Act II. Scene I.--A portico. Griseldis reluctantly, but obediently,

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RENAISSANCE FANCIES AND STUDIES:

BEING A SEQUEL TO

EUPHORION

BY

VERNON LEE

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE

1895

[_All rights reserved_]

_Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.

_At the Ballantyne Press_

_TO_

_MY DEAR FRIENDS_

_MARIA AND PIER DESIDERIO PASOLINI_

_EASTER 1895_

PREFACE

These essays being mainly the outcome of direct personal impressions of

certain works of art and literature, and of the places in which they

were produced, I have but few acknowledgments to make to the authors of

books treating of the same subject. Among the exceptions to this rule, I

must mention foremost Professor Tocco's _Eresia nel Medio Evo_, Monsieur

Gebhart's _Italie Mystique_, and Monsieur Paul Sabatier's _St. Francois

d'Assise_.

I am, on the other hand, very deeply indebted to the conversation and

advice of certain among my friends, for furnishing me second-hand a

little of that archaeological and critical knowledge which is now-a-days

quite unattainable save by highly trained specialists. My best thanks,

therefore, to Miss Eugenie Sellers, editor of Furtwaengler's "Masterpieces

of Greek Sculpture;" to Mr. Bernhard Berenson, author of "Venetian

Painters," and a monograph on Lorenzo Lotto; and particularly to my

friend Mrs. Mary Logan, whose learned catalogue of the Italian paintings

at Hampton Court is sufficient warrant for the correctness of my

art-historical statements, which she has had the kindness to revise.

MAIANO, NEAR FLORENCE,

_April_ 1895.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE ix

THE LOVE OF THE SAINTS 1

THE IMAGINATIVE ART OF THE RENAISSANCE 65

TUSCAN SCULPTURE 135

A SEEKER OF PAGAN PERFECTION, BEING THE LIFE

OF DOMENICO NERONI, PICTOR SACRILEGUS 163

VALEDICTORY 233

THE LOVE OF THE SAINTS

I

"Panis Angelicus fit panis hominum. O res mirabilis, manducat Dominum

Pauper, Servus et Humilis." These words of the Matins of the Most Holy

Sacrament I heard for the first time many years ago, to the beautiful

and inappropriate music of Cherubini. They struck me at that time as

foolish, barbarous, and almost gross; but since then I have learned to

think of them, and in a measure to feel of them, as of something greater

and more solemn than all the music that Cherubini ever wrote.

All the hymns of the same date are, indeed, things to think upon. They

affect one--the "Stabat Mater," for instance, and the "Ave Verum"--very

much in the same way as the figures which stare down, dingy green and

blue, from the gold of the Cosmati's mosaics: childish, dreary, all

stiff and agape, but so solemn and pathetic, and full of the greatest

future. For out of those Cosmati mosaics, and those barbarous frescoes

of the old basilicas, will come Giotto and all the Renaissance; and out

of those Church songs will come Dante; they are all signs, poor primitive

rhymes and primitive figures, that the world is teeming again, and will

bear, for centuries to come, new spiritual wonders. Hence the importance,

the venerableness of all those mediaeval hymns. But of none so much, to

my mind, as of those words I have quoted from the Matins of the Most

Holy Sacrament--

"O res mirabilis, manducat Dominum,

Pauper, Servus et Humilis."

For their crude and pathetic literality, their image of the Godhead

actually giving Himself, as they emphatically say, to be _chewed_ by the

poor and humble man and the serf, show them to have been most especially

born, abortions though they be, in the mightiest throes of mystical

feeling, after the incubation of whole nations, born of the great mediaeval

marriage, sublime, grotesque, morbid, yet health-bringing, between

abstract idealising religious thought and the earthly affections of

lovers and parents--a strange marriage, like that of St. Francis and

Poverty, of which the modern soul also had to be born anew.

Indeed, if we realise in the least what this hymn must have meant,

shouted in the processions of Flagellants, chaunted in the Pacts of

Peace after internecine town wars; above all, perhaps, muttered in

the cell of the friar, in the den of the weaver; if we sum up, however

inadequately, the state of things whence it arose, and whence it helped

to deliver us, we may think that the greatest music is scarcely reverent

enough to accompany these poor blundering rhymes.

The Feast of the Most Holy Sacrament, to whose liturgy this hymn, "O Res

Mirabilis," belongs, was instituted to commemorate the miracle of Bolsena,

which, coming late as it did, in the country of St. Francis, and within

two years of the birth of Dante, seems in its significant coincidences,

in its startling symbolism, the fit material summing up of what is

conveniently designated as the Franciscan revival: the introduction into

religious matters of passionate human emotion. For in the year 1263, at

Bolsena in Umbria, the consecrated wafer dropped blood upon the hands of

an unbelieving priest.

This trickery of a single individual, or more probably hallucination--this

lie and self-delusion of interested or foolish bystanders--just happened

to symbolise a very great reality. For during the earlier Middle Ages,

before the coming of Francis of Assisi, the souls of men, or, more

properly, their hearts, had been sorely troubled and jeopardised.

The mixture of races and civilisations, southern and northern and

eastern, antique and barbarian, which had been slowly taking place ever

since the fall of the Roman Empire, had seemed, in its consummation of

the twelfth century, less fertile on the whole than poisonous. The old

tribal system, the old civic system, triumphant centralising imperialism,

had all been broken up long since; and now feudalism was going to pieces

in its turn, leaving a chaos of filibustering princelets, among whom

loomed the equivocal figures of Provencal counts, of Angevin and Swabian

kings, brutal as men of the North, and lax as men of the South; moreover,

suspiciously oriental; brilliant and cynical persons, eventually to be

typified in Frederick II., who was judiciously suspected of being

Antichrist in person. In the midst of this anarchy, over-rapid industrial

development had moreover begotten the tendencies to promiscuity, to

mystical communism, always expressive of deep popular misery. The Holy

Land had become a freebooter's Eldorado; the defenders of Christ's

sepulchre were turned half-Saracen, infected with unclean mixtures of

creeds. Theology was divided between neo-Aristotelean logic, abstract

and arid, and Alexandrian esoteric mysticism, quietistic, nay, nihilistic;

and the Church had ceased to answer to any spiritual wants of the people.

Meanwhile, on all sides everywhere, heresies were teeming, austere and

equivocal, pure and unclean according to individuals, but all of them

anarchical, and therefore destructive at a moment when, above all, order

and discipline were wanted. The belief in the world's end, in the speedy

coming of Antichrist and the Messiah, was rife among all sects; and

learned men, the disciples of Joachim of Flora, were busy calculating

the very year and month. Lombardy, and most probably the south of France,

Flanders and the Rhine towns, were full of strange Manichean theosophies,

pessimistic dualism of God and devil, in which God always got the worst

of it, when God did not happen to be the devil himself. The ravening

lions, the clawing, tearing griffins, the nightmare brood carved on the

capitals, porches, and pulpits of pre-Franciscan churches, are surely

not, as orthodox antiquarians assure us, mere fanciful symbols of the

Church's vigilance and virtues: they express too well the far-spread

occult Manichean spirit, the belief in a triumphant power of evil.

Michelet, I think, has remarked that there was a moment in the early

Middle Ages when, in the mixture of all contrary things, in the very

excess of spiritual movement, there seemed a possibility of dead level,

of stagnation, of the peoples of Europe becoming perhaps bastard

Saracens, as in Merovingian times they had become bastard Romans; a

chance of Byzantinism in the West. Be this as it may, it seems certain

that, towards the end of the twelfth century, men's souls were shaken,

crumbling, and what was worse, excessively arid. There was as little

certainty of salvation as in the heart of that Priest saying Mass at

Bolsena; but the miracle came to mankind at large some seventy years

before it came to him. It had begun, no doubt, unnoticed in scores

of obscure heresies, in hundreds of unnoticed individuals; it became

manifest to all the world in the persons of Dominick, of Elizabeth of

Hungary, of King Lewis--above all, of Francis of Assisi. As in the

hands of the doubting priest, so in the hands of all suffering mankind,

the mystic wafer broke, proving itself true food for the soul: the

life-blood of hope and love welled forth and fertilised the world. For

the second time, and in far more humble and efficacious way, Christ had

been given to man.

To absorb the Eternal Love, to feed on the Life of the World, to make

oneself consubstantial therewith, these passionate joys of poor mediaeval

humanity are such as we should contemplate with sympathy only and respect,

even when the miracle is conceived and felt in the grossest, least

spiritual manner. That act of material assimilation, that feeding off

the very Godhead in most literal manner, as described in the hymn to

the Most Holy Sacrament, was symbolic of the return from exile of the

long-persecuted instincts of mankind. It meant that, spiritually or

grossly, each according to his nature, men had cast fear behind them,

and--O res mirabilis!--grown proud once more to love.

Of this new wonder--questionable enough at times, but, on the whole,

marvellously beneficent--the German knightly poets, so early in the

field, are naturally among the earliest (for the Provencals belonged to

a sceptical, sensual country) to give us a written record. Nearly all of

the Minnesingers composed what we must call religious erotics, in no

way different, save for names of Christ and the Virgin, from their most

impassioned secular ones. The Song of Solomon, therefore, is one of the

few pieces of written literature of which we find constant traces in the

works of these very literally illiterate poets. Yet the quality of their

love, if one may say so, is very different from anything Hebrew, or,

for the matter of that, Greek or Roman; their ardour is not a transient

phenomenon which disturbs them, like that of the Shulamite, or the lover

described by Sappho or Plato, but a chief business of their life, as in

the case of Dante, of Petrarch, of Francesca and Paolo, or Tristram and

Yseult. Indeed, it is difficult to guess whether this self-satisfied,

self-glorifying quality, which distinguishes mediaeval passion from the

passion (always regarded as an interlude, harmless or hurtful, in civic

concerns) of unromantic Antiquity--whether, I say, this peculiarity of

mediaeval love is due to its having served for religious as well as

for secular use, or whether the possibility of its being brought into

connection with the highest mysteries and aspirations was not itself a

result of the dignity in which mere earthly ardours had come to be held.

Be this as it may, these German devotional rhapsodies display their

essentially un-Hebrew, un-antique characters only the more by the traces

of the _canticus canticorum_ in them, as in all devout love lyrics.

Any one curious in such matters may turn to a very striking poem by

Dante's contemporary, Frauenlob, in Von der Hagen's great collection.

Also to a very strange composition, from the heyday of minne-song,

by Heinrich von Meissen. This is not the furious love ode, but the

ceremonious epithalamium of devotional poetry. It is the bearing in

triumph, among flare of torches and incense smoke, over flower-strewn

streets and beneath triumphal arches, of the Bride of the Soul, her

enthroning on a stately couch, like some new-wed Moorish woman, for

men to come and covet and admire. Above all, and giving one a shock of

surprise by association with the man's other work, is a very long and

elaborate poem addressed to Christ or God by no less a minnesinger than

Master Gottfried of Strasburg. In it the Beloved is compared to all the

things desired by eye or ear or taste or smell: cool water and fruit

slaking feverish thirst, lilies with vertiginous scent, wine firing the

blood, music wakening tears, precious stones of Augsburger merchants,

essences and spices of an Eastern cargo:--

"Ach herzen Trut, genaden vol,

Ach wol u je mer mere wol,

Ein suez in Arzenie

Ach herzen bruch, ach herzen not.

Ach Rose rot,

Ach rose wandels vrie!

Ach jugend in jugent, ach jugender Muot,

Ach bluejender herzen Minne!"

And so on for pages; the sort of words which poor Brangwain may have

overheard on the calm sea, when the terrible knowledge rushed cold to

her heart that Tristram and Yseult had drained the fatal potion.

All this is foolish and unwholesome enough, just twice as much so, for

its spiritual allegorising, as the worldly love poetry of these often

foolish and unwholesome German chivalrous poets. But, for our consolation,

in that same huge collection of Von der Hagen's Minnesingers, stand the

following six lines, addressed to the Saviour, if tradition is correct,

by a knightly monk, Bruder Wernher von der Tegernsee:--

"Du bist min, ih bin din;

Des solt du gewis sin.

Du bist beslozzen

In minem herzen;

_Verlorn ist daz sluzzelin:

Du muost immer drinne sin._"

"Thou art locked up in my heart; the little key is lost; thou must

remain inside."

This is a way of loving not logically suitable, perhaps, to a divine

essence, but it is the lovingness which fertilises the soul, and makes

flowers bud and birds sing in the heart of man. Out of it, through

simple creatures like Bruder Wernher, through the simplicity of scores

of obscurer singers and craftsmen than he, of hundreds of nameless good

men and women, comes one large half of the art of Dante and Giotto, nay,

of Raphael and Shakespeare: the tenderness of the modern world, unknown

to stoical Antiquity.

II

The early Middle Ages--the times before Love came, and with it the

gradual dignifying of all realities which had been left so long to mere

gross or cunning or violent men--the early Middle Ages have left behind

them one of the most complete and wonderful of human documents, the

letters of Abelard and Heloise. This is a book which each of us should

read, in order to learn, with terror and self-gratulation, how the

aridity of the world's soul may neutralise the greatest individual

powers for happiness and good. These letters are as chains which we

should keep in our dwelling-place, to remind us of past servitude,

perhaps to warn us against future.

No other two individuals could have been found to illustrate, by the

force of contrast, the intellectual and moral aridity of that eleventh

century, which yet, in a degree, was itself a beginning of better things.

For Heloise and Abelard were not merely among the finest intellects

of the Middle Ages; they were both, in different ways, to the highest

degree passionately innovating natures. No woman has ever been more rich

and bold and warm of mind and heart than Heloise; nor has any woman ever

questioned the unquestioned ideas and institutions of her age, of any

age, with such vehemence and certainty of intuition. She judges questions

which are barely asked and judged of now-a-days, applying to consecrated

sentimentality the long-lost instinctive human rationalism of the ancient

philosophers. How could St. Luke recommend us to desist from getting

back our stolen property? She feels, however obscurely, that this is

foolish, antisocial, unnatural. Nay, why should God prefer the penitence

of one sinner to the constant goodness of ninety-nine righteous men? She

is, this learned theologian of the eleventh century, as passionately

human in thought as any Mme. Roland or Mary Wolstonecraft of a hundred

years ago.

Abelard, on the other hand, we know to have been one of the most subtle

and solvent thinkers of the Middle Ages; pursued by the greatest

theologians, crushed by two Councils, and remaining, in the popular

fancy, as a sort of Friar Bacon, a forerunner of the wizard Faustus; a

man whom Bernard of Clairvaux called a thief of souls, a rapacious wolf,

a Herod; a man who reveals himself a Pagan in his attempts to turn Plato

into a Christian; a man who disputes about Faith in the teeth of Faith,

and criticises the Law in the name of the Law; a man, most enormous of

all, who sees nothing as symbol or emblem (_per speculum in aenigmate_),

but dares to look all things in the face (_facie ad faciem omnia

intuetur_). _Facie ad faciem omnia intuetur_, this, which is the

acknowledged method of all modern, as it had been of all antique, thought,

nay, of all modern, all antique, all healthy spiritual life--this was

the most damnable habit of Abelard; and, as the letters show, of Heloise.

What shall we think, in consequence, of the intellectual and moral

sterility of the orthodox world of the eleventh century, when we find

this heretical man, this rebellious woman, arguing incessantly about

unrealities, crushing out all human feeling, judging all questions of

cause and effect, settling all relations of life, with reference to a

system of intricate symbolical riddles? These things are exceedingly

difficult for a modern to realise; we feel as though we had penetrated

into some Gulliver's world or kingdom of the Moon; for theology and

its methods have been relegated, these many hundred years, to a sort

of _Hortus inclusus_ where nothing human grows. These mediaeval men

of science apply their scientific energies to mastering, collecting,

comparing and generalising, not of any single fact of nature, but of the

words of other theologians. The magnificent sense of intellectual duty,

so evident in Abelard, and in a dozen monastic authors quoted by him,

is applied solely to fantasticating over Scripture and its expositors,

and diverting their every expression from its literal, honest, sane

meaning. And indeed, are some of the high efforts of mediaeval genius, the

calculations of Joachim and the Eternal Gospel, any better than the Book

of Dreams and the Key to the Lottery? Most odious, perhaps, in this

theology triumphant (sickening enough, in good sooth, even in the timid

official theology of later days), is the loss of all sense of what's

what, of fitness and decency, which interprets allegorically the grosser

portions of Scripture, and, by a reverse process, lends to the soul

the vilest functions of the body, and discusses virtue in the terms

of fleshliness. No knowledge can come out of this straw-splitting _in

vacuo_; and certainly no art out of this indecent pedant's symbolism:

all things are turned to dusty, dirty lumber.

