this is the enduring interest of his story--even after his
conversion, forget the old gods. He is one of the last who
seriously and sincerely entertained the claim on men's faith of the
pagan religions; he is anxious to ascertain the true significance of
the obscurest legend, the lightest tradition concerning them.
With many thoughts and many influences which led him in that
direction, [44] he did not become a monk; only he became
gentle and patient in disputation; retaining "somewhat of the old
plenty, in dainty viand and silver vessel," he gave over the
greater part of his property to his friend, the mystical poet
Beniveni, to be spent by him in works of charity, chiefly in the
sweet charity of providing marriage-dowries for the peasant girls
of Florence. His end came in 1494, when, amid the prayers and
sacraments of Savonarola, he died of fever, on the very day on
which Charles the Eighth entered Florence, the seventeenth of
November, yet in the time of lilies--the lilies of the shield of
France, as the people now said, remembering Camilla's
prophecy. He was buried in the conventual church of Saint
Mark, in the hood and white frock of the Dominican order.
It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in the
Dominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older gods, himself
like one of those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to the new
religion, but still with a tenderness for the earlier life, and
desirous literally to "bind the ages each to each by natural piety"-
-it is because this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made
in his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of
paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of those
writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the Heptaplus, or
Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation, he endeavours to
reconcile the [45] accounts which pagan philosophy had given of
the origin of the world with the account given in the books of
Moses--the Timaeus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The
Heptaplus is dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose
interest, the preface tells us, in the secret wisdom of Moses is
well known. If Moses seems in his writings simple and even
popular, rather than either a philosopher or a theologian, that is
because it was an institution with the ancient philosophers, either
not to speak of divine things at all, or to speak of them
dissemblingly: hence their doctrines were called mysteries.
Taught by them, Pythagoras became so great a "master of
silence," and wrote almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God
in his heart, and speaking wisdom only among the perfect. In
explaining the harmony between Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold
on every sort of figure and analogy, on the double meanings of
words, the symbols of the Jewish ritual, the secondary meanings
of obscure stories in the later Greek mythologists. Everywhere
there is an unbroken system of correspondences. Every object in
the terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol or counterpart, of
some higher reality in the starry heavens, and this again of some
law of the angelic life in the world beyond the stars. There is the
element of fire in the material world; the sun is the fire of heaven;
and in the super-celestial world there is the fire of [46] the
seraphic intelligence. "But behold how they differ! The
elementary fire burns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the super-
celestial fire loves." In this way, every natural object, every
combination of natural forces, every accident in the lives of men,
is filled with higher meanings. Omens, prophecies, supernatural
coincidences, accompany Pico himself all through life. There are
oracles in every tree and mountain-top, and a significance in
every accidental combination of the events of life.
This constant tendency to symbolism and imagery gives Pico's
work a figured style, by which it has some real resemblance to
Plato's, and he differs from other mystical writers of his time by
a genuine desire to know his authorities at first hand. He reads
Plato in Greek, Moses in Hebrew, and by this his work really
belongs to the higher culture. Above all, we have a constant
sense in reading him, that his thoughts, however little their
positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them
of deep and passionate emotion; and when he explains the grades
or steps by which the soul passes from the love of a physical
object to the love of unseen beauty, and unfolds the analogies
between this process and other movements upward of human
thought, there is a glow and vehemence in his words which
remind one of the manner in which his own brief existence
flamed itself away.
I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth [47] century was, in
many things, great rather by what it designed or aspired to do,
than by what it actually achieved. It remained for a later age to
conceive the true method of effecting a scientific reconciliation
of Christian sentiment with the imagery, the legends, the theories
about the world, of pagan poetry and philosophy. For that age
the only possible reconciliation was an imaginative one, and
resulted from the efforts of artists, trained in Christian schools, to
handle pagan subjects; and of this artistic reconciliation work like
Pico's was but the feebler counterpart. Whatever philosophers
had to say on one side or the other, whether they
were successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the old to the
new, and to justify the expenditure of so much care and thought
on the dreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek religion,
the direct charm of its story, were by artists valued and cultivated
for their own sake. Hence a new sort of mythology, with a tone
and qualities of its own. When the ship-load of sacred earth from
the soil of Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up from it, unlike any
flower men had seen before, the anemone with its concentric
rings of strangely blended colour, still to be found by those who
search long enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma. Just
such a strange flower was that mythology of the Italian
Renaissance, which grew up from the mixture of two traditions,
two [48] sentiments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story
was regarded as so much imaginative material to be received and
assimilated. It did not come into men's minds to ask curiously of
science, concerning the origin of such story, its primary form and
import, its meaning for those who projected it. The thing sank
into their minds, to issue forth again with all the tangle about it of
medieval sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the
Tribune of the Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the pagan
religion, and with it the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking
fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into the presence of the Madonna, as
simpler painters had introduced there other products of the earth,
birds or flowers, while he has given to that Madonna herself
much of the uncouth energy of the older and more primitive
"Mighty Mother."
This picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly to the art
of the close of the fifteenth century, pervades, in Pico della
Mirandola, an actual person, and that is why the figure of Pico is
so attractive. He will not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of
one's self, to turn again to the pages of his forgotten books,
although we know already that the actual solution proposed in
them will satisfy us as little as perhaps it satisfied him. It is said
that in his eagerness for mysterious learning he once paid a great
sum for a collection of cabalistic manuscripts, which turned out
to be forgeries; and [49] the story might well stand as a parable of
all he ever seemed to gain in the way of actual knowledge. He
had sought knowledge, and passed from system to system, and
hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledge than
because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty in
knowledge, which would come down and unite what men's
ignorance had divided, and renew what time had made dim. And
so, while his actual work has passed away, yet his own qualities
are still active, and himself remains, as one alive in the grave,
caesiis et vigilibus oculis, as his biographer describes him, and
with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti rubore interspersa, as with
the light of morning upon it; and he has a true place in that group
of great Italians who fill the end of the fifteenth century with their
names, he is a true humanist. For the essence of humanism is
that belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing
which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose
its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside
which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once
been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which
they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal.
1871.
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
[50] IN Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is
mentioned by name--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may
be due to chance only, but to some will rather appear a result of
deliberate judgment; for people have begun to find out the charm
of Botticelli's work, and his name, little known in the last
century, is quietly becoming important. In the middle of the
fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that
meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the
great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple
religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century,
and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of
birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were
works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio,
and in new readings of his own of classical stories: or, if he
painted religious incidents, painted them with an under-current of
original sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the
picture through the veil of its ostensible subject. What [51] is the
peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure, which
his work has the property of exciting in us, and which we cannot
get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak of a
comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which
a critic has to answer.
In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life
is almost colourless. Criticism indeed has cleared away much of
the gossip which Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of
Lippo and Lucrezia, and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del
Castagno. But in Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate.
He did not even go by his true name: Sandro is a nickname, and
his true name is Filipepi, Botticelli being only the name of the
goldsmith who first taught him art. Only two things happened to
him, two things which he shared with other artists:--he was
invited to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later
life under the influence of Savonarola, passing apparently almost
out of men's sight in a sort of religious melancholy, which lasted
till his death in 1515, according to the received date. Vasari says
that he plunged into the study of Dante, and even wrote a
comment on the Divine Comedy. But it seems strange that he
should have lived on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that
some document might come to light, which, fixing the date of his
death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him, of his
dejected old age.
[52] He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm
of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the
charm of line and colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he
becomes the illustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the
edition of 1481, the blank spaces, left at the beginning of every
canto for the hand of the illuminator, have been filled, as far as
the nineteenth canto of the Inferno, with impressions of engraved
plates, seemingly by way of experiment, for in the copy in the
Bodleian Library, one of the three impressions it contains has
been printed upside down, and much awry, in the midst of the
luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the followers of Giotto, with
their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to put that
weight of meaning into outward things, light, colour, everyday
gesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, and
before the fifteenth century Dante could hardly have found an
illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident,
blending, with a naïve carelessness of pictorial propriety, three
phases of the same scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often
a stumbling-block to painters, who forget that the words of a
poet, which only feebly present an image to the mind, must be
lowered in key when translated into visible form, make one regret
that he has not rather chosen for illustration the more subdued
imagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the [53] scene of those who
"go down quick into hell," there is an inventive force about the
fire taking hold on the upturned soles of the feet, which proves
that the design is no mere translation of Dante's words, but a true
painter's vision; while the scene of the Centaurs wins one at
once, for, forgetful of the actual circumstances of their
appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight on the thought of
the Centaurs themselves, bright, small creatures of the woodland,
with arch baby faces and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows.
Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have
been a mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in
his work of that alert sense of outward things, which, in the
pictures of that period, fills the lawns with delicate living
creatures, and the hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of
water with flowering reeds. But this was not enough for him; he
is a visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles
Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of Dante, Masaccio,
Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or less refining,
the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary painters; they
are almost impassive spectators of the action before them. But
the genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it
as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this
interest it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and
[54] isolating others, and always combining them anew. To him,
as to Dante, the scene, the colour, the outward image or gesture,
comes with all its incisive and importunate reality; but awakes in
him, moreover, by some subtle law of his own structure, a mood
which it awakes in no one else, of which it is the double or
repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share it, with visible
circumstance.
But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy
of Dante which, referring all human action to the simple formula
of purgatory, heaven and hell, leaves an insoluble element of
prose in the depths of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with
the portrait of the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit
or discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical censure.
