Scene V.--Triumphal arch, with bear chained to it, peacock, tame deer,

crowd of courtiers. A lawyer reads the act of divorce. The Marquis steps

forward to Grizel with hands raised, "After this kind of behaviour, it

is quite impossible for me to live with you any longer." Griseldis is

ladylike and resigned. The Marquis says with acrimonious politeness,

"I am sorry, madam, I must trouble you to restore to me those garments

before departing from my house." Griseldis slowly let her golden frock

fall to her feet, then walks off (Scene VI.) towards the little pink

farm, where her father is driving the sheep. The courtiers look on and

say, "Dear, dear, what very strange things do happen!"

Act III. Scene I.--Outside Giannucole's farm. The Marquis below. Griseldis

at the balcony. He says, "I want to hire you as a maid." "Yes, my Lord."

Scene II.--A portico, with a large company at dinner. The Marquis

introduces his supposed bride and brother-in-law, in reality his own

children. He turns round to Griseldis, who is waiting at table, and bids

her be a little more careful what she is about with those dishes. Scene

III.--Dumb show. Griseldis, in her black smock, is sweeping out the future

Marchioness's chamber. Scene IV.--At table. The Marquis suddenly bids

Griseldis, who is waiting, come and sit by him; he kisses her, and points

at the supposed bride and brother-in-law. "Those are our children, dear."

A young footman is quite amazed. Scene V.--A procession of caparisoned

horse, and giraffes carrying monkeys. A grand supper. "And they live

happy ever after."

But the fairy tale, beyond all others, with these painters of the

fifteenth century, is the antique myth. No Bibbienas and Bembos

and Calvos have as yet indoctrinated them (as Raphael, alas! was

indoctrinated) with the _real spirit of classical times_, teaching them

that the essence of antiquity was to have no essence at all; no Ariostos

and Tassos have taught the world at large the real Ovidian conception,

the monumental allegoric nature and tendency to vacant faces and

sprawling, big-toed nudity of the heroes and goddesses as Giulio Romano

and the Caracci so well understood to paint them. For all the humanists

that hung about courts, the humanities had not penetrated much into

the Italian people. The imaginative form and colour was still purely

mediaeval; and the artists of the early Renaissance had to work out their

Ovidian stories for themselves, and work them out of their own material.

Hence the mythological creatures of these early painters are all, more

or less, gods in exile, with that charm of a long residence in the

Middle Ages which makes, for instance, the sweetheart of Ritter Tannhaeuser

so infinitely more seductive than the paramour of Adonis; that charm

which, when we meet it occasionally in literature, in parts of Spenser,

for instance, or in a play like Peel's "Arraignment of Paris," is so

peculiarly delightful.

These early painters have made up their Paganism for themselves, out of

all pleasant things they knew; their fancy has brooded upon it; and the

very details that make us laugh, the details coming direct from the

Middle Ages, the spirit in glaring opposition occasionally to that of

Antiquity, bring home to us how completely this Pagan fairyland is a

genuine reality to these men. We feel this in nearly all the work of

that sort--least, in the archaeological Mantegna's. We see it beginning

in the mere single figures--the various drawings of Orpheus, "Orpheus le

doux menestrier jouant de flutes et de musettes," as Villon called him,

much about that time--piping or fiddling among little toy animals out of

a Nuremberg box; the drawing of fauns carrying sheep, some with a queer

look of the Good Shepherd about them, of Pinturicchio; and rising to

such wonderful exhibitions (to me, with their obscure reminiscence of

pageants, they always seem like ballets) as Perugino's Ceiling of the

Cambio, where, among arabesqued constellations, the gods of antiquity

move gravely along: the bearded knight Mars, armed _cap-a-pie_ like a

mediaeval warrior; the delicate Mercurius, a beautiful page-boy stripped

of his emblazoned clothes; Luna dragged along by two nymphs; and Venus

daintily poised on one foot on her dove-drawn chariot, the exquisite

Venus in her clinging veils, conquering the world with the demure

gravity and adorable primness of a high-born young abbess.

The actual fairy story becomes, little by little, more complete--the

painters of the fifteenth century work, little guessing it, are the

precursors of Walter Crane. The full-page illustration of a tale of

semi-mediaeval romance--of a romance like Spenser's "Fairy Queen" or

Mr. Morris's "Earthly Paradise," exists distinctly in that picture

and drawing, by the young Raphael or whomsoever else, of Apollo and

Marsyas.[9] This piping Marsyas seated by the tree stump, this naked

Apollo, thin and hectic like an undressed archangel, standing against

the Umbrian valley with its distant blue hills, its castellated village,

its delicate, thinly-leaved trees--things we know so well in connection

with the Madonna and Saints, that this seems absent for only a few

minutes--all this is as little like Ovid as the triumphant antique

Galatea of Raphael is like Spenser. Again, there is Piero di Cosimo's

Death of Procris: the poor young woman lying dead by the lake, with

the little fishing town in the distance, the swans sailing and cranes

strutting, and the dear young faun--no Praxitelian god with invisible

ears, still less the obscene beast whom the late Renaissance copied from

Antiquity--a most gentle, furry, rustic creature, stooping over her in

puzzled, pathetic concern, at a loss, with his want of the practice of

cities and the knowledge of womankind, what to do for this poor lady

lying among the reeds and the flowering scarlet sage; a creature the

last of whose kind (friendly, shy, woodland things, half bears or half

dogs, frequent in mediaeval legend), is the satyr of Fletcher's "Faithful

Shepherdess," the only poetic conception in that gross and insipid piece

of magnificent rhetoric. The perfection of the style must naturally be

sought from Botticelli, and in his Birth of Venus (but who may speak of

that after the writer of most subtle fancy, of most exquisite language,

among living Englishman?)[10] This goddess, not triumphant but sad in

her pale beauty, a king's daughter bound by some charm to flit on her

shell over the rippling sea, until the winds blow it in the kingdom of

the good fairy Spring, who shelters her in her laurel grove and covers

her nakedness with the wonderful mantle of fresh-blown flowers....

[Footnote 9: I believe now unanimously given to Pinturicchio.]

[Footnote 10: Alas! no longer among the living, though among those

whose spiritual part will never die. Walter Pater died July 1894: a

man whose sense of loveliness and dignity made him, in mature life,

as learned in moral beauty as he had been in visible.]

But the imagination born of the love of beautiful and suggestive detail

soars higher; become what I would call the lyric art of the Renaissance,

the art which not merely gives us beauty, but stirs up in ourselves as

much beauty again of stored-up impression, reaches its greatest height

in certain Venetian pictures of the early sixteenth century. Pictures of

vague or enigmatic subject, or no subject at all, like Giorgione's Fete

Champetre and Soldier and Gipsy, Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, The

Three Ages of Man, and various smaller pictures by Bonifazio, Palma,

Basaiti; pictures of young men in velvets and brocades, solemn women

with only the glory of their golden hair and flesh, seated in the grass,

old men looking on pensive, children rolling about; with the solemnity

of great, spreading trees, of greenish evening skies: the pathos of

the song about to begin or just finished, lute or viol or pipe still

lying hard by. Of such pictures it is best, perhaps, not to speak. The

suggestive imagination is wandering vaguely, dreaming; fumbling at

random sweet, strange chords out of its viol, like those young men and

maidens. The charm of such works is that they are never explicit; they

tell us, like music, deep secrets, which we feel, but cannot translate

into words.

IV

The first new factor in art which meets us at the beginning of the

sixteenth century is not among the Italians, and is not a merely

artistic power. I speak of the passionate individual fervour for

the newly recovered Scriptures, manifest among the German engravers,

Protestants all or nearly all, and among whose works is for ever turning

up the sturdy, passionate face of Luther, the enthusiastic face of

Melanchthon. The very nature of these men's art is conceivable only

where the Bible has suddenly become the reading, and the chief reading,

of the laity. These prints, large and small, struck off in large numbers,

are not church ornaments like frescoes or pictures, nor aids to monastic

devotion like Angelico's Gospel histories at St. Mark's--they are

illustrations to the book which every one is reading, things to be

framed in the chamber of every burgher or mechanic, to be slipped into

the prayer-book of every housewife, to be conned over during the long

afternoons, by the children near the big stove or among the gooseberry

bushes of the garden. And they are, therefore, much more than the

Giottesque inventions, the expression of the individual artist's

ideas about the incidents of Scripture; and an expression not for the

multitude at large, fresco or mosaic that could be elaborated by a

sceptical or godless artist, but a re-explanation as from man to man

and friend: this is how the dear Lord looked, or acted--see, the words

in the Bible are so or so forth. Therefore, there enters into these

designs, which contain after all only the same sort of skill which was

rife in Italy, so much homeliness at once, and poignancy and sublimity

of imagination. The Virgin, they have discovered, is not that grandly

dressed lady, always in the very finest brocade, with the very finest

manners, and holding a divine infant that has no earthly wants, whom Van

Eyck and Memling and Meister Stephan painted. She is a good young woman,

a fairer version of their dear wife, or the woman who might have been

that; no carefully selected creature as with the Italians, no well-made

studio model, with figure unspoilt by child-bearing, but a real wife and

mother, with real milk in her breasts (the Italian virgin, save with one

or two Lombards, is never permitted to suckle)[11], which she very readily

and thoroughly gives to the child, guiding the little mouth with her

fingers. And she sits in the lonely fields by the hedges and windmills

in the fair weather; or in the neat little chamber with the walled town

visible between the pillar of the window, as in Bartholomew Beham's

exquisite design, reading, or suckling, or sewing, or soothing the

fretful baby; no angels around her, or rarely: the Scripture says

nothing about such a court of seraphs as the Italians and Flemings, the

superstitious Romanists, always placed round the mother of Christ. It

is all as it might have happened to them; they translate the Scripture

into their everyday life, they do not pick out of it the mere stately

and poetic incidents like the Giottesques. This everyday life of theirs

is crude enough, and in many cases nasty enough; they have in those

German free towns a perfect museum of loathsome ugliness, born of ill

ventilation, gluttony, starvation, or brutality: quite fearful wrinkled

harridans and unabashed fat, guzzling harlots, and men of every variety

of scrofula, and wart and belly, towards none of which (the best far

transcending the worst Italian Judas) they seem to feel any repugnance.

