father's profession; but we know that Raphael loved her blindly,
passionately, beyond all other thoughts; as Agostino Chigi loved the
magnificent Imperia for whom the Farnesina was built and made beautiful.
And there was a time when the great painter was almost idle, out of love
for the girl, and went about languidly with pale face and shadowed eyes,
and scarcely cared to paint or draw. He was at work in the Vatican then,
or should have been, and in the Farnesina, too; but each day, when he
went out, his feet led him away from the Pope's palace and across the
square, by the Gate of the Holy Spirit and down the endless straight
Lungara towards the banker's palace; but when he reached it he went on
to the Fornarina's house, and she was at the window waiting for him. For
her sake he refused to marry the great Cardinal Bibbiena's well-dowered
niece, Maria, and the world has not ceased to believe that for too much
love of the Fornarina he died. But before that, as Fabio Chigi tells,
Pope Leo the Tenth, being distressed by the painter's love sickness,
asked Agostino Chigi if there were not some way to bring him back to
work. And the great banker, as anxious for his Farnesina as the Pope was
for his Vatican, spirited away the lovely girl for a time, she
consenting for her lover's sake. And Chigi then pretended to search for
her, and comforted Raphael with news of her and promises of her return,
so that after being half mad with anxiety he grew calmer, and worked for
a time at his painting. But soon he languished, and the cure was worse
than the evil; so that one day Chigi brought the girl back to him
unawares and went away, leaving them together.
Of the end we know nothing, nor whether Margaret was with him when he
died; we know nothing, save that she outlived him, and died in her turn,
and lies in a grave which no one can find. But when all Rome was in
sorrow for the dead man, when he had been borne through the streets to
his grave, with his great unfinished Transfiguration for a funeral
banner, when he had been laid in his tomb in the Pantheon, beside Maria
Bibbiena, who had died, perhaps, because he would not love her, then
the pale Margaret must have sat often by the little Gothic window near
the Septimian gate, waiting for what could not come any more. For she
had loved a man beyond compare; and it had been her whole life.
[Illustration: MONASTERY OF SANT' ONOFRIO
From an old engraving]
If one comes from the Borgo by the Lungara, and if one turns up the
steep hill to the right, there is the place where Tasso died,
seventy-five years after Raphael was gone. The small monastery of Sant'
Onofrio, where he spent the last short month of his life, used to be a
lonely and beautiful place, and is remembered only for his sake, though
it has treasures of its own--the one fresco painted in Rome by Lionardo
da Vinci, and paintings by Domenichino and Pinturicchio in its portico
and little church, as well as memories of Saint Philip Neri, the
Roman-born patron saint of Rome. All these things barely sufficed to
restrain the government from turning it into a barrack for the city
police a few years ago, when the name of one of Italy's greatest poets
should alone have protected it. It was far from the streets and
thoroughfares in older times, and the quiet sadness of its garden called
up the infinite melancholy of the poor poet who drew his last breath of
the fresh open air under the old tree at the corner, and saw Rome the
last time, as he turned and walked painfully back to the little room
where he was to die. It is better to think of it so, when one has seen
it in those days, than to see it as it is now, standing out in vulgar
publicity upon the modern avenue.
There died the man who had sung, and wandered, and loved; who had been
slighted, and imprisoned for a madman; who had escaped and hidden
himself, and had yet been glorious; who had come to Rome at last to
receive the laureate's crown in the Capitol, as Petrarch had been
crowned before him. His life is a strange history, full of discordant
passages that left little or no mark in his works, so that it is a
wonder how a man so torn and harassed could labour unceasingly for many
years at a work so perfectly harmonious as 'Jerusalem Freed'; and it
seems strange that the hot-headed, changeable southerner should have
stood up as the determined champion of the Epic Unity against the
school of Ariosto, the great northern poet, who had believed in
diversity of action as a fundamental principle of the Epic; it is
stranger still and a proof of his power that Tasso should have earned
something like universal glory against the long-standing supremacy of
Ariosto in the same field, in the same half-century, and living at the
same court. Everything in Tasso's life was contradictory, everything in
his works was harmonious. Even after he was dead, the contrasts of glory
and misery followed his bones like fate. He died in the arms of Cardinal
Aldobrandini, the Pope's nephew, almost on the eve of his intended
crowning in the Capitol; he was honoured with a magnificent funeral, and
his body was laid in an obscure corner, enclosed in a poor deal coffin.
