genius new and better tools, and therefore a better means of expression.
In a way, almost every painter of early times was an inventor, and had
to be, because for a long time the methods and tools of painting were
absurdly insufficient. Every man who succeeded had discovered some new
way of grinding and mixing colours, of preparing the surface on which he
worked, of using the brush and the knife, and of fixing the finished
picture by means of varnishes. The question of what painters call the
vehicle for colour was always of immense importance. Long before Giotto
began to work there seem to have been two common ways of painting,
namely, in fresco, with water-colours, and on prepared surfaces by means
of wax mixed with some sort of oil.
In fresco painting, the mason, or the plasterer, works with the painter.
A surface as large as the artist expects to use during a few hours is
covered with fresh stucco by the mason, and thoroughly smoothed with a
small trowel. Stucco, as used in Italy, is a mixture of slaked lime and
white marble dust, or very fine sand which has been thoroughly sifted.
If stained to resemble coloured or veined marbles, and immediately
ironed till it is dry with hot smooth irons, the surface of the mass is
hardened and polished to such a degree that it is almost impossible to
distinguish it from real marble without breaking into it. Waxing gives
it a still higher polish. But if water-colours are used for painting a
picture upon it, and if the colours are laid on while the stucco is
still damp, they unite with the lime, and slowly dry to a surface which
is durable, but neither so hard nor so polished as that produced when
the stucco is ironed. The principal conditions are that the stucco must
be moist, the wall behind it absolutely dry and the colours very thin
and flowing. Should the artist not cover all that has been prepared for
his day's work, the remainder has to be broken out again and laid on
fresh the next day. It is now admitted that the wall-paintings of the
ancients were executed in this way. As it was impossible for the artist
at any time to have the whole surface of the freshly stuccoed wall at
his disposal in order to draw his picture before painting it, he either
drew the design in red upon the rough dry plaster, and then had the
stucco laid over it in bits, or else he made a cartoon drawing of the
work in its full size. The outlines were then generally pricked out with
a stout pin, and the cartoon cut up into pieces of convenient
dimensions, so that the painter could lay them against the fresh stucco
and rub the design through, or pounce it, as we should say, with
charcoal dust, like a stencil. He then coloured it as quickly as he
could. If he made a mistake, or was not pleased with the effect, there
was no remedy except the radical one of breaking off the stucco, laying
it on fresh, and beginning over again. It was clearly impossible to
paint over the same surface again and again as can be done in oil
painting.
No one knows exactly when eggs were first used in fresco painting, nor
does it matter much. Some people used the yolk and the white together,
some only one or the other, but the egg was, and is, always mixed with
water. Some artists now put gum tragacanth into the mixture. It is then
used like water in water-colour work, but is called 'tempera' or
'distemper.' The effect of the egg is to produce an easy flow of the
colour with so little liquid that the paint does not run on the surface,
as it easily does in ordinary water-colours. The effect of the yellow
yolk of the egg upon the tints is insignificant, unless too much be
used. By using egg, one may paint upon ordinary prepared canvas as
easily as with oils, which is impossible with water-colour.
As for the early paintings upon panels of wood, before oils were used,
they were meant to be portable imitations of fresco. The wood was
accordingly prepared by covering it with a thin coating of fine white
cement, or stucco, which was allowed to dry and become perfectly hard,
because it was of course impossible to lay it on fresh every day in
such small quantities. The vehicle used could therefore not be water,
which would have made the colours run. The most common practice of the
Byzantine and Romanesque schools seems to have been to use warm melted
wax in combination with some kind of oil, the mixture being kept ready
at hand over a lighted lamp, or on a pan of burning charcoal. There are
artists in Europe, still, who occasionally use wax in this way, though
generally mixed with alcohol or turpentine, and the result is said to be
very durable. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted many pictures in this way.
With regard to using oils on a dry surface in wall painting, instead of
fresco, Lionardo da Vinci tried it repeatedly with the result that many
of his wall paintings were completely lost within thirty or forty years
after they had been painted. The greatest of those which have survived
at all, the Last Supper in Milan, has had to be restored so often that
little of the original picture remains untouched.
The enormous value of linseed oil and nut oil as a vehicle was apparent
as soon as it was discovered in Holland. Its great advantages are that,
unlike water or egg, it will carry a large quantity of colour upon the
canvas at the first stroke, that it dries slowly, so that the same
ground may be worked over without haste while it is still fresh, and
that it has a very small effect in changing the tints of the original
paints used. One may see what value was attached to its use from the
fact that those who first brought it to Italy worked in secret. Andrea
Castagno, surnamed the Assassin, learned the method from his best
friend, Domenico Veneziano, and then murdered him while he was singing a
serenade under a lady's window, in order to possess the secret alone.
