There is here a large hall, containing a brief chronicle of the progress of
painting from Cimabue to--Carlo Dolce! There may be a still deeper descent;
but that is bathos sufficient for any lover of his species.
It is desirable to look at these painters of the thirteenth, fourteenth,
and fifteenth centuries with some reference to the political condition of
Florence and of Italy at that time. In truth, Florence during the period of
its life _was_ Italy,--the _vivida vis_, creative, contemplative, ornative,
impulsive to the clay of Europe. The art of painting seems to spring
full-grown into existence, with the appearance of Cimabue in the latter
part of the thirteenth century. Even so the Italian language suddenly
crystallizes itself into a brilliant and perpetual type, at the same epoch
as the wondrous poem of Dante flashes forth from the brooding chaos,--the
_fiat lux_ of a new intellectual world.
The Emperor Frederic II., last of the imperial Hohenstaufens, died in 1250.
Chivalrous, adventurous, despotic, as became the head of the conquering
German races at their epoch of triumph,--imaginative, poetical, debauched,
atheistical, as might be expected of a prince born in Italy, he seemed to
justify the somewhat incongruous eagerness with which the Florentine mind
sought political salvation in the bosom of the Church. Yet here seems the
fatal flaw in the liberal system of Italy at that period. The Ghibelline
party was at least consistent. To be an imperialist, a Hohenstaufenite,
was at least definite; as much so as to be an absolutist, a Habsburgite,
a Napoleonite to-day. But to be a Guelph,--to be in favor of municipal
development, local self-government, intellectual progress, and to fight for
all these things under the banner of the Church, in an age which witnessed
the establishment of the Inquisition, in an age when the mighty spirit of
Hildebrand was rising every day from his grave in more and more influential
and imposing shape,--this was to place one's self in a false position.
Dante, no doubt, felt all this to the core of his being. A poet by nature,
with that intense, morbid, proud, uncomfortable, alternately benevolent
and misanthropical temperament which occasionally accompanies the poetic
faculty, he had little in common with the bustling, vivacious character
of his fellow-townsmen. _Fiorentino di nascita, non di costumi_, as he
describes himself, he had slight sympathy with Blacks or Whites, Guelphs
or Ghibellines. A Guelph by birth, a Ghibelline by banishment, he was in
reality an absolutist in politics, and a bigot in religion. Had a hell
never been heard of, he would have invented one, for the mere comfort of
roasting his enemies in it, and his friends along with them,--the solitary
enjoyment of his lifetime. His part in public affairs has been much
magnified. He was prior in 1300; but almost any citizen of Florence might
be prior. He was once sent to Rome, on a diplomatic errand; but he was
only the envoy of a party, only one of a set of delegates appointed by
the Whites. He was banished for his political opinions, and afterwards
condemned to death; but even this was no distinction; for six hundred other
persons, most of them obscure men, were included in the same sentence,
for the same offence. They all happened, in short, to belong to the party
opposed to the one which was successful. His merits of style can hardly
be exaggerated. Alone of mankind he almost created a language. Imagine
the English, or the German, or the French poetry of the year 1300 flowing
musically and familiarly from the lips of 1857! The culture, too, of
his epoch might almost be measured by his personal accomplishments. The
Aristotle, the Bacon, the Humboldt of Florence was one of the world's
great poets into the bargain; but he was any thing but a statesman or a
politician.
In his poetry, accordingly, written when the Florentine democracy was
young, vigorous, and mischievous, there is no chord of sympathy with
the polity of his native place. On the contrary, the whole magnificent
"Commedia" is a _De profundis_ chanted out of an oppressed and scornful
bosom, a fiery protest, an excoriating satire against the liberty upon
which the Commonwealth prided itself. Florence banished and would have
burned her poet. The poet banished and burned Florence in the great hell
which his imagination created and peopled. His ashes,--so often and so
vainly implored for by the repentant and sorrowing mother, who had driven
him from her bosom with curses, to wander and to starve, "to eat the bitter
bread of exile, and to feel that sharpest arrow in the bow of exile, the
going up and down in another's house,"--his ashes are not the property of
the Republic. Are his laurels? Yes. The "Divina Commedia" is a splendid
proof of the vitality which pervades a republican atmosphere. There was
little of justice perhaps, and less of security and comfort; but there was
at any rate life, intellectual development, thought, pulsation, fierce
collision of mind with mind, attrition of human passions and divine
faculties, out of which an elemental fire was created which flamed over the
civilized world, and has lighted the torches of civilization for centuries.
He who would study the _artes humaniores_ must turn of necessity to two
fountain heads; and he finds them in the trampled marketplaces of two
noisy, turbulent, unreasonable, pestilent little democratic cities,--Athens
and Florence. Extinguish the architecture and the sculpture, the poetry and
the philosophy of Attica; obliterate from the sum of civilization the names
of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli,--of Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo
da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Michel Angelo,--of Brunetto, Ficino, Politian; and
how much diminished will be the remainder!
Nevertheless, it is in vain to look for any special seal set by the spirit
of liberty upon the artistic productions of the earlier age in Florence.
The works of the great painters bear the impress of the Church. If the
spirit of liberty be present at all, it is veiled and hooded by monastic
garments. But it should never be forgotten, that, in this age, the Church
embodied an element of liberty. The keys of Saint Peter were brandished
against the universal sceptre of the Suabians; cultivated intellect was
matched, and often successfully, against brutal violence. The Pope was the
rival of Cæsar.
