[Page heading: GENRE ARTISTS]
It is a temptation to hasten on from Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio to
Botticelli and Leonardo, to men of genius as artists reappearing again
after two generations, men who accomplished with scarcely an effort what
their precursors had been toiling after. But from these it would be even
more difficult than at present to turn back to painters of scarcely any
rank among the world's great artists, and of scarcely any importance as
links in a chain of evolution, but not to be passed by, partly because
of certain qualities they do possess, and partly because their names
would be missed in an account, even so brief as this, of Florentine
painting. The men I chiefly refer to, one most active toward the middle
and the other toward the end of the fifteenth century, are Benozzo
Gozzoli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Although they have been rarely coupled
together, they have much in common. Both were, as artists, little more
than mediocrities with almost no genuine feeling for what makes painting
a great art. The real attractiveness of both lies entirely outside the
sphere of pure art, in the realms of _genre_ illustration. And here the
likeness between them ends; within their common ground they differed
widely.
[Page heading: BENOZZO GOZZOLI]
Benozzo was gifted with a rare facility not only of execution but of
invention, with a spontaneity, a freshness, a liveliness in telling a
story that wake the child in us, and the lover of the fairy tale. Later
in life, his more precious gifts deserted him, but who wants to resist
the fascination of his early works, painted, as they seem, by a Fra
Angelico who had forgotten heaven and become enamoured of the earth and
the spring-time? In his Riccardi Palace frescoes, he has sunk already to
portraying the Florentine apprentice's dream of a holiday in the country
on St. John's Day; but what a _naïf_ ideal of luxury and splendour it
is! With these, the glamour in which he saw the world began to fade away
from him, and in his Pisan frescoes we have, it is true, many a quaint
bit of _genre_ (superior to Teniers only because of superior
associations), but never again the fairy tale. And as the better
recedes, it is replaced by the worse, by the bane of all _genre_
painting, non-significant detail, and positive bad taste. Have London
or New York or Berlin worse to show us than the jumble of buildings in
his ideal of a great city, his picture of Babylon? It may be said he
here continues mediæval tradition, which is quite true, but this very
fact indicates his real place, which, in spite of his adopting so many
of the fifteenth-century improvements, is not with the artists of the
Renaissance, but with the story-tellers and costumed fairy-tale painters
of the transition, with Spinello Aretino and Gentile da Fabriano, for
instance. And yet, once in a while, he renders a head with such
character, or a movement with such ease that we wonder whether he had
not in him, after all, the making of a real artist.
[Page heading: GHIRLANDAIO]
Ghirlandaio was born to far more science and cunning in painting than
was current in Benozzo's early years, and all that industry, all that
love of his occupation, all that talent even, can do for a man, they did
for him; but unfortunately he had not a spark of genius. He appreciated
Masaccio's tactile values, Pollaiuolo's movement, Verrocchio's effects
of light, and succeeded in so sugaring down what he adopted from these
great masters that the superior philistine of Florence could say: "There
now is a man who knows as much as any of the great men, but can give me
something that I can really enjoy!" Bright colour, pretty faces, good
likenesses, and the obvious everywhere--attractive and delightful, it
must be granted, but, except in certain single figures, never
significant. Let us glance a moment at his famous frescoes in Santa
Maria Novella. To begin with, they are so undecorative that, in spite of
the tone and surface imparted to them by four centuries, they still
suggest so many _tableaux vivants_ pushed into the wall side by side,
and in tiers. Then the compositions are as overfilled as the sheets of
an illustrated newspaper--witness the "Massacre of the Innocents," a
scene of such magnificent artistic possibilities. Finally, irrelevant
episodes and irrelevant groups of portraits do what they can to distract
our attention from all higher significance. Look at the "Birth of John";
Ginevra dei Benci stands there, in the very foreground, staring out at
you as stiff as if she had a photographer's iron behind her head. An
even larger group of Florentine housewives in all their finery
disfigures the "Birth of the Virgin," which is further spoiled by a _bas
relief_ to show off the painter's acquaintance with the antique, and by
the figure of the serving maid who pours out water, with the rush of a
whirlwind in her skirts--this to show off skill in the rendering of
movement. Yet elsewhere, as in his "Epiphany" in the Uffizi, Ghirlandaio
has undeniable charm, and occasionally in portraits his talent, here at
its highest, rises above mediocrity, in one instance, the fresco of
Sassetti in Santa Trinità, becoming almost genius.