[Page heading: NATURALISM IN FLORENTINE ART]
From the brief account just given of the four dominant personalities in
Florentine painting from about 1430 to about 1460, it results that the
leanings of the school during this interval were not artistic and
artistic alone, but that there were other tendencies as well, tendencies
on the one side, toward the expression of emotion (scarcely less
literary because in form and colour than if in words), and, on the
other, toward the naturalistic reproduction of objects. We have also
noted that while the former tendency was represented by Filippo alone,
the latter had Paolo Uccello, and all of Castagno and Veneziano that the
genius of these two men would permit them to sacrifice to naturalism
and science. To the extent, however, that they took sides and were
conscious of a distinct purpose, these also sided with Uccello and not
with Filippo. It may be agreed, therefore, that the main current of
Florentine painting for a generation after Masaccio was naturalistic,
and that consequently the impact given to the younger painters who
during this period were starting, was mainly toward naturalism. Later,
in studying Botticelli, we shall see how difficult it was for any one
young at the time to escape this tide, even if by temperament farthest
removed from scientific interests.
Meanwhile we must continue our study of the naturalists, but now of the
second generation. Their number and importance from 1460 to 1490 is not
alone due to the fact that art education toward the beginning of this
epoch was mainly naturalistic, but also to the real needs of a rapidly
advancing craft, and even more to the character of the Florentine mind,
the dominant turn of which was to science and not to art. But as there
were then no professions scientific in the stricter sense of the word,
and as art of some form was the pursuit of a considerable proportion of
the male inhabitants of Florence, it happened inevitably that many a lad
with the natural capacities of a Galileo was in early boyhood
apprenticed as an artist. And as he never acquired ordinary methods of
scientific expression, and never had time for occupations not
bread-winning, he was obliged his life long to make of his art both the
subject of his strong instinctive interest in science, and the vehicle
of conveying his knowledge to others.
[Page heading: ALESSIO BALDOVINETTI]
This was literally the case with the oldest among the leaders of the new
generation, Alessio Baldovinetti, in whose scanty remaining works no
trace of purely artistic feeling or interest can be discerned; and it is
only less true of Alessio's somewhat younger, but far more gifted
contemporaries, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea Verrocchio. These also we
should scarcely suspect of being more than men of science, if Pollaiuolo
once or twice, and Verrocchio more frequently, did not dazzle us with
works of almost supreme art, which, but for our readiness to believe in
the manifold possibilities of Florentine genius, we should with
exceeding difficulty accept as their creation--so little do they seem to
result from their conscious striving. Alessio's attention being largely
devoted to problems of vehicle--to the side of painting which is
scarcely superior to cookery--he had time for little else, although that
spare time he gave to the study of landscape, in the rendering of which
he was among the innovators. Andrea and Antonio set themselves the much
worthier task of increasing on every side the effectiveness of the
figure arts, of which, sculpture no less than painting, they aimed to be
masters.
[Page heading: POLLAIUOLO AND VERROCCHIO]
To confine ourselves, however, as closely as we may to painting, and
leaving aside for the present the question of colour, which, as I have
already said, is, in Florentine art, of entirely subordinate importance,
there were three directions in which painting as Pollaiuolo and
Verrocchio found it had greatly to advance before it could attain its
maximum of effectiveness: landscape, movement, and the nude. Giotto had
attempted none of these. The nude, of course, he scarcely touched;
movement he suggested admirably, but never rendered; and in landscape
he was satisfied with indications hardly more than symbolical, although
quite adequate to his purpose, which was to confine himself to the human
figure. In all directions Masaccio made immense progress, guided by his
never failing sense for material significance, which, as it led him to
render the tactile values of each figure separately, compelled him also
to render the tactile values of groups as wholes, and of their landscape
surroundings--by preference, hills so shaped as readily to stimulate the
tactile imagination. For what he accomplished in the nude and in
movement, we have his "Expulsion" and his "Man Trembling with Cold" to
witness. But in his works neither landscape nor movement, nor the nude,
are as yet distinct sources of artistic pleasure--that is to say, in
themselves life-enhancing. Although we can well leave the nude until we
come to Michelangelo, who was the first to completely realise its
distinctly artistic possibilities, we cannot so well dispense with an
enquiry into the sources of our æsthetic pleasure in the representation
of movement and of landscape, as it was in these two directions--in
movement by Pollaiuolo especially, and in landscape by Baldovinetti,
Pollaiuolo, and Verrocchio--that the great advances of this generation
of Florentine painters were made.