It was six years before the monks of Sant' Onofrio dug up the bones and
placed them in a little lead box 'out of pity,' as the inscription on
the metal lid told, and buried them again under a poor slab that bore
his name, and little else; and when a monument was at last made to him
in the nineteenth century, by the subscriptions of literary societies,
it was so poor and unworthy that it had better not have been set up at
all. A curious book might be written upon the vicissitudes of great
men's bones.
Opposite the Farnesina stands the great Palazzo Corsini, once the
habitation of the Riario family, whose history is a catalogue of
murders, betrayals, and all possible crimes, and whose only redeeming
light in a long history was that splendid and brave Catherine Sforza,
married to one of their name, who held the fortress of Forli so bravely
against Caesar Borgia, who challenged him to single combat, which he
refused out of shame, who was overcome by him at last, and brought
captive to the Vatican in chains of gold, as Aurelian brought Zenobia.
In the days of her power she had lived in the great palace for a time.
It looks modern now; it was once a place of evil fame, and is said to
have been one of the few palaces in Rome which contained one of those
deadly shafts, closed by a balanced trap door that dropped the living
victim who stepped upon it a hundred and odd feet at a fall, out of
hearing and out of sight for ever. From the Riario it was bought at
last, in 1738, by the Corsini, and when they began to repair it, they
found the bones of the nameless dead in heaps far down among the
foundations.
There also lived Christina, Queen of Sweden, of romantic and execrable
memory, for twenty years; and here she died, the strangest compound of
greatness, heroism, vanity and wickedness that ever was woman to the
destruction of man; ending her terrible life in an absorbing passion for
art and literature which attracted to itself all that was most delicate
and refined at the end of the seventeenth century; dabbling in alchemy,
composing verses forgotten long ago, discoursing upon art with Bernini,
dictating the laws of verse to the poet Guidi, collecting together a
vast library of rare books and a great gallery of great pictures, and
of engravings and medals and beautiful things of every sort--the only
woman, perhaps, who was ever like Lucrezia Borgia, and outdid her in all
ways.
Long before her time, a Riario, the Cardinal of Saint George, had like
tastes and drew about him the thinkers and the writers of his age, when
the Renascence was at its climax and the Constable of Bourbon had not
yet been shot down at the walls a few hundred yards from the Corsini
palace, bequeathing the plunder of Rome to his Spaniards and Germans.
Here Erasmus spent those hours of delight of which he eloquently wrote
in after years, and here, to this day, in the grand old halls whence the
Riario sent so many victims to their deaths below, a learned and
literary society holds its meetings. Of all palaces in Rome in which she
might have lived, fate chose this one for Queen Christina, as if its
destiny of contrasts past and future could best match her own.
Much more could be told of Trastevere and much has been told already;
how Beatrice Cenci lies in San Pietro in Montorio, how the lovely
Farnesina, with all its treasures, was bought by force by the Farnese
for ten thousand and five hundred scudi,--two thousand and one hundred
pounds,--how the Region was swept and pillaged again and again by
Emperors and nobles, and people and Popes, without end.
But he who should wander through the Regions in their order, knowing
that the greatest is last, would tire of lingering in the long Lungara
and by the Gate of the Holy Spirit, while on the other side lies the
great Castle of Sant' Angelo, and beyond that the Vatican, and Saint
Peter's church; and for that matter, a great part of what has not been
told here may be found in precise order and ready to hand in all those
modern guide books which are the traveller's first leading-strings as he
learns to walk in Rome.
* * * * *
Yet here, on the threshold of that Region which contains many of the
world's most marvellous treasures of art--at the Gate of the Holy
Spirit, through which Raphael so often passed between love and work--I
shall say a few words about that development in which Italy led the
world, and something of the men who were leaders in the Renascence.