They have also a beastly love of horrors; their decollations and

flagellations are quite sickening in detail, as distinguished from the

tidy, decorous executions of the early Italians; and one feels that they

do enjoy seeing, as in one of their prints, the bowels of St. Erasmus

being taken out with a windlass, or Jael, as Altdorfer has shown her

in his romantic print, neatly hammering the nail into the head of the

sprawling, snoring Sisera. There is a good deal of grossness, too (of

which, among the Italians, even Robetta and similar, there is so little),

in the details of village fairs and adventures of wenches with their

Schatz; and a strange permeating nightmare, gruesomeness of lewd, warty

devils, made up of snouts, hoofs, bills, claws, and incoherent parts

of incoherent creatures; of perpetual skeletons climbing in trees, or

appearing behind flower-beds. But there is also--and Holbein's Dance of

Death, terrible, jocular, tender, vulgar and poetic, contains it all, this

German world--a great tenderness. Tenderness not merely in the heads of

women and children, in the fervent embrace of husband and wife and mother

and daughter; but in the feeling for dumb creatures and inanimate things,

the gentle dogs of St. Hubert, the deer that crouch among the rocks with

Genevieve, the very tangled grasses and larches and gentians that hang

to the crags, drawn as no Italian ever drew them; the quiet, sentimental

little landscapes of castles on fir-clad hills, of manor-houses, gabled

and chimneyed, among the reeds and willows of shallow ponds. These

feelings, Teutonic doubtless, but less mediaeval than we might think, for

the Middle Ages of the Minnesingers were terribly conventional, seem to

well up at the voice of Luther; and it is this which make the German

engravers, men not always of the highest talents, invent new and beautiful

Gospel pictures. Of these I would take two as typical--typical of

individual fancy most strangely contrasting with the conventionalism of

the Italians. Let the reader think of any of the scores of Flights into

Egypt, and of Resurrections by fifteenth-century Italians, or even

Giottesques; and then turn to two prints, one of each of these subjects

respectively, by Martin Schongauer and Altdorfer. Schongauer gives a

delightful oasis: palms and prickly pears, the latter conceived as

growing at the top of a tree; below, lizards at play and deer grazing;

in this place the Virgin has drawn up her ass, who browses the thistles

at his feet, while St. Joseph, his pilgrim bottle bobbing on his back,

hangs himself with all his weight to the branches of a date palm, trying

to get the fruit within reach. Meanwhile a bevy of sweet little angels

have come to the rescue; they sit among the branches, dragging them down

towards him, and even bending the whole stem at the top so that he may

get at the dates. Such a thing as this is quite lovely, particularly

after the routine of St. Joseph trudging along after the donkey, the

eternal theme of the Italians. In Altdorfer's print Christ is ascending

in a glory of sunrise clouds, banner in hand, angels and cherubs peering

with shy curiosity round the cloud edge. The sepulchre is open, guards

asleep or stretching themselves, and yawning all round; and childish

young angels look reverently into the empty grave, rearranging the

cerecloths, and trying to roll back the stone lid. One of them leans

forward, and utterly dazzles a negro watchman, stepping forward, lantern

in hand; in the distance shepherds are seen prowling about. "This," says

Altdorfer to himself, "is how it must have happened."

[Footnote 11: And the circular so-called Botticelli (now given, I

believe, to San Gallo) in the National Gallery.]

Hence, among these Germans, the dreadful seriousness and pathos of the

Passion, the violence of the mob, the brutality of the executioners,

above all, the awful sadness of Christ. There is here somewhat of the

realisation of what He must have felt in finding the world He had come

to redeem so vile and cruel. In what way, under what circumstances,

such thoughts would come to these men, is revealed to us by that

magnificent head of the suffering Saviour--a design apparently for a

carved crucifix--under which Albrecht Duerer wrote the pathetic words:

"I drew this in my sickness."

Thus much of the power of that new factor, the individual interest in

the Scriptures. All other innovations on the treatment of religious

themes were due, in the sixteenth century, but still more in the

seventeenth, to the development of some new artistic possibility, or

to the gathering together in the hands of one man of artistic powers

hitherto existing only in a dispersed condition. This is the secret

of the greatness of Raphael as a pictorial poet, that he could do all

manner of new things merely by holding all the old means in his grasp.

This is the secret of those wonderful inventions of his, which do not

take our breath away like Michelangelo's or Rembrandt's, but seem at the

moment the one and only right rendering of the subject: the Liberation

of St. Peter, Heliodorus, Ezechiel, and the whole series of magnificent

Old Testament stories on the ceiling of the Loggie. In Raphael we see

the perfect fulfilment of the Giottesque programme: he can do all that

the first theme inventors required for the carrying out of their ideas;

and therefore he can have new, entirely new, themes. Raphael furnishes,

for the first time since Giotto, an almost complete set of pictorial

interpretations of Scripture.

We are now, as we proceed in the sixteenth century, in the region where

new artistic powers admit of new imaginative conceptions on the part

of the individual. We gain immensely by the liberation from the old

tradition, but we lose immensely also. We get the benefit of the fancy

and feelings of this individual, but we are at the mercy, also, of his

stupidity and vulgarity. Of this the great examples are Tintoretto, and

after him Velasquez and Rembrandt. Of Tintoret I would speak later,

for he is eminently the artist in whom the gain and the loss are most

typified, and perhaps most equally distributed, and because, therefore,

he contrasts best with the masters anterior to Raphael.

The new powers in Velasquez and Rembrandt were connected with the

problem of light, or rather, one might say, in the second case, of

darkness. This new faculty of seizing the beauties, momentary and not

inherent in the object, due to the various effects of atmosphere and

lighting up, added probably a good third to the pleasure-bestowing

faculty of art; it was the beginning of a kind of democratic movement

against the stern domination of such things as were privileged in shape

and colour. A thousand things, ugly or unimaginative in themselves, a

plain face, a sallow complexion, an awkward gesture, a dull arrangement

of lines, could be made delightful and suggestive. A wet yard, a pail

and mop, and a servant washing fish under a pump could become, in the

hands of Peter de Hoogh, and thanks to the magic of light and shade, as

beautiful and interesting in their way as a swirl of angels and lilies

by Botticelli. But this redemption of the vulgar was at the expense,

as I have elsewhere pointed out, of a certain growing callousness to

vulgarity. What holds good as to the actual artistic, visible quality,

holds good also as to the imaginative value. Velasquez's Flagellation,

if indeed it be his, in our National Gallery, has a pathos, a something

that catches you by the throat, in that melancholy weary body, broken

with ignominy and pain, sinking down by the side of the column, which

is inseparable from the dreary grey light, the livid colour of the

flesh--there is no joy in the world where such things can be. But the

angel who has just entered has not come from heaven--such a creature is

fit only to roughly shake up the pillows of paupers, dying in the damp

dawn in the hospital wards.

It is, in a measure, different with Rembrandt, exactly because he is the

master, not of light, but of darkness, or of light that utterly dazzles.

His ugly women and dirty Jews of Rotterdam are either hidden in the gloom

or reduced to mere vague outlines, specks like gnats in the sunshine, in

the effulgence of light. Hence we can enjoy, almost without any disturbing

impressions, the marvellous imagination shown in his etchings of Bible

stories. Rembrandt is to Duerer as an archangel to a saint: where the

German draws, the Dutchman seems to bite his etching plate with elemental

darkness and glory. Of these etchings I would mention a few; the reader

may put these indications alongside of his remembrances of the Arena

Chapel, or of Angelico's cupboard panels in the Academy at Florence:

they show how intimately dramatic imagination depends in art upon mere

technical means, how hopelessly limited to mere indication were the

early artists, how forced along the path of dramatic realisation are the

men of modern times.

_The Annunciation to the Shepherds_: The heavens open in a circular

whirl among the storm darkness, cherubs whirling distantly like

innumerable motes in a sunbeam; the angel steps forward on a ray of

light, projecting into the ink-black night. The herds have perceived

the vision, and rush headlong in all directions, while the trees groan

beneath the blast of that opening of heaven. A horse, seen in profile,

with the light striking on his eyeball, seems paralysed by terror. The

shepherds have only just awakened. _The Nativity_: Darkness. A vague

crowd of country folk jostling each other noiselessly. A lantern, a

white speck in the centre, sheds a smoky, uncertain light on the corner

where the Child sleeps upon the pillows, the Virgin, wearied, resting

by its side, her face on her hand. Joseph is seated by, only his head

visible above his book. The cows are just visible in the gloom. The

lantern is held by a man coming carefully forward, uncovering his head,

the crowd behind him. _A Halt on the Journey to Egypt_: Night. The

lantern hung on a branch. Joseph seated sleepily, with his fur cap

drawn down; the Virgin and Child resting against the packsaddle on the

ground. _An Interior_: The Virgin hugging and rocking the Child. Joseph,

outside, looks in through the window. _The Raising of Lazarus_: A vault

hung with scimitars, turbans, and quivers. Against the brilliant daylight

just let in, the figure of Christ, seen from behind, stands out in His

long robes, raising His hand to bid the dead arise. Lazarus, pale,

ghost-like in this effulgence, slowly, wearily raises his head in the

sepulchre. The crowd falls back. Astonishment, awe. This coarse Dutchman

has suppressed the incident of the bystanders holding their nose, to

which the Giottesques clung desperately. This is not a moment to think of

stenches or infection. _Entombment_: Night. The platform below the cross.

A bier, empty, spread with a winding-sheet, an old man arranging it at

the head. The dead Saviour being slipped down from the cross on a sheet,

two men on a ladder letting the body down, others below receiving it,

trying to prevent the arm from trailing. Immense solemnity, carefulness,

hushedness. A distant illuminated palace blazes out in the night. One

feels that they are stealing Him away.

I have reversed the chronological order and chosen to speak of Tintoret

after Rembrandt, because, being an Italian and still in contact with

some of the old tradition, the great Venetian can show more completely,

both what was gained and what was lost in imaginative rendering by the

liberation of the individual artist and the development of artistic

means. First, of the gain. This depends mainly upon Tintoret's handling

of light and shade, and his foreshortenings: it enables him to compose

entirely in huge masses, to divide or concentrate the interest, to throw

into vague insignificance the less important parts of a situation in

order to insist upon the more important; it gives him the power also of

impressing us by the colossal and the ominous. The masterpiece of this

style, and probably Tintoret's masterpiece therefore, is the great

Crucifixion at S. Rocco. To feel its full tragic splendour one must

think of the finest things which the early Renaissance achieved, such as

Luini's beautiful fresco at Lugano; by the side of the painting at S.

Rocco everything is tame, except, perhaps, Rembrandt's etching called

the Three Crosses. After this, and especially to be compared with the

frescoes of Masaccio and Ghirlandaio of the same subject, comes the

Baptism of Christ. The old details of figures dressing and undressing,

which gave so much pleasure to earlier painters, for instance, Piero

della Francesca, in the National Gallery, are entirely omitted, as the

nose-holding in the Raising of Lazarus, is omitted by Rembrandt. Christ

kneels in the Jordan, with John bending over him, and vague multitudes

crowding the banks, distant, dreamlike beneath the yellow storm-light.

Of Tintoret's Christ before Pilate, of that figure of the Saviour, long,

straight, wrapped in white and luminous like his own wraith, I have

spoken already. But I must speak of the S. Rocco Christ in the Garden,

as imaginative as anything by Rembrandt, and infinitely more beautiful.

