Howard's Questionings.
_When the fight begins within himself,
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up beneath his feet--both tug--
He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes
And grows_.
--BROWNING.
[Illustration: PONTE ALLA CARRAJA, FLORENCE.]
At last the morning came when the postponed visit to Santa Maria del
Carmine, on the other side of the Arno, was to be made. Miss Sherman had
so evidently desired to join in the study of the old painters that Mrs.
Douglas suggested to her brother that she be invited to do so, but he
had thought it not best.
"The others would not be so free to talk," he said. "I do not wish any
constraint. Now we are only a family party,--with the exception of
Howard, and I confess that I sometimes wish he did not join us in this."
Malcom was again with them, for the first time since they were at
Fiesole, and this was enough to make the occasion a particularly joyous
one.
The romantic mystery of Masaccio's short life and sudden, secret death,
and the wonderful advance that he effected in the evolution of Italian
painting of the fifteenth century, had greatly interested them as they
had read at home about him, and all were eager to see the frescoes.
"They are somewhat worn and dark," Mr. Sumner said, "and at first you
will probably feel disappointed. What you must particularly look for
here is that which you have hitherto found nowhere else,--the expression
of individuality in figures and faces. Giotto, you remember, sought to
tell some story; to illustrate some Bible incident so that it should
seem important and claim attention. Masaccio went to work in a wholly
different way. While Giotto would say to himself: 'Now I am going to
paint a certain Bible story; what people shall I introduce so that this
story shall best seem to be a real occurrence?' Masaccio would think: 'I
wish to make a striking picture of Peter and John, or any other sacred
characters. What story or incident shall I choose for representation
that will best show the individual characteristics of these men?'
"Possessing this great love for people, he studied the drawing of the
human figure as had never been done before in the history of Christian
art. At this time, more than a hundred years after Giotto, artists were
beginning to master the science of perspective drawing, and in
Masaccio's pictures we see men standing firmly on their feet, and put
upon different planes in the same picture; their figures well poised,
and true to anatomy. In one of them is his celebrated naked, shivering
youth, who is awaiting baptism,--the study of which wrought a revolution
in painting."
A little afterward they were standing in the dim Brancacci Chapel of
Santa Maria del Carmine, whose walls are covered with frescoes of scenes
in the lives of Christ and His apostles. They had learned that there was
an artist called Masolino, who, perhaps, had begun these frescoes, and
had been Masaccio's teacher; and that a young man called Filippino Lippi
had finished them some years after they had been left incomplete by
Masaccio's early death.
All were greatly impressed by the fact that so little can be known of
Masaccio, who wrought here so well; that even when, or how, or where he
died is a mystery; and yet his name is one of the very greatest in early
Italian art.
They talked of how the greatest masters of the High Renaissance--Michael
Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael--used to come here to study, and
thus this little chapel became a great art school; and how, at the
present time, it is esteemed by many one of the four most important
art-buildings in the world;--the others being, Arena Chapel, Padua,
where are Giotto's frescoes; Sistine Chapel, Rome, where are Michael
Angelo's greatest paintings; and Scuola di San Rocco, Venice, which is
filled with Tintoretto's work.
He then called their attention to the composition of Masaccio's
frescoes; asking them especially to notice that, while only a few people
are taking part in the principal scene, many others are standing about
interested in looking on; all, men with strongly marked
characteristics,--individual, and worthy of attention.
"May I repeat a verse or two of poetry right here where we stand,
uncle?" asked Margery. "It keeps saying itself in my mind. I think you
all know it and who wrote it, but that is all the better."
And in her own sweet way she recited James Russell Lowell's beautiful
tribute to Masaccio:--
"He came to Florence long ago
And painted here these walls, that shone
For Raphael and for Angelo,
With secrets deeper than his own,
Then shrank into the dark again,
And died, we know not how or when.
"The darkness deepened, and I turned
Half sadly from the fresco grand;
'And is this,' mused I, 'all ye earned,
High-vaulted brain and cunning hand,
That ye to other men could teach
The skill yourselves could never reach?'
* * * * *
"Henceforth, when rings the health to those
Who live in story and in song,
O, nameless dead, that now repose
Safe in oblivion's chambers strong,
One cup of recognition true
Shall silently be drained to you!"
"But Masaccio does not need any other monument than this chapel. He is
not very badly off, I am sure, while this stands, and people come from
all over the world to visit it," exclaimed Malcom, as they left the
Brancacci Chapel, and walked slowly down the nave of the church.
"Is this all he painted?" asked Barbara.