Art is not dependent on the creations of genius alone. It is also the
result of developing manual skill to the highest degree. Without genius,
works of art might as well be turned out by machinery; without manual
skill, genius could have no means of expression. As a matter of fact, in
our own time, it is the presence of genius, without manual skill, or
foolishly despising it, that has produced a sort of school called the
impressionist.
To go back to first principles, the word Art, as every child knows, is
taken directly from the Latin ars, artis, which the best Latin
dictionary translates or defines: 'The faculty of joining anything
corporeal or spiritual properly or skilfully,' and therefore: 'skill,
dexterity, art, ability,' and then: 'skill or faculty of the mind or
body that shows itself in performing any work, trade, profession, art,
science.' From the meaning of the Latin word we may eliminate what
refers to spiritual things; not because literature, for instance, is not
art, as well as music and the rest, but because we have to do with
painting, sculpture, architecture, metal working, and the like, in which
actual manual skill is a most integral element.
Now it is always admitted that art grew out of handicraft, when
everything was made by hand, and when the competition between workers
was purely personal, because each man worked for himself and not for a
company in which his individuality was lost. That is nowhere more clear
than in Italy, though the conditions were similar throughout Europe
until the universal introduction of machinery. The transition from
handicraft to art was direct, quick and logical, and at first it
appeared almost simultaneously in all the trades. The Renascence appears
to us as a sort of glorious vision in which all that was beautiful
suddenly sprang into being again, out of all that was rough and chaotic
and barbarous. In real fact the Renascence began among carpenters, and
blacksmiths, and stone masons, and weavers, when they began to take
pride in their work, when they began to try and ornament their own
tools, when the joiner who knew nothing of the Greeks began to trace a
pattern with a red-hot nail on the clumsy wooden chest, when the smith
dinted out a simple design upon the head of his hammer, when the mason
chipped out a face or a leaf on the corner of the rough stone house, and
when the weaver taught himself to make patterns in the stuff he wove.
The true beginning of the Renascence was the first improvement of
hand-work after an age in which everything people used had been rougher
and worse made than we can possibly imagine. Then one thing suggested
another, and each generation found some new thing to do, till the result
was a great movement and a great age. But there never was, and never
could have been, any art at all without hand-work. Progress makes almost
everything by machinery, and dreams of abolishing hand-work altogether,
and of making Nature's forces do everything, and provide everything for
everybody, so that nobody need work at all, and everybody may have a
like share in what is to cost nobody anything. Then, in the dream,
everybody will be devoted to what we vaguely call intellectual pursuits,
and the human race will be raised to an indefinitely high level. In
reality, if such things were possible, we should turn into oysters, or
into something about as intelligent. It is the experience of all ages
that human beings will not work unless they are obliged to, and
degenerate rapidly in idleness, and there have not been many exceptions
to the rule. Art grew out of hand-work, but it grew in it, too, as a
plant in the soil; when there is no more hand-work, there will be no
more art. The two belong to each other, and neither can do without the
other.
[Illustration: THE FORUM
Looking West]
Of course, I do not mean to say that there was a succession of
centuries, or even one century, during which no pictures were painted in
Italy, or no sculptures carved. The tradition of the arts survived, like
the tradition of Latin poetry, with the same result, that rude works
were produced in the early churches and convents. But there was no life
in those things; and when, after a long time, after the early Crusades,
Byzantine artists came to Italy, their productions were even worse than
those of the still ignorant Italians, because they were infinitely more
pretentious, with their gildings and conventionalities and
expressionless types, and were not really so near the truth. What I mean
is that the revival of real art came from a new beginning deep down and
out of sight, among humble craftsmen and hard-working artisans, who
found out by degrees that their hands could do more than they had been
taught to do, and that objects of daily use need not be ugly or merely
plain in order to be strong and well made and serviceable. And as this
knowledge grew among them with practice and by experiment, they rose to
the power of using for new purposes of beauty the old methods of
painting and sculpture, which had survived, indeed, but which were of no
value to the old-fashioned artists who had learned them from generation
to generation, without understanding and without enthusiasm.
The highest of the crafts in the Middle Age was goldsmithing. When
almost every other artistic taste had disappeared from daily life in
that rough time, the love of personal adornment had survived, and when
painters and sculptors were a small band of men, trained to represent
certain things in certain ways--trained like a church choir, in fact, to
the endless repetition of ancient themes--the goldsmiths had latitude
and freedom to their hearts' desire and so many buyers for their work
that their own numbers were not nearly so limited as those of 'artists'
in the narrow sense. One chief part of their art lay in drawing and
modelling, another in casting metals, another in chiselling, and they
were certainly the draughtsmen of an age in which the art of drawing was
practically lost among painters; and it was because they learned how to
draw that so many of them became great painters when the originality of
two or three men of genius had opened the way.
One says 'two or three,' vaguely, but the art had grown out of infancy
when they appeared, and there was an enormous distance between Cimabue,
whom people call the father of painting, and the Cosmas family, of whom
the last died about the time that Cimabue was born. But though Cimabue
was a noble, the Cosmas family who preceded him were artisans first and
artists afterwards, and men of the people; and Giotto, whom Cimabue
discovered sketching sheep on a piece of slate with a pointed stone, was
a shepherd lad. So was Andrea Mantegna, who dominated Italian art a
hundred and fifty years later--so was David, one of the greatest poets
that ever lived, and so was Sixtus the Fifth, one of the strongest popes
that ever reigned--all shepherds.
It is rather remarkable that although so many famous painters were
goldsmiths, none of the very greatest were. Among the goldsmiths were
Orcagna, Ghiberti, Ghirlandajo, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Francia,
Verrocchio, Andrea del Sarto. But Benvenuto Cellini, the greatest of
goldsmiths, was never a painter, and the very greatest painters were
never goldsmiths, for Cimabue, Giotto, Mantegna, Lionardo da Vinci,
Perugino, Raphael, Michelangelo, all began in the profession that made
them the greatest artists of their age. It is very hard to get at an
idea of what men thought about art in those times. Perhaps it would be
near the truth to say that it was looked upon as a universal means of
expression. What strikes one most in the great pictures of that time is
their earnestness, not in the sense of religious faith, but in the
determination to do nothing without a perfectly clear and definite
meaning, which any cultivated person could understand, and at which even
a child might guess. Nothing was done for effect, nothing was done
merely for beauty's sake. It was as if the idea of usefulness, risen
with art from the hand-crafts, underlay the intentions of beauty, or of
devotion, or of history, which produced the picture. In those times,
when the artist put in any accessory he asked himself: 'Does it mean
anything?' whereas most painters of today, in the same case, ask
themselves: 'Will it look well?' The difference between the two points
of view is the difference between jesting and being in earnest--between
an art that compared itself with an ideal future, and the art of today
that measures itself with an ideal past. The great painters of the
Renascence appealed to men and to men's selves, whereas the great
painters of today appeal chiefly to men's eyes and to that much of men
which can be stirred through the eye only.
It was not that those early artists were religious enthusiasts, moved by
a spiritual faith such as that which inspired Fra Angelico and one or
two others. Few of them were religious men; several of them, like
Perugino, were freethinkers. It was not, I think, because they looked
upon art itself as a very sacred matter, not to be jested with, since
they used their art against their enemies for revenge and ridicule. It
was rather because everyone was in earnest then, and was forced to be by
the nature of the times; whereas people now are only relatively in
earnest, and stake their money only where men once staked their lives.
That was one reason. Another may be that the greatest painters of those
times were practically men of universal genius and were always men of
vast reading and cultivation, the equals and often the superiors of the
learned in all other branches of science, literature and art. They were
not only great painters, but great men and great thinkers, and far above
doing anything solely 'for effect.' Lionardo da Vinci has been called
the greatest man of the fifteenth century--so has Michelangelo--so,
perhaps, has Raphael. They seemed able to do everything, and they have
not been surpassed in what they did as painters, sculptors, architects,
engineers, fortifiers of cities, mathematicians, thinkers. No one
nowadays ever thinks of a painter as being anything but a painter, and
people shrug their shoulders at the idea that an artist can do anything
of the kind called 'serious' in this age.
[Illustration: EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS]
One asks what were the surroundings, the customs, the habits, in which
these men grew to be already great at an age when modern boys are at
college. One asks whether that system of teaching or education, whatever
it may have been, was not much more likely to make great men than ours.
And the answer suggests itself: our teaching is for the many, and the
teaching of that day was for the few.
Let anyone try and imagine the childhood of Giotto as the account of it
has come down to us through almost all the authorities. He was born in
the year 1276--when Dante was about eleven years old. That was the time
when the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines were at their height. That was
the year in which Count Ugolino della Gherardesca got back his lordship
over Pisa--where he was to be starved to death with his two sons and two
grandsons some twelve years later. That was the time when four Popes
died in sixteen months--the time when the Sicilian Vespers drove Charles
of Anjou from Sicily for ever--when Guido da Montefeltro was fighting
and betraying and fighting again--the time of Dante's early youth, in
which fell most of those deeds for which he consigned the doers to hell
and their names to immortality.
Imagine, then, what a shepherd's hut must have been in those days, in a
narrow valley of the Tuscan hills--the small cottage built of unhewn
stones picked up on the hillside, fitted together one by one, according
to their irregular shapes, and cemented, if at all, with clay and mud
from the river bed--the roof of untrimmed saplings tied together and
thatched with chestnut boughs, held down by big stones, lest the wind
should blow them away. The whole, dark brown and black with the rich
smoke of brushwood burned in the corner to boil the big black cauldron
of sheep's milk for the making of the rank 'pecorino' cheese. One square
room, lighted from the door only. The floor, the beaten earth. The beds,
rough-hewn boards, lying one above the other, like bunks, on short
strong lengths of sapling stuck into the wall. For mattresses, armfuls
of mountain hay. The people, a man, his wife and two or three children,
dressed winter and summer in heavy brown homespun woollen and
sheepskins. For all furniture, a home-made bench, black with age and
smoke. The food, day in, day out, coarse yellow meal, boiled thick in
water and poured out to cool upon the black bench, divided into portions
then with a thin hide thong, crosswise and lengthwise, for each person a
yellow square, and eaten greedily with unwashed hands that left a little
for the great sheep-dog. The drink, spring water and the whey left from
the cheese curds, drunk out of a small earthen pot, passed from mouth
to mouth. A silent bunch of ignorant human beings, full of thought for
the morrow, and of care for the master's sheep that were herded together
in the stone pen all round the hut; fighting the wolves in winter, and
in summer time listening for the sound of war from the valley, when
Guelph and Ghibelline harried all the country, and killed every stray
living thing for food. And among these half-starved wretches was a boy
of twelve or thirteen years, weak-jointed, short-winded, little better
than a cripple and only fit to watch the sheep on summer days when the
wolves were not hungry--a boy destined to be one of the greatest
artists, one of the greatest architects, and one of the most cultivated
men of that or any other age--Giotto.
The contrast between his childhood and his manhood is so startling that
one cannot realize it. It means that in those days the way from nothing
to much was short and straight for great minds--impossible and
impracticable for small ones. Great intelligences were not dwarfed to
stumps by laborious school work, were not stuffed to a bursting point by
cramming, were not artificially inflamed by the periodical blistering of
examinations; but average intelligences had not the chance which a
teaching planned only for the average gives them now. Talent, in the
shape of Cimabue, found genius, in the form of Giotto, clothed in rags,
sketching sheep with one stone on another; talent took genius and fed it
and showed it the way, and presently genius overtopped talent by a
mountain's head and shoulders. Cimabue took Giotto from his father, glad
to be rid of the misshapen child that had to be fed and could do nothing
much in return; and from the smoky hut in the little Tuscan valley the
lad was taken straight to the old nobleman painter's house in the most
beautiful city of Italy, was handed over to Brunetto Latini, Dante's
tutor, to be taught book-learning, and was allowed to spend the other
half of his time in the painting room, at the elbow of the greatest
living painter.