The moonlight tips the draperies of the three sleeping apostles, gigantic,

solemn. Above, among the bushes, leaning His head on His hand, is seated

Christ, weary to death, numbed by grief and isolation, recruiting for

final resistance. The sense of being abandoned of all men and of God has

never been brought home in this way by any other painter; the little

tear-stained Saviours, praying in broad daylight, of Perugino and his

fellows, are mere distressed mortals. This betrayed and resigned Saviour

has upon Him the _weltschmerz_ of Prometheus. But even here we begin to

feel the loss, as well as the gain, of the painter being forced from the

dramatic routine of earlier days: instead of the sweet, tearful little

angel of the early Renaissance, there comes to this tragic Christ, in

a blood-red nimbus, a brutal winged creature thrusting the cup in His

face. The uncertainty of Tintoret's inspirations, the uncertainty of

result of these astonishing pictorial methods of attaining the dramatic,

the occasional vapidness and vulgarity of the man, unrestrained by any

stately tradition like the vapidness and vulgarity of so many earlier

masters,[12] comes out already at S. Rocco. And principally in the

scene of the Temptation, a theme rarely, if ever, treated before the

sixteenth century, and which Tintoret has made unspeakably mean in its

unclean and dramatically impotent suggestiveness: the Saviour parleying

from a kind of rustic edifice with a good-humoured, fat, half feminine

Satan, fluttering with pink wings like some smug seraph of Bernini's

pupils. After this it is scarce necessary to speak of whatever is

dramatically abortive (because successfully expressing just the wrong

sort of sentiment, the wrong situation) in Tintoret's work: his Woman

taken in Adultery, with the dapper young Rabbi, offended neither by

adultery in general nor by this adulteress in particular; the Washing of

the Feet, in London, where the conversation appears to turn upon the

excessive hotness or coldness of the water in the tub; the Last Supper

at S. Giorgio Maggiore, where, among the mysterious wreaths of smoke

peopled with angels, Christ rises from His seat and holds the cup to His

neighbour's lips with the gesture, as He says, "This is My blood," of

a conjuror to an incredulous and indifferent audience. To Tintoret

the contents of the chalice is the all-important matter: where is the

majesty of the old Giottesque gesture, preserved by Leonardo, of pushing

forward the bread with one hand, the wine with the other, and thus

uncovering the head and breast of the Saviour, the gesture which does

indeed mean--"I am the bread you shall eat, and the wine you shall

drink"? There remains, however, to mention another work of Tintoret's

which, coming in contact with one's recollections of earlier art, may

suggest strange doubts and well nigh shake one's faith in the imaginative

efficacy of all that went before: his enormous canvas of the Last Day,

at S. Maria dell' Orto. The first and overwhelming impression, even

before one has had time to look into this apocalyptic work, is that

no one could have conceived such a thing in earlier days, not even

Michelangelo when he painted his Last Judgment, nor Raphael when he

designed the Vision of Ezechiel. This is, indeed, one thinks, a revelation

of the end of all things. Great storm clouds, whereon throne the Almighty

and His Elect, brood over the world, across which, among the crevassed,

upheaving earth, pours the wide glacier torrent of Styx, with the boat

of Charon struggling across its precipitous waters. The angels, confused

with the storm clouds of which they are the spirit, lash the damned down

to the Hell stream, band upon band, even from the far distance. And in

the foreground the rocks are splitting, the soil is upheaving with the

dead beneath; here protrudes a huge arm, there a skull; in one place the

clay, rising, has assumed the vague outline of the face below. In the

rocks and water, among the clutching, gigantic men, the huge, full-bosomed

woman, tosses a frightful half-fleshed carcass, grass still growing from

his finger tips, his grinning skull, covered half with hair and half

with weeds, greenish and mouldering: a sinner still green in earth and

already arising.

[Footnote 12: How peccable is the individual imagination, unchastened

by tradition! I find among the illustrations of Mr. Berenson's very

valuable monograph on Lotto, a most curious instance in point. This

psychological, earnest painter has been betrayed, by his morbid

nervousness of temper, into making the starting of a cat into the

second most important incident in his Annunciation.]

A wonderful picture: a marvellous imaginative mind, with marvellous

imaginative means at his command. Yet, let us ask ourselves, what is the

value of the result? A magnificent display of attitudes and forms, a

sort of bravura ghastliness and impressiveness, which are in a sense

_barrocco_, reminding us of the wax plague models of Florence and of

certain poems of Baudelaire's. But of the feeling, the poetry of this

greatest of all scenes, what is there? And, standing before it, I think

instinctively of that chapel far off on the windswept Umbrian rock, with

Signorelli's Resurrection: a flat wall accepted as a flat wall, no

place, nowhere. A half-dozen groups, not closely combined. Colour

reduced to monochrome; light and shade nowhere, as nowhere also all

these devices of perspective. But in that simply treated fresco, with

its arrangement as simple as that of a vast antique bas-relief, there

is an imaginative suggestion far surpassing this of Tintoret's. The

breathless effort of the youths breaking through the earth's crust,

shaking their long hair and gasping; the stagger of those rising to

their feet; the stolidity, hand on hip, of those who have recovered

their body but not their mind, blinded by the light, deafened by the

trumpets of Judgment; the absolute self-abandonment of those who can

raise themselves no higher; the dull, awe-stricken look of those who

have found their companions, clasping each other in vague, weak wonder;

and further, under the two archangels who stoop downwards with the

pennons of their trumpets streaming in the blast, those figures who

beckon to the re-found beloved ones, or who shade their eyes and point

to a glory on the horizon, or who, having striven forward, sink on

their knees, overcome by a vision which they alone can behold. And

recollecting that fresco of Signorelli's, you feel as if this vast, tall

canvas at S. Maria dell' Orto, where topple and welter the dead and the

quick, were merely so much rhetorical rhodomontade by the side of the

old hymn of the Last Day--

"Mors stupebit et natura

Quum resurget creatura

Judicanti responsura."

V

Again, in the chaos of newly-developing artistic means, and of struggling

individual imaginations, we get once more, at the end of the eighteenth

century, to what we found at the beginning of the fourteenth: the art

that does not show, but merely speaks. We find it in what, of all things,

are the apparently most different to the quiet and placid outline

illustration of the Giottesque: in the terrible portfolio of Goya's

etchings, called the Disasters of War. Like Duerer and Rembrandt, the

great Spaniard is at once extremely realistic and extremely imaginative.

But his realism means fidelity, not to the real aspect of things, of

the _thing in itself_, so to speak, but to the way in which things will

appear to the spectator at a given moment. He isolates what you might

call a case, separating it from the multitude of similar cases, giving

you one execution where several must be going on, one firing off of

cannon, one or two figures in a burning or a massacre; and his technique

conduces thereunto, blurring a lot, rendering only the outline and

gesture, and that outline and gesture frequently so momentary as to be

confused. But he is real beyond words in his reproduction of the way in

which such dreadful things must stamp themselves upon the mind. They are

isolated, concentrated, distorted: the multiplicity of horrors making

the perceiving mind more sensitive, morbid as from opium eating, and

thus making the single impression, which excludes all the rest, more vivid

and tremendous than, without that unconsciously perceived rest, it could

possibly be. Nay, more, these scenes are not merely rather such as they

were recollected than as they really were seen; they are such as they

were recollected in the minds and feelings of peasants and soldiers, of

people who could not free their attention to arrange all these matters

logically, to give them their relative logical value. The slaughtering

soldiers--Spaniards, English, or French--of the Napoleonic period become

in his plates Turks, Saracens, huge vague things in half Oriental

costumes, whiskered, almost turbaned in their fur caps, they become

almost ogres, even as they must have done in the popular mind. The

shooting of deserters and prisoners is reduced to the figures at the

stake, the six carbine muzzles facing them: no shooting soldiers, no

stocks to the carbines, any more than in the feeling of the man who

was being shot. The artistic training, the habit of deliberately or

unconsciously looking for visible effects which all educated moderns

possess, prevents even our writers from thus reproducing what has been

the actual mental reality. But Goya does not for a moment let us suspect

the presence of the artist, the quasi-writer. The impression reproduced

is the impression, not of the artistic bystander, but of the sufferer or

the sufferer's comrades. This makes him extraordinarily faithful to the

epigraphs of his plates. We feel that the woman, all alone, without

bystanders, earthworks, fascines, smoke, &c., firing off the cannon,

is the woman as she is remembered by the creature who exclaims, "Que

valor!" We feel that the half-dead soldier being stripped, the condemned

turning his head aside as far as the rope will permit, the man fallen

crushed beneath his horse or vomiting out his blood, is the wretch who

exclaims, "Por eso soy nacido!" They are, these etchings of Goya's, the

representation of the sufferings, real and imaginative, of the real

sufferers. In the most absolute sense they are the art which does not

merely show, but tells; the suggestive and dramatic art of the individual,

unaided and unhampered by tradition, indifferent to form and technicality,

the art which even like the art of the immediate predecessors of Giotto,

those Giuntas and Berlinghieris, who left us the hideous and terrible

Crucifixions, says to the world, "You shall understand and feel."

TUSCAN SCULPTURE

I

We are all of us familiar with the two adjacent rooms at South Kensington

which contain, respectively, the casts from antique sculpture and those

from the sculpture of the Renaissance; and we are familiar also with the

sense of irritation or of relief which accompanies our passing from

one of them to the other. This feeling is typical of our frame of mind

towards various branches of the same art, and, indeed, towards all

things which might be alike, but happen to be unlike. Times, countries,

nations, temperaments, ideas, and tendencies, all benefit and suffer

alternately by our habit of considering that if two things of one sort

are not identical, one must be in the right and the other in the wrong.

The act of comparison evokes at once our innate tendency to find fault;

and having found fault, we rarely perceive that, on better comparing,

there may be no fault at all to find.

As the result of such comparison, we shall find that Renaissance

sculpture is unrestful, huddled, lacking selection of form and harmony

of proportions; it reproduces ugliness and perpetuates effort; it is

sometimes grotesque, and frequently vulgar. Or again, that antique

sculpture is conventional, insipid, monotonous, without perception for

the charm of detail or the interest of individuality; afraid of movement

and expression, and at the same time indifferent to outline and grouping;

giving us florid nudities which never were alive, and which are doing

and thinking nothing whatever. Thus, according to which room or which

mood we enter first, we are sure to experience either irritation at

wrong-headedness or relief at right-doing; whether we pass from the

sculpture of ancient Greece to the sculpture of mediaeval Italy, or _vice

versa_.

But a more patient comparison of these two branches of sculpture, and of

the circumstances which made each what it was, will enable us to enjoy

the very different merits of both, and will teach us also something of

the vital processes of the particular spiritual organism which we call

an art.