"There is one other fresco in the cloister of this same church, but it
is sadly injured--indeed half obliterated," answered Mr. Sumner. "That
is all. But his influence cannot be estimated. What he, then a poor,
unknown young man, working his very best upon these walls, accomplished
for the great world of painting can never be measured. He surely wrought
'better than he knew.' This was because he, for the first time in the
history of modern painting, portrayed real life. All the
conventionalities that had hitherto clung, in a greater or less degree,
to painting, were dropped by him; and thus the way was opened for the
perfect representations of the High Renaissance which so soon followed.
We will next give some time to the study of the works of Ghirlandajo and
Botticelli, who, with Filippino Lippi, who finished these frescoes which
we have just been looking at, make a famous trio of Early Renaissance
painters."
After they had crossed Ponte alla Carraja, Margery said she wished to do
some shopping on Via dei Fossi, which was close at hand--that street
whose shop windows are ever filled with most fascinating groups of
sculptured marbles and bronzes, and all kinds of artistic
bric-a-brac--and begged her uncle to accompany her.
"I wish no one else to come," she said, with her own little, emphatic
nod.
"Oh, ho! secrets!" exclaimed Malcom; "so we must turn aside!"
"Do go to drive with me," begged Howard. "Here we are close to my hotel,
and I can have the team ready right off."
So they walked a few steps along the Lung' Arno to the pleasant, sunny
Hotel de la Grande Bretagne, which Howard had chosen for his Florentine
home, and soon recrossed the Arno, and swept out through Porta Romana
into the open country, behind Howard's beautiful gray horses.
The crisp, cool air brought roses into Barbara's and Bettina's cheeks,
and ruffled their pretty brown hair. Malcom was in high spirits after
his long confinement to the house, and Howard tried to throw off a
gloomy, discouraged feeling that had hung over him all the morning.
Seated opposite Barbara, and continually meeting her frank, steadfast
eyes, he seemed to realize as he had never before done the obvious truth
of Mrs. Douglas's words, when she had said that Barbara was perfectly
unconscious of his love for her; and all the manhood within him strove
to assert itself to resist an untimely discovery of his feeling, for
fear of the mischief it might cause.
Howard had been doing a great deal of new thinking during the past
weeks. He suddenly found himself surrounded by an atmosphere wholly
different from that in which he had before lived.
Sprung from an aristocratic and thoroughly egoistic ancestry on his
father's side, and a morbidly sensitive one on his mother's; brought up
by his paternal grandmother, whose every thought had been centred upon
him as the only living descendant of her family; surrounded by servants
who were the slaves of his grandmother's and his own whims; not even his
experience in the Boston Latin School, chosen because his father,
grandfather, and great-grandfather had been educated there, had served
to widen much the horizon of his daily living, or to make him anything
like a typical American youth.
Now, during the last two or three months he had been put into wholly
changed conditions. An habitual visitor to this family into whose life
he had accidentally entered, he had been a daily witness of Mrs.
Douglas's self-forgetting love, which was by no means content with
ministering to the happiness of her own loved home ones, but continually
reached out to an ever widening circle, blessing whomever it touched. He
could not be unconscious that every act of Robert Sumner's busy life was
directed by the desire to give of himself to help others; that a high
ideal of beneficence, not gain, was always before him, and was that by
which he measured himself. The wealth, the position of both, served only
to make their lives more generous.
And he saw that the younger people of the household had caught the same
spirit. Malcom, Margery, Barbara, and Bettina forgot themselves in each
other, and were most generous in all their judgments. They esteemed
people according to that which they were in themselves, not according to
what they had, and shrank from nothing save meanness and selfishness.
As we have seen, he had been attracted in a wonderful way to Barbara
ever since he had first met her. Her beauty, her unconscious pride of
bearing, mingled with her sweet, unaffected enthusiasms, were a swift
revelation to one who had never in his life before given a second
thought to any girl; and a fierce longing to win her love had taken
possession of his whole being, as he had confessed to Mrs. Douglas.
But to-day there was a chill upon him. He had before been confident of
the future. It must not, should not disappoint him, he had said to
himself again and again. Somehow he was not now so sure of himself and
it. There seemed a mystery before him. The way that had always before
seemed to open to his will refused to disclose itself. How could he win
the affection of this noble girl, whose life already seemed so full that
she felt no lack, who was so warm and generous in her feelings to all,
so thoroughly unselfish, so wholesome, so lovable? How he did long to
make all her wishes centre on him, even as his did upon her!