But it soon became universally known and made a revolution in Italian
painting.
In the older times, when rare and valuable pigments were used, as well
as large quantities of pure gold, the materials to be employed and their
value were stipulated for in the contract made between the painter and
his employer before the picture was begun, and an artist's remuneration
at that time was much of the nature of a salary, calculated on an
approximate guess at the time he might need for the work. That was, of
course, a survival from the time of the Byzantine artists, to whom gold
and silver and paints were weighed out by the ecclesiastics for whom
they painted, and had to be accounted for in the finished picture. There
is a story told of an artist's apprentice, who made a considerable sum
of money by selling the washings of his master's brushes when the latter
was using a great quantity of ultramarine; and that shows the costliness
of mere paints at that time. As for the more valuable materials, the
great altar picture in Saint Mark's, in Venice, is entirely composed of
plates of pure gold enamelled in different colours, and fastened in a
sort of mosaic upon the wood panel as required, the lights and shades
being produced by hatching regular lines through the hard enamel with a
sharp instrument. The whole technical history of painting lies between
that sort of work and the modern painter's studio.
Before oil painting became general, artists were largely dependent on
commissions in order to do any work except drawing. Fresco needed a
wall, and work done in that manner could not be removed from place to
place. The old-fashioned panel work with its gold background was so
expensive that few artists could afford to paint pictures on the mere
chance of selling them. But the facilities and the economy of pure
tempera work, and work in oils, soon made easel pictures common.
Between the time of Giotto and that of Mantegna another means of
expression, besides painting, was found for artists, if not by accident,
by the ingenuity of the celebrated goldsmith, Maso Finiguerra, who was
the first man in Italy, and probably the first in the world, to take off
upon paper impressions in ink from an engraved plate.
[Illustration: THE PALATINE]
The especial branch of goldsmithing which he practised was what the
Italians still call 'niello' work, or the enamelling of designs upon
precious metals. The method of doing such work is this. Upon the piece
to be enamelled the design is first carefully drawn with a fine point,
precisely as in silver chiselling, and corrected till quite perfect in
all respects. This design is then cut into the metal with very sharp
tools, evenly, but not to a great depth. When completely cut, the
enamelling substance, which is generally sulphate of silver, is placed
upon the design in just sufficient quantities, and the whole piece of
work is then put into a furnace and heated to such a point that the
enamel melts and fills all the cuttings of the design, while the metal
itself remains uninjured. This is an easier matter than might be
supposed, because gold and silver, though soft under the chisel, will
not melt except at a very high temperature. When the enamel has cooled,
the whole surface is rubbed down to a perfect level, and the design
appears with sharp outlines in the polished metal.
Now anyone who has ever worked with a steel point on bright metal knows
how very hard it is to judge of the correctness of the drawing by merely
looking at it, because the light is reflected in all directions into
one's eyes, not only from untouched parts of the plate, but from the
freshly cut lines. The best way of testing the work is to blacken it
with some kind of colour that is free from acid, such as a mixture of
lampblack and oil, to rub the surface clean so as to leave the ink only
in the engraved lines, and then take an impression of the drawing upon
damp paper. That is practically what Finiguerra did, and in so doing he
discovered the art of engraving. Probably goldsmiths had done the same
before him, as they have always done since, but none of them had thought
of drawing upon metal merely for the sake of the impression it would
make, and without any intention of using the metal afterwards. Within
fifty years of Finiguerra's invention very beautiful engravings were
sold all over Italy, and many famous painters engraved their own
works--foremost among these, Mantegna and Botticelli.
Early Italian art rose thus by regular steps, from the helpless,
traditional, imitative work of the Romanesque and Byzantine artists to
its highest development. It then passed a succession of climaxes in the
masterpieces of Lionardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, and
thence descended gradually to the miserably low level of the eighteenth
century.
It is easy to trace the chief objects which painting had in view in its
successive phases. Tradition, Reality and Illusion were the three.
Cimabue was still a Traditionist. Giotto was the first Realist. Mantegna
first aimed at the full illusion which finished art is capable of
producing, and though not so great a man as Giotto, was a much greater
painter. Then came Lionardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, the men of
universal genius, who could make use of tradition without being
commonplace, who could be realistic without being coarse, and who
understood how to produce illusion without being theatrical. In the
decay of Italian art what strikes one most strongly is the combination
of the three faults which the great men knew how to avoid--coarseness,
commonplace thought and theatrical execution.