The first great painting in the Academy--to return from this digression--is
the famous Madonna of Cimabue. This picture is astonishing. Although
considered by many critics to manifest lingering traces of the Byzantine
bandages, it seems to us, on the contrary, to be wonderfully free from
stiffness and conventionality. The genius of Cimabue extricates itself at a
bound from the trammels of preceding systems, and flies vigorously towards
nature.
The Madonna is colossal. She wears a hood, and holds her child in her
arms. There is a strong human, yet spiritualized expression upon the face.
The drapery is gracefully arranged, not folded like mummy cloths; and the
color is strong and liberally laid on, without any attempt, however, at
transparency of shadow. There is little indication of the technical glories
of succeeding centuries. Perhaps the best part of the picture is in the
lower margin. Here are four heads of saints, painted with a breadth and
energy absolutely startling, when one recollects by whom and when they were
executed. Dominic Ghirlandaio, two hundred years later, could hardly have
put more masculine expression into a quartet of heads.
Giotto's Madonna is the pendant to that of Cimabue; but although painted
twenty-five years later, it shows less progress in art than might be
expected. Giotto's triumphs are to be found in the frescos of the
Santa Croce. In that unequalled series, the art-student recognizes,
almost at a glance, the power of the master. Largeness, rhythm, and
harmony of composition,--dramatic movement, and individual beauty of
expression,--heads which have brains, eyes which can smile, lips which can
speak, fluent limbs which can move, or remain in natural repose,--the whole
surrounded and inspired by that atmosphere of piety, that effluence of
religious ecstasy, which can never be imitated, and which came from the
unquestioning faith of the artist;--such wonders were for the first time
revealed by Giotto. The shepherd boy, whom Cimabue found drawing pictures
upon a stone in the open field, nobly repaid his patron and master, by
extending still farther the domain of art,--by throwing its doors wide open
to the cool breath of nature and the liberal sunshine. To pass from the
Byzantines into the school of Giotto is to come out from the catacombs into
the warm precincts of the cheerful day.
Of the pictures of the early part of the fifteenth century, none are
more worthy of attention in this collection than those of Fra Angelico
of Fiesole. (1387-1455.) Nevertheless, it seems no great progress from
Cimabue, Giotto, and Orgagna, whose compositions are so full of energetic
life and human passion, to these careful, gentle miniatures upon an
expanded scale. The Fra was a _miniatore_, after all,--a manuscript
illuminator of the first class. His effort to represent a descent from the
cross in a large and dramatic manner is feeble and flat. This flight seems
beyond his strength; and his waxy little wings, which sustained him so well
within his own sphere, melted at once in this higher region.
Far better is an exquisite little picture in his very best manner, a
work which hangs in the apartment De' Piccoli Quadri. This is a Judgment
Day, and a cheerful painting of its class. There is an old conceit, very
cleverly carried out through the whole composition, of representing all the
just made perfect as actually converted into little children. Kings with
crowns, popes, bishops, cardinals in hats and mitres, monks cowled and
robed in conventual habiliments, are all philandering together through
gardens of amaranth and asphodel towards the Grecian portico of heaven; and
all these fortunate personages, whether monarchs, priests, fine ladies, or
beggars, are depicted with perfectly infantine faces. To do this well lay
exactly in the quaint, delicate nature of the angelic Frater; and this
portion of the picture is most exquisitely handled. The other moiety, where
devils with rabbits' ears, tiger faces, and monkeys' tails, are forking
over the damned into frying-pans, while Satan devours them as fast as
cooked, is common-place and vulgar. At the same time, it is certain that
the whole composition shows much poetry of invention and delicacy of
finish.
Andrew Castagno's Magdalen, like Donatello's Wooden Statue of the same
penitent in the Baptistery, seems a female Robinson Crusoe,--hirsute,
cadaverous, fleshless, uncombed and uncomely,--certainly a more edifying
spectacle than the voluptuous, Titianesque exhibitions of fair frailty
which became the fashion afterwards.
Of Gentile da Fabriano, a very rare master, there hangs an Adoration of
the Magi, marked May, 1423. One always feels grateful to such of the
_Quattrocentisti_ as enlarged the sphere of artistic action, by going out
of the conventional circle of holy families, nativities, and entombments.
There is a dash about Gentile, a fresh, cavalier-like gentility, quite
surprising, and altogether his own. A showy, flippant frivolity in several
of the figures enlivens and refreshes us with its mundane sparkle and
energy. One of the three kings, in particular,--a young, well-dressed,
vivacious, _goguenard_-looking personage, with a very glittering pair of
spurs, which his groom is just unbuckling, while another holds a highly
bedizened war-horse, who is throwing up his head, showing all his teeth,
and crying ha, ha, with all his might,--has a very dramatic effect.
Of the Lippo Lippis, the Lorenzo di Credis, the Ghirlandaios, the
Peruginos, and the other great masters of the fifteenth century, of whom
are many masterpieces in this collection, there shall, for the present, not
a word be said.
There is also a portrait of Savonarola, by Fra Bartolommeo. The face is
neither impressive nor attractive. The head is shorn, except the monastic
coronal, and shows a small organ of benevolence, and a very large one
of self-esteem. The profile is not handsome,--the nose being regularly
aquiline, while the mouth is heavy with a projecting upper lip. A strong,
blue beard, closely shaven, but very visible, darkens and improves the
physiognomy.