But Barbara's ideals were high. She would demand much of him whom she
could love. Only the other day he had heard her say in a voice deep with
feeling that money and position were nothing in comparison with a life
that was ever giving itself to enrich others. Whom did she mean? he
wondered. It seemed as if she knew some one who was even then in her
mind, and a fierce jealousy sprang up with the thought. She surely
could not have meant him, for he had never lived for any other than
himself, nor did he wish to think of anything but himself. He wanted to
get well and to have Barbara love him. Then he would take her away from
everybody else and lavish everything upon her, and how happy would he
be! Could he only look into the future, he thought, and see that this
was to come, he would ask nothing else.
Poor Howard! Could the future have opened before his wish never so
little, how soon would his restless, raging emotions have become hushed
into a great silence!
* * * * *
A few evenings afterward, as they were all sitting together in the
library, and Howard with them, Mr. Sumner, knowing that the young people
had been reading and talking of Ghirlandajo and Botticelli, said that
perhaps there would be no better time for talking of these artists than
the present.
"With Masaccio," he continued, "we have begun a new period of Italian
painting,--the period of the Early Renaissance. All the former great
artists,--Cimabue, Giotto, and Fra Angelico, whom we have particularly
studied,--and the lesser ones, about whom you have read,--Orcagna,
Taddeo Gaddi, and Uccello, the bird-lover (who gave himself so
untiringly to the study of linear perspective),--belong to the Gothic
period, literally the rude period; in which, although a steady advance
was made, yet the works are all more or less very imperfect
art-productions. All these are wholly in the service of the Church, and
are painted in fresco on plaster or in _tempera_ on wood. In the Early
Renaissance, however, a new impulse was seen. Artists were much better
equipped for their work, nature-study progressed wonderfully, anatomy
was studied, perspective was mastered, the sphere of art widened to take
in history, portraits, and mythology; and in the latter part of this
period, as we shall see, oil-painting was introduced."
"Can you give us any dates of these periods to remember, uncle?" asked
Malcom.
"Roughly speaking, the Gothic period covers the years from about 1250 to
1400; the Early Renaissance, from about 1400 to 1500. Masaccio, as we
have seen, was the first great painter of the Early Renaissance, and he
lived from 1401 to 1428. But these dates are not arbitrary. Fra Angelico
lived until 1455, and yet his pictures belong wholly to the Gothic
period; so also do those of other Gothic painters whose lives overlap
the Early Renaissance in point of time. It is the spirit of the art
that definitely determines its place, although the general dates help
one to remember.
"We will not talk long of Ghirlandajo,--Domenico Ghirlandajo (for there
is another, Ridolfo by name, who is not nearly so important to the
art-world). His composition is similar to that of Masaccio. A few people
are intimately engaged, and the others are bystanders, or onlookers. One
characteristic is that many of these last are portraits of Florentine
men and women who were his contemporaries, and so we get from his
pictures a knowledge of the people and costumes of his time. His
backgrounds are often masses of Florentine architecture, some of which
you will readily recognize. His subjects are religious.
"For studying his work, go again to Santa Maria Novella, where is a
series of frescoes representing scenes in the lives of the Virgin Mary
and John the Baptist. I would give some time to these, for in them you
will find all the characteristics of Ghirlandajo's frescoes, which are
his strongest work. Then you will find two good examples of his
_tempera_ painting on wooden panels in the Uffizi Gallery: an _Adoration
of the Magi_, and a _Madonna and Saints_, which are in the Sala di
Lorenzo Monaco near Fra Angelico's _Madonna_--the one which is
surrounded by the famous musical Angels. Others are in the Pitti
Gallery and Academy. His goldsmith's training shows in these smaller
pictures more than in the frescoes. We see it in his love for painting
golden ornaments and decoration of garments."
"Is his work anything like that of Michael Angelo, Mr. Sumner?" asked
Barbara. "He was Angelo's teacher, was he not?"
"Yes, history tells us that he held that position for three years; but
judging from the work of both, I should say that not much was either
taught or learned. Ghirlandajo's work possesses great strength, as does
Michael Angelo's, but on wholly different lines. Ghirlandajo loved to
represent grave, dignified figures,--which were portraits,--clad in long
gowns, stiff brocades, and flowing mantles; and there are superb
accessories in his pictures,--landscapes, architecture, and decorated
interiors. On the other hand, Michael Angelo's figures are most
impersonal, and each depends for effect simply on its own magnificence
of conception and rendering. The lines of figures are of far more
importance than the face, which is the farthest possible removed from
the portrait--and for accessories of any kind he cared not at all."
At this moment callers were announced and Mr. Sumner said they would
resume their talk some other time.
"It will be well for you if you can look at these paintings by
Ghirlandajo to-morrow morning if it be a bright day," he said, "while
all that I have told you is fresh in your minds. I cannot go with you,
but if you think of anything you would like to ask me about them, you
can do so before we begin on Botticelli."