As with the intellectual, so also, in large degree, with the moral:

a splendid will to do right is applied, in its turn, to phantoms.

Here again the letters of Abelard and Heloise are extraordinarily

instructive. The highest virtue, the all-including (how differently

Dante feels, whatever he may say!), is _obedience_. Thus Abelard,

having quoted from St. Augustine that all which is done for obedience'

sake is well done, proceeds very logically: "It is more advantageous for

us to act rightly than to do good.... We should think not so much of the

action itself, as of the manner in which it is performed."

Do not imagine that this care for the motive and contempt of the action

arises from an estimate of the importance of a man's sum-total of

tendencies, contrasted with his single, perhaps unintentional, acts;

still less that the advantage thus referred to has anything to do with

other men's happiness. The advantage is merely to the individual soul,

or in a cruder, truer view, to the individual combustible body to which

that soul shall be eternally reunited hereafter. And the spirit which

makes virtue alone virtuous is the spirit of obedience: obedience

theoretically to a god, but practically to a father of the Church, a

Council, an abbot or abbess. In this manner right-doing is emptied of

all rational significance, becomes dependent upon what itself, having

no human, practical reason, is mere arbitrary command. Chastity, for

instance, which is, together with mansuetude, the especial Christian

virtue, becomes in this fashion that mere guarding of virginity which,

for some occult reason, is highly prized in Heaven; as to clean living

being indispensable for bearable human relations, which even the unascetic

ancients recognised so clearly, there is never an inkling of that. Whence,

indeed, such persons as do not _go in for_ professionally pleasing the

divinity, who are neither priests, monks, nor nuns, need not stickle

about it; and the secular literature of the Middle Ages, with its

Launcelots, Tristrams, Flamencas, and all its German and Provencal

lyrists, becomes the glorification of illicit love. Indeed, in the

letters before us, Abelard regrets his former misconduct only with

reference to religious standards: as a layman he was perfectly free to

seduce Heloise; the scandal, the horrible sin, was not the seduction,

but the profanation by married love of the dress of a nun, the sanctuary

of the virgin. So it is with the renunciation of all the world's pleasures

and interests. The ascetic sacrifice of inclination, which the stoics

had conceived as resistance to the tyrant without and the tyrant within,

as a method for serene and independent life and death, this ascetic

renunciation becomes, in this arid theological world, the mere giving up

to please a jealous God of all that is not He. Abelard's regulations for

the nuns, which he gives as rules of perfection (save in the matter of

that necessary half sin, marriage) to devout lay folk, come after all to

this: give human nature enough to keep it going, so that it may be able

to sacrifice everything else to the jealousy of the Godhead. Eating,

clothing oneself, washing (though, by the way, there is no mention

of this save for the sick), nay, speaking and thinking, are merely

instrumental to the contemplation of God; any more than suffices for

this is sinful. On this point Abelard quotes, with stolidest approval,

one of the most heart-rending of anecdotes. A certain monk being asked

why he had fled humankind, answered, on account of his great love for

it, and the impossibility of loving God and it at the same time.

Think upon that. Think on the wasted treasure of loving-kindness of

which that monk and the thousands he represents cheated his fellow-men.

O love of human creatures, of man for woman, parents and children, of

brethren, love of friends; fuel and food, which keeps the soul alive,

balm curing its wounds, or, if they be incurable, helps the poor dying

thing to die at last in peace--this was those early saints' notion of

thee!

To refuse thus to love is to refuse not merely the highest usefulness,

but to refuse also the best kind of justice. Here again, nay, here more

than ever, we may learn from those wonderful letters. They constitute,

indeed, a document of the human soul to which, in my recollection, one

other only, Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, can be compared. But in these

letters,--hers of grief, humiliation, hopelessness, making her malign

her noble self; and his, bitter, self-righteous, crammed with theological

moralisings--we see not merely the dual drama of two ill-assorted

creatures, but the much more terrible tragedy, superadded by the

presence, looming, impassive, as of Cypris in Euripides' Hippolytus, of

a third all-powerful and superhuman entity: the spirit of monasticism.

The unequal misery, the martyrdom of Heloise arises herefrom, that she

rebels against this _Deus ex machina_; that this nun of the eleventh

century is a strong warm-hearted modern woman, fit for Browning. While

Abelard is her whole life, the intimate companion of her highest thoughts,

she is only a toy to him, and a toy which his theologian's pride, his

monkish self-debasement, makes him afraid and ashamed of. Abelard has

been for her, and ever remains, something like Brahma to Goethe's

Bayadere; her love, her love above all for his intrepid intellect, has

raised him to a sacredness so great, that his whim, his fame, his peace,

his very petulance can be refused nothing; and that, on the other hand,

any concession taken from him seems positive sacrilege. Hence her refusal

of marriage, her answer, "that she would be prouder as his mistress--the

Latin word is harlot--than as the wife of Caesar." Fifty years later, in

the kind, passionate, poetical days of St. Francis, Heloise might have

given this loving fervour to Christ, and been a happy, if a deluded,

woman; but in those frigid monkish days, there was no one for her to

love, save this frigid monkish Abelard. As it is, therefore, she loves

Christ and God in obedience to Abelard; she passionately cons the fathers,

the Scriptures, merely because, so to speak, the hand of Abelard has

lain on the page, the eyes of Abelard have followed the characters; and

finally, after all her vain entreaties for (she scarce knows what!) love,

sympathy, one personal word, she feeds her starving heart on the only

answer to her supplications--the dialectic exercises, metaphysical

treatises, and theological sermons (containing even the forms applicable

only to a congregation) which he doles out to her. Thankful for anything

which comes _from_ him, however little it comes _to_ her.

How different with Abelard! Despite occasional atrocious misery and

unparalleled temporal misfortunes (which on the whole act upon him as

tonics), this great metaphysician is well suited to his times, and

spiritually thrives in their exhausted, chill atmosphere. The public

rumour (which Heloise hurls at him in a fit of broken-hearted rage),

that his passion for her had been but a passing folly of the flesh,

he never denies, but, on the contrary, reiterates perpetually for

her spiritual improvement; let her understand clearly from what

inexpressible degradation God in His mercy has saved them, at least

saved him; let her realise that he wanted only carnal indulgence, and

would have got it, if need be, through threats and blows. He recognises,

in his past, only a feeling which, now it is over, fills his ascetic

mind with nothing but disgust and burning shame, and hence he tries, by

degrading it still more, by cynically raking up all imaginable filth,

to separate that past from his present. So far, were only he himself

concerned, one would sympathise, though contemptuously, with this

agonised reaction of a proud, perhaps a vain, _man_ of mere intellect.

But the atrocious thing is, that he treats her as a loathsome relic of

this past dishonour; and answers her prayer (after twelve years'

silence!) for a word of loving-kindness by elaborate denunciations of

their former love, and reiterated jubilations that _he_, at least, has

long been purged thereof; not unmixed with sharp admonishment that she

had better not try to infect his soul afresh, but set about, if needful,

cleansing her own. Now it so happens that what he would cure her of is

incurable, being, in fact, eternal, divine--simple human love. So, to

his pious and cynical admonitions she answers with strange inconsistency.

Long brooding over his taunts will sometimes make her, to whom he is

always the divinity, actually believe, despite her reiteration, that

she had sinned out of obedience to him, that she really is a polluted

creature, guilty of the unutterable crime of contaminating a man of God,

nay, a god himself. And then, unable to silence affection, she cries

out in agony at the perversity of her nature, incapable even of hating

sincerely its sinfulness; for would she not do it again, is she not the

same Heloise who would have left the very altar, the very communion with

Christ, at Abelard's word? At other times she is pious, resigned, almost

serene; for is that not Abelard's wish? a careful mother to her nuns.

But when, encouraged by her docility and blind to her undying love,

Abelard believes that he has succeeded in quieting her down, and rewards

her piety by some rhetorical phrase of Monkish eulogy, she suddenly

turns round, a terrible tragic figure. She repudiates the supposed

purity and piety, blazons out her wickedness and hypocrisy, and cries

out, partly with the horror of the sacrilegious nun, mainly with the

pride of the faithful wife, that it is not God she loves but Abelard.

After the most violent of these outbreaks there is a dead silence. One

guesses that some terrible message has come, warning her that unless she

promised that she would never write to Abelard save as the Abbess of the

Paraclete to the monk of Cluny, not a word from him shall ever come;

and that, in order to keep this last miserable comfort, she has bitten

out that truth-speaking tongue of hers. For after this there are only

questions on theological points and on the regulation of nunneries; and

Abelard becomes as liberal of words as he used to be chary, as full of

encouragement as he once was of insult, now that he feels comfortably

certain that Heloise has changed from a mistress to a penitent, and that

in her also there is an end at last of all that sinful folly of love.

And thus, upon Heloise pacified, numbed, dead of soul, among her praying

and scrubbing and cooking and linen-mending nuns; and Abelard reassured,

serene, spiritually proud once more among the raging controversies, the

ecclesiastical persecutions in which his soul prospered, the volume

closes; the curtain falls upon one of the most terrible tragedies of the

heart, as poignant after seven hundred years as in those early Middle

Ages, before St. Francis claimed sun and swallows as brethren, and the

baby Christ was given to hold to St. Anthony of Padua.

III

The humanising movement, due no doubt to greater liberty and prosperity,

to the growing importance of honest burgher life, which the Church

authorised in the person of Francis of Assisi, doubtless after persecuting

it in the persons of dozens of obscure heresiarchs--this great revival

of religious faith was essentially the triumph of profane feeling in the

garb of religious: the sanctification, however much disguised, of all

forms of human love. One is fully aware of the moral dangers attendant

upon every such equivocation; and the great saints (like their last modern

representatives, the fervent, shrewd, and kindly leaders of certain

Protestant revivals) were probably, for all their personal extravagances,

most fully prepared for every sort of unwholesome folly among their

disciples. The whole of a certain kind of devotional literature, manuals

of piety, Church hymns, lives and correspondence of saintly persons, is

unanimous in testifying to the hysterical self-consciousness, intellectual

enervation, emotional going-to-bits, and moral impotence produced by

such vicarious and barren expenditure of feeling. Yet it seems to me

certain that this enthroning of human love in matters spiritual was an

enormous, indispensable improvement, which, whatever detriment it may

have brought in individual and, so to say, professionally religious

cases, nay, perhaps to all religion as a whole, became perfectly

wholesome and incalculably beneficent in the enormous mass of

right-minded laity.

For human emotion, although so often run to waste, had been at least

elicited, and, once elicited, could find, in nine cases out of ten, its

true and beneficent channel; whereas, in the earlier mediaeval days, the

effort to crush out all human feeling (as with that holy man quoted by

Abelard), to break all human solidarity, had not merely left the world

in the hands of unscrupulous and brutal persons, but had imprisoned all

finer souls in solitary and selfish thoughts of their individual salvation.

Things were now different. The story of Lucchesio of Poggibonsi, recovered

from oblivion by M. Paul Sabatier, is the most lovely expression of

Franciscan tenderness and reverence towards the affections of the

laymen, and ought to be remembered in company with the legend of the

wood-pigeons, whom St. Francis established in his cabin and blessed in

their courtship and nesting. This Lucchesio had exercised a profession

which has ever savoured of damnation to the minds of the poor and their

lovers, that of corn merchant or speculator in grain; but touched by

Franciscan preaching, he had kept only one small garden, which, together

with his wife, he cultivated half for the benefit of the poor. One day

the wife, known in the legend only as Bona Donna, sickened and knew

she must die, and the sacrament was brought to her accordingly. But

Lucchesio never thought that it could be God's will that he should

remain on earth after his wife had been taken from him. So he got

himself shriven, received the last sacraments with her, held her hands

while she died; and when she was dead, stretched himself out, made

the sign of the cross, called on Jesus, Mary, and St. Francis, and

peacefully died in his turn: God could not have wished him to live on

without her. The passionate Franciscan sympathy with human love makes

light of all the accepted notions of bereavement being acceptable as a

divine dispensation. Lucchesio of Poggibonsi was, we are told, a member of

the Third Order of Franciscans, and his legend may help us to appreciate

the value of such institutions, which gave heaven to the laity, to

the married burgher, the artisan, the peasant; which fertilised the

religious ideal with the simplest and sweetest instincts of mankind.

But, Third Order apart, the mission of the regular Franciscans and

Dominicans is wholly different from that of the earlier orders of

monasticism proper. The earlier monks, however useful and venerable as

tillers of the soil and students of all sciences, were, nevertheless,

only agglomerated hermits, retired from the world for the safety each of

his own soul; whereas the preaching, wandering friars are men who mix

with the world for the sake of souls of others. Thus, throughout the

evolution of religious communities, down to the Jesuits and Oratorians,

to the great nursing brother-and sisterhoods of the seventeenth century,

we can watch the substitution of care for lay souls in the place of

more saintly ones--a gradual secularisation in unsuspected harmony with

the heretical and philosophical movements which tend more and more to

make religion an essential function of life, instead of an activity with

which life is for ever at variance.

In accordance with this evolution is the great enthroning of love in the

thirteenth century: it means the replacing of the terror of a divinity,

who was little better than a metaphysical Moloch (sometimes, and oftener

than we think, a metaphysical Ormuzd and Ahriman of Manichean character),

by the idolatry of an all-gracious Virgin, of an all-compassionate and

all-sympathising Christ.

It was an effort at self-righting of the unhappy world, this love-fever

which followed on the many centuries of monastic self-mutilation; for,

in sickness of the spirit, the hot stage, for all its delirium, means

a possibility of life. Moreover, it gave to mankind a plenitude of

happiness such as is necessary, whether reasonable or unreasonable, for

mankind to continue living at all; art, poetry, freedom, all the things

which form the _Viaticum_ on mankind's journey through the dreary ages,

requiring for their production, it would seem, an extra dose of faith,

of hope, and happiness. Indeed, the Franciscan movement is important not

so much for its humanitarian quality as for its optimism.

Many other religious movements have asserted, with equal and greater

efficacy, the need for charity and loving-kindness; but none, as it

seems to me, has conceived like it that charity and loving-kindness are

not mitigations of misery, but aids to joy. The universal brotherhood,

preached by Francis of Assisi, is a brotherhood not of suffering, but of

happiness, nay, of life and of happiness.

The sun, in the wonderful song which he made--characteristically--during

his sickness, is the brother of man because of his radiance and splendour;

water and fire are his brethren on account of their virtues of purity

and humbleness, of jocund and beautiful strength;[1] and if we find,

throughout his legends, the Saint perpetually accompanied by birds--the

swallows he begged to let him speak, the falcon who called him in the

morning, the turtle-doves whose pairing he blessed, and all the feathered

flock whom Benozzo represents him preaching to in the lovely fresco at

Montefalco--if, as I say, there is throughout his life and thoughts a

sort of perpetual whir and twitter of birds, it is, one feels sure,

because the creatures of the air, free to come and go, to sit on

beautiful trees, to drink of clear streams, to play in the sunshine and

storm, able above all to be like himself, poets singing to God, are the

symbols, in the eyes of Francis, of the greatest conceivable

felicity.[2]

[Footnote 1: St. Francis's hymn (Sabatier, _St. Francois d'Assise_):--

Laudato sie, mi signore, cum tucte le tue creature,

Spetialimento messer lo frate sole,

Lo quale jorna, et illumini per lui;

_Et ello e bello e radiante cum grande splendore._

* * * * *

Laudato si, me signore per frate Vento

Et per aere et nubilo et sereno et omne tempo

* * * * *

Laudato, si, mi signore, per sor acqua

La quale e multo utile et humele et pretiosa et casta;

Laudato si, mi signore, per frate focu

Per lo quale ennallumini la nocte

_Et ello e bello et jocundo e robustioso e forte._

In its rudeness, how magnificent is this last line!]

[Footnote 2: St. Francis's sermon to the birds in the valley of Bevagna

(_Fioretti_ xvi.): "Ancora gli (a Dio) siete tenuti per lo elemento

dell' aria che egli ha diputato a voi ... e Iddio vi pasce, e davvi li

fiumi e le fonti per vostro bere; davvi li monti e le valli per vostro

rifugio e gli alberi alti per fare li vostri nidi ... e pero guardatevi,

sirocchie mie, del peccato della ingratitudine, e sempre vi studiate di

lodare Iddio ... e allora tutti qugli uccilli si levarons in aria con

maraviglios canti."

_Fioretti_ xxviii. "... Questo dono, che era dato a frate Bernardo da

Quintevalle, cioe, che volando si pascesse come la rondine." _Fioretti_

xxii., Considerazioni i.]

