angelo was occupied with designs for a picture of the Crucifixion,
which he never executed, though he gave a drawing of Christ upon the cross
to Vittoria Colonna; and that his last work in marble was the unfinished
"Pietà" in the Duomo at Florence.[436]
SCARCO D' UN IMPORTUNA
Freed from a burden sore and grievous band,
Dear Lord, and from this wearying world untied,
Like a frail bark I turn me to Thy side,
As from a fierce storm to a tranquil land.
Thy thorns, Thy nails, and either bleeding hand,
With Thy mild gentle piteous face, provide
Promise of help and mercies multiplied,
And hope that yet my soul secure may stand.
Let not Thy holy eyes be just to see
My evil past, Thy chastened ears to hear
And stretch the arm of judgment to my crime:
Let Thy blood only lave and succour me,
Yielding more perfect pardon, better cheer
As older still I grow with lengthening time.
NON FUR MEN LIETI
Not less elate than smitten with wild woe
To see not them but Thee by death undone,
Were those blest souls, when Thou above the sun
Didst raise, by dying, men that lay so low:
Elate, since freedom from all ills that flow
From their first fault for Adam's race was won;
Sore smitten, since in torment fierce God's son
Served servants on the cruel cross below.
Heaven showed she knew Thee, who Thou wert and whence,
Veiling her eyes above the riven earth;
The mountains trembled and the seas were troubled:
He took the Fathers from hell's darkness dense:
The torments of the damned fiends redoubled:
Man only joyed, who gained baptismal birth.
The collection of his poems is closed with yet another sonnet in the same
lofty strain of prayer, and faith, and hope in God.[437]
MENTRE M' ATTRISTA
Mid weariness and woe I find some cheer
In thinking of the past, when I recall
My weakness and my sins and reckon all
The vain expense of days that disappear:
This cheers by making, ere I die, more clear
The frailty of what men delight miscall;
But saddens me to think how rarely fall
God's grace and mercies in life's latest year.
For though Thy promises our faith compel,
Yet, Lord, what man shall venture to maintain
That pity will condone our long neglect?
Still, from Thy blood poured forth we know full well
How without measure was Thy martyr's pain,
How measureless the gifts we dare expect.
From the thought of Dante, through Plato, to the thought of Christ: so our
study of Michael Angelo's sonnets has carried us. In communion with these
highest souls Michael Angelo habitually lived; for he was born of their
lineage, and was like them a lifelong alien on the earth.
FOOTNOTES:
[412] See Guasti's _Rime di Michel Agnolo Buonarrote_, Firenzi, 1863, p.
189. The future references will be made to that edition.
[413] "I can translate, and have translated, two books of Ariosto at the
rate nearly of one hundred lines a day; but so much meaning has been put
by Michael Angelo into so little room, and that meaning sometimes so
excellent in itself, that I found the difficulty of translating him
insurmountable."--Note to Wordsworth's English version of some sonnets of
Michael Angelo.
[414] See above, Chapter VIII, The Pietà.
[415] See Gotti's Life, p. 48, and Giannotti's works (Firenze, Le
Monnier, 1850), quoted by Gotti, pp. 249-257.
[416] See Appendix to Gotti's Life, No. 25.
[417] See Gotti's Life, p. 256.
[418] Guasti, pp. 153-155.
[419] Guasti, pp. 156, 167.
[420] Guasti, p. 158.
[421] See above, Chapter VIII, Vittoria Colonna.
[422] Guasti, p. 226.
[423] Guasti, p. 218.
[424] _Ib._ pp. 182, 210.
[425] Guasti, p. 212.
[426] Delivered before the Florentine Academy in 1546. See Guasti, p.
173, for the sonnet, and p. lxxv. for the dissertation. See also Gotti,
p. 249, for Michael Angelo's remarks upon the latter.
[427] Guasti, pp. 189, 188.
[428] See _Archivio Buonarroti_; and above, p. 318, note 2.
[429] _Rime_, p. xlv.
[430] Gotti's Life, pp. 231-233.
[431] Guasti, pp. 190-202.
[432] Ib. p. 162.
[433] Guasti, p. 205.
[434] Guasti, pp. 230-232.
[435] Guasti, pp. 244, 245.
[436] Ib. pp. 241-245.
[437] Guasti, p. 246.
APPENDIX III
_Chronological Tables of the Principal Artists mentioned in this Volume_
The lists which follow have been, drawn up with a view to assisting the
reader of my chapters on Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting. I have
only included the more prominent names; and these I have placed in the
order of their occurrence in the foregoing pages. In compiling them, I
have consulted the Index to Le Monnier's edition of Vasari (1870), Crowe
and Cavalcaselle's "History of Painting," and Milizia's "Dictionary of
Architects."
_ARCHITECTS_
Name Born Died
Arnolfo di Cambio 1210 1311
Giotto di Bondone 1276 1337
Andrea Orcagna -- about 1369
Filippo Brunelleschi 1377 1446
Leo Battista Alberti 1405 1472
Michellozzo Michellozzi 1391 1472
Benedetto da Majano 1442 1497
Giuliano di San Gallo 1445 1516
Antonio di San Gallo 1455 1534?
Antonio Filarete -- 1465?