This Matteo Palmieri, (two dim figures move under that name in
contemporary history,) was the reputed author of a poem, still
unedited, La Città Divina, which represented the human race as
an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were
neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlier
Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect in
that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been
only one of those familiar compositions in which religious
reverie has recorded its impressions of the various forms of
beatified existence--Glorias, as they were called, like that [55] in
which Giotto painted the portrait of Dante; but somehow it was
suspected of embodying in a picture the wayward dream of
Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed. Artists so
entire as Botticelli are usually careless about philosophical
theories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine of the
fifteenth century, and his work a poem in terza rima. But
Botticelli, who wrote a commentary on Dante, and became the
disciple of Savonarola, may well have let such theories come and
go across him. True or false, the story interprets much of the
peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his profane and sacred
persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but with a
sense of displacement or loss about them--the wistfulness of
exiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known
issue of them explains, which runs through all his varied work
with a sentiment of ineffable melancholy.
So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,
Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in
great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great
refusals. He thus sets for himself the limits within which art,
undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and
surest work. His interest is neither in the untempered goodness
of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna's
Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain
condition, always [56] attractive, clothed sometimes by passion
with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened
perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from
which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this
sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual
of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary
as he is, so forcible a realist.
It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression
and charm. He has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar
type, definite enough in his own mind, for he has painted it over
and over again, sometimes one might think almost mechanically,
as a pastime during that dark period when his thoughts were so
heavy upon him. Hardly any collection of note is without one of
these circular pictures, into which the attendant angels depress
their heads so naïvely. Perhaps you have sometimes wondered
why those peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed to no
acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and
more, and often come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and
the Virgins of Fra Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting
them with those, you may have thought that there was something
in them mean or abject even, for the abstract lines of the face
have little nobleness, and the colour is wan. For with Botticelli
she too, though she holds in her hands the "Desire of all nations,"
is one of those who [57] are neither for Jehovah nor for His
enemies; and her choice is on her face. The white light on it is
cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon
the ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange
whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the
mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has
already that sweet look of devotion which men have never been
able altogether to love, and which still makes the born saint an
object almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed,
he guides her hand to transcribe in a book the words of her
exaltation, the Ave, and the Magnificat, and the Gaude Maria,
and the young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from her
dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and to support the book.
But the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words
have no meaning for her, and her true children are those others,
among whom, in her rude home, the intolerable honour came to
her, with that look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces
which you see in startled animals--gipsy children, such as those
who, in Apennine villages, still hold out their long brown arms to
beg of you, but on Sundays become enfants du choeur, with their
thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on their
sunburnt throats.
What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical
subjects, its most complete [58] expression being a picture in the
Uffizii, of Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque
emblems of the middle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar
feeling, and even its strange draperies, powdered all over in
the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure
that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres. At first,
perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which
seems to recall all at once whatever you have read of Florence in
the fifteenth century; afterwards you may think that this
quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the
colour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet, the more you
come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all
colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit
upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the
better you will like this peculiar quality of colour; and you will
find that quaint design of Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the
Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves even of
the finest period. Of the Greeks as they really were, of their
difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their outward life, we
know far more than Botticelli, or his most learned
contemporaries; but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge
of the lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the
Hellenic spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a
record of the first impression made [59] by it on minds
turned back towards it, in almost painful aspiration, from a world
in which it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the
energy, the industry of realisation, with which Botticelli carries
out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence
over the human mind of the imaginative system of which this is
perhaps the central myth. The light is indeed cold--mere sunless
dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine;
and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air
each long promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge.
Men go forth to their labours until the evening; but she is awake
before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her face was
at the thought of the whole long day of love yet to come. An
emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the grey
water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she sails,
the sea "showing his teeth," as it moves, in thin lines of foam,
and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in
outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as
Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this imagery
to be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness
of resources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued
and chilled it. But this predilection for minor tones counts also;
and what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has
conceived the goddess [60] of pleasure, as the depositary of a
great power over the lives of men.
I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is the result of
a blending in him of a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain
condition, its attractiveness, its investiture at rarer moments in a
character of loveliness and energy, with his consciousness of the
shadow upon it of the great things from which it shrinks, and that
this conveys into his work somewhat more than painting usually
attains of the true complexion of humanity. He paints the story
of the goddess of pleasure in other episodes besides that of her
birth from the sea, but never without some shadow of death in the
grey flesh and wan flowers. He paints Madonnas, but they shrink
from the pressure of the divine child, and plead in unmistakable
undertones for a warmer, lower humanity. The same figure--
tradition connects it with Simonetta, the Mistress of Giuliano de'
Medici--appears again as Judith, returning home across the hill
country, when the great deed is over, and the moment of
revulsion come, when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a
burthen; as Justice, sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look of
self-hatred which makes the sword in her hand seem that of a
suicide; and again as Veritas, in the allegorical picture of
Calumnia, where one may note in passing the suggestiveness of
an accident which identifies the image of Truth with the person
of Venus. [61] We might trace the same sentiment through his
engravings; but his share in them is doubtful, and the object of
this brief study has been attained, if I have defined aright the
temper in which he worked.