Indeed, we can judge of what the Franciscan movement was to the world by

what its gospel, the divine _Fioretti_, are even to ourselves. This humble

collection of stories and sayings, sometimes foolish, always childlike,

becomes, to those who have read it with more than the eyes of the body,

a beloved and necessary companion, like the solemn serene books of antique

wisdom, the passionate bitter Book of Job, almost, in a way, like the

Gospels of Christ. But not for the same reason: the book of Francis

teaches neither heroism nor resignation, nor divine justice and mercy;

it teaches love and joyfulness. It keeps us for ever in the company of

creatures who are happy because they are loving: whether the creatures

be poor, crazy Brother Juniper (the comic person of the cycle) eating

his posset in brotherly happiness with the superior he had angered; or

Brother Masseo, unable from sheer joy in Christ to articulate anything

save "U-u-u," "like a pigeon;" or King Lewis of France falling into the

arms of Brother Egidio; or whether they be the Archangel Michael in

friendly converse with Brother Peter, or the Madonna handing the divine

child for Brother Conrad to kiss, or even the Wolf of Gubbio, converted,

and faithfully fulfilling his bargain. There are sentences in the

_Fioretti_ such as exist perhaps in no other book in the world, and

which teach something as important, after all, as wisdom even and perfect

charity--"And there answered Brother Egidio: Beloved brethren, know that

as soon as he and I embraced one another, the light of wisdom revealed

and manifested to me his heart, and to him mine; and thus by divine

operation, seeing one into the other's heart, that which I would have

said to him and he to me, each understood much better than had we spoken

with our tongue, and with greater joyfulness...." Again, Jesus appeared

to Brother Ruffino and said, "Well didst thou do, my son, inasmuch as

thou believedst the words of St. Francis; for he who saddened thee was

the demon, whereas I am Christ thy teacher; and for token thereof I will

give thee this sign: As long as thou live, thou shalt never feel

affliction of any sort nor sadness of heart."

St. Francis, we are told, being infirm of body, was comforted through

God's goodness by a vision of the joy of the blessed. "Suddenly there

appeared to him an angel in a great radiance, which angel held a viol

in his left hand and a bow in his right. And while St. Francis remained

in stupefaction at the sight, this angel drew the bow once _upwards_

across the viol, and instantly there issued such sweetness of melody as

melted the soul of St. Francis, and suspended it from all bodily sense.

And, as he afterwards told his companions, he was of opinion that if

that angel had drawn the bow _downwards_ (instead of upwards) across the

viol, his soul would have departed from his body for the very excess of

delight."

It was not so much to save the souls of men from hell, about which,

indeed, there is comparatively little talk in the _Fioretti_, but to

draw them also into the mystic circle where such angelic music was

heard, that Francis of Assisi preached throughout Umbria, and even

as far as the Soldan's country; and, if we interpret it rightly, the

strings of that heavenly viol were the works of creation and the souls

of all creatures, and the bow, whose upward movement ravished, and whose

downward movement would have almost annihilated with its sweetness, that

bow drawn across the vibrating world was no other than love.

IV

Justice preached by Hebrew prophets, charity and purity taught by Jesus

of Nazareth, fortitude recommended by Epictetus and Aurelius, none of

these great messages to men necessarily produce that special response

which we call Art. But the message of loving joyfulness, of happiness

in the world and the world's creatures, whether men or birds, or sun

or moon,--this message, which was that of St. Francis, sets the soul

singing; and just such singing of the soul makes art. Hence, even as

the Apennine blazed with supernatural light, and its forests and rocks

became visible to the most distant wayfarers, when the Eternal Love

smote with its beams the praying saint on La Vernia; so also the souls

of those men of the Middle Ages were made luminous and visible by the

miracle of poetry and painting, and we can see them still, distinct even

at this distance.

One of the earliest of the souls so revealed is that of the Blessed

Jacopone of Todi. Jacopo dei Benedetti, a fellow-countryman of St.

Francis, must have been born in the middle of the thirteenth century,

and is said to have died in 1316, when Dante, presumably, was writing

his "Purgatory" and "Paradise;" to him is ascribed the authorship of

the hymn "Stabat Mater," remembered, and to be remembered (owing to the

embalming power of music) far beyond his vernacular poems. Tradition has

it that he turned to the religious life in consequence of the sudden

death of his beloved, and the discovery that she had worn a hair-shirt

next her delicate body. Be this as it may, many allusions in his poems

suggest that he had lived the wild life of the barbarous Umbrian cities,

being a highwayman perhaps, forfeiting his life, and also having to fly

the country before the fury of some family vendetta. On the other hand,

it is plain at every line that he was a frantic ascetic, taking a savage

pleasure in vilifying all mundane things, and passionately disdainful of

study, of philosophical and theological subtleties. No poet, therefore,

of the troubadour sort, or of the idealising learned refinement of

Guinicelli or Cavalcanti. Nor was his life one of apostolic sweetness.

Having taken part in the furious Franciscan schism, and pursued with

invectives Boniface VIII., he was cast by that Pope into a dungeon at

Palestrina. "My dwelling," he writes, "is subterranean, and a cesspool

opens on to it; hence a smell not of musk. No one can speak to me; the

man who waits on me may, but he is obliged to make confession of my

sayings. I wear jesses like a falcon, and ring whenever I move: he who

comes near my room may hear a queer kind of dance. When I have laid

myself down, I am tripped up by the irons, and wound round in a big

chain (_negli ferri inzampagliato, inguainato in catenone_). I have a

little basket hung up so that the mice may not injure it; it can hold

five loaves.... While I eat them little by little, I suffer great

cold."

Moreover, Pope Boniface refuses him absolution, and Jacopone's

invectives are alternated with heart-rending petitions that this mercy

at least be shown him; as to his other woes, he will endure them till

his death. In this frightful place Jacopone had visions, which the

Church, giving him therefore the title of Blessed, ratifies as genuine.

One might expect nightmares, such as troubled the early saints in the

wilderness, or John Bunyan in gaol; but that was not the spirit of the

mediaeval revival: terror had been cast out by love. More than a quarter

of Jacopone's huge volume consists in what is merely love poetry: he is

languishing, consumed by love; when the beloved departs, he sighs and

weeps, and shrieks, and _dies alive_. Will the beloved have no mercy?

"Jesu, donami la morte, o di te fammi assaggiare." Then the joys of

love, depicted with equal liveliness, amplifications as usual of the

erotic hyperboles of the Shulamite and her lover; the phenomenon, to

whose uncouth strangeness devotional poetry accustoms us even now-a-days,

which we remarked in Gottfried von Strasburg and Frauenlob, and on which

it is needless further to insist.

But there is here in Jacopone something which we missed in Gottfried

and Frauenlob, of which there is no trace in the Song of Solomon, but

which, suggested in the lovely six lines of Bruder Wernher, makes the

emotionalism of the Italian Middle Ages wholesome and fruitful. A

child-like boy and girlish light-heartedness that makes love a matter

not merely of sighing and dying, but of singing and dancing; and,

proceeding thence, a fervour of loving delightedness which is no longer

of the man towards the woman, but of the man and the woman towards the

baby. The pious monk, in his ecstasies over Jesus, intones a song which

might be that of those passionate _farandoles_ of angels who dance and

carol in Botticelli's most rapturous pictures:--

"Amore, amor, dove m'hai tu menato?

Amore, amor, fuor di me m'hai trattato.

Ciascun amante, amator del Signore,

Venga alla danza cantando d'amore."

Can we not see them, the souls of such fervent lovers, swaying and

eddying, with joined hands and flapping wings, flowers dropping from

their hair, above the thatched roof of the stable at Bethlehem?

The stable at Bethlehem! It is perpetually returning to Jacopone's

thoughts. The cell, the dreadful underground prison at Palestrina, is

broken through, irradiated by visions which seem paintings by Lippo or

Ghirlandaio, nay, by Correggio and Titian themselves, "the tender baby

body (_il tenerin corpo_) of the blood of Mary has been given in charge

to a pure company; St. Joseph and the Virgin contemplate the little

creature (_il piccolino_) with stupefaction. _O gran piccolino Jesu

nostro diletto_, he who had seen Thee between the ox and the little

ass, breathing upon thy holy breast, would not have guessed thou were

begotten of the Trinity!" But besides the ox and the ass there are the

angels. "In the worthy stable of the sweet baby the angels are singing

round the little one; they sing and cry out, the beloved angels, quite

reverent, timid and shy (_tutti riverenti, timidi e subbietti_, this

beautiful expression is almost impossible save in Italian), round the

little baby Prince of the Elect who lies naked among the prickly hay. He

lies naked and without covering; the angels shout in the heights. And

they wonder greatly that to such lowliness the Divine Verb should have

stooped. The Divine Verb, which is highest knowledge, this day seems as

if He knew nothing of anything (_il verbo divino che e sommo sapiente,

in questo di par che non sappia niente!_). Look at him on the hay, crying

and kicking (_che gambetta piangente_), as if He were not at all a divine

man...." Meanwhile, other angels, as in Benozzo's frescoes, are busy

"picking rarest flowers in the garden." In the garden! Why He Himself

is a fragrant garden; Jesus is a garden of many sweet odours; and "what

they are those can tell who are the lovers of this sweet little brother

of ours."

_Di Questo nostro dolce fratellino_: it is such expressions as these,

Bambolino, Piccolino, Garzolino, "el magno Jesulino," these caressing,

ever-varied diminutives, which make us understand the monk's passionate

pleasure in the child; and which, by the emotion they testify to and

re-awaken, draw more into relief, make visible and tangible the little

kicking limbs on the straw, the dimpled baby's body.

And then there are the choruses of angels. "O new song," writes Jacopone,

"which has killed the weeping of sick mankind! Its melody, methinks,

begins upon the high _Fa_, descending gently on the _Fa_ below, which

the _Verb_ sounds. The singers, jubilating, forming the choir, are the

holy angels, singing songs in that hostelry, before the little babe, who

is the Incarnate Word. On lamb's parchment, behold! the divine note is

written, and God is the scribe, Who has opened His hand, and has taught

the song."

Have we not here, in this odd earliest allegory of music and theology,

this earliest precursor of the organ-playing of Abt Vogler, one of those

choirs, clusters of singing childish heads--clusters, you might almost

say, of sweet treble notes, tied like nosegays by the score held

scrollwise across them, which are among the sweetest inventions of

Italian art, from Luca della Robbia to Raphael, "cantatori, guibilatori,

che tengon il coro?"

And this is the place for a remark which, in the present uncertainty

of all aesthetic psychology, I put forward as a mere suggestion, but

a suggestion less wide of the truth than certain theories now almost

unquestioned: the theories which arbitrarily assume that art is the

immediate and exact expression of contemporary spiritual aspirations and

troubles. That such may be the case with literature, particularly the

more ephemeral kinds thereof, is very likely, since literature, save in

the great complex structures of epos, tragedy, choral lyric, is but the

development of daily speech, and possibly as upstart, as purely passing,

as daily speech itself; moreover, in its less artistic forms, requiring

little science or apprenticeship.

But art is a thing of older ancestry; you cannot, however bursting

with emotion, embody your feelings in forms like those of Phidias, of

Michelangelo, of Bach, or Mozart, unless such forms have come ready to

hand through the long, steady working of generations of men: Phidias

and Bach in person, cut off from their precursors, would not, for all

their genius, get as far as a schoolboy's caricature, or a savage's

performance on a marrow-bone. And these slowly elaborated forms,

representing the steady impact of so many powerful minds, representing,

moreover, the organic necessity by which, a given movement once started,

that movement is bound to proceed in a given direction, these forms

cannot be altered, save infinitesimally, to represent the particular

state of the human soul at a given moment. You might as well suppose

that the human shape itself, evolved through these millions of years,

could suddenly be accommodated to perfect representation of the momentary

condition of certain human beings; even the Tricoteuses of the guillotine

had the heads and arms of ordinary women, not the beaks and claws of

harpies. Hence such expressiveness must be limited to microscopic

alterations; and, indeed, one marvels at the modest demands of the art

critics, who are satisfied with the pucker of a frontal muscle of a

Praxitelean head as testimony to the terrible deep disorder in the

post-Periclean Greek spirit, and who can still find in the later

paintings of Titian, when all that makes Titian visible and admirable

is deducted, a something, just a little _je ne sais quoi_, which proves

these later Titians to have originated in the Catholic reaction. If

the theory of art as the outcome of momentary conditions be limited

to such particularities, I am quite willing to accept it; only, such

particularities do not constitute the large, important and really

valuable characteristics of art, and it matters very little by what

they are produced.

How then do matters stand between art and civilisation? Here follows

my hypothesis. There is in the history of every art (and for brevity's

sake, I include in this term every distinct category, say, renaissance

sculpture as distinguished from antique, of the same art) a moment when,

for one reason or other, that art begins to come to the fore, to bestir

itself. The circumstances of the nation and time make this art materially

advantageous or spiritually attractive; the opening up of quarries, the

discovery of metallic alloys, the necessity of roofing larger spaces,

the demand for a sedentary amusement, for music to dance to in new social

gatherings--any such humble reason, besides many others, can cause one

art to issue more particularly out of the limbo of the undeveloped, or

out of the lumber-room of the unused.

It is during this historic moment--a moment which may last years or

scores of years--that, as it seems to me, an art can really be deeply

affected by its surrounding civilisation. For is it not called forth by

that civilisation's requirements, material or spiritual; and is it not,

by the very fact of being thus new, or at all events nascent, devoid

of all conditioning factors, save those which the civilisation and

its requirements impose from without? An art, like everything vital,

takes shape not merely by pressure from without, but much more by the

necessities inherent in its own constitution, the almost mechanical

necessities by which all variable things _can_ vary only in certain

fashions. All the natural selection, all the outer pressure in the

world, cannot make a stone become larger by cutting, cannot make colour

less complex by mixing, cannot make the ear perceive a dissonance more

easily than a consonance, cannot make the human mind turn back from

problems once opened up, or revert instantaneously to effects it is sick

of; and a number of such immutable necessities constitute what we call

the organism of an art, which can therefore respond only in one way and

not another to the influences of surrounding civilisation. Given the

sculpture of the AEgina period, it is impossible we should not arrive at

the sculpture of the time of Alexander: the very constitution of clay

and bronze, of marble, chisel and mallet, let alone that of the human

mind, makes it inevitable; and you would have it inevitably if you could

invert history, and put Chaeronea in the place of Salamis. But there

is no reason why you should eventually get Lysippian and Praxitelean

sculpture instead of Egyptian or Assyrian, say, in the time of Homer,

whenever that may have been. For the causes which forced Greek sculpture

along the line leading to Praxiteles and Lysippus were not yet at work;

and had other forces, say, a preference for stone work instead of clay

and bronze work, a habit of Persian or Gaulish garments, of Lydian

effeminate life instead of Dorian athleticism, supervened, had satraps

ordered rock-reliefs of battles instead of burghers ordering brazen

images of boxers and runners, Praxiteles and Lysippus might have

remained _in mente Dei_, if, indeed, even there. Similarly, once

given your Pisan sculptors, Giotto, nay, your imaginary Cimabue, you

inevitably get your Donatello, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and eventually

your Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Titian; for the problems of form and of

sentiment, the questions of perspective, anatomy, dramatic expression,

lyric suggestion, architectural decoration, were established, in however

rudimentary a manner, as soon as painting was ordered to leave off doing

idle, emotionless Christs, rows of gala saints and symbols of metaphysic

theology, and told to set about showing the episodes of Scripture, the

things Christ and the Apostles did, and the places where they did them,

and the feelings they felt about it all; told to make visible to the

eye the gallant archangels, the lovable Madonnas, the dear little baby

Saviours, the angels with their flowers and songs, all the human hope

and pity and passion and tenderness which possessed the world in the

days of St. Francis.

What pictures should we have seen if Christianity (which was impossible)

had continued in the habits of thought and feeling of the earlier Middle

Ages? Byzantine _icones_ become frightfuler and frightfuler, their

theological piety perhaps sometimes relieved by odd wicked Manichean

symbolism; all talent and sentiment abandoning painting, perhaps to

the advantage of music, whose solemn period of recondite contrapuntal

complexity--something corresponding to the ingenuities and mysticism of

theology--might have come two centuries earlier, and delighted the world

instead of being unnoticed by it. Be this as it may, there is no need

for wondering, as people occasionally wonder, how the solemn terror, the

sweetness, pathos, or serenity of men like Signorelli, Botticelli, or

Perugino, nay Michelangelo, Raphael, or Giorgione, could have originated

among Malatestas, Borgias, Poggios, or Aretines. It did not. And,

therefore, since literature always precedes its more heavily cumbered

fellow-servant art, we must look for the literary counterpart of the

painters of the Renaissance among the writers who preceded them by

many generations, men more obviously in touch with the great mediaeval

revival: Dante, Boccaccio, the compilers of the "Fioretti di San

Francesco," and, as we have just seen, Fra Jacopone da Todi.