In the early phase of the philosophy of art--a phase lingering on to our

own day in the works of certain critics--the peculiarities of a work of

art were explained by the peculiarities of character of the artist: the

paintings of Raphael and the music of Mozart partook of the gentleness

of their life; while the figures of Michelangelo and the compositions of

Beethoven were the outcome of their misanthropic ruggedness of temper.

The insufficiency, often the falseness, of such explanations became

evident when critics began to perceive that the works of one time and

country usually possessed certain common peculiarities which did not

correspond to any resemblance between the characters of their respective

artists; peculiarities so much more dominant than any others, that a

statue or a picture which was unsigned and of obscure history was

constantly attributed to half-a-dozen contemporary sculptors or painters

by half-a-dozen equally learned critics. The recognition of this fact

led to the substitution of the _environment_ (the _milieu_ of Monsieur

Taine) as an explanation of the characteristics, no longer of a single

work of art, but of a school or group of kindred works. Greek art

henceforth was the serene outcome of a serene civilisation of athletes,

poets, and philosophers, living with untroubled consciences in a good

climate, with slaves and helots to char for them while they ran races,

discussed elevated topics, and took part in Panathenaic processions,

riding half naked on prancing horses, or carrying olive branches and

sacrificial vases in honour of a divine patron, in whom they believed

only as much as they liked. And the art of the Middle Ages was the

fantastic, far-fetched, and often morbid production of nations of

crusaders and theologians, burning heretics, worshipping ladies, seeing

visions, and periodically joining hands in a vertiginous death-reel,

whose figures were danced from country to country. This new explanation,

while undoubtedly less misleading than the other one, had the disadvantage

of straining the characteristics of a civilisation or of an art in order

to tally with its product or producer; it forgot that Antiquity was not

wholly represented by the frieze of the Parthenon, and that the Gothic

cathedrals and the frescoes of Giotto had characteristics more

conspicuous than morbidness and insanity.

Moreover, in the same way that the old personal criticism was unable to

account for the resemblance between the works of different individuals

of the same school, so the theory of the environment fails to explain

certain qualities possessed in common by various schools of art and various

arts which have arisen under the pressure of different civilisations;

and it is obliged to slur over the fact that the sculpture of the time

of Pericles and Alexander, the painting of the early sixteenth century,

and the music of the age of Handel, Haydn, and Mozart are all very much

more like one another in their serene beauty than they are any of them

like the other productions, artistic or human, of their environment.

Behind this explanation there must therefore be another, not controverting

the portion of truth it contains, but completing it by the recognition

of a relation more intimate than that of the work of art with its

environment: the relation of form and material. The perceptions of the

artist, what he sees and how he sees it, can be transmitted to others

only through processes as various as themselves: hair seen as colour

is best imitated with paint, hair seen as form with twisted metal wire.

It is as impossible to embody certain perceptions in some stages of

handicraft as it would be to construct a complex machine in a rudimentary

condition of mechanics. Certain modes of vision require certain methods

of painting, and these require certain kinds of surface and pigment. Until

these exist, a man may see correctly, but he cannot reproduce what he is

seeing. In short, the work of art represents the meeting of a mode of

seeing and feeling (determined partly by individual characteristics,

partly by those of the age and country) and of a mode of treating

materials, a craft which may itself be, like the mind of the artist,

in a higher or lower stage of development.

The early Greeks had little occasion to become skilful carvers of

stone. Their buildings, which reproduced a very simple wooden structure,

were ornamented with little more than the imitation of the original

carpentering; for the Ionic order, poor as it is of ornament, came only

later; and the Corinthian, which alone offered scope for variety and

skill of carving, arose only when figure sculpture was mature. But the

Greeks, being only just in the iron period (and iron, by the way, is the

tool for stone), were great moulders of clay and casters of metal. The

things which later ages made of iron, stone, or wood, they made of clay

or bronze. The thousands of exquisite utensils, weapons, and toys in our

museums make this apparent; from the bronze greaves delicately modelled

like the legs they were to cover, to the earthenware dolls, little

Venuses, exquisitely dainty, with articulated legs and go-carts.

Hence the human figure came to be imitated by a process which was not

sculpture in the literal sense of carving. It is significant that the

Latin word whence we get _effigy_ has also given us _fictile_, the making

of statues being thus connected with the making of pots; and that the

whole vocabulary of ancient authors shows that they thought of statuary

not as akin to cutting and chiselling, but to moulding ([Greek: plasso]

= _fingo_), shaping out of clay on the wheel or with the modelling

tool.[13] It seems probable that marble-work was but rarely used for

the round until the sixth century; and the treatment of the hair,

the propping of projecting limbs and drapery, makes it obvious that a

large proportion of the antiques in our possession are marble copies of

long-destroyed bronzes.[14] So that the Greek statue, even if eventually

destined for marble, was conceived by a man having the habit of

modelling in clay.

[Footnote 13: I am confirmed in these particulars by my friend

Miss Eugenie Sellers, whose studies of the ancient authorities on

art--Lucian, Pausanias, Pliny, and others, will be the more fruitful

that they are associated with knowledge--uncommon in archaeologists--of

more modern artistic processes.]

[Footnote 14: This becomes overwhelmingly obvious on reading Professor

Furtwaengler's great "Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture." Praxiteles

appears to have been exceptional in his preference for marble.]

Let us turn from early Greece to mediaeval Italy. Hammered iron had

superseded bronze for weapons and armour, and silver and gold, worked

with the chisel, for ornaments. On the other hand, the introduction from

the East of glazed pottery had banished to the art of the glass-blower

all fancy in shaping utensils. There was no demand in common life for

cast metal-work, and there being no demand for casting, there was no

practice either in its cognate preliminary art of moulding clay. Hence,

such bronze work as originated was very unsatisfactory; the lack of

skill in casting, and the consequent elaboration of bronze-work with the

file, lasting late into the Renaissance. But the men of the Middle Ages

were marvellously skilful carvers of stone. Architecture, ever since the

Roman time, had given more and more importance to sculptured ornament:

already exquisite in the early Byzantine screens and capitals, it

developed through the elaborate mouldings, traceries, and columns of

the Lombard style into the art of elaborate reliefs and groups of the

full-blown Gothic; indeed the Gothic church is, in Italy, the work no

longer of the mason, but of the sculptor. It is no empty coincidence

that the hillside villages which still supply Florence with stone and

with stonemasons should have given their names to three of its greatest

sculptors, Mino da Fiesole, Desiderio da Settignano, and Benedetto da

Maiano; that Michelangelo should have told Vasari that the chisel and

mallet had come to him with the milk of his nurse, a stonecutter's wife

from those same slopes, down which jingle to-day the mules carting

ready-shaped stone from the quarries. The mediaeval Tuscans, the Pisans

of the thirteenth, and the Florentines of the fifteenth century, evidently

made small wax or clay sketches of their statues; but their works are

conceived and executed in the marble, and their art has come out of the

stone without interposition of other material, even as the figures which

Michelangelo chopped, living and colossal, direct out of the block.[15]

[Footnote 15: Interesting details in Vasari's treatise, and in his

Lives of J. della Quercia, Ferrucci, and other sculptors.]

The Greek, therefore, was a moulder of clay, a caster of bronze, in the

early time when the art acquires its character and takes its direction;

in that period, on the contrary, the Tuscan was a chaser of silver, a

hammerer of iron, above all a cutter of stone. Now clay (and we must

remember that bronze is originally clay) means the modelled plane and

succession of planes smoothed and rounded by the finger, the imitation

of all nature's gently graduated swellings and depressions, the absolute

form as it exists to the touch; but clay does not give interesting light

and shade, and bronze is positively blurred by high lights; and neither

clay nor bronze has any resemblance to the texture of human limbs or

drapery: it gives the form, but not the stuff. It is the exact reverse

with marble. Granulated like a living fibre, yet susceptible of a delicate

polish, it can imitate the actual substance of human flesh, with its

alternations of opacity and luminousness; it can reproduce, beneath

the varied strokes of the chisel, the grain, running now one way, now

another, which is given to the porous skin by the close-packed bone

and muscle below. Moreover, it is so docile, so soft, yet so resistant,

that the iron can cut it like butter or engrave it lightly like agate;

so that the shadows may pour deep into chasms and pools, or run over the

surface in a network of shallow threads; light and shade becoming the

artist's material as much as the stone itself.

The Greek, as a result, perceived form not as an appearance, but as a

reality; saw with the eye the complexities of projection and depression

perceivable by the hand. His craft was that of measurements, of minute

proportion, of delicate concave and convex--in one word, of _planes_.

His dull, malleable clay, and ductile, shining bronze had taught him

nothing of the way in which light and shadow corrode, blur, and pattern

a surface. His fancy, his skill, embraced the human form like the gypsum

of the moulder, received the stamp of its absolute being. The beauty he

sought was concrete, actual, the same in all lights and from all points

of view: the comely man himself, not the beautiful marble picture.

The marble picture, on the other hand--a picture in however high and

complete relief--a picture for a definite point of view, arranged by

receiving light projected at a given angle on a surface cut deep or

shallow especially to receive it--was produced by the sculpture that

spontaneously grew out of the architectural stone-cutting of the Byzantine

and Lombard schools. The mouldings on a church, still more the stone

ornaments of its capitals, pulpit, and choir rails, seen, as they are,

each at various and peculiar heights above the eye, under light which,

however varying, can never get behind or above them if outdoor, below

or in flank if indoor--these mouldings, part of a great architectural

pattern of black and white, inevitably taught the masons all the subtle

play of light and surface, all the deceits of position and perspective.

And the mere manipulation of the marble taught them, as we have seen,

the exquisite finenesses of surface, texture, crease, accent, and line.

What the figure actually was--the real proportions and planes, the

actual form of the model--did not matter; no hand was to touch it, no

eye to measure; it was to be delightful only in the position which the

artist chose, and in no other had it a right to be seen.

II

These were the two arts, originating from a material and a habit of work

which were entirely different, and which produced artistic necessities

diametrically opposed. It might be curious to speculate upon what would

have resulted had their position in history been reversed; what statues

we should possess had the marble-carving art born of architectural

decoration originated in Greece, and the art of clay and bronze flourished

in Christian and mediaeval Italy. Be this as it may, the accident of the

surroundings--of the habits of life and thought which pressed on the

artist, and combined with the necessities of his material method--appears

to have intensified the peculiarities organic in each of the two

sculptures. I say _appears_, because we must bear in mind that the

combination was merely fortuitous, and guard against the habit of

thinking that because a type is familiar it is therefore alone

conceivable.