Bramante Lazzari 1444 1514
Cristoforo Rocchi -- --
Ventura Vitoni -- --
Raffaello Santi 1483 1520
Giulio Romano 1499 1546
Baldassare Peruzzi 1481 1536
Jacopo Sansovino 1477 1570
Michele Sanmicheli 1484 1559
Baccio d'Agnolo 1462 1543
Michael Angelo Buonarroti 1475 1564
Andrea Palladio 1518 1580
Giacomo Barozzi 1507 1573
Vincenzo Scamozzi 1552 1616
Galeazzo Alessi 1500 1572
Bartolommeo Ammanati 1511 1592
_SCULPTORS_
Name Born Died
Niccola Pisano after 1200 1278
Giovanni Pisano about 1240 1320
Lorenzo Maitani -- 1330
Andrea Pisano about 1273 about 1349
Giotto di Bondone 1276 1337
Nino Pisano -- about 1360
Giovanni Balduccio about 1300 about 1347
Filippo Calendario -- 1355
Andrea Orcagna -- about 1369
Lorenzo Ghiberti 1378 1455
Giacomo della Quercia 1374 1438
Filippo Brunelleschi 1377 1446
Donatello 1366 1466
Andrea Verocchio 1435 1488
Alessandro Leopardi -- after 1522
Antonio Pollajuolo 1429 1498
Piero Pollajuolo 1441 1489?
Luca della Robbia 1400 1482
Agostino di Duccio -- after 1461
Antonio Rossellino 1427 1478?
Matteo Civitali 1435 1501
Mino da Fiesole 1431 1484
Desiderio da Settignano 1428 1464
Guido Mazzoni -- 1518
Antonio Begarelli 1479 about 1565
Antonio Amadeo 1447? about 1520
Andrea Contucci 1460 1529
Jacopo Sansovino 1477 1570
Michael Angelo Buonarroti 1475 1564
Raffaello da Montelupo 1505 1567
Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli 1507 1563
Baccio Bandinelli 1493 1560
Bartolommeo Ammanati 1511 1592
Benvenuto Cellini 1500 1571
Gian Bologna 1524 1608
_PAINTERS_
Name Born Died
Giovanni Cimabue 1240? 1302?
Giotto di Bondone 1276 1337
Andrea Orcagna -- about 1369
Ambrogio Lorenzetti -- about 1348
Pietro Lorenzetti -- about 1350
Taddeo Gaddi about 1300 1366
Francesco Traini -- after 1378
Duccio di Buoninsegna -- about 1320
Simone Martini 1285? 1344
Taddeo di Bartolo about 1362 1422
Spinello Aretino -- 1410
Masolino da Panicale 1384 1447?
Masaccio 1402 1429
Paolo Uccello 1397 1475
Andrea del Castagno 1396 1457
Piero della Francesca 1420? 1506?
Melozzo da Forli about 1438 1494
Francesco Squarcione 1394 1474
Gentile da Fabriano about 1370 about 1450
Fra Angelico 1387 1455
Benozzo Gozzoli 1420 1498
Lippo Lippi 1412? 1469
Filippino Lippi 1457 1504
Sandro Botticelli 1447 1510
Piero di Cosimo 1462 1521?
Domenico Ghirlandajo 1449 before 1498
Andrea Mantegna 1431 1506
Luca Signorelli about 1441 1523
Pietro Perugino 1446 1524
Bernardo Pinturicchio 1454 1513
Francesco Francia 1450 1517
Fra Bartolommeo 1475 1517
Mariotto Albertinelli 1474 1515
Lionardo da Vinci 1452 1519
Raffaello Santi 1483 1520
Antonio Allegri da Correggio 1494? 1534
Michael Angelo Buonarroti 1475 1564
Bartolommeo Vivarini -- after 1499
Jacopo Bellini 1400? 1464?
Gentile Bellini 1426 1507
Vittore Carpaccio -- after 1519
Giovanni Bellini 1427 1516
Giorgione 1478 1511
Tiziano Vecelli 1477 1576
Paolo Veronese 1530 1588
Tintoretto 1512 1594
Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio 1467 1516
Marco d' Oggiono about 1470 1530
Cesare da Sesto -- about 1524
Bernardino Luini about 1460 after 1530
Gaudenzio Ferrari 1484 1549
Giulio Romano 1499 1546
Giovanni da Udine 1487 1564
Perino del Vaga 1499 1547
Marcello Venusti -- about 1584
Sebastian del Piombo 1485 1547
Daniele da Volterra about 1509 1566
Il Parmigianino 1504 1540
Federigo Baroccio 1528 1612
Andrea del Sarto 1487 1531
Jacopo Pontormo 1494 1557
Angelo Bronzino 1502 1572
Il Sodoma 1477 1549
Baldassare Peruzzi 1481 1536
Domenico Beccafumi 1486 1551
Benvenuto Garofalo 1481 1559
Dosso Dossi about 1479 1542
Il Moretto about 1500 after 1556
Giovanni Battista Moroni 1510 1578
Giorgio Vasari 1511 1574
[Transcribers Note: The references in the Footnotes which contain the text
"See Chapter" were depicted in the original text as page numbers. They
have been changed to the paragraph heading for that page as marked in
the Chapter Headings in this text version.]