V

What art would there have been without that Franciscan revival, or

rather what emotional synthesis of life would art have had to record?

This speculation has been dismissed as futile, because it is impossible

to conceive that mankind could have gone on without some such enthusiastic

return of faith in the goodness of things. But another question remains

to be answered, remains to be asked; and that is, what was the spiritual

meaning of the art which immediately preceded the Franciscan revival?

what was the emotional synthesis of life given by those who had come too

early to partake in the new religion of love?

The question seems scarcely to have occurred to any one, perhaps because

the Church found it expedient to obliterate, to the best of her power,

all records of her terrible mediaeval vicissitudes, and to misinterpret,

for the benefit of purblind antiquarians, the architectural symbolism of

the earlier Middle Ages.

Since, in the deciphering of such expressions of mankind's moods and

intuitions, scientific investigation is scarcely more important than

the moods and intuitions of the looker-on, it seems quite fitting that

I should begin these suggestions about pre-Franciscan Italian art by

saying that some years ago there met by accident in my mind a certain

impression of Lombard twelfth-century art, and a certain anecdote of

Lombard twelfth-century history.

It was at Lucca, a place most singularly rich in round-arched buildings,

that I was, so to speak, overwhelmed by the fact that the Italian churches

of immediately pre-Franciscan days possess by way of architectural

ornamentation nothing but images of deformity and emblems of wickedness.

This fact, apart from its historical bearing, may serve also to illustrate

a theory I have already put forth, to wit, that the only art which is

necessarily expressive of contemporary thought and feeling is such as

embodies very little skill, and as expresses but very few organic

necessities of form, both of which can result only from the activity

and the influence of generations of craftsmen; since in these Lucchese

churches the architectural forms proclaim one thing and the sculptural

details another. The first speak only of logic and serenity; the second

only of the most abominable nightmare. The truth is, that these churches

of Lucca, and their more complex and perfect prototypes, like Sant'

Ambrogio of Milan, and San Miniato of Florence, are not the real outcome

of the century which built them. It is quite natural that, with their

stately proportions, their harmonious restrained vaultings, their easy,

efficient colonnades, their ample and equable illumination, above all

their obvious pleasure in constructive logic, these churches should

affect us as being _classic_ as opposed to romantic, and even in a very

large measure actually antique; for they have come, through generations

as long-lived and as scanty as those of the patriarchs, straight from

the classic, the antique; grandchildren of the courts of law and temples

of Pagan Rome, children of the Byzantine basilicas of early Christian

days; strange survivals from distant antiquity, testifying to the lack

of artistic initiative in the barbarous centuries between Constantine to

Barbarossa. No period in the world's history could have produced anything

so organic without the work of previous periods; and when the Middle

Ages did in their turn produce an architecture original to themselves,

it was by altering these still classic forms into something absolutely

different: that thirteenth-century Gothic which answers to the material

and necessities of the democratic and romantic times heralded by St.

Francis. The twelfth century, therefore, could not express itself in

the architectural forms and harmonies of those Lucchese churches; but

it could express itself in their rude and thoroughly original sculpture.

Hence, while there is in them no indication of the symbolism of the coming

ogival Gothic, there is no trace either of the symbolism belonging to

Byzantine buildings. None of the Gothic imagery testifying faith and

joy in God and His creatures; no effigies of saints; at most only of

the particular building's patron; no Madonnas, infant Christs, burning

cherubim, singing and playing angels, armed romantic St. Michael or

St. George; none of those goodly rows of kings and queens guarding the

portals, or of those charming youthful heads marking the spring of the

pointed arch, the curve of the spandril. Nor, on the other hand, any

remnant of Byzantine devices of the date-loaded palms, the peacocks

and doves, the bunches of grapes, the serene, almost Pagan imagery which

graces the churches of the Caelian and Aventine, the basilicas of

Ravenna, and which would seem the necessary accompaniment of this

stately Neo-Byzantine architecture. The churches of Lucca, like their

contemporaries and immediate predecessors throughout Tuscany and North

Italy, are ornamented only with symbols of terror.[3]

[Footnote 3: The Cathedral of Assisi, a very early mediaeval building,

affords a singular instance of the meeting of the last remnant of that

serene symbolism of Roman and Byzantine-Roman churches with the usual

Lombard horrors. A fine passion-flower or vine encircles the porch,

peacocks strut and drink from an altar, while, on the other hand, lions

mangle a man and a sheep, and horrible composite monsters, resembling

the prehistoric plesiosaurus, bite each other's necks. A Madonna and

Christ are enthroned on Byzantine seats, the weight resting on human

beings, not so realistically crushed as those of Ferrara and Milan, but

suffering. There is a similar meeting of symbols in the neighbouring

Cathedral of Foligno; and, so far as I could see, the Umbrian valley

is rich in very early churches of this type, sometimes lovely in

ornamentation, like S. Pietro of Spoleto, sometimes very rude, like

the tiny twin churches of Bevagna.]

The minds of the sculptors seem haunted by the terror of wicked wild

beasts, irresistible and mysterious, as in the night fears of children.

The chief ornament of St. Michael of Lucca is a curious band of black

and white inlaid work, of which Mr. Ruskin has said, with the optimism

of an orthodox symbolist, that it shows that the people of Lucca loved

hunting, even as the people of Florence loved the sciences and crafts

symbolised on their belfry. But the two or three solitary mannikins of

the frieze of St. Michael exemplify not the pleasures, but the terrors

of the chase; or rather they are not hunting, but being hunted by the

wild beasts all round; attacked rather than pursuing, flying on their

little horses from the unequal fight, or struggling under the hug of

bears, the grip of lions; never does one of them carry off a dead

creature or deal a mortal blow. The wild beasts are masters of the

situation, the men mere intruders, speedily worsted; and this is proved

by the fact that where the wolves, lions, and bears are not struggling

with human beings, they are devouring each another, the appearance of

the poor little scared men being only an interlude in the everlasting

massacre of one beast by another. The people who worked this frieze may

have pretended, perhaps, that they were expressing the pleasures of

hunting; but what they actually realised was evidently the horrors of a

world given over to ravening creatures. The porch sculptures of this

and all the other churches of Lucca remove all further doubt upon this

point. For here what human beings there lie under the belly and in the

claws (sometimes a mere horrid mangled human head) of the lions and

lionesses who project like beamheads out of the wall or carry the porch

columns on their back: scowling, murderous creatures, with which the

twelfth and early thirteenth century ornamented even houses and public

tanks like Fonte Branda, which less terrified generations adorned with

personified virtues. The nightmare of wild beasts is carried on in the

inside of the churches: there again, under the columns of the pulpits

are the lions and lionesses gnashing their teeth, tearing stags and

gazelles and playing with human heads. And, to increase the horror,

there also loom on the capitals of the nave strange unknown birds of

prey, fantastic terrible vultures and griffins. Everywhere massacre and

nightmare in those churches of Lucca. And the impression they made on

my mind was naturally strengthened by the recollection of the similar

and often more terrible carvings in other places, Milan, Pavia, Modena,

Volterra, the Pistoiese and Lucchese hill-towns, in all other places

rich in pre-Franciscan art. Above all, there came to my mind the image

of the human figures which in most of such pre-Franciscan places express

the other half of all this terror, the feelings of mankind in this kingdom

of wicked, mysterious wild beasts. I allude to the terrible figures,

crushed into dwarfs and hunchbacks by the weight of porch columns and

pulpits, amid which the tragic creature, with broken spine and starting

eyes, of Sant' Ambrogio of Milan is, through sheer horrified realisation,

a sort of masterpiece. But there are wild beasts, lions and lionesses,

among the works of thirteenth-century sculptors, and lions and lionesses

continue for a long time as ornaments of pure Gothic architecture. Of

course; but it was the very nearness of the resemblance of these later

creatures that brought home to me the utterly different, the uniform and

extraordinary character, of those of earlier date: the emblem was kept

by the force of tradition, but the meaning thereof was utterly changed.

The Pisani, for instance, carved lions and lionesses under all their

pulpits; some of them are merely looking dignified, others devouring

their prey, but they are conceived by a semi-heraldic decorator or an

intelligent naturalist; nay, the spirit of St. Francis has entered into

the sculptors, the feeling for animal piety and happiness, to the extent

of representing the lionesses as suckling and tenderly licking their

whelps. The men of that time cannot even conceive, in their newly acquired

faith and joy in God and His creatures, what feelings must have been

uppermost in the men who first set the fashion of adorning churches with

men-devouring monsters.

Such were my impressions during those days spent among the serene

Lucchese churches and their terrible emblems. And under their influence,

thinking of the times which had built the churches and carved the

emblems, there came to my memory a very curious anecdote, unearthed

by the learned ecclesiastical historian Tocco, and consigned in his

extremely suggestive book on mediaeval heresies. A certain priest of

Milan became so revered for his sanctity and learning, and for the

marvellous cures he worked, that the people insisted on burying him

before the high altar, and resorting to his tomb as to that of a saint.

The holy man became even more undoubtedly saintly after his death; and

in the face of the miracles which were wrought by his intercession, it

became necessary to proceed to his beatification. The Church was about

to establish his miraculous sainthood, when, in the official process

of collecting the necessary information, it was discovered that the

supposed saint was a Manichean heretic, a _Catharus_, a believer in the

wicked Demiurgus, the creating Satan, the defeat of the spiritual God,

and the uselessness of the coming of Christ. It was quite probable that

he had spat upon the crucifix as a symbol of the devil's triumph; it was

quite possible that he had said masses to Satan as the true creator of

all matter. Be this as it may, that priest's half-canonised bones were

publicly burnt and their ashes scattered to the wind. The anecdote shows

that the Manichean heresies, some ascetic and tender, others brutal and

foul, had made their way into the most holy places. And, indeed, when we

come to think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a revelation,

this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk of becoming a

dualistic religion--a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of

pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the

individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such views, identical

with those of the transcendental theologians of the fourth century, and

equivalent to the philosophical pessimism of our own day, as expounded

particularly by Schopenhauer, should have found favour among the best

and most thoughtful men of the early Middle Ages. In those stern and

ferocious, yet tender-hearted and most questioning times, there must

have been something logically satisfying, and satisfying also to the

harrowed sympathies, in the conviction, if not in the dogma, that the

soul of man had not been made by the maker of the foul and cruel world

of matter; and that the suffering of all good men's hearts corresponded

with the suffering, the humiliation of a mysteriously dethroned God of

the Spirit. And what a light it must have shed, completely solving all

terrible questions, upon the story of Christ's martyrdom, so constantly

uppermost in the thoughts and feelings of mediaeval men!

Now, the men who built Sant' Ambrogio[4] and San Miniato a Monte,

who carved the stone nightmares, the ravening lions, the squashed and

writhing human figures of the early Lombard and Tuscan churches, were

the contemporaries of that Manichean priest of Milan, who, although a

saint, had believed in the triumph of the Devil and the wickedness of

the Creator. And among his fellow-heretics--those heretics lurking

everywhere, and most among the most religious--should we not expect to

find the mysterious guilds of Lombard freemasons, and the craftsmen to

whom they gradually revealed their secrets, affirming in their stone

symbolism to the already initiated, and suggesting to the uninitiated,

their terrible creed of inevitable misery on earth? Nay, can we not

imagine some of them, even as the Templars were accused of doing (and

the Templars were patrons, remember, of important guilds of masons),

propitiating the Great Enemy by service and ritual, proclaiming his

Power, even as the ancients propitiated the divinities of darkness whom

they hated? For the God of Good, we can fancy them reasoning, the Pure

Spirit who will triumph when all this cruel universe goes to pieces,

can wish for no material altars, and can have no use for churches.

Or did not the idea of a dualism become confused into a vacillating,

contradictory notion of a Power at once good and evil, something

inscrutable, unthinkable, but inspiring less confidence than terror?

[Footnote 4: Here are a few dates, as given by Murray's Handbooks.

Fiesole Cathedral begun 1028; S. Miniato a Monte, 1013; Pisa Cathedral

consecrated 1118; baptistery (lower storey), 1153. Lucca facade

(interior later), 1204; S. Frediano of Lucca begun by Perharit 671,

altered in twelfth century; S. Michele facade, 1188. Pistoia: S.

Giovanni Evangelista by Gruamons, 1166; S. Andrea, also by Gruamons; S.

Bartolomeo by Rudolphinus, 1167. Pulpit of S. Ambrogio of Milan, 1201;

church traditionally begun about 868, probably much more modern.]

Whatever the secret of those sculptured monsters, this much is

historically certain, that a dualistic, profoundly pessimist belief had

honeycombed Christianity throughout Provence and Northern and Central

Italy. But for this knowledge it would be impossible to explain the

triumphant reception given to St. Francis and his sublime, illogical

optimism, his train of converted wolves, sympathising birds, and saints

and angels mixing familiarly with mortal men. The Franciscan revival

has the strength and success of a reaction. And in sweeping away the

pessimistic terrors of mankind, it swept away, by what is at least

a strange coincidence, the nightmare sculpture of the old Lombard

stonemasons.

What the things were which made room for the carved virgins and saints,

the lute-playing angels and nibbling squirrels and twittering birds of

Gothic sculpture, I wish to put before the reader in one significant

example. The Cathedral of Ferrara is a building which, although finished

in the thirteenth century, had been begun and consecrated so early as

1135, and the porch thereof, as is frequently the case, appears to have

been erected earlier than other portions. Of this porch two pillars

are supported by life-sized figures, one bearded, one beardless, both

dressed in the girdled smock of the early Middle Ages. The enormous

weight of the porch is resting, not conventionally (as in the antique

caryatid) on the head, but on the spine; and the head is protruded

forwards in a fearful effort to save itself, the face most frightfully

convulsed: another moment and the spine must be broken and the head

droop freely down. Before the portals, but not supporting anything, are

six animals of red marble--a griffin, two lions, two lionesses, or what

seem such, and a second griffin. The central lions are well preserved,

highly realistic, but also decorative; one of them is crushing a large

ram, another an ox, both creatures splendidly rendered. I imagine these

central lions to be more recent (having perhaps replaced others) than

their neighbours, which are obliterated to the extent of being lions or

lionesses only by guesswork. These nameless feline creatures hold what

appear to be portions of sheep, one of them having at its flank a curious

excrescence like the stinging scorpion of the Mithra groups. The griffins,

on the other hand, although every detail is rubbed out, are splendid in

power and expression--great lion-bodied creatures, with gigantic eagle's

beak, manifestly birds rather than beasts, with the muscular neck and

probably the movement of a hawk. Like hawks, they have not swooped on

to their prey, but let themselves drop on to it, arriving not on their

belly like lions, but on their wings like birds. The prey is about a

fourth of the griffin's size. One of the griffins has swooped down

upon a wain, whose two wheels just protrude on either side of him; the

heads of two oxen are under his paws, and the head, open mouthed, with

terrified streaming hair, of the driver; beasts and men have come down

flat on their knees. The other griffin has captured a horse and his

rider; the horse has shied and fallen sideways beneath the griffin's

loins, with head protruding on one side and hoofs on the other, the

empty stirrup is still swinging. The rider, in mail-shirt and Crusader's

helmet, has been thrown forward, and lies between the griffin's claws,

his useless triangular shield clasped tight against his breast. Perhaps

merely because the attitude of the two griffins had to be symmetrical,

and the horse and rider filled up the space under their belly less

closely than the cart, oxen, and driver, there arises the suggestive

fact that the poor man and his bullocks are crushed more mercilessly

than the rich man and his horse. But be this as it may, poor and rich,

serf and knight, the griffin of destiny encompasses and pounces upon

each; and the talons of evil pin down and the beak of misery rends with

impartial cruel certainty.

Such is the account of the world and man, of justice and mercy, recorded

for us by the stonemasons of Ferrara.

VI

As with the emotional, the lyric element in Renaissance art, so also

with the narrative or dramatic; it belongs not to the original, real,

or at all events primitive Christianity of the time when the Man Jesus

walked on earth in the body, but to that day when He arose once more, no

less a Christ, be sure, in the soul of those men of the Middle Ages.