[Illustration: PALAZZO DEI CONSERVATORI
From a print of the last century]
Cimabue had found out that it was possible to paint sacred pictures
without the dictation of priests, as prescribed by the Council of Nice.
The idea discovered by Giotto, or rather the fact, namely, that nature
could be copied artistically, produced a still greater revolution, and
he had hosts of scholars and followers and imitators. But they were
nothing more, or at the most it may be said that they developed his idea
to the furthest with varying success. It was realism--sometimes a kind
of mystic evocation of nature, disembodied and divinely pure, as in
Beato Angelico; often exquisitely fresh and youthful, as in his pupil,
Benozzo Gozzoli, whose vast series of frescoes half fills the Camposanto
of Pisa--sometimes tentative and experimental, or gravely grand, as in
Masaccio, impetuous and energetic as in Fra Lippo Lippi, fanciful as in
Botticelli--but still, always realism, in the sense of using nature
directly, without any distinct effort at illusion, the figures mostly
taken from life, and generally disposed in one plane, the details
minute, the landscapes faithful rather than suggestive.
The lives of those men were all typical of the times in which they
lived, and especially the life of the holy man we call Beato Angelico,
of saintly memory, that of the fiery lay brother, Filippo Lippi, whose
astounding talents all but redeemed his little less surprising sins--and
lastly that of Andrea Mantegna.
The first two stand out in tremendous contrast as contemporaries--the
realist of the Soul, and the realist of the Flesh, the Saint and the
Sinner, the Ascetic and the Sensualist.
Beato Angelico--of his many names, it is easier to call him by the one
we know best--was born in 1387. At that time the influence of the Empire
in Italy was ended, and that of the Popes was small. The Emperors and
the Popes had in fact contended for the control of municipal rights in
the free Italian cities; with the disappearance of those rights under
the Italian despots the cause of contention was gone, as well as the
partial liberty which had given it existence. The whole country was cut
up into principalities owned and ruled by tyrants. Dante had been dead
about sixty years, and the great imperial idea which he had developed in
his poem had totally failed. The theoretical rights of man, as usual in
the world's history, had gone down before the practical strength of
individuals, whose success tended, again, to call into activity other
individuals, to the general exaltation of talent for the general
oppression of mediocrity. In other words, that condition had been
produced which is most favourable to genius, because everything between
genius and brute strength had been reduced to slavery in the social
scale. The power to take and hold, on the one hand, and the power to
conceive and execute great works on the other, were as necessary to each
other as supply and demand; and all moral worth became a matter of
detail compared with success.
In such a state of the world, a man of creative genius who chanced to be
a saint was an anomaly; there was no fit place for him but a monastery,
and no field for his powers but that of Sacred Art. It was as natural
that Angelico should turn monk as that Lippo Lippi, who had been made
half a monk against his will, should turn layman.
In the peaceful convent of Saint Mark, among the Dominican brethren,
Beato Angelico's character and genius grew together; the devout artist
and the devotional mystic were inseparably blended in one man, and he
who is best remembered as a famous painter was chosen by a wise Pope to
be Archbishop of Florence, for his holy life, his gentle character and
his undoubted learning.
He could not refuse the great honour outright; but he implored the Pope
to bestow it upon a brother monk, whom he judged far more worthy than
himself. He was the same consistent, humble man who had hesitated to eat
meat at the Pope's own table without the permission of the prior of his
convent--a man who, like the great Saint Bernard, had given up a
prosperous worldly existence in pure love of religious peace. It was no
wonder that such a man should become the realist of the angels and a
sort of angel among realists--himself surnamed by his companions the
'Blessed' and the 'Angelic.'
Beside him, younger than he, but contemporary with him, stands out his
opposite, Filippo Lippi. He was not born rich, like Angelico. He came
into the world in a miserable by-way of Florence, behind a Carmelite
convent. His father and mother were both dead when he was two years old,
and a wretchedly poor sister of his father took care of him as best she
could till he was eight. When she could bear the burden no longer, she
took him to the door of the monastery, as orphans were taken in those
days, and gave him over to the charity of the Carmelite fathers. Most
of the boys brought to them in that way grew up to be monks, and some of
them became learned; but the little Filippo would do nothing but scrawl
caricatures in his copybook all day long, and could not be induced to
learn anything. But he learned to draw so well that when the prior saw
what he could do, he allowed him to paint; and at seventeen the lad who
would not learn to read or write knew that he was a great artist, and
turned his back on the monastery that had given him shelter, and on the
partial vows he had already taken. He was the wildest novice that ever
wore a frock. He had almost missed the world, since a little more
inclination, a little more time, might have made a real monk of him. But
he had escaped, and he took to himself all the world could give, and
revelled in it with every sensation of his gifted, sensuous nature. It
was only when he could not get what he wanted that he had curious
returns of monkish reasoning. The historian of his life says that he
would give all he possessed to secure the gratification of whatever
inclination chanced to be predominant at the moment; but if he could by
no means accomplish his wishes, he would then depict the object which
attracted his attention and he would try, by reasoning and talking with
himself, to diminish the violence of his inclination.