We all know all about the antique and the mediaeval _milieu_. It is

useless to recapitulate the influence, on the one hand, of antique

civilisation, with its southern outdoor existence, its high training

of the body, its draped citizens, naked athletes, and half-clothed

work-folk, its sensuous religion of earthly gods and muscular demigods;

or the influence, on the other hand, of the more complex life of the

Middle Ages, essentially northern in type, sedentary and manufacturing,

huddled in unventilated towns, with its constant pre-occupation, even

among the most sordid grossness, of the splendour of the soul, the

beauty of suffering, the ignominy of the body, and the dangers of bodily

prosperity. Of all this we have heard even too much, thanks to the

picturesqueness which has recommended the _milieu_ of Monsieur Taine

to writers more mindful of literary effect than of the philosophy of

art. But there is another historical circumstance whose influence, in

differentiating Greek sculpture from the sculpture of mediaeval Italy,

can scarcely be overrated. It is that, whereas in ancient Greece

sculpture was the important, fully developed art, and painting merely

its shadow; in mediaeval Italy painting was the art which best answered

the requirements of the civilisation, the art struggling with the most

important problems; and that painting therefore reacted strongly upon

sculpture. Greek painting was the shadow of Greek sculpture in an almost

literal sense: the figures on wall and base, carefully modelled, without

texture, symmetrically arranged alongside of each other regardless of

pictorial pattern, seem indeed to be projected on to the flat surface by

the statues; they are, most certainly, the shadow of modelled figures

cast on the painter's mind.

The sculptor could learn nothing new from paintings where all that is

proper to painting is ignored:--plane always preferred to line, the

constructive details, perceptible only as projection, not as colour or

value (like the insertion of the leg and the thigh), marked by deep

lines that look like tattoo marks; and perspective almost entirely

ignored, at least till a late period. It is necessary thus to examine

Greek painting[16] in order to appreciate, by comparison with this

negative art, the very positive influence of mediaeval painting or

mediaeval sculpture. The painting on a flat surface--fresco or panel--which

became more and more the chief artistic expression of those times, taught

men to consider perspective; and, with perspective and its possibility

of figures on many planes, grouping: the pattern that must arise from

juxtaposed limbs and heads. It taught them to perceive form no longer as

projection or plane; but as line and light and shade, as something whose

charm lay mainly in the boundary curves, the silhouette, so much more

important in one single, unchangeable position than where, the eye

wandering round a statue, the only moderate interest of one point of

view is compensated by the additional interest of another. Moreover,

painting, itself the product of a much greater interest in colour than

Antiquity had known, forced upon men's attention the important influence

of colour upon form. For, although the human being, if we abstract the

element of colour, if we do it over with white paint, has indeed the

broad, somewhat vague form, the indecision of lines which characterises

antique sculpture; yet the human being as he really exists, with his

coloured hair, eyes, and lips, his cheeks, forehead, and chin patterned

with tint, has a much greater sharpness, precision, contrast of form,

due to the additional emphasis of the colour. Hence, as pictorial

perspective and composition undoubtedly inclined sculptors to seek

greater complexities of relief and greater unity of point of view, so

the new importance of drawing and colouring suggested to them a new view

of form. A human being was no longer a mere arrangement of planes and

of masses, homogeneous in texture and colour. He was made of different

substances, of hair, skin over fat, muscle, or bone, skin smooth,

wrinkled, or stubbly, and, besides this, he was painted different

colours. He had, moreover, what the Greeks had calmly whitewashed away,

or replaced by an immovable jewel or enamel: that extraordinary and

extraordinarily various thing called an Eye.

[Footnote 16: At all events, Greek painting preceding or contemporaneous

with the great period of sculpture. Later painting was, of course, much

more pictorial.]

All these differences between the monochrome creature--colour

abstracted--of the Greeks and the mottled real human being, the

sculptors of the Renaissance were led to perceive by their brothers the

painters; and having perceived, they were dissatisfied at having to omit

in their representation. But how show that they too had seen them?

Here return to our notice two other peculiarities which distinguish

mediaeval sculpture from antique: first, that mediaeval sculpture, rarely

called upon for free open-air figures, was for ever producing architectural

ornament, seen at a given height and against a dark background; and

indoor decoration seen under an unvarying and often defective light;

and secondly, that mediaeval sculpture was the handicraft of the subtle

carver in delicate stone.

The sculpture which was an essential part of Lombard and Gothic

architecture required a treatment that should adapt it to its particular

place and subordinate it to a given effect. According to the height

above the eye and the direction of the light, certain details had to be

exaggerated, certain others suppressed; a sculptured window, like those

of Orsanmichele, would not give the delightful pattern of black and

white unless some surfaces were more raised than others, some portions

of figure or leafage allowed to sink into quiescence, others to start

forward by means of the black rim of undercutting; and a sepulchral

monument, raised thirty feet above the spectator's eye, like those

inside Sta. Maria Novella, would present a mere intricate confusion

unless the recumbent figure, the canopy, and various accessories, were

such as to seem unnatural at the level of the eye. Thus, the heraldic

lions of one of these Gothic tombs have the black cavity of the jaw cut

by marble bars which are absolutely out of proportion to the rest of the

creature's body, and to the detail of the other features, but render the

showing of the teeth even at the other side of the transept. Again, in

the more developed art of the fifteenth century, Rossellino's Cardinal

of Portugal has the offside of his face shelved upwards so as to catch

the light, because he is seen from below, and the near side would

otherwise be too prominent; while the beautiful dead warrior, by an

unknown sculptor, at Ravenna has had a portion of his jaw and chin

deliberately cut away, because the spectator is intended to look down

upon his recumbent figure. If we take a cast of the Cardinal's head and

look down upon it, or hang a cast of the dead warrior on the wall, the

whole appearance alters; the expression is almost reversed and the

features are distorted. On the other hand, a cast from a real head,

placed on high like the Cardinal's, would become insignificant, and laid

at the height of a table, like the dead warrior's, would look lumbering

and tumid. Thus, again, the head of Donatello's Poggio, which is visible

and intelligible placed high up in the darkness of the Cathedral of

Florence, looks as if it had been gashed and hacked with a blunt knife

when seen in the cast at the usual height in an ordinary light.

Now this subtle circumventing of distance, height, and darkness; this

victory of pattern over place; this reducing of light and shadow into

tools for the sculptor, mean, as we see from the above examples,

sacrificing the reality to the appearance, altering the proportions

and planes so rigorously reproduced by the Greeks, mean sacrificing the

sacred absolute form. And such a habit of taking liberties with what

can be measured by the hand, in order to please the eye, allowed the

sculptors of the Renaissance to think of their model no longer as

the homogeneous _white man_ of the Greeks, but as a creature in whom

structure was accentuated, intensified, or contradicted by colour and

texture.

Furthermore, these men of the fifteenth century possessed the cunning

carving which could make stone vary in texture, in fibre, and almost in

colour.

A great many biographical details substantiate the evidence of statues

and busts that the sculptors of the Renaissance carried on their business

in a different manner from the ancient Greeks. The great development in

Antiquity of the art of casting bronze, carried on everywhere for the

production of weapons and household furniture, must have accustomed

Greek sculptors (if we may call them by that name) to limit their personal

work to the figure modelled in clay. And the great number of their

works, many tediously constructed of ivory and gold, shows clearly that

they did not abandon this habit in case of marble statuary, but merely

gave the finishing strokes to a copy of their clay model, produced by

workmen whose skill must have been fostered by the apparently thriving

trade in marble copies of bronzes.

It was different in the Renaissance. Vasari recommends, as obviating

certain miscalculations which frequently happened, that sculptors should

prepare large models by which to measure the capacities of their block

of marble. But these models, described as made of a mixture of plaster,

size, and cloth shavings over tow and hay, could serve only for the

rough proportions and attitude; nor is there ever any allusion to any

process of minute measurement, such as pointing, by which detail could

be transferred from the model to the stone. Most often we hear of small

wax models which the sculptors enlarged directly in the stone. Vasari,

while exaggerating the skill of Michelangelo in making his David out of

a block mangled by another sculptor, expresses no surprise at his having

chopped the marble himself; indeed, the anecdote itself affords evidence

of the commonness of such a practice, since Agostino di Duccio would not

have spoilt the block if he had not cut into it rashly without previous

comparison with a model.[17] We hear, besides, that Jacopo della

Quercia spent twelve years over one of the gates of S. Petronio, and

that other sculptors carried out similar great works with the assistance

of one man, or with no assistance at all,--a proceeding which would have

seemed the most frightful waste except in a time and country where

half of the sculptors were originally stone-masons and the other half

goldsmiths, that is to say, men accustomed to every stage, coarse or

subtle, of their work. The absence of replicas of Renaissance sculpture,

so striking a contrast to the scores of repetitions of Greek works,

proves, moreover, that the actual execution in marble was considered

an intrinsic part of the sculpture of the fifteenth century, in the

same way as the painting of a Venetian master. Phidias might leave the

carving of his statues to skilful workmen, once he had modelled the

clay, even as the painters of the merely designing and linear schools,

Perugino, Ghirlandaio, or Botticelli, might employ pupils to carry out

their designs on panel or wall. But in the same way as a Titian is not a

Titian without a certain handling of the brush, so a Donatello is not a

Donatello, or a Mino not a Mino, without a certain individual excellence

in the cutting of the marble.

[Footnote 17: Several Greek vases and coins show the sculptor modelling

his figure; while in Renaissance designs, from that of Nanni di Banco

to a mediocre allegorical engraving in an early edition of Vasari, the

sculptor, or the personified art of Sculpture, is actually working with

chisel and mallet.]

These men brought, therefore, to the cutting of marble a degree of

skill and knowledge of which the ancients had no notion, as they had no

necessity. In their hands the chisel was not merely a second modelling

tool, moulding delicate planes, uniting insensibly broad masses of

projection and depression. It was a pencil, which, according as it was

held, could emphasise the forms in sharp hatchings or let them die away

unnoticed in subdued, imperceptible washes. It was a brush which could

give the texture and the values of the colour--a brush dipped in various

tints of light and darkness, according as it poured into the marble the

light and the shade, and as it translated into polishings and rough

hewings and granulations and every variety of cutting, the texture of

flesh, of hair, and of drapery; of the blonde hair and flesh of children,

the coarse flesh and bristly hair of old men, the draperies of wool, of

linen, and of brocade. The sculptors of Antiquity took a beautiful human

being--a youth in his perfect flower, with limbs trained by harmonious

exercise and ripened by exposure to the air and sun--and, correcting

whatever was imperfect in his individual forms by their hourly experience

of similar beauty, they copied in clay as much as clay could give of his

perfections: the subtle proportions, the majestic ampleness of masses,

the delicate finish of limbs, the harmonious play of muscles, the serene

simplicity of look and gesture, placing him in an attitude intelligible

and graceful from the greatest possible distance and from the largest

variety of points of view. And they preserved this perfect piece of

loveliness by handing it over to the faithful copyist in marble, to the

bronze, which, more faithful still, fills every minutest cavity left by

the clay. Being beautiful in himself, in all his proportions and details,

this man of bronze or marble was beautiful wherever he was placed and

from wheresoever he was seen; whether he appeared foreshortened on a

temple front, or face to face among the laurel trees, whether shaded by

a portico, or shining in the blaze of the open street. His beauty must

be judged and loved as we should judge and love the beauty of a real

human being, for he is the closest reproduction that art has given of

beautiful reality placed in reality's real surroundings. He is the

embodiment of the strength and purity of youth, untroubled by the

moment, independent of place and of circumstance.

Of such perfection, born of the rarest meeting of happy circumstances,

Renaissance sculpture knows nothing. A lesser art, for painting was then

what sculpture had been in Antiquity; bound more or less closely to

the service of architecture; surrounded by ill-grown, untrained bodies;

distracted by ascetic feelings and scientific curiosities, the sculpture

of Donatello and Mino, of Jacopo della Quercia and Desiderio da

Settignano, of Michelangelo himself, was one of those second artistic

growths which use up the elements that have been neglected or rejected

by the more fortunate and vigorous efflorescence which has preceded.

It failed in everything in which antique sculpture had succeeded; it

accomplished what Antiquity had left undone. Its sense of bodily beauty

was rudimentary; its knowledge of the nude alternately insufficient and

pedantic; the forms of Donatello's David and of Benedetto's St. John are

clumsy, stunted, and inharmonious; even Michelangelo's Bacchus is but

a comely lout. This sculpture has, moreover, a marvellous preference

for ugly old men--gross, or ascetically imbecile; and for ill-grown

striplings: except the St. George of Donatello, whose body, however, is

entirely encased in inflexible leather and steel, it never gives us the

perfection and pride of youth. These things are obvious, and set us

against the art as a whole. But see it when it does what Antiquity never

attempted; Antiquity which placed statues side by side in a gable,

balancing one another, but not welded into one pattern; which made

relief the mere repetition of one point of view of the round figure, the

shadow of the gable group; which, until its decline, knew nothing of the

pathos of old age, of the grotesque exquisiteness of infancy, of the

endearing awkwardness of adolescence; which knew nothing of the texture

of the skin, the silkiness of the hair, the colour of the eye.

III

Let us see Renaissance sculpture in its real achievement.

Here are a number of children by various sculptors of the fifteenth

century. This is the tiny baby whose little feet still project from a

sort of gaiter of flesh, whose little boneless legs cannot carry the fat

little paunch, the heavy big head. Note that its little skull is still

soft, like an apple, under the thin floss hair. Its elder brother or

sister is still vaguely contemplative of the world, with eyes that

easily grow sleepy in their blueness. Those a little older have learned

already that the world is full of solemn people on whom to practise

tricks; their features have scarcely accentuated, their hair has merely

curled into loose rings, but their eyes have come forward from below the

forehead, eyes and forehead working together already; and there are

great holes, into which you may dig your thumb, in the cheeks. Those of

fourteen or fifteen have deplorably thin arms, and still such terrible

calves; and a stomach telling of childish gigantic meals; but they have

the pert, humorous frankness of Verrocchio's David, who certainly flung

a jest at Goliath's unwieldy person together with his stone; or the

delicate, sentimental pretty woman's grace of Donatello's St. John of

the Louvre, and Benedetto da Maiano's: they will soon be poring over

the _Vita Nuova_ and Petrarch. Two other St. Johns--I am speaking of

Donatello's--have turned out differently. One, the first beard still

doubtful round his mouth, has already rushed madly away from earthly

loves; his limbs are utterly wasted by fasting; except his legs, which

have become incredibly muscular from continual walking; he has begun

to be troubled by voices in the wilderness--whether of angels or of

demons--and he flies along, his eyes fixed on his scroll, and with them

fixing his mind on unearthly things; he will very likely go mad, this

tempted saint of twenty-one. Here he is again, beard and hair matted,

almost a wild man of the woods, but with the gravity and self-possession

of a preacher; he has come out of the wilderness, overcome all temptations,

his fanaticism is now militant and conquering. This is certainly not

the same man, but perhaps one of his listeners, this old King David of

Donatello--a man at no time intelligent, whose dome-shaped head has

taken back, with the thin white floss hair that recalls infancy, an

infantine lack of solidity; whose mouth is drooping already, perhaps

after a first experience of paralysis, and his eyes getting vague in

look; but who, in this intellectual and physical decay, seems to have

become only the more full of gentleness and sweetness; misnamed David, a

Job become reconciled to his fate by becoming indifferent to himself, an

Ancient Mariner who has seen the water-snakes and blessed them and been

filled with blessing.

These are all statues or busts intended for a given niche or bracket, a

given portico or window, but in a measure free sculpture. Let us now

look at what is already decoration. Donatello's Annunciation, the big

coarse relief in friable grey stone (incapable of a sharp line), picked

out with delicate gilding; no fluttering or fainting, the angel and the

Virgin grave, decorous, like the neighbouring pilasters. Again, his

organ-loft of flat relief, with granulated groundwork: the flattened

groups of dancing children making, with deep, wide shadows beneath their

upraised, linked arms, a sort of human trellis-work of black and white.

Mino's Madonna at Fiesole: the relief turned and cut so as to look out

of the chapel into the church, so that the Virgin's head, receiving the

light like a glory on the pure, polished forehead, casts a nimbus of

shadow round itself, while the saints are sucked into the background,

their accessories only, staff and gridiron, allowed to assert themselves

by a sharp shadow; a marvellous vision of white heavenly roses, their

pointed buds and sharp spines flourishing on martyrs' blood and incense,

grown into the close lips and long eyes, the virginal body and thin

hands of Mary. From these reliefs we come to the compositions, group

inside group, all shelving into portico and forest vista, of the pulpit

of Sta. Croce, the perspective bevelling it into concavities, like those

of panelling; the heads and projecting shoulders lightly marked as some

carved knob or ornament; to the magnificent compositions in light and

shade, all balancing and harmonising each other, and framed round by

garlands of immortal blossom and fruit, of Ghiberti's gates.

Nor is this all. The sculpture of the Renaissance, not satisfied with

having portrayed the real human being made of flesh and blood, of bone

and skin, dark-eyed or flaxen-haired, embodied in the marble the

impalpable forms of dreams. Its latest, greatest, works are those

sepulchres of Michelangelo, whose pinnacle enthrones strange ghosts of

warriors, and whose steep sides are the unquiet couch of divinities

hewn, you would say, out of darkness and the light that is as darkness.

A SEEKER OF PAGAN PERFECTION

BEING THE LIFE OF DOMENICO NERONI, PICTOR SACRILEGUS

Every time, of late years, of my being once more in Rome, I have been

subject to a peculiar mental obsession: retracing my steps, if not

materially, in fancy at least, to such parts of the city as bear witness

to the strange meeting of centuries, where the Middle Ages have altered

to their purposes, or filled with their significance, the ruined remains

of Antiquity.

Such places are scarcer than one might have expected, and for that

reason perhaps more impressive, more fragmentary and enigmatic. There

are the colossal columns--great trickles and flakes of black etching as

with acid their marble--of the temple of Mars Ultor, with that Tuscan

palace of Torre della Milizia rising from among them. There is, inside

Ara Coeli--itself commemorating the legend of Augustus and the Sibyl--the

tomb of Dominus Pandulphus Sabelli, its borrowed vine-garlands and satyrs

and Cupids surmounted by mosaic crosses and Gothic inscriptions; and

outside the same church, on a ground of green and gold, a Mother of God

looking down from among gurgoyles and escutcheons on to the marble

river-god of the yard of the Capitol below. Then also, where pines and

laurels still root in the unrifled tombs, the skeleton feudal fortress,

gutted as by an earthquake, alongside of the tower of Caecilia Metella.

These were the places to which my thoughts were for ever recurring; to

them, and to nameless other spots, the street-corner, for instance,

where an Ionic pillar, with beaded and full-horned capital, is walled

into the side of an insignificant modern house. I know not whether, in

consequence of this straining to see the meeting-point of Antiquity and

the Middle Ages (like the fancy, sometimes experienced, to reach the

confluence of rivers), or rather as a cause thereof, but a certain story

has long lurked in the corners of my mind. Twenty years have passed since

first I was aware of its presence, and it has undergone many changes. It

is presumably a piece of my inventing, for I have neither read it nor

heard it related. But by this time it has acquired a certain traditional

veracity in my eyes, and I give to the reader rather as historical fact

than as fiction the study which I have always called to myself: _Pictor

Sacrilegus_.

I

Domenico, the son of Luca Neroni, painter, sculptor, goldsmith, and

engraver, about whom, owing either to the scarcity of his works or

the scandal of his end, Vasari has but a few words in another man's

biography, must have been born shortly before or shortly after the year

1450, a contemporary of Perugino, of Ghirlandaio, of Filippino Lippi,

and of Signorelli, by all of whom he was influenced at various moments,

and whom he influenced by turns.

He was born and bred in the Etruscan town of Volterra, of a family which

for generations had exercised the art of the goldsmith, stimulated,

perhaps, by the sight of ornaments discovered in Etruscan tombs, and

carrying on, peradventure, some of the Etruscan traditions of two

thousand years before. The mountain city, situate on the verge of the

malarious seaboard of Southern Tuscany, is reached from one side through

windings of barren valleys, where the dried-up brooks are fringed,

instead of reed, with the grey, sand-loving tamarisk; and from the other

side, across a high-lying moorland of stunted heather and sere grass,

whence the larks rise up scared by only a flock of sheep or a mare and

her foal, and you journey for miles without meeting a house or a clump

of cypresses. In front, with the white road zigzagging along their

crests, is a wilderness of barren, livid hillocks, separated by huge

fissures and crevassed by huge cracks, with here and there separate

rocks, projecting like Druidic stones from the valley of gaping ravines;

and beyond them all a higher mountain, among whose rocks and ilexes you

doubtfully distinguish the walls and towers of the Etruscan city. A mass

of Cyclopean wall and great black houses, grim with stone brackets and

iron hooks and stanchions, all for defence and barricade, Volterra looks

down into the deep valleys, like the vague heraldic animal, black and

bristly, which peers from the high tower of the municipal palace. One

wonders how this could ever have been a city of the fat, voluptuous

Etruscans, whose images lie propped up and wide-eyed on their stone

coffin-lids. The long wars of old Italic times, in which Etruria fell

before Rome, must have burned and destroyed, as one would think, the

land as well as the inhabitants, leaving but grey cinders and blackened

stone behind. Siena and Florence ruined Volterra once more in the Middle

Ages, isolating it near the pestilential Maremma and checking its growth

outward and inward. The cathedral, the pride of a mediaeval commonwealth,

is still a mean and unfinished building of the twelfth century. There

is no native art, of any importance, of a later period; what the town

possesses has come from other parts, the altar-pieces by Matteo di

Giovanni and Signorelli, for instance, and the marble candelabra,

carried by angels, of the school of Mino da Fiesole.

In this remote and stagnant town, the artistic training of Domenico

Neroni was necessarily imperfect and limited throughout his boyhood

to the paternal goldsmith's craft. Indeed, it seems likely that some

peculiarities of his subsequent life as an artist, his laboriousness

disproportionate to all results, his persistent harping on unimportant

detail, and his exclusive interest in line and curve, were due not

merely to an unhappy and laborious temperament, but also to the long

habit of an art full of manual skill and cunning tradition, which

presented the eye with ingenious patterns, but rarely attempted, save in

a few church ornaments, more of the domain of sculpture, to tell a story

or express a feeling.

Besides this influence of his original trade, we find in Domenico

Neroni's work the influence of his early surroundings. His native

country is such as must delight, or help to form, a painter of pale

anatomies. The painters of Southern Tuscany loved as a background the

arid and mountainous country of their birth. Taddeo di Bartolo placed

the Death of the Virgin among the curious undulations of pale clay and

sandy marl that stretch to the southernmost gates of Siena; Signorelli

was amused and fascinated by the odd cliffs and overhanging crags,

unnatural and grotesque like some Druidic monument, of the valleys of

the Paglia and the Chiana; and Pier della Francesca has left, in the

allegorical triumphs of Frederick of Urbino and his duchess, studies

most exquisite and correct, of what meets the traveller's eyes on the

watersheds of the central Apennine, sharp-toothed lines of mountain

peaks pale against the sky, dim distant whiteness of sea, and valleys

and roads and torrents twisting intricately as on a map. The country

about Volterra, revealing itself with rosy lividness at dawn, with

delicate periwinkle blue at sunset, through an open city gate or a gap

between the tall black houses, helped to make Neroni a lover of muscle

and sinew, of the strength and suppleness of movement, of the osseous

structure divined within the limbs; and made him shrink all his life

long, not merely from drapery or costume that blunted the lines of the

body, but from any warmth and depth of colour; till the figures stood

out like ghosts, or people in faded tapestries, from the pale lilacs and

greys and washed out cinnamons of his backgrounds. For the bold peaks

and swelling mountains of the valleys of the Arno and the Tiber, and the

depths of colour among vegetation and rivers, seemed crude and emphatic

to a man who carried in his memory those bosses of hill, pearly where

the waters have washed the sides, pale golden buff where a little sere

grass covers the rounded top; those great cracks and chasms, with the

white road snaking along the narrow table-land and the wide valleys; and

the ripple of far-off mountain chains, strong and restrained in curves,

exquisite in tints, like the dry white and purpled hemlock, and the

dusty lilac scabius, which seem to flower alone in that arid and

melancholy and beautiful country.

"Colour," wrote Domenico Neroni, among a mass of notes on his art,

measurements, and calculations, "is the enemy of noble art. It is the

enemy of all precise and perfect form, since where colour exists form

can be seen only as juxtaposition of colour. For this reason it has

pleased the Creator to lend colour only to the inanimate world, as

to senseless vegetables and plants, and to the lower kinds of living

creatures, as birds, fishes, and reptiles; whereas nobler creatures, as

lions, tigers, horses, cattle, stags, and unicorns, are robed in white

or dull skins, the noblest breeds, indeed, both of horses, as those of

the Soldans of Egypt and Numidia, and of oxen, as those of the valleys

of the Clitumnus and Chiana, being white; whence, indeed, the poet Virgil

has said that such latter are fittest for sacrifice to the immortal

gods; 'hinc albi, Clitumne, greges,' and what follows. And man, the

masterpiece of creation, is white; and only in the less noble portions

of his body, which have no sensitiveness and no shape (being, indeed,

vegetative and deciduous), as hair and beard, partaking of colour.

Wherefore the ancient Romans and Greeks, portraying their gods, chose

white marble for material, and not gaudy porphyry or jasper, and

portrayed them naked. Whence certain moderns, calling themselves

painters, who muffle our Lord and the Holy Apostles in many-coloured

garments, thinking thereby to do a seemly and honourable thing, but

really proceeding basely like tailors, might take a lesson if they

could."

The quotation from Virgil, and the allusion to the statues of the

immortal gods, shows that Neroni must have written these lines in

the later part of his career, when already under the influence of

that humanist Filarete, who played so important a part in his life,

and when possessed already by those notions which brought him to so

strange and fearful an end. But from his earliest years he sought

for form, despising other things. He passed with contempt through a six

months' apprenticeship at Perugia, railing at the great factory of

devotional art established there by Perugino, of whom, with his rows of

splay-footed saints and spindle-shanked heroes, he spoke with the same

sweeping contempt as later Michelangelo. At Siena, which he described

(much as its earlier artists painted it) as a town of pink toy-houses

and scarlet toy-towers, he found nothing to admire save the marble

fountain of Jacopo della Quercia, for the antique group of the Three

Graces, later to be drawn by the young Raphael, had not yet been given

to the cathedral by the nephew of Pius II. The sight of these noble

reliefs, particularly of the one representing Adam and Eve driven out of

Paradise, with their strong and well-understood nudities, determined him

to exchange painting for sculpture, and made him hasten to Florence to

see the works of Donatello and of Ghiberti.

Domenico Neroni must have spent several years of his life--between

1470 and 1480--in Florence, but little of his work has remained in that

city,--little, at least, that we can identify with certainty. For taking

service, as he did, with the Pollaiolos, Verrocchio, Nanni di Banco, and

even with Filippino and Botticelli, wherever his inquisitive mind could

learn, or his restless, fastidious, laborious talent gain him bread, it

is presumable that much of his work might be discovered alongside that

of his masters, in the collective productions of the various workshops.

It is possible thus that he had a hand in much metal and relief work

of the Pollaiolos, and perhaps even in the embroidering and tapestries

of which they were undertakers; also in certain ornaments, friezes of

Cupids and dolphins, and exquisite shell and acanthus carving of the

monuments of Santa Croce; and it may be surmised that he occasionally

assisted Botticelli in his perspective and anatomy, since that master

took him to Rome when commissioned to paint in the chapel of Pope

Sixtus. Indeed, in certain little-known studies for Botticelli's Birth

of Venus and Calumny of Apelles one may discover, in the strong sweep of

the outline, in the solid fashion in which the figures are planted on

their feet--all peculiarities which disappear in the painted pictures,

where grace of motion and exquisitive research take the place of solid

draughtsman-ship--the hand of the artist whom the restless desire to

confront ever new problems alone prevented from attaining a place among

the great men of his time.

For there was in Domenico Neroni, from the very outset of his career, a

curiosity after the hidden, a passion for the unattainable, which kept

him, with greater power than many of his contemporaries, and vastly

greater science, a mere student throughout his lifetime. He resembled

in some respects his great contemporary Leonardo, but while the eager

inquisitiveness of the latter was tempered by a singular power of

universal enjoyment, a love of luxury and joyousness in every form, the

intellectual activity of Neroni was exasperated into a kind of unhappy

mania by the fact that its satisfaction was the only happiness that he

could conceive. He would never have understood, or understanding would

have detested, the luxurious _dilettante_ spirit which made Leonardo

prefer painting to sculpture, because whereas the sculptor is covered

with a mud of marble dust, and works in a place disorderly with chips

and rubbish, the painter "sits at his easel, well dressed and at ease,

in a clean house adorned with pictures, his work accompanied by music

or the reading of delightful books, which, untroubled by the sound of

hammering and other noises, may be listened to with very great pleasure."

The workshop of Neroni, when he had one of his own, was full of cobwebs

and dust, littered with the remains of frugal and unsavoury meals,

and resolutely closed to the rich and noble persons in whose company

Leonardo delighted. And if Neroni, in his many-sided activity, eventually

put aside sculpture for painting, it was merely because, as he was wont

to say, a figure must needs look real when it is solid and you can

walk round it; but to make men and women rise out of a flat canvas or

plastered wall, and stand and move as if alive, is truly the work of a

god.

Men and women, said Neroni; and he should have added men and women nude.

For the studies which he made of the anatomy of horses and dogs were

destined merely to shed light on the construction of human creatures;

and his elaborate and exquisite drawings of undulating hills and sinuous

rivers, nay, of growths of myrtle and clumps of daffodils, were intended

as practice towards drawing the more subtle lines and curves of man's

body. And as to clothes, he could not understand that great anatomists

like Signorelli should huddle their figures quite willingly in immense

cloaks and gowns; still less how exquisite draughtsmen like his friend

Botticelli (who had the sense of line like no other man since Frate

Lippo, although his people were oddly out of joint) could take pleasure

in putting half-a-dozen veils atop of each other, and then tying them

all into bunches and bunches with innumerable bits of tape! As to himself,

he invariably worked out every detail of the nude, in the vain hope that

the priests and monks for whom he worked would allow at least half of

those beautiful anatomies to remain visible; and when, with infinite

difficulties and bad language, he gradually gave in to the necessity of

some sort of raiment, it was of such a nature--the hose and jerkins of

the men-at-arms like a second skin, the draperies of the womankind as

clinging as if they had been picked out of the river, that a great many

pious people absolutely declined to pay the agreed on sum for paintings

more suited to Pagan than to Christian countries; and indeed Fra Girolamo

Savonarola included much work of Domenico's in his very finest burnings.

Such familiarity with nude form was not easily attained in the fifteenth

century. Mediaeval civilisation gave no opportunities for seeing naked

or half-naked people moving freely as in the antique palaestra; and

there had yet been discovered too few antique marbles for the empiric

knowledge of ancient sculptors to be empirically inherited by modern

ones. Observation of the hired model, utterly insufficient in itself,

required to be supplemented by a thorough science of the body's

mechanism. But physiology and surgery were still in their infancy;

and artists could not, as they could after the teachings of Vesalius,

Fallopius, and Cesalpinus, avail themselves of the science accumulated

for medical purposes. Verrocchio and the Pollaiolos most certainly, and

Donatello almost without a doubt, practised dissection as a part of

their business, as Michelangelo, with the advantage of twenty years of

their researches behind him, practised it passionately in his turn. Of

all the men of his day, Domenico Neroni, however, was the most fervent

anatomist. He ran every risk of contagion and of punishment in order

to procure corpses from the hospital and the gibbet. He undermined his

constitution by breathing and handling corruption, and when his friends

implored him to spare his health, he would answer, although unable to

touch food for sickness, by paraphrasing the famous words of Paolo

Uccello, and exclaiming from among his grisly and abominable properties,

"Ah! how sweet a thing is not anatomy!"

There was nothing, he said--for he spoke willingly to any one who

questioned him on these subjects--more beautiful than the manner in

which human beings are built, or indeed living creatures of any kind;

for, in the scarcity of corpses and skeletons, he would pick up on his

walks the bones of sheep that had died on the hill-sides, or those of

horses and mules furbished up by the scavenger dogs of the river-edge.

It was marvellous to listen to him when he was in the vein. He sat

handling horrible remains and talking about them like a lover about his

mistress or a preacher about God; indeed, bones, muscles, and tendons

were mistress and god all in one to this fanatical lover of human form.

He would insist on the loveliness of line of the scapula, finding in the

sweep of the _acromion_ ridge a fanciful resemblance to the pinion, and

in the angular shape of the _coracoid_ process to the neck and head of a

raven in full flight. Following with his finger the triangular outline

of the bone, he went on to explain how its freedom of movement is due to

its singular independence; laid loosely on the flat muscles behind the

upper ribs, it moves with absolute freedom, backwards and forwards, up

and down, unconnected with any other bone, till, turning the corner of

the shoulder, it is hinged rather than tied to the collar-bone; the

collar-bone itself free to move upwards from its articulation in the

sternum. And then talk of the great works of man! Talk of Brunellesco

and his cupola, of the engineers of the Duke of Calabria! Look at the

human arm: what engineer would have dared to fasten anything to such a

movable base as that? Yet an arm can swing round like a windmill, and

lift weights like the stoutest crane without being wrenched out of

its sockets, because the muscles act as pulleys in four different

directions. And see, under the big _deltoid_, which fits round the

shoulder like an epaulette and pulls the arm up, is the scapular

group, things like tidily sorted skeins, thick on the shoulder-blades,

diminished to a tendon string at their insertion in the arm; their

business is to pull the arm back, in opposition to the big pectoral

muscle which pulls it forwards. Here you have your arm working up,

backwards or forwards; but how about pulling it down? An exquisite

little arrangement settles that. Instead of being inserted with the rest

on the outside of the arm-bone, the lowest muscle takes another road,

and is inserted in the under part of the bone, in company with the great

_latissimus dorsi_, and these tightening while the _deltoid_ slackens,

pull the arm down. No other arrangement could have done it with so little

bulk; and an additional muscle on the under-arm or the ribs would have

spoilt the figure of Apollo himself.

Among the paintings of contemporary artists, the one which at that time

afforded Domenico the most unmingled satisfaction was Pollaiolo's tiny

panel of Hercules and the Hydra. There! You might cover it with the palm

of your hand; but in that hand you would be holding the concentrated

strength and valour of the world, the true son of Jove, the most beautiful

muscles that ever were seen! At least the most beautiful save in the

statues of Donatello; for, of course, Donato was the greatest craftsman

that had ever lived; and Domenico spoke of him as, in Vasari's day, men

were to speak of Michelangelo.

For I ask you, who save an angel in human shape could have modelled that

David, so young and triumphant and modest, treading on Goliath's head,

with toes just slightly turned downwards, and those sandals, of truly

divine workmanship? And that St. John in the Wilderness--how beautiful

are not his ribs, showing under the wasted pectoral muscles; and how one

sees that the _radius_ rolls across the _ulna_ in the forearm; surely

one's heart, rather than the statue, must be made of stone if one can

contemplate without rapture the exquisite rendering of the texture where

the shin-bone stands out from the muscles of the leg. Such must have

been the works of those famous Romans and Greeks, Phidias and Praxiteles.

Such were the notions of Domenico of Volterra in the earlier part of his

career. For a change came gradually upon him after his first visit to

Rome, whither, about 1480, he accompanied Botticelli, Rosselli, and

Ghirlandaio, whom His Beatitude Pope Sixtus had sent for to decorate the

new chapel of the palace.

II

We must not be deluded, like Domenico Neroni during his Florentine days,

into the easy mistake of considering mere realism as the veritable aim

of the art of his days. Deep in the life of that art, and struggling

for ever through whatever passion for scientific accuracy, technical

skill, or pathetic expression, is the sense of line and proportion, the

desire for pattern, growing steadily till its triumph under Michelangelo

and Raphael.

This reveals itself earliest in architecture. The men of the fifteenth

century had lost all sense of the logic of construction. Columns,

architraves, friezes, and the various categories of actual stone

and brick work, occurred to them merely as so much line and curve,

applicable to the surface of their buildings, with not more reference

to their architecture than a fresco or an arras. The Pazzi Chapel, for

instance, is one agglomeration of architectural members which perform

no architectural function; but, taken as a piece of surface decoration,

say as a stencilling, what could be more harmonious? Or take Alberti's

famous church at Rimini; it is but a great piece of architectural

veneering, nothing that meets the eye doing any real constructive duty,

its exquisite decoration no more closely connected with the building

than the strips of damask and yards of gold braid used in other places

on holidays. As the fifteenth century treats the architectural detail

of Graeco-Roman art, so likewise does it proceed with its sculptured

ornament; all meaning vanishes before the absorbing interest in pattern.

For there is in antique architectural ornament a much larger proportion

of significance than can strike us at first. Thus the garlands of ivy

and fruit had actually hung round the tomb before being carved on its

sides; before ornamenting its corners the rams' heads and skulls of oxen

had lain for centuries on the altar. The medallions of nymphs, centaurs,

tritons, which to us are so meaningless and irrelevant, had a reference

either to the divinity or to the worshippers; and there is probably

almost as much spontaneous symbolism in the little cinerary box in the

Capitol (of a person called Felix), with its variously employed genii,

making music, carrying lanterns and torches, burning or extinguished

under a trellis hung with tragic masks, as in any Gothic tomb with

angels drawing the curtains of the deathbed. There has been, with the

change of religion, an interruption in the symbolic tradition; yet,

though we no longer interpret with readiness this dead language of

paganism, we feel, if we are the least attentive, that it contains

a real meaning. We feel that the sculptors cared not merely for the

representation, but also for the object represented. These things were

dear to them, a part of their life, their worship, their love; and they

put as much observation into their work as any Gothic sculptor, and

often as much fancy and humour (though both more beautiful), as one may

judge, with plenty of comparison at hand, by a certain antique altar in

Siena Cathedral, none of whose Gothic animals come up to the wonderful

half-human rams' heads and bored, cross griffins of this forlorn fragment

of paganism. The significance of classic ornament the men of the

fifteenth century straightway overlooked. They laid hold of it as

merely so much form, joining sirens, griffins, garlands, rams' heads,

victories, without a suspicion that they might mean or suggest anything.

They do, in fact, mean nothing, in most Florentine work, besides

exquisite pattern; in the less subtle atmosphere of Venice they reach

that frank senselessness which has moved the wrath of Ruskin. But what a

charm have not even those foolish monuments of doges and admirals, tier

upon tier of triumphal arch, of delicately flowered column and scalloped

niche, and then rows of dainty warriors and virtues; how full of meaning

to the eye and spirit is not this art so meaningless to the literary

mind!

Of course the painting of that age never became an art of mere pattern

like the architecture. The whole life and thought of the time was poured

into it; and the art itself developed in its upward movement a number

of scientific interests--perspective, anatomy, expression--which

counteracted that tendency to seek for mere beauty of arrangement and

detail. Yet the perfection of Renaissance art never lies in any realism

in our modern sense, still less in such suggestiveness as belongs to our

literary age; and its triumph is when Raphael can vary and co-ordinate

the greatest number of heads, of hands, feet, and groups, as in the

School of Athens, the Parnassus, the marvellous little Bible histories

of the Loggie; above all, in that "Vision of Ezekiel," which is the very

triumph of compact and harmonious composition; when Michelangelo can

tie human beings into the finest knots, twist them into the most shapely

brackets, frameworks, and key-stones. Even throughout the period of

utmost realism, while art was struggling with absorbing problems, men

never dreamed of such realism as ours. They never painted a corner of

nature at random, merely for the sake of veracity; they never modelled

a modern man or woman in their real everyday dress and at their real

everyday business. In the midst of everything composition ruled supreme,

and each object must needs find its echo, be worked into a scheme of

lines, or, with the Venetians, of symmetrically arranged colours. There

is an anatomical engraving by Antonio Pollaiolo, one of the strongest

realists of his time, which sums up the tendencies of fifteenth-century

art. It is a combat of twelve naked men, extraordinarily hideous and

in hideous attitudes, but they are so arranged that their ungainly and

flayed-looking limbs form with the background of gigantic ivy tendrils

an intricate and beautiful pattern, such as we find in Morris's paper

and stuffs.

This hankering after pattern, this desire for beauty as such, became

manifest in Domenico Neroni after his first sojourn in Rome.

The Roman basilicas, with their stately rows of columns, Corinthian and

Ionic, taken from some former temple, and their sunken floor, solemn

with Byzantine patterns of porphyry and serpentine, had impressed with

their simplicity and harmony the mind of this Florentine, surrounded

hitherto by the intricacies of Gothic buildings. They had formed the

link to those fragments of ancient architecture, more intact but also

more hidden than in our days, whose dignity of proportion and grace of

detail--vast rosetted arches and slender rows of fluted pillars--our

modern and Hellenicised taste has treated with too ready contempt. For

this Vitruvian art, unoriginal and bungling in the eyes of our purists,

was yet full of the serenity, the ampleness which the Middle Ages lacked,

and affected the men of the fifteenth century much like a passage of

Virgil after a canto of Dante. It formed the fit setting for those

remains of antique sculpture which were then gradually beginning to be

drawn from the earth. Of such statues and reliefs--which the men of

the Renaissance regarded as the work rather of ancient Rome than of

Greece--a certain amount was beginning to be carried all over Italy, and

notably to the houses of the rich Florentine merchants, who incrusted

their staircase walls with inscriptions and carvings, and set statues

and sarcophagi under the columns of their courtyards. But such sculpture

was chosen rather for its portable character than its excellence; and

although single busts and slabs were diligently studied by Florentine

artists, there could not have existed in Florence a number of antiques

sufficient to impress the ideal of ancient art upon men surrounded on

all sides by the works of medieval painters and sculptors.

To the various sights of Rome must be due that sudden enlarging of

style, that kind of new classicism, which distinguishes the work of

fifteenth-century masters after their visit to the Eternal City, enabling

Ghirlandaio, Signorelli, Perugino, and Botticelli to make the Sixtine

Chapel, and even the finical Pinturicchio, the Vatican library, into

centres of fresh influence for harmony and beauty.

The result upon Domenico Neroni was a momentary confusion in all his

artistic conceptions. Too much of a seeker for new things, for secret

and complicated knowledge, to undergo a mere widening of style like his

more gifted or more placid contemporaries, he fell foul of his previous

work and his previous masters, without finding a new line or new ideals.

The frescoes of Castagno, the little panels of the Pollaiolos, nay, even

the works of Donatello, were no longer what they had seemed before his

Roman journey, and even what he had remembered them in Rome; for it is

with more noble things, even as with the rooms which we inhabit, which

strike us as small and dingy only on returning from larger and better

lighted ones.