The Evangelists had never felt--why should they, good, fervent Jewish

laymen?--the magic of the baby Christ as it was felt by those mediaeval

ascetics, suddenly reawakened to human feeling. There is neither

tenderness nor reverence in the Gospels for the mother of the Lord;

some rather rough words on her motherhood; and that mention in St. John,

intended so evidently to bring the Evangelist, or supposed Evangelist,

into closer communion with Christ, not to draw attention to Christ's

mother. Yet out of those slight, and perhaps almost contemptuous

indications, the Middle Ages have made three or four perfect and wonderful

types of glorified womanhood: the Mother in adoration, the crowned,

enthroned Virgin, the Mater Gloriosa; the broken-hearted Mother, Mater

Dolorosa, as found at the foot of the cross or fainting at the deposition

therefrom; types more complete and more immortal than that of any Greek

divinity; above all, perhaps, the mere young mother holding the child

for kindly, reverent folk to look at, for the little St. John to play

with, or alone, looking at it, thinking of it in solitude and silence:

the whole lovingness of all creatures rising in a clear flame to heaven.

Nay, is not the suffering Christ a fresh creation of the Middle Ages,

made really to bear the sorrows of a world more sorrowful than that of

Judea? That strange Christ of the Resurrection, as painted occasionally

by Angelico, by Pier della Francesca, particularly in a wonderful small

panel by Botticelli; the Christ not yet triumphant at Easter, but risen

waist-high in the sepulchre, sometimes languidly seated on its rim, stark,

bloodless, with scarce seeing eyes, and the motionless agony of one

recovering from a swoon, enduring the worst of all his martyrdom, the

return to life in that chill, bleak landscape, where the sparse trees

bend in the dawn wind; returning from death to a new, an endless series

of sufferings, even as that legend made him answer the wayfaring Peter,

_returning to be crucified once more--iterum crucifigi_.

All this is the lyric side, on which, in art as in poetry, there are as

many variations as there are individual temperaments, and the variety in

Renaissance art is therefore endless. Let us consider the narrative or

dramatic side, on which, as I have elsewhere tried to show, all that

could be done was done, only repetition ensuing, very early in the

history of Italian art, by the Pisans, Giotto and Giotto's followers.

These have their counterpart, their precursors, in the writers and

reciters of devotional romances.

Among the most remarkable of these is the "Life of the Magdalen,"

printed in certain editions of Frate Domenico Cavalca's well known

charming translations of St. Jerome's "Lives of the Saints." Who the

author may be seems quite doubtful, though the familiar and popular

style might suggest some small burgher turned Franciscan late in life.

As the spiritual love lyrics of Jacopone stand to the _Canzonieri_ of

Dante and of Dante's circle of poets, so does this devout novel stand to

Boccaccio's more serious tales, and even to his "_Fiammetta_;" only, I

think that the relation of the two novelists is the reverse of that of

the poets; for, with an infinitely ruder style, the biographer of the

Magdalen, whoever he was, has also an infinitely finer psychological

sense than Boccaccio. Indeed, this little novel ought to be reprinted,

like "Aucasin et Nicolette," as one of the absolutely satisfactory

works, so few but so exquisite, of the Middle Ages.

It is the story of the relations of Jesus with the family of Lazarus,

whose sister Mary is here identified with the Magdalen; and it is, save

for the account of the Passion, which forms the nucleus, a perfect tissue

of inventions. Indeed, the author explains very simply that he is

narrating not how he knows of a certainty that things did happen, but

how it pleases him to think that they might have happened. For the man

puts his whole heart in the story, and alters, amplifies, explains away

till his heart is satisfied. The Magdalen, for instance, was not all

the sort of woman that foolish people think. If she took to scandalous

courses, it was only from despair at being forsaken by her bridegroom,

who left her on the wedding-day to follow Christ to the desert, and who

was no other than the Evangelist John. Moreover, let no vile imputations

be put upon it; in those days, when everybody was so good and modest, it

took very little indeed (in fact, nothing which our wicked times would

notice at all) to get a woman into disrepute.

Judged by our low fourteenth-century standard, this sinning Magdalen

would have been only a little over-cheerful, a little free, barely

what in the fourteenth century is called (the mere notion would

have horrified the house of Lazarus) _a trifle fast_; our unknown

Franciscan--for I take him to be a Franciscan--insists very much on her

having sung and whistled on the staircase, a thing no modest lady of

Bethany would then have done; but which, my dear brethren, is after

all....

This sinful Magdalen, repenting of her sins, such as they are, is living

with her sister Mary and her brother Lazarus; the whole little family

bound to Jesus by the miracle which had brought Lazarus back to life.

Jesus and his mother are their guests during Passion week; and the awful

tragedy of the world and of heaven passes, in the anonymous narrative,

across the narrow stage of that little burgher's house. As in the art of

the fifteenth century, the chief emotional interest of the Passion is

thrown not on the Apostles, scarcely on Jesus, but upon the two female

figures, facing each other as in some fresco of Perugino, the Magdalen

and the Mother of Christ. Facing one another, but how different! This

Magdalen has the terrific gesture of despair of one of those colossal

women of Signorelli's, flung down, as a town by earthquake, at the foot

of the cross. She was pardoned "because she had loved much"--_quia

multo amavit_. The unknown friar knew what _that_ meant as well as his

contemporary Dante, when Love showed him the vision of Beatrice's death.

Never was there such heart-breaking as that of his heroine: she becomes

almost the chief personage of the Passion; for she knows not merely all

the martyrdom of the Beloved, feels all the agonies of His flesh and

His spirit, but knows--how well!--that she has lost Him. Opposite this

terrible convulsive Magdalen, sobbing, tearing her hair and rolling on the

ground, is the other heart-broken woman, the mother; but how different!

She remains maternal through her grief, with motherly thoughtfulness

for others; for to the real mother (how different in this to the lover!)

there will always remain in the world some one to think of. She bridles

her sorrow; when John at last hesitatingly suggests that they must not

stay all night on Calvary, she turns quietly homeward; and, once at home,

tries to make the mourners eat, tries to eat with them, makes them take

rest that dreadful night. For such a mother there shall not be mere

bitterness in death; and here follows a most beautiful and touching

invention: the glorified Christ, returning from Limbo, takes the happy,

delivered souls to visit his mother.

"And Messer Giesu having tarried awhile with them in that place, said:

'Now let us go and make my mother happy, who with most gentle tears is

calling upon me.' And they went forthwith, and came to the room where

our Lady was praying, and with gentle tears asking God to give her

back her son, saying it was to-day the third day. And as she stayed

thus, Messer Giesu drew near to her on one side, and said: 'Peace and

cheerfulness be with thee, Holy Mother.' And straightway she recognised

the voice of her blessed son, and opened her eyes and beheld him thus

glorious, and threw herself down wholly on the ground and worshipped

him. And the Lord Jesus knelt himself down like her; and then they rose

to their feet and embraced one another most sweetly, and gave each other

peace, and then went and sat together," while all the holy people from

Limbo looked on in admiration, and knelt down one by one, first the

Baptist, and Adam and Eve, and all the others, saluting the mother of

Christ, while the angels sang the end of all sorrows.

VII

There would be much to say on this subject. One might point out, for

instance, not only that Dante has made the lady he loved in his youth

into the heroine--a heroine smiling in fashion more womanlike than

theological--of his vision of hell and heaven; but what would have been

even less possible at any previous moment of the world's history, he

has interwoven his theogony so closely with strands of most human

emotion and passion (think of that most poignant of love dramas in the

very thick of hell!), that, instead of a representation, a chart, so to

speak, of long-forgotten philosophical systems, his poem has become a

picture, pattern within pattern, of the life of all things: flowers

blowing, trees waving, men and women moving and speaking in densest

crowds among the flaming rocks of hell, the steps of purgatory, the

planispheres of heaven's stars making the groundwork of that wondrous

tapestry. But it is better to read Dante than to read about Dante, so I

let him be.

On the other hand, and lest some one take Puritanic umbrage at my

remarks on early Italian art, and deprecate the notion that religious

painters could be so very human, I shall say a few parting words about

the religious painter, the saint _par excellence_, I mean the Blessed

Angelico. Heaven forbid I should attempt to turn him into a brother

Lippo, of the Landor or Browning pattern! He was very far indeed, let

alone from profanity, even from such flesh and blood feeling as that of

Jacopone and scores of other blessed ones. He was, emotionally, rather

bloodless; and whatsoever energy he had probably went in tussels with

the technical problems of the day, of which he knew much more, for

all his cloistered look, than I suspected when I wrote of him before.

Angelico, to return to the question, was not a St. Francis, a Fra

Jacopone. But even Angelico had his passionately human side, though it

was only the humanness of a nice child. In a life of hard study, and

perhaps hard penance, that childish blessed one nourished childish

desires--desires for green grass and flowers, for gay clothes,[5] for

prettily-dressed pink and lilac playfellows, for the kissing and hugging

in which he had no share, for the games of the children outside the

convent gate. How human, how ineffably full of a good child's longing,

is not his vision of Paradise! The gaily-dressed angels are leading the

little cowled monks--little baby black and white things, with pink faces

like sugar lambs and Easter rabbits--into deep, deep grass quite full

of flowers, the sort of grass every child on this wicked earth has been

cruelly forbidden to wade in! They fall into those angels' arms, hugging

them with the fervour of children in the act of _loving_ a cat or a dog.

They join hands with those angels, outside the radiant pink and blue

toy-box towers of the celestial Jerusalem, and go singing "Round the

Mulberry Bush" much more like the babies in Kate Greenaway's books than

like the Fathers of the Church in Dante. The joys of Paradise, for this

dear man of God, are not confined to sitting _ad dexteram domini_....

[Footnote 5: Mme. Darmesteter's charming essays "The End of the Middle

Ages," contain some amusing instances of such repressed love of finery

on the part of saints. Compare Fioretti xx., "And these garments of

such fair cloth, which we wear (in Heaven) are given us by God in

exchange for our rough frocks."]

_Di questo nostro dolce Fratellino_; that line of Jacopone da Todi,

hymning to the child Christ, sums up, in the main, the vivifying spirit

of early Italian art; nay, is it not this mingled emotion of tenderness,

of reverence, and deepest brotherhood which made St. Francis claim sun

and birds, even the naughty wolf, for brethren? This feeling becomes

embodied, above all, in the very various army of charming angels;

and more particularly, perhaps, because Venice had no other means of

expression than painting, in the singing and playing angels of the

old Venetians. These angels, whether they be the girlish, long-haired

creatures, robed in orange and green, of Carpaccio; or the naked babies,

with dimpled little legs and arms, and filetted silky curls of Gian

Bellini, seem to concentrate into music all the many things which that

strong pious Venice, tongue-tied by dialect, had no other way of saying;

and we feel to this day that it sounds in our hearts and attunes them to

worship or love or gentle contemplation. The sound of those lutes and

pipes, of those childish voices, heard and felt by the other holy persons

in those pictures--Roman knight Sebastian, Cardinal Jerome, wandering

palmer Roch, and all the various lovely princesses with towers and palm

boughs in their hands--moreover brings them together, unites them in one

solemn blissfulness round the enthroned Madonna. These are not people

come together by accident to part again accidentally; they are eternal,

part of a vision disclosed to the pious spectator, a crowning of the

Mass with its wax-lights and songs.

But the Venetian playing and singing angels are there for something more

important still. Those excellent old painters understood quite well that

in the midst of all this official, doge-like ceremony, it was hard, very

hard lines for the poor little Christ Child, having to stand or lie for

ever, for ever among those grown-up saints, on the knees of that majestic

throning Madonna; since the oligarchy, until very late, allowed no little

playfellow to approach the Christ Child, bringing lambs and birds and

such-like, and leading Him off to pick flowers as in the pictures of those

democratic Tuscans and Umbrians. None of that silly familiarity, said

stately Venetian piety. But the painters were kinder. They incarnated

their sympathy in the baby music-making angels, and bade them be friendly

to the Christ Child. They are so; and nowhere does it strike one so much

as in that fine picture, formerly called Bellini, but more probably Alvise

Vivarini, at the Redentore, where the Virgin, in her lacquer-scarlet

mantle, has ceased to be human altogether, and become a lovely female

Buddha in contemplation, absolutely indifferent to the poor little

sleeping Christ. The little angels have been sorry. Coming to make their

official music, they have brought each his share of heaven's dessert: a

little offering of two peaches, three figs, and three cherries on one

stalk (so precious therefore!), placed neatly, spread out to look much,

not without consciousness of the greatness of the sacrifice. They have

not, those two little angels, forgotten, I am sure, the gift they have

brought, during that rather weary music-making before the inattentive

Madonna. They keep on thinking how Christ will awake to find all those

precious things, and they steel their little hearts to the sacrifice.

The little bird who has come (invited for like reason) and perched on

the curtain bar, understands it all, respects their feelings, and refrains

from pecking.

Such is the heart of the saints, and out of it comes the painted triumph

of _El Magno Jesulino_.

THE IMAGINATIVE ART OF THE RENAISSANCE

I

In a Florentine street through which I pass most days, is a house

standing a little back (the place is called the Square of Purgatory),

the sight of which lends to that sordid street of stained palace backs,

stables, and dingy little shops, a certain charm and significance, in

virtue solely of three roses carved on a shield over a door. The house

is a humble one of the sixteenth century, and its three roses have just

sufficient resemblance to roses, with their pincushion heads and straight

little leaves, for us to know them as such. Yet that rude piece of

heraldic carving, that mere indication that some one connected with the

house once thought of roses, is sufficient, as I say, to give a certain

pleasurableness to the otherwise quite unpleasurable street.

This is by no means an isolated instance. In various places, as emblems

of various guilds or confraternities, one meets similarly carved, on

lintel or escutcheon, sheaves of lilies, or what is pleasanter still,

that favourite device of the Renaissance (become well known as the

monogram of the painter Benvenuto Garofalo), a jar with five clove-pinks.

And on each occasion of meeting them, that carved lily and those graven

clove-pinks, like the three roses in the Square of Purgatory, have shed

a charm over the street, given me a pleasure more subtle than that derived

from any bed of real lilies, or pot of real clove-pinks, or bush of real

roses; colouring and scenting the street with this imaginary colour and

perfume. What train of thought has been set up? It would be hard to say.

Something too vague to be perceived except as a whole impression of

pleasure; a half-seen vision, doubtless, of the real flowers, of the

places where they grow; perhaps even a faint reminiscence, a dust of

broken and pounded fragments, of stories and songs into which roses

enter, or lilies, or clove-pinks.

Hereby hangs a whole question of aesthetics. Those three stone roses

are the type of one sort of imaginative art; of one sort of art which,

beyond or independent of the charm of visible beauty, possesses a charm

that acts directly upon the imagination. Such charm, or at least such

interest, may be defined as the literary element in art; and I should

give it that name, did it not suggest a dependence upon the written word

which I by no means intend to imply. It is the element which, unlike

actual representation, is possessed by literature as well as by art;

indeed, it is the essence of the former, as actual representation is of

the latter. But it belongs to art, in the cases when it belongs to it at

all, not because the artist is in any way influenced by the writer, but

merely because the forms represented by the artist are most often the

forms of really existing things, and fraught, therefore, with associations

to all such as know them; and because, also, the artist who presents

these forms is a human being, and as such not only sees and draws,

but feels and thinks; because, in short, literature being merely the

expression of habits of thought and emotion, all such art as deals with

the images of real objects tends more or less, in so far as it is a

human being, to conform to its type.

This is one kind of artistic imagination, this which I have rudely

symbolised in the symbol of the three carved roses--the imagination

which delights the mind by holding before it some charming or uncommon

object, and conjuring up therewith a whole train of feeling and fancy;

the school, we might call it, of intellectual decoration, of arabesques

formed not of lines and colours, but of associations and suggestions.

And to this school of the three carved roses in the Square of Purgatory

belong, among others, Angelico, Benozzo, Botticelli, and all those

Venetians who painted piping shepherds, and ruralising magnificent

ladies absorbed in day-dreams.

But besides this kind of imagination in art, there is another and

totally different. It is the imagination of how an event would have

looked; the power of understanding and showing how an action would have

taken place, and how that action would have affected the bystanders; a

sort of second-sight, occasionally rising to the point of revealing, not

merely the material aspect of things and people, but the emotional value

of the event in the eyes of the painter. Thus, for instance, Tintoret

concentrated a beam of sunlight into the figure of Christ before Pilate,

not because he supposed Christ to have stood in that sunlight, but

because the white figure, shining yet ghost-like, seemed to him, perhaps

unconsciously, to indicate the position of the betrayed Saviour among

the indifference and wickedness of the world. Hence I would divide all

imaginative art, particularly that of the old Italian masters, into art

which stirs our own associations, and suggests to us trains of thought

and feeling perhaps unknown to the artist, and art which exhibits a

scene or event foreign to ourselves, and placed before us with a

deliberate intention. Both are categories of imaginative activity

due to inborn peculiarities of character; but one of them, namely, the

suggestive, is probably spontaneous, and quite unintentional, hence

never asked for by the public, nor sought after by the artist; while the

other, self-conscious and intentional, is therefore constantly sought

after by the artist, and bargained for by the public. I shall begin

with the latter, because it is the recognised commodity: artistic

imagination, as bought and sold in the market, whether of good quality

or bad.

II

The painters of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century,

developing the meagre suggestions of Byzantine decoration, incorporating

the richer inventions of the bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors and

of the medallions surrounding the earliest painted effigies of holy

personages, produced a complete set of pictorial themes illustrative

of Gospel history and of the lives of the principal saints. These

illustrative themes--definite conceptions of situations and definite

arrangements of figures--became forthwith the whole art's stock, universal

and traditional; few variations were made from year to year and from

master to master, and those variations resolved themselves continually

back into the original type. And thus on, through the changes in artistic

means and artistic ends, until the Italian schools disappeared finally

before the schools of France and Flanders. Let us take a striking example.

The presentation of the Virgin remains unaltered in main sentiment and

significance of composition, despite the two centuries and more which

separate the Gaddi from Titian and Tintoret, despite the complete change

in artistic aims and methods separating still more completely the men of

the fourteenth century from the men of the sixteenth. The long flight of

steps stretching across the fresco in Santa Croce stretches also across

the canvas of the great Venetians; and the little girl climbs up them

alike, presenting her profile to the spectator; although at the top

of the steps there is in one case a Gothic portal, and in the other a

Palladian portico, and at the bottom of the steps in the fresco stand

Florentines who might personally have known Dante, and at the bottom

of the steps in the pictures the Venetian patrons of Aretino. Yet the

presentation of the little maiden to the High Priest is quite equally

conceivable in many other ways and from many other points of view. As

regards both dramatic conception and pictorial composition, the moment

might have been differently chosen; the child might still be with its

parents or already with the priest; and the flight of steps might have

been replaced by the court of the temple. Any man might have invented

his own representation of the occurrence. But the men of the sixteenth

century adhered scrupulously or indifferently to the inventions of the

men of the fourteenth.

This is merely one instance in a hundred. If we summon up in our mind

as many as we can of the various frescoes and pictures representing the

chief incidents of Scripture history, we shall find that, while there

are endless differences between them with respect to drawing, anatomy,

perspective, light and shade, colour and handling, there are but few and

slight variations as regards the conception of the situation and the

arrangement for the figures. In the Marriage of the Virgin the suitors

are dressed, sometimes in the loose robe and cap with lappets of the

days of Giotto, and sometimes in the tight hose and laced doublet of

the days of Raphael and of Luini; but they break their wands across

their knees with the same gesture and expression; and although the temple

is sometimes close at hand, and sometimes a little way off, the wedding

ceremony invariably takes place outside it, and not inside. The shepherds

in the Nativity are sometimes young and sometimes old, but they always

come in broad daylight, and the manger by which the Virgin is kneeling

is always outside the stable, and always in one corner of the picture.

Again, whatever slight difference there may be in the expression and

gesture of the apostles at the Last Supper, they are always seated on

one side only of a table facing the spectator, with Judas alone on a

stool on the opposite side. And although there are two themes of the

Entombment of Christ, one where the body is stretched on the ground, the

other where it is being carried to the sepulchre, the action is always

out of doors, and never, as might sometimes be expected, gives us the

actual burial in the vault. These examples are more than sufficient. Yet

I feel that any description in words is inadequate to convey the extreme

monotony of all these representations, because the monotony is not merely

one of sentiment by selection of the dramatic moment, but of the visible

composition of the paintings, of the outlines of the groups and the

balancing of them. A monotony so complete that any one of us almost

knows what to expect, in all save technical matters and the choice of

models, on being told that in such a place there is an old Italian

fresco, or panel, or canvas, representing some principal episode of

Gospel history.

The explanation of this fidelity to one theme of representation in an

art which was the very furthest removed from any hieratic prescriptions,

in an art which was perpetually growing--and growing more human and

secular--must be sought for, I think, in no peculiarities of spiritual

condition or national imagination, but in two facts concerning the merely

technical development of painting, and the results thereof. These two

facts are briefly: that at a given moment--namely, the end of the

thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth--there existed

just enough power of imitating nature to admit of the simple indication

of a dramatic situation, without further realisation of detail; and

that at this moment, consequently, there originated such pictorial

indications of the chief dramatic situations as concerned the Christian

world. And secondly, that from then and until well into the sixteenth

century, the whole attention of artists was engrossed in changing the

powers of indication into powers of absolute representation, developing

completely the drawing, anatomy, perspective, colour, light and shade,

and handling, which Giotto and his contemporaries had possessed only in

a most rudimentary condition, and which had sufficed for the creation of

just such pictorial themes as they had invented, and no more.

Let me explain myself further. The artists of the fourteenth century,

with the exception of Giotto himself--to whose premature excellence none

of his contemporaries and disciples ever attained--give us, by means of

pictorial representation, just about the same as could be given to us

by the conventional symbolism of writing. In describing a Giottesque

fresco, or panel, we are not stopped by the difficulty of rendering

visible effects in words, because the visible effects that meet us are

in reality so many words; so that, to describe the picture, it almost

suffices to narrate the story, no arrangements of different planes and

of light and shade, no peculiarities of form, foreshortening, colour,

or texture requiring to be seen in order to be fully understood. The

artists of the fifteenth century--for the Giottesques do little more

than carry, without developing them, the themes of Giotto into various

parts of Italy--work at adding to the art exactly those qualities which

belong exclusively to it, and which baffle the mere written word: they

acquire the means, slowly and laboriously, of showing these events no

longer merely to the mind, but also to the eye; they place these people

in real space, in real relations of distance and light, they give them

a real body which can stand and move, made of real flesh and blood and

bones, and covered with real clothes; they turn these abstractions once

more into realities like the realities of nature whence they had been

abstracted. But the work of the fifteenth century does not go beyond

filling up the programme indicated by the Giottesques; and it is only

after the men of the sixteenth century have been enabled to completely

realise all that the men of the fourteenth century had indicated, that

art, with Michelangelo, Tintoret, and still more with the great painters

of Spain and Flanders, proceeds to encounter problems of foreshortening,

of light and shade, of atmospheric effect, that could never have been

imagined by the contemporaries of Giotto, nor even by the contemporaries

of Ghirlandaio and the Bellini. Hence, throughout the fifteenth century,

while there is a steady development of the artistic means required to

realise those narrative themes which the Giottesques had invented, there

is no introduction of any new artistic means unnecessary for this result,

but which, like the foreshortenings of Michelangelo, and the light

and shade of Tintoret, like the still further additions to painting

represented by men like Velasquez and Rembrandt, could suggest new

treatment of the old histories and enable the well-known events to be

shown from totally new intellectual standpoints, and in totally new

artistic arrangements. If we look into the matter, we shall recognise

that the monotony of representation throughout the Renaissance can

be amply accounted for without referring to the fact, which, however,

doubtless went for something, that the men of the fifteenth century were

too much absorbed in the working out of details to feel any desire for

new pictorial versions of the stories of the Gospel, and the lives of

the Saints.

Moreover, the Giottesques--among whom I include the immediate precursors,

sculptors as well as painters, of Giotto--put into their Scripture

stories an amount of logic, of sentiment, of dramatic and psychological

observation and imagination more than sufficient to furnish out the works

of three generations of later comers. Setting aside Giotto himself, who

concentrates and diffuses the vast bulk of dramatic invention as well

as of artistic observation and skill, there is in even the small and

smallest among his followers, an extraordinary happiness of individual

invention of detail. I may quote a few instances at random. It would be

difficult to find a humbler piece of work than the so-called Tree of

the Cross, in the Florentine Academy: a thing like a huge fern, with

medallion histories in each frond, it can scarcely be considered a work

of art, and stands halfway between a picture and a genealogical tree.

Yet in some of its medallions there is a great vivacity of imaginative

rendering; for instance, the Massacre of the Innocents represented by

a single soldier, mailed and hooded, standing before Herod on a floor

strewn with children's bodies, and holding up an infant by the arm, like

a dead hare, preparing slowly to spit it on his sword; and the kiss of

Judas, the soldiers crowding behind, while the traitor kisses Christ,

seems to bind him hand and foot with his embraces, to give him up, with

that stealthy look backwards to the impatient rabble--a representation

of the scene, infinitely superior in its miserable execution to Angelico's

Ave Rabbi! with its elaborate landscape of towers and fruit trees.

Again, in a series of predella histories of the Virgin, in the same

place, also a very mediocre and anonymous work, there is extraordinary

charm in the conception of the respective positions of Mary and Joseph

at their wedding: he is quite old and grey; she young, unformed, almost

a child, and she has to stand on two steps to be on his level, raising

her head with a beautiful, childlike earnestness, quite unlike the

conventional bridal timidity of other painters. Leaving these unknown

mediocrities, I would refer to the dramatic value (besides the great

pictorial beauty) of an Entombment by Giottino, in the corridor of the

Uffizi: the Virgin does not faint, or has recovered (thus no longer

diverting the attention from the dead Saviour to herself, as elsewhere),

and surrounds the head of her son with her arms; the rest of the figures

restrain themselves before her, and wink with strange blinking efforts

to keep back their tears. Still more would I speak of two small frescoes

in the Baroncelli Chapel at Santa Croce, which are as admirable in

poetical conception as they are unfortunately poor in artistic execution.

One of them represents the Annunciation to the Shepherds: they are lying

in a grey, hilly country, wrapped in grey mists, their flock below asleep,

but the dog vigilant, sniffing the supernatural. One is hard asleep; the

other awakes suddenly, and has turned over and looks up screwing his

eyes at the angel, who comes in a pale yellow winter sunrise cloud, in

the cold, grey mist veined with yellow. The chilliness of the mist at

dawn, the wonder of the vision, are felt with infinite charm. In the

other fresco the three kings are in a rocky place, and to them appears,

not the angel, but the little child Christ, half-swaddled, swimming

in orange clouds on a deep blue sky. The eldest king is standing, and

points to the vision with surprise and awe; the middle-aged one shields

his eyes coolly to see; while the youngest, a delicate lad, has already

fallen on his knees, and is praying with both hands crossed on his breast.

For dramatic, poetic invention, these frescoes can be surpassed, poor as

is their execution, only by Giotto's St. John ascending slowly from the

open grave, floating upwards, with outstretched arms and illumined face,

to where a cloud of prophets, with Christ at their head, enwraps him in

the deep blue sky.

These pictorial themes elaborated by the painters of the school of

Giotto were not merely as good, in a way, as any pictorial themes could

be: simple, straightforward, often very grand, so that the immediately

following generations could only spoil, but not improve upon them; they

were also, if we consider the matter, the only pictorial representations

of Scripture histories possible until art had acquired those new powers

of foreshortening, and light and shade and perspective, which were

sought for only after the complete attainment of the more elementary

powers which the Giottesques never fully possessed. Let us ask ourselves

how, in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, any notable change in

general arrangement of any well-known Scripture subject could well have

been introduced; and, in order to do so, let us realise one or two cases

where the same subjects have been treated by later masters. Tintoretto's

Last Judgment, where the Heavenly Hosts brood, poised on their wings,

above the river of hell which hurries the damned down its cataracts, is

impossible so long as perspective and foreshortening will barely admit

(as is the case up to the end of the fifteenth century), of figures

standing firmly on the ground and being separated into groups at various

distances. In Rembrandt's and Terburg's Adoration of the Shepherds, the

light emanates from the infant Christ; in Ribera's magnificent Deposition

from the Cross, the dead Saviour and His companions are represented,

not, as in the Entombments of Perugino and Raphael, in the open air,

but in the ghastly light of the mouth of the sepulchre. These are new

variations upon the hackneyed themes, but how were they possible so long

as the problems of light and shade were limited (as was the case even

with Leonardo), to giving the modelling, rather in form than in colour,

of a face or a limb? One of the earliest and greatest innovations is

Signorelli's treatment of the Resurrection in the chapel of San Brizio,

at Orvieto; he broke entirely with the tradition (exemplified particularly

by Angelico) of making the dead come fully fleshed and dressed as in

their lifetime from under the slabs of a burial place, goaded by grotesque

devils with the snouts and horns of weasels and rams, with the cardboard

masks of those carnival mummers who gave the great pageant of Hell

mentioned by old chroniclers. But Signorelli's innovation, his naked

figures partially fleshed and struggling through the earth's crust, his

naked demons shooting through the air and tying up the damned, could

not possibly have been executed or even conceived until his marvellous

mastery of the nude and of the anatomy of movement had been obtained.

Indeed, wherever, in the art of the fifteenth century, we find a beginning

of innovation in the conception and arrangement of a Scripture history,

we shall find also the beginning of the new technical method which has

suggested such a partial innovation. Thus, in the case of one of the

greatest, but least appreciated, masters of the early Renaissance, Paolo

Uccello. His Deluge, in the frescoes of the green cloister of S. Maria

Novella, is wonderfully original as a whole conception; and the figure

clinging to the side of the ark, with soaked and wind-blown drapery;

the man in a tub trying to sustain himself with his hands, the effort

and strain of the people in the water, are admirable as absolute

realisation of the scene. Again, in the Sacrifice of Noah, there is in

the foreshortened figure of God, floating, brooding, like a cloud, with

face downward and outstretched hands over the altar, something which is

a prophecy, and more than a prophecy, of what art will come to in the

Sixtine and the Loggie. But these inventions are due to Uccello's

special and extraordinary studies of the problems of modelling and

foreshortening; and when his contemporaries try to assimilate his

achievements, and unite them with the achievements of other men in other

special technical directions, there is an end of all individual poetical

conception, and a relapse into the traditional arrangements; as may be

seen by comparing the Bible stories of Paolo Uccello with those of

Benozzo Gozzoli at Pisa.

It is not wonderful that the painters of the fifteenth century should

have been satisfied with repeating the themes left by the Giottesques.

For the Giottesques had left them, besides this positive heritage, a

negative heritage, a programme to fill up, of which it is difficult to

realise the magnitude. The work of the Giottesques is so merely poetic,

or at most so merely decorative in the sense of a mosaic or a tapestry,

and it is in the case of Giotto and one or two of his greatest

contemporaries, particularly the Sienese, so well-balanced and

satisfying as a result of its elementary nature that we are apt to

overlook the fact that everything in the way of realisation as opposed

to indication, everything distinguishing the painting of a story from

the mere telling thereof, remained to be done. And such realisation

could be attained only through a series of laborious failures. It is by

comparing some of the later Giottesques themselves, notably the Gaddi

with Giotto, that we bring home to ourselves, for instance, that Giotto

did not, at least in his finest work at Florence, attempt to model his

frescoes in colour. Now the excessive ugliness of the Gaddi frescoes at

St. Croce is largely due to the effort to make form and boss depend, as

in nature, upon colour. Giotto, in the neighbouring Peruzzi and Bardi

chapels, is quite satisfied with outlining the face and draperies in

dark paint, and laying on the colour, in itself beautiful, as a child

will lay it on to a print or outline drawing, filling up the lines, but

not creating them. I give this as a solitary instance of one of the

first and most important steps towards pictorial realisation which the

great imaginative theme-inventors left to their successors. As a fact,

the items at which the fifteenth century had to work are too many to

enumerate; in many cases each man or group of men took up one particular

item, as perspective, modelling, anatomy, colour, movement, and their

several subdivisions, usually with the result of painful and grotesque

insistency and onesidedness, from the dreadful bag of bones anatomies

of Castagno and Pollaiolo, down to the humbler, but equally necessary,

architectural studies of Francesco di Giorgio. Add to this the necessity

of uniting the various attainments of such specialists, of taming down

these often grotesque monomaniacs, of making all these studies of drawing,

anatomy, colour, modelling, perspective, &c., into a picture. If that

picture was lacking in individual poetic conception; if those studies

were often intolerably silly and wrong-headed from the intellectual

point of view; if the old themes were not only worn threadbare, but

actually maltreated, what wonder? The themes were there, thank Heaven!

no one need bother about them; and no one did. Moreover, as I have

already pointed out, no one could have added anything, save in the

personal sentiment of the heads, the hands, the tilt of the figure,

or the quality of the form. Everything which depends upon dramatic

conception, which is not a question of form or sentiment, tended merely

to suffer a steady deterioration. Thus, nearly two hundred years after

Giotto, Ghirlandaio could find nothing better for his frescoes in

St. Trinita than the arrangement of Giotto's St. Francis, with the

difference that he omitted all the more delicate dramatic distinctions.