There was no lack of adventure in his life, either. Once, at Ancona, on
the Adriatic, he ventured too far out to sea in an open boat, and he
and his companions were picked up by a Barbary pirate and carried off to
Africa. But for his genius he might have ended his days there, instead
of spending only eighteen months in slavery. A clever drawing of the
pirate chief, made on a whitewashed wall with a bit of charcoal from a
brazier, saved him. The Moor saw it, was delighted, set him to paint a
number of portraits, in defiance of Moses, Mahomet and the Koran, and
then, by way of reward, brought him safe across the water to Naples and
gave him his liberty.
He painted more pictures, earned money, and worked his way back to
Florence. As long as he worked at all he did marvels, but a pretty face
was enough to make him forget his art, his work and the Princes and
Dukes who employed him. Cosimo de Medici once shut him up with his
picture, to keep him at it; he tore the sheets of his bed into strips,
knotted them together, escaped by the window--and was of course
forgiven. The nuns of Saint Margaret employed him to paint an
altar-piece for them; he persuaded them to let the most beautiful of
their novices sit as a model for one of the figures; he made love to
her, of course, and ran away with her, leaving the picture unfinished.
It is characteristic of him that though he never forsook her, he refused
the Pope's offer of a dispensation from his early vows which would have
enabled him to marry her--for he hated all ties and bonds alike, and a
regular marriage would have seemed to him almost as bad as slavery in
Africa.
Lippo represented one extreme of character, Beato Angelico the other.
Between them were many men of almost equal genius, but of more common
temper, such as Botticelli, who was Lippo's pupil, or Benozzo Gozzoli,
the pupil of Angelico. Of Sandro Botticelli we know at least that he
resembled his master in one respect--he positively refused to learn
anything from books, and it was in sheer despair that his father,
Filipepe, apprenticed the boy to a goldsmith, who rejoiced in the
nickname of Botticello--'the little tun'--perhaps on account of his
rotund figure, and it was from this first master of his that the boy
came to be called 'Botticello's Sandro.' The goldsmith soon saw that the
boy was a born painter, and took him to Lippo Lippi to be taught. Both
Botticelli and Gozzoli, like many first-rate artists of that time, were
quiet, hard-working men, devoted to their art, and not remarkable for
anything else. The consequence is that little is known about their
lives. It is natural that we should know most about the men who were
most different from their companions, such as Michelangelo on the one
hand, and Benvenuto Cellini on the other, or Beato Angelico and Lippo
Lippi, or the clever Buffalmacco--whose practical jokes were told by
Boccaccio and Sacchetti, and have even brought him into modern
literature--and Lionardo da Vinci. Then, as now, there were two types
of artists, considered as men; there were Bohemians and scholars.
Lionardo and Michelangelo were grave and learned students; so was Beato
Angelico in a sense limited to theology. But Benvenuto, Lippo Lippi and
Buffalmacco were typical Bohemians. As for the latter, he seems scarcely
ever to have painted a picture without playing off a practical jest upon
his employer, and he began his career by terrifying his master, who
insisted upon waking him to work before dawn. He fastened tiny wax
tapers upon the backs of thirty black beetles, and as soon as he heard
the old man stirring and groping in the dark, he lighted the tapers
quickly, and drove the beetles into the room, through a crack under the
door, and they ran wildly hither and thither on the pavement. The master
took them for demons come to carry off his soul; he almost lost his
senses in a fit, and he used half the holy water in Florence to exorcise
the house. But ever afterwards he was too much frightened to get up
before daylight, and Buffalmacco slept out the long night in peace.
Andrea Mantegna, the great painter and engraver, who made the final step
in the development of pictorial art in Italy, was a shepherd's son, like
Giotto, born about one hundred years after Giotto's death. Similar
conditions and a similar bent of genius produced different results in
different centuries. Between Giotto and Mantegna the times had changed;
men lived differently, thought differently and saw differently.
How Mantegna got into the studio of the learned master Squarcione of
Padua is not known. The shepherd lad may have strayed in on a summer's
day, when the door was open, and attracted the painter's attention and
interest. One of the greatest living painters today was a Bavarian
peasant boy, who used to walk ten miles barefoot to the city and back on
Sundays, carrying his shