[Page heading: POPULARISERS OF ART]
Leonardo and Botticelli, like Michelangelo after them, found imitators
but not successors. To communicate more material and spiritual
significance than Leonardo, would have taken an artist with deeper
feeling for significance; to get more music out of design than
Botticelli, would have required a painter with even greater passion for
the re-embodiment of the pure essences of touch and movement. There were
none such in Florence, and the followers of Botticelli--Leonardo's were
all Milanese, and do not here concern us--could but imitate the patterns
of their master: the patterns of the face, the patterns of the
composition, and the patterns of the line; dragging them down to their
own level, sugaring them down to their own palate, slowing them down to
their own insensitiveness for what is life-communicating. And although
their productions, which were nothing but translations of great man's
art into average man's art, became popular, as was inevitable, with the
average man of their time, (who comprehended them better and felt more
comfortable in their presence than in that of the originals which he
respectfully admired but did not so thoroughly enjoy), nevertheless we
need not dwell on these popularisers nor on their popularisations--not
even on Filippino, with his touch of consumptive delicacy, nor
Raffaelino del Garbo, with his glints of never-to-be-fulfilled promise.
[Page heading: FRA BARTOLOMMEO]
Before approaching the one man of genius left in Florence after
Botticelli and Leonardo, before speaking of Michelangelo, the man in
whom all that was most peculiar and much that was greatest in the
striving of Florentine art found its fulfilment, let us turn for a
moment to a few painters who, just because they were men of manifold
talent, might elsewhere almost have become masters. Fra Bartolommeo,
Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and Bronzino were perhaps no less gifted as
artists than Palma, Bonifazio Veronese, Lotto, and Tintoretto; but their
talents, instead of being permitted to flower naturally, were scorched
by the passion for showing off dexterity, blighted by academic ideals,
and uprooted by the whirlwind force of Michelangelo.
Fra Bartolommeo, who in temperament was delicate, refined, graceful, and
as a painter had a miniaturist's feeling for the dainty, was induced to
desert his lovely women, his exquisite landscape, and his gentleness of
expression for figures constructed mechanically on a colossal scale, or
for effects of the round at any cost. And as evil is more obvious than
good, Bartolommeo, the painter of that masterpiece of colour and light
and shade, of graceful movement and charming feeling, the "Madonna with
the Baptist and St. Stephen" in the Cathedral at Lucca, Bartolommeo, the
dainty deviser of Mr. Mond's tiny "Nativity," Bartolommeo, the artificer
of a hundred masterpieces of pen drawing, is almost unknown; and to most
people Fra Bartolommeo is a sort of synonym for pomposity. He is known
only as the author of physically colossal, spiritually insignificant
prophets and apostles, or, perchance, as the painter of pitch-dark
altar-pieces: this being the reward of devices to obtain mere relief.
[Page heading: ANDREA DEL SARTO]
Andrea del Sarto approached perhaps as closely to a Giorgione or a
Titian as could a Florentine, ill at ease in the neighbourhood of
Leonardo and Michelangelo. As an artist he was, it is true, not endowed
with the profoundest sense for the significant, yet within the sphere of
common humanity who has produced anything more genial than his "Portrait
of a Lady"--probably his wife--with a Petrarch in her hands? Where out
of Venetia can we find portraits so simple, so frank, and yet so
interpretive as his "Sculptor," or as his various portraits of
himself--these, by the way, an autobiography as complete as any in
existence, and tragic as few? Almost Venetian again is his "St. James"
caressing children, a work of the sweetest feeling. Even in colour
effect, and technique, how singularly close to the best Venetian
painting in his "Dispute about the Trinity"--what blacks and whites,
what greys and purplish browns! And in addition, tactile values peculiar
to Florence--what a back St. Sebastian's! But in a work of scarcely less
technical merit, the "Madonna of the Harpies," we already feel the man
not striving to get the utmost out of himself, but panting for the grand
and magnificent. Even here, he remains almost a great artist, because
his natural robustness comes to his rescue; but the "Madonna" is too
obviously statuesque, and, good saints, pray why all these draperies?
The obviously statuesque and draperies were Andrea's devices for keeping
his head above water in the rising tide of the Michelangelesque. As you
glance in sequence at the Annunziata frescoes, on the whole so full of
vivacity, gaiety, and genuine delight in life, you see from one fresco
to another the increased attention given to draperies. In the Scalzo
series, otherwise masterpieces of tactile values, the draperies do their
utmost to smother the figures. Most of these paintings are closed in
with ponderous forms which have no other purpose than to serve as a
frame, and as clothes-horses for draperies: witness the scene of
Zacharias in the temple, wherein none of the bystanders dare move for
fear of disturbing their too obviously arranged folds.
Thus by constantly sacrificing first spiritual, and then material
significance to pose and draperies, Andrea loses all feeling for the
essential in art. What a sad spectacle is his "Assumption," wherein the
Apostles, the Virgin herself, have nothing better to do than to show off
draperies! Instead of feeling, as in the presence of Titian's "Assunta,"
wrapt to heaven, you gaze at a number of tailor's men, each showing how
a stuff you are thinking of trying looks on the back, or in a certain
effect of light. But let us not end on this note; let us bear in mind
that, despite all his faults, Andrea painted the one "Last Supper" which
can be looked at with pleasure after Leonardo's.
[Page heading: PONTORMO]
Pontormo, who had it in him to be a decorator and portrait-painter of
the highest rank, was led astray by his awe-struck admiration for
Michelangelo, and ended as an academic constructor of monstrous nudes.
What he could do when expressing _himself_, we see in the lunette at
Poggio a Caiano, as design, as colour, as fancy, the freshest, gayest,
most appropriate mural decoration now remaining in Italy; what he could
do as a portrait-painter, we see in his wonderfully decorative panel of
Cosimo dei Medici at San Marco, or in his portrait of a "Lady with a
Dog" (at Frankfort), perhaps the first portrait ever painted in which
the sitter's social position was insisted upon as much as the personal
character. What Pontormo sank to, we see in such a riot of meaningless
nudes, all caricatures of Michelangelo, as his "Martyrdom of Forty
Saints."
[Page heading: BRONZINO]
Bronzino, Pontormo's close follower, had none of his master's talent as
a decorator, but happily much of his power as a portrait-painter. Would
he had never attempted anything else! The nude without material or
spiritual significance, with no beauty of design or colour, the nude
simply because it was the nude, was Bronzino's ideal in composition, and
the result is his "Christ in Limbo." But as a portrait-painter, he took
up the note struck by his master and continued it, leaving behind him a
series of portraits which not only had their effect in determining the
character of Court painting all over Europe, but, what is more to the
point, a series of portraits most of which are works of art. As
painting, it is true, they are hard, and often timid; but their air of
distinction, their interpretive qualities, have not often been
surpassed. In his Uffizi portraits of Eleanora di Toledo, of Prince
Ferdinand, of the Princess Maria, we seem to see the prototypes of
Velasquez' queens, princes, and princesses: and for a fine example of
dignified rendering of character, look in the Sala Baroccio of the
Uffizi at a bust of a young woman with a missal in her hand.