I have already alluded to the poetic conception of an early Marriage of

the Virgin in the Florence Academy; that essential point of the extreme

youth of Mary was never again attended to, although the rest of the

arrangement was repeated for two centuries. Similarly, no one noticed

or reproduced the delicate distinctions of action which Gaddi had put

into his two Annunciations of the Cappella Baroncelli; the shepherds

henceforth sprawled no matter how; and the scale of expression in the

vision of the Three Kings was not transferred to the more popular theme

of their visit to the stable at Bethlehem. In Giotto's Presentation at

the Temple in the Arena chapel at Padua, the little Mary is pushed up

the steps by her mother; in the Baroncelli frescoes the little girl,

ascending gravely, turns round for a minute to bless the children at

the foot of the steps. Here are two distinct dramatic conceptions, the

one more human, the other more majestic; both admirable. The fifteenth

century, nay, the fourteenth, took no account of either; the Virgin

merely went up the steps, connected by no emotion with the other

characters, a mere little doll, as she is still in the big pictures

of Titian and Tintoret, and quite subordinate to any group of richly

dressed men or barebacked women. It is difficult to imagine any miracle

quite so dull as the Raising of the King's Son in the Brancacci Chapel;

its dramatic or undramatic foolishness is surpassed only by certain

little panels of Angelico, with fiery rain and other plagues coming down

upon the silly blue and pink world of dolls.

A satisfactory study of the lack of all dramatic invention of the

painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is afforded by the

various representations of the Annunciation of the Virgin, one of the

favourite themes of the early Renaissance. It never seems to have

occurred to any one that the Virgin and the Archangel might be displayed

otherwise than each in one corner of the picture. Such a composition as

that of Rossetti's Ancilla Domini, where the Virgin cowers on her bed

as the angel floats in with flames round his feet; such a suggestion as

that of the unfinished lily on the embroidery frame, was reserved for

our sceptical and irreverent, but imaginative times.

The variety in these Annunciations depends, as I have remarked, not upon

a new dramatic conception, producing, as in the case of Rossetti's, a new

visible arrangement; but upon the particular kind of form preferred by

the artist, and the particular kind of expression common in his pictures;

the variety, I may add, is, with one or two exceptions, a variety in

inertness. Let us look at a few, taking merely those in one gallery, the

Uffizi. The Virgin, in that superb piece of gilding by Simone Martini

(did those old painters ever think of the glorified evening sky when

they devised such backgrounds?), is turning away from the angel in sheer

loathing and anger, a great lady feeling sick at the sudden intrusion of

a cad. In a picture by Angelo Gaddi, she is standing with her hand on her

chest, just risen from her chair, like a prima donna going to answer an

_encore_--a gracious, but not too eager recognition of an expected

ovation. In one by Cosimo Rossetti she lifts both hands with shocked

astonishment as the angel scuddles in; in the lovely one, with blue

Alpine peaks and combed-out hair, now given to Verocchio, she raises one

hand with a vacant smile, as if she were exclaiming, "Dear me! there's

that angel again." The one slight deviation from the fixed type of

Annunciation, Angelico's, in a cell at St. Mark's, where he has made

the Virgin kneel and the angel stand, merely because he had painted

another Annunciation with a kneeling angel a few doors off, is due to

no dramatic inspiration. The angel standing upright with folded arms

(how different from Rossetti's standing angel!) while the Virgin kneels,

instead of kneeling to her as, according to etiquette, results merely

in an impression that this silly, stolid, timid little _Ancilla Domini_

(here again one thinks of Rossetti's cowering and dazed Virgin), has

been waiting for some time in that kneeling attitude, and that the

Archangel has come by appointment.

Among this crowd of unimpressive, nay brainless, representations of one

of the grandest and sweetest of all stories, there stand out two--an

Annunciation by Signorelli, a small oil painting in the Uffizi, and

one by Botticelli,[6] a large tempera picture in the same room. But

they stand out merely because the one is the work of the greatest

early master of form and movement, or rather the master whose form and

movement had a peculiar quality of the colossal; and the other is the

work of the man, of all Renaissance painters, whose soul seems to have

known most of human, or rather feminine wistfulness, and sorrow, and

passion.

[Footnote 6: Probably executed from Botticelli's design, by Raffaellino

del Garbo.]

The little panel by Signorelli (the lowest compartment, divided into

three, of an altar-piece) is perhaps, besides the Orvieto _Resurrection_,

his most superb and poetical work. The figures, only three inches high,

have his highest quality of powerful grandeur, solemnly rustic in the

kneeling shepherds--solemn in the very swagger, hand on hip, of the

parti-coloured bravoes of the Magi; the landscape, only a few centimetres

across, is one of the amplest and most austere that ever has been painted:

a valley, bounded by blue hills and dark green ilex groves, wide, silent,

inhabited by a race larger and stronger than the human, with more than

human passions, but without human speech. In it the Virgin is seated

beneath a portico, breathing, as such creatures must breathe, the vast

greenness, the deep evening breeze. And to her comes bounding, with

waving draperies and loosened hair, the Archangel, like a rushing wind,

the wind which the strong woman is quietly inhaling. There is no religious

sentiment here, still less any human: the Madonna bows gravely as one

who is never astonished; and, indeed, this race of giants, living in

this green valley, look as if nothing could ever astonish them--walking

miracles themselves, and in constant relation with the superhuman.

We must forget all such things in turning to that Annunciation of

Botticelli. The angel has knelt down vehemently, but drawn himself back,

frightened at his own message; moved overmuch and awed by what he has to

say, and her to whom he must say it; lifting a hand which seems to beg

patience, till the speech which is throbbing in his heart can pass his

lips; eagerness defeating itself, passionate excitement turned into awe

in this young, delicate, passionate, and imaginative creature. He has

not said the word; but she has understood. She has seen him before; she

knows what he means, this vehement, tongue-tied messenger; and at his

sight she reels, her two hands up, the beating of her own blood too loud

in her ears, a sudden mist of tears clouding her eyes. This is no simple

damsel receiving the message, like Rossetti's terrified and awe-stricken

girl, that she is the handmaid of the Lord. This is the nun who has been

waiting for years to become Christ's own bride, and receives at length

the summons to him, in a tragic overpowering ecstasy, like Catherine in

Sodoma's fresco, sinking down at the touch of the rays from Christ's

wounds. Nay, this is, in fact, the mere long-loving woman, suddenly

overcome by the approach of bliss ever hungered for, but never expected,

hearing that it is she who is the beloved; and the angel is the knight's

squire, excited at the message he has to carry, but terrified at the

sight of the woman to whom he must carry it, panting with the weight of

another man's love, and learning, as he draws his breath to say those

words, what love is himself.

The absence of individual invention, implying the absence of individual

dramatic realisation, strikes one more than anywhere in the works of

Angelico; and most of all in his frescoes of the cells of St. Mark's.

For, while these are evidently less cared for as art, indeed scarcely

intended, in their hasty execution, to be considered as paintings at

all, they are more strictly religious in intention than any other of

Angelico's works; indeed, perhaps, of all paintings in the world, the

most exclusively devoted to a religious object. They are, in fact, so

many pages of Scripture stuck up, like texts in a waiting-room, in the

cells of the convent: an adjunct to the actual written or printed Bible

of each monk. For this reason we expect them to possess what belongs so

completely to the German engravers of Duerer's school, the very essential

of illustrative art--imaginative realisation of the scenes, an attempt

to seize the attention and fill it with the subject. This is by no means

the case: for Angelico, although a saint, was a man of the fifteenth

century, and, despite all his obvious efforts, he was not a real follower

of Giotto. What impressiveness of actual artistic arrangement these

frescoes really possess, is due, I think, to no imaginative effort

of the artist, but to the exigencies of the place; as any similar

impressiveness is due in Signorelli's Annunciation to the quality of his

form, and in Botticelli's Annunciation to the pervading character of his

heads and gestures. These pale angels and St. Dominicks and Magdalens,

these diaphanous, dazzling Christs and Virgins of Angelico's, shining

out of the dark corner of the cell made darker, deeper, by the dark

green or inky purple ground on which they are painted, are less the

spiritual conception of the painter than the accidental result of the

darkness of the place, where lines must be simple and colours light, if

anything is to be visible. For in the more important frescoes in the

corridors and chapter-room, where the light is better, there is a return

to Angelico's hackneyed vapid pinks and blues and lilacs, and a return

also to his niminy-piminy lines, to all the wax-doll world of the missal

painter. The fine fresco of St. Dominick at the foot of the cross, which

seems to constitute an exception to this rule, really goes to prove it,

since it is intended to be seen very much like the cell frescoes: white

and black on a blue ground at the end of the first corridor, a thing

to be looked at from a great distance, to impress the lay world that

sees it at the cloister and from outside the convent railing. The cell

frescoes are, I have said, the most exclusively religious paintings in

the world, since they are to the highest degree, what all absolutely

pious art must be, _aids to devotion_. Their use is to assist the monk

in that conjuring up of the actual momentary feelings, nay, sensations,

of the life of Christ which is part of his daily duty. They are such

stimuli as the Church has given sometimes in an artistic, sometimes in a

literary form, to an imagination jaded by the monotonous contemplation

of one subject, or overexcited to the extent of rambling easily to

another: they are what we fondly imagine will be the portraits of the

dear dead which we place before us, forgetting that after a while we

look without seeing, or see without feeling. That this is so, that these

painted Gospel leaves stuck on the cell walls are merely such mechanical

aids to devotion, explains the curious and startling treatment of

some of the subjects, which are yet, despite the seeming novelty and

impressiveness, very cold, undramatic, and unimaginative. Thus, there

is the fresco of Christ enthroned, blindfold, with alongside of Him a

bodiless scoffing head, with hat raised, and in the act of spitting;

buffeting hands, equally detached from any body, floating also on the

blue background. There is a Christ standing at the foot of the cross,

but with his feet in a sarcophagus, the column of the flagellation

monumentally or heraldically on one side, the lance of Longinus on the

other; and above, to the right, the floating face of Christ being kissed

by that of Judas; to the left the blindfold floating head of Christ again,

with the floating head of a soldier spitting at Him; and all round

buffeting and jibing hands, hands holding the sceptre of reed, and

hands counting out money; all arranged very much like the nails, hammer,

tweezers and cock on roadside crosses; each a thing whereon to fix

the mind, so as to realise that kiss of Judas, that spitting of the

soldiers, those slaps; and to hear, if possible, the chink of the pieces

of silver that sold our Lord. How different, these two pictorial dodges

of the purely mechanical Catholicism of the fifteenth century from

the tender or harrowing gospel illustrations, where every detail is

conceived as happening in the artist's own town and to his own kinsfolk,

of the Lutheran engravers of the school of Duerer!

Thus things go on throughout the fifteenth century, and, indeed,

deep into the sixteenth, where traditional arrangement and individual

conception overlap, according as a new artistic power does or does not

call forth a new dramatic idea. I have already alluded to the fact that

the Presentation of the Virgin remains the same, so far as arrangement

is concerned, in the pictures of Titian and Tintoret as in the frescoes

of Giotto and Gaddi. Michelangelo's Creation of Adam seems still inherited

from an obscure painter in the "Green Cloister," who inherited it from

the Pisan sculptors. On the other hand, the Resurrection and Last Judgment

of Signorelli at Orvieto, painted some years earlier, constitutes in many

of its dramatic details a perfectly original work. Be this as it may, and

however frequent the recurrence of old themes, with the sixteenth century

commences the era of new individual dramatic invention. Michelangelo's

Dividing of the Light from the Darkness, where the Creator broods still

in chaos, and commands the world to exist; and Raphael's Liberation of

St. Peter, with its triple illumination from the moon, the soldier's

torches and the glory of the liberating angel, are witnesses that

henceforward each man may invent for himself, because each man is in

possession of those artistic means which the Giottesques had indicated

and the artists of the fifteenth century had laboriously acquired. And

now, the Giottesque programme being fulfilled, art may go abroad and

seek for new methods and effects, for new dramatic conceptions.

III

The other day, walking along the river near Careggi (with its memories

of Lorenzo dei Medici and his Platonists), close to the little cupola

and loggia built by Ghirlandaio, I came upon a strip of new grass,

thickly whitened with daisies, beneath the poplars beginning to yellow

with pale sprouting leaves. And immediately there arose in my mind, by

the side of this real grass and real budding of trees, the remembrance

of certain early Renaissance pictures: the rusty, green, stencilled

grass and flowers of Botticelli, the faded tapestry work of Angelico;

making, as it were, the greenness greener, the freshness fresher, of

that real grass and those real trees. And not by the force of contrast,

but rather by the sense that as all this appears to me green and fresh

in the present, so likewise did it appear to those men of four centuries

ago: the fact of their having seen and felt, making me, all the more,

see and feel.

This is one of the peculiarities of rudimentary art--of the art of

the early Renaissance as well as of that of Persia and India, of

Constantinople, of every peasant potter all through the world: that,

not knowing very well its own aims, it fills its imperfect work with

suggestion of all manner of things which it loves, and tries to gain in

general pleasurableness what it loses in actual achievement; and lays

hold of us, like fragments of verse, by suggestiveness, quite as much

as by pictorial realisation. And upon this depends the other half of

the imaginative art of the Renaissance, the school of intellectual

decoration, of arabesques formed, not of lines and of colours, but of

associations and suggestions.

The desire which lies at the bottom of it--a desire masked as religious

symbolism in the old mosaicists and carvers and embroiderers--is the

desire to paint nice things, in default of painting a fine picture. The

beginning of such attempts is naturally connected with the use of gilding;

whether those gold grounds of the panel pictures of the fourteenth century

represented to the painters only a certain expenditure of gold foil, or

whether (as I have suggested, but I fear fantastically) their streakings

and veinings of coppery or silvery splendour, their stencillings of rays

and dots and fretwork, their magnificent inequality and variety of brown

or yellow or greenish effulgence, were vaguely connected in the minds of

those men with the splendour of the heaven in which the Virgin and the

Saints really dwell. It is the cunning use of this gilding, of tools

for ribbing and stencilling and damascening, which give half of their

marvellous exotic loveliness to Simone Martini's frescoes at Assisi and

his Annunciation of the Florentine Gallery; this, and the feeling for

wonderful gold woven and embroidered stuffs, like that white cloth of

gold of the kneeling angel, fit, in its purity and splendour, for the

robe of Grail king. The want of mechanical dexterity, however, prevented

the Giottesques from doing very much in the decorative line except

in conjunction with the art--perhaps quite separate from that of the

painter, and exercised by a different individual--of the embosser and

gilder.

It is with the fifteenth century that begins, in Italy as in Flanders (we

must think of the carved stonework, the Persian carpets, the damascened

armour, the brocade dresses of Van Eyck's and Memling's Holy Families),

the deliberate habit of putting into pictures as much as possible of the

beautiful and luxurious things of this world. The house of the Virgin,

originally a very humble affair, or rather, in the authority of the

early Giottesques, a _no place, nowhere_, develops gradually into a

very delightful residence in the choicest part of the town, or into a

pleasantly situated villa, like the one described in the Decameron,

commanding a fine view. The Virgin's bedchamber, where we are shown it,

as, for instance, in Crivelli's picture in the National Gallery, is

quite as well appointed in the way of beautiful bedding, carving, and

so forth, as the chamber of the lady of John Arnolfini of Lucca in Van

Eyck's portrait. Outside it, as we learn from Angelico, Cosimo Rosselli,

Lippi, Ghirlandaio, indeed, from almost every Florentine painter,

stretches a pleasant portico, decorated in the Ionic or Corinthian

style, as if by Brunellesco or Sangallo, with tesselated floor, or

oriental carpet, and usually a carved or gilded desk and praying

stool; while the privacy of the whole place is guarded by a high wall,

surmounted by vases, overtopped by cypresses, and in whose shelter

grows a row of well-kept roses and lilies. Sometimes this house, as I

have said, becomes a villa, as is the case, not unfrequently, with the

Lombards, who love to make the angel appear on the flowery grass against

a background of Alpine peaks, such as you see them, rising blue and

fairylike from the green ricefields about Pavia. Crivelli, however,

though a Lombard, prefers a genteel residence in town, the magnificent

Milan of Galeazzo and Filippo Visconti. He gives us a whole street,

where richly dressed and well peruked gentlemen look down from

the terraces, duly set with flower-pots, of houses ornamented with

terra-cotta figures and medallions like those of the hospital at Milan.

In this street the angel of the Annunciation is kneeling, gorgeously

got up in silks and brocades, and accompanied by a nice little bishop

carrying a miniature town on a tray. The Virgin seems to be receiving

the message through the window or the open door. She has a beautiful bed

with a red silk coverlet, some books, and a shelf covered with plates

and preserve jars. This evident appreciation of jam, as one of the

pleasant things of this world, corresponds with the pot of flowers on

the window, the bird-cage hanging up: the mother of Christ must have the

little tastes and luxuries of a well-to-do burgess's daughter. Again,

the cell of St. Jerome, painted some thirty years later by Carpaccio, in

the Church of the Slavonians, contains not only various convenient and

ornamental articles of furniture, but a collection of nick-nacks, among

which some antique bronzes are conspicuous.

The charm in all this is not so much that of the actual objects

themselves; it is that of their having delighted those people's minds.

We are pleased by their pleasure, and our imagination is touched by

their fancy. The effect is akin to that of certain kinds of poetry,

not the dramatic certainly, where we are pleased by the mere suggestion

of beautiful things, and quite as much by finding in the poet a mind

appreciative and desirous of them, constantly collecting them and

enhancing them by subtle arrangements; it is the case with much lyric

verse, with the Italian folk-rhymes, woven out of names of flowers

and herbs, with some of Shakespeare's and Fletcher's songs, with the

"Allegro" and "Penseroso," Keats, some of Heine, and, despite a mixture

of unholy intention, Baudelaire. The great master thereof in the early

Renaissance, the lyrist, if I may use the word, of the fifteenth century,

is of course Botticelli. He is one of those who most persistently

introduce delightful items into their works: elaborately embroidered

veils, scarves, and gold fringes. But being a man of fine imagination

and most delicate sense of form, he does not, like Angelico or Benozzo

or Carpaccio, merely stick pretty things about; he works them all into

his strange arabesque, half intellectual, half physical. Thus the screen

of roses[7] behind certain of his Madonnas, forming an exquisite Morris

pattern with the greenish-blue sky interlaced; and those beautiful,

carefully-drawn branches of spruce-fir and cypress, lace-like in his

Primavera; above all, that fan-like growth of myrtles, delicately cut

out against the evening sky, which not merely print themselves as shapes

upon the mind, but seem to fill it with a scent of poetry.

[Footnote 7: I learn from the learned that the Florence and Louvre

Madonnas, with the roses, are not Botticelli's; but Botticelli, I

am sure, would not have been offended by those lovely bushes being

attributed to him.]

This pleasure in the painter's pleasure in beautiful things is connected

with another quality, higher and rarer, in this sort of imaginative art.

It is our appreciation of the artist's desire for beauty and refinement,

of his search for the exquisite. Herein, to my mind, lies some of

the secret of Botticelli's fantastic grace; the explanation of that

alternate or rather interdependent ugliness and beauty. Botticelli,

as I have said elsewhere, must have been an admirer of the grace and

sentiment of Perugino, of the delicacy of form of certain Florentine

sculptors--Ghiberti, and those who proceed from him, Desiderio, Mino,

and particularly the mysterious Florentine sculptor of Rimini; and what

these men have done or do, Botticelli attempts, despite or (what is

worse) by means of the realistic drawing and ugly models of Florence,

the mechanism and arrangement of coarse men like the Pollaiolos.

The difficulty of attaining delicate form and sentiment with such

materials--it cannot be said to have been attained in that sense by any

other early Tuscan painter, not even Angelico or Filippo Lippi--makes the

desire but the keener, and turns it into a most persevering and almost

morbid research. Thence the extraordinary ingenuity displayed, frequently

to the detriment of the work, in the arrangement of hands (witness the

tying, clutching hands, with fingers bent curiously in intricate knots,

of the Calumny of Apelles), and of drapery; in the poising of bodies and

selection of general outline. This search for elegance and grace, for

the refined and unhackneyed, is frequently baffled by the ugliness of

Botticelli's models, and still more by Botticelli's deficient knowledge

of anatomy and habit of good form. But, when not baffled, this desire is

extraordinarily assisted by those very defects. This great decorator,

who uses the human form as so much pattern element, mere lines and

curves like those of a Raffaelesque arabesque, obtains with his

imperfect, anatomically defective, and at all events ill-fashioned

figures, a far-fetched and poignant grace impossible to a man dealing

with more perfect elements. For grace and distinction, which are

qualities of movement rather than of form, do not strike us very much in

a figure which is originally well made. The momentary charm of movement

is lost in the permanent charm of form; the creature could not be

otherwise than delightful, made as it is; and we thus miss the sense of

selection and deliberate arrangement, the sense of beauty as movement,

that is, as grace. Whereas, in the case of defective form, any grace

that may be obtained affects us _per se_. It need not have been there;

indeed, it was unlikely to be there; and hence it obtains the value and

charm of the unexpected, the rare, the far-fetched. This, I think, is

the explanation of the something of exotic beauty that attaches to

Botticelli: we perceive the structural form only negatively, sufficiently

to value all the more the ingenuity of arrangement by which it is made

to furnish a beautiful outline and beautiful movement; and we perceive

the great desire thereof. If we allow our eye to follow the actual

structure of the bodies, even in the Primavera, we shall recognise that

not one of these figures but is downright deformed and out of drawing.

Even the Graces have arms and shoulders and calves and stomachs all at

random; and the most beautiful of them has a slice missing out of her

head. But if, instead of looking at heads, arms, legs, bodies, separately,

and separate from the drapery, we follow the outline of the groups against

the background, drapery clinging or wreathing, arms intertwining, hands

combed out into wonderful fingers; if we regard these groups of figures

as a pattern stencilled on the background, we recognise that no pattern

could be more exquisite in its variety of broken up and harmonised lines.

The exquisite qualities of all graceful things, flowers, branches,

swaying reeds, and certain animals like the stag and peacock, seem to

have been abstracted and given to these half-human and wholly wonderful

creatures--these thin, ill put together, unsteady youths and ladies. The

ingenious grace of Botticelli passes sometimes from the realm of art

to that of poetry, as in the case of those flowers, with stiff, tall

stems, which he places by the uplifted foot of the middle Grace, thus

showing that she has trodden over it, like Virgil's Camilla, without

crushing it. But the element of sentiment and poetry depends in reality

upon the fascination of movement and arrangement; fascination seemingly

from within, a result of exquisite breeding in those imperfectly made

creatures. It is the grace of a woman not beautiful, but well dressed

and moving well; the exquisiteness of a song sung delicately by an

insufficient or defective voice: a fascination almost spiritual, since

it seems to promise a sensitiveness to beauty, a careful avoidance of

ugliness, a desire for something more delicate, a reverse of all things

gross and accidental, a possibility of perfection.

This imagination of pleasant detail and accessory, which delights us

by the intimacy into which we are brought with the artist's innermost

conception, develops into what, among the masters of the fifteenth

century, I should call the imagination of the fairy tale. A small number

of scriptural and legendary stories lend themselves quite particularly

to the development of such beautiful accessory, which soon becomes the

paramount interest, and vests the whole with a totally new character: a

romantic, childish charm, the charm of the improbable taken for granted,

of the freedom to invent whatever one would like to see but cannot, the

charm of the fairy story. From this unconscious altering of the value of

certain Scripture tales, arises a romantic treatment which is naturally

applied to all other stories, legends of saints, biographical accounts,

Decameronian tales (Mr. Leyland once possessed some Botticellian

illustrations of the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti, the hero of Dryden's

"Theodore and Honoria," a sort of pendant to the Griseldis attributed to

Pinturicchio), and mythological episodes: a new kind of invention, based

upon a desire to please, and as different from the invention of the

Giottesques as the Arabian Nights are different from Homer.

I have said that it begins with the unconscious altering of the values

of certain scriptural stories, owing to the preponderance of detail over

accessory. The chief example of this is the Adoration of the Magi. In

the paintings of the Giottesques, and in the paintings of the serious,

or duller, masters of the fifteenth century--Ghirlandaio, Rosselli,

Filippino, those for whom the fairy tale could exist no more than for

Michelangelo or Andrea del Sarto--the chief interest in this episode is

the Holy Family, the miraculous Babe whom these great folk came so far to

see. The fourteenth century made very short work of the kings, allowing

them a minimum of splendour; and those of the fifteenth century, who

cared only for artistic improvement, copied slavishly, giving the kings

their retinue only as they might have introduced any number of studio

models or burgesses aspiring at portraits, after the fashion of the

Brancacci and S. Maria Novella frescoes, where spectators of miracles

make a point never to look at the miraculous proceedings. But there

were men who felt differently: the men who loved splendour and detail.

To Gentile da Fabriano, that wonderful man in whom begins the colour and

romance of Venetian painting,[8] the adoration of the kings could not

possibly be what it had been for the Giottesques, or what it still was

for Angelico. The Madonna, St. Joseph, the child Christ did not cease to

be interesting: he painted them with evident regard, gave the Madonna a

beautiful gold hem to her dress, made St. Joseph quite unusually amiable,

and shed a splendid gilt glory about the child Christ. But to him the

wonderful part of the business was not the family in the shed at Bethlehem

which the kings came to see; but those kings themselves, who came from

such a long way off. He put himself at the point of view of a holy

family less persuaded of its holiness, who should suddenly see a bevy

of grand folks come up to their door: the miraculous was here. The

spiritual glory was of course on the side of the family of Joseph; but

the temporal glory, the glory that delighted Gentile, that went to

his brain and made him childishly happy, was with the kings and their

retinue. That retinue--the trumpeters prancing on white horses, with

gold lace covers, the pages, the armour-bearers, the treasurers, the

huntsmen with the hounds, the falconers with the hawks, winding for

miles down the hills, and expanding into the circle of strange and

delightful creatures that kings must have about their persons: jesters

with heads thrown back and eyes squeezed close, while thinking of some

funny jest; dwarfs and negroes, almost as amusing as their camels

and giraffes; tame lynxes chained behind the saddle, monkeys perched,

jabbering, on the horses' manes--all this was much more wonderful in

Gentile da Fabriano's opinion than all the wonders of the Church, which

grew somehow less wonderful the more implicitly you believed in them.

Then, in the midst of all these delightful splendours, the kings

themselves! The old grey-beard in the brown pomegranate embossed brocade

going on all fours, and kissing the little child's feet; the dark young

man, with peaked beard and wistful face, removing his coroneted turban;

and last, but far from least, the youngest king, the beardless boy, with

the complexion of a well-bred young lady, the almond eyes and golden

hair, standing up in his tunic of white cloth of silver, while one squire

unbuckled his spurs and another removed his cloak. The darling little

Prince Charming, between whom and the romantic bearded young king there

must for some time have been considerable rivalry, and alternating views

in the minds of men and the hearts of women (particularly when the

second king, the bearded one, became the John Palaeologus of Benozzo),

until it was victoriously borne in upon the public that this delicate,

beardless creature, so much younger and always the last, must evidently

be _the_ prince, the youngest of the king's sons in the fairy tales, the

one who always succeeds where the two elder have failed, who gets the

Water that Dances and the Apple Branch that Sings, who carries off the

enchanted oranges, slays the ogre, releases the princess, flies through

the air, the hero, the prince of Fairyland....

[Footnote 8: This quality, particularly in the Adoration of the Magi,

is already very marked in the very charming and little known frescoes

of Ottaviano Nelli, in the former Trinci Palace at Foligno. Nelli was

the master of Gentile, and through him greatly influenced Venice.]

The fairy business of the story of the Three Kings takes even greater

proportions in the delightful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi

Chapel. Here the Holy Family are suppressed, so to speak, altogether,

tucked into the altar in a picture, and the act of adoration at Bethlehem

becomes the mere excuse for the romantic adventures of three people of

the highest quality. The journey itself, where Gentile da Fabriano sums

up in that procession twisting about the background of his picture, here

occupies a whole series of frescoes. And on this journey is concentrated

all that the Renaissance knew of splendour, delightfulness, and romance.

The green valleys, watered by twisting streams, with matted grasses,

which Botticelli puts behind his enthroned Madonna and victorious

Judith; Angelico's favourite hillsides with blossoming fruit trees and

pointing cypresses; the mysterious firwoods--more mysterious for their

remoteness on the high Apennines--which fascinate the fancy of Filippo

Lippi; all this is here, and through it all winds the procession of

the Three Kings. There are the splendid stuffs and Oriental jewels and

trappings, the hounds and monkeys, and jesters and negroes, the falcon

on the wrist, the lynxes chained to the saddle, all the magnificence

dreamed by Gentile da Fabriano; and among it all ride, met by bevies

of peacock-winged angels, kneeling and singing before the flowering

rose-hedges, the Three Kings. The old man, who looks like some Platonist

philosopher, the beardless prince, surrounded by his noisy huntsmen and

pages; and that dark-bearded youth in the Byzantine dress and shovel

hat, the genuine king from the East, riding with ardent, wistful eyes, a

beautiful kingly young Quixote: Sir Percival seeking the Holy Grail, or

King Cophetua seeking for his beggar girl. It is a page of fairy tale,

retold by Boiardo or Spenser.

After such things as these it is difficult to speak of those more

prosaic tales, really intended as such, on which the painters of the

Renaissance spent their fancy. Still they have all their charm, these

fairy tales, not of the great poets indeed, but of the nursery.

There is, for instance, the story of a good young man (with a name for

a fairy tale too, AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini!) showing his adventures by

land and sea and at many courts, the honours conferred on him by kings

and emperors, and how at last he was made Pope, having begun as a mere

poor scholar on a grey nag; all painted by Pinturicchio in the Cathedral

library of Siena. There is the lamentable story of a bride and bridegroom,

by Vittore Carpaccio: the stately, tall bride, St. Ursula, and the dear

little foolish bridegroom, looking like her little brother; a story

containing a great many incidents: the sending of an embassy to the King;

the King being sorely puzzled in his mind, leaning his arm upon his bed

and asking the Queen's advice; the presence upon the palace steps of an

ill-favoured old lady, with a crutch and basket, suspiciously like the

bad fairy who had been forgotten at the christening; the apparition of

an angel to the Princess, sleeping, with her crown neatly put away at

the foot of the bed; the arrival of the big ship in foreign parts, with

the Bishop and Clergy putting their heads out of the port-holes and

asking very earnestly, "Where are we?" and finally, a most fearful

slaughter of the Princess and her eleven thousand ladies-in-waiting. The

same Carpaccio--a regular old gossip from whom one would expect all the

formulas, "and then he says to the king, Sacred Crown," "and then the

Prince walks, walks, walks, walks." "A company of knights in armour nice

and shining," "three comely ladies in a green meadow," and so forth of

the professional Italian story-teller--the same Carpaccio, who was also,

and much more than the more solemn Giovanni Bellini, the first Venetian

to handle oil paints like Titian and Giorgione, painted the fairy tale

of St. George, with quite the most dreadful dragon's walk, a piece of

sea sand embedded with bones and half-gnawed limbs, and crawled over

by horrid insects, that any one could wish to see; and quite the most

comical dragon, particularly when led out for execution among the

minarets and cupolas and camels and turbans and symbols of a kind of

small Constantinople.

One of the funniest of all such series of stories, and which shows that

when the Renaissance men were driven to it they could still invent,

though (apparently) when they had to invent in this fashion, they ceased

to be able to paint, is the tale of Griseldis, attributed in our National

Gallery to Pinturicchio, but certainly by a very inferior painter of his

school. The Marquis, after hunting deer on a steep little hill, shaded

by elm trees, sees Griseldis going to a well, a pitcher on her head. He

reins in his white horse, and cranes over in his red cloak, the young

parti-coloured lords-in-waiting pressing forwards to see her, but only

as much as politeness warrants. Scene II.--A stubbly landscape. The

Marquis, in red and gold cloak and well-combed yellow head of hair,

approaches on foot to the little pink farm-house. Surprise of old

Giannucole, who is coming down the exterior steps. "Bless my soul! the

Lord Marquis!" "Where is your daughter?" asks the Marquis, with pointing

finger. But the daughter, hearing voices, has come on to the balcony and

throws up her arms astonished. "Dear me! the cavalier who accosted me in

the wood!" The Marquis and Grizel walk off, he deferentially dapper, she

hanging back a little in her black smock. Scene III.--The Marquis, still

in purple and gold, and red stockings and Hessian boots, says with some

timidity and much grace, pointing to the magnificent clothes brought by

his courtiers, "Would you mind, dear Grizel, putting on these clothes

to please me?" But Griseldis is extremely modest. She tightens her white

shift about her, and doesn't dare look at the cloth of gold dress which

is so pretty. Scene IV.--A triumphal arch, with four gilt figures. The

Marquis daintily, with much wrist-twisting, offers to put the ring on

Griseldis' hand, who obediently accepts, while pages and trumpeters hold

the Marquis's three horses.

Act II. Scene I.--A portico. Griseldis reluctantly, but obediently,

gives up her baby. Scene II.--A conspirator in black cloak and red

stockings walks off with it on the tips of his toes, and then returns

and tells the Marquis that his Magnificence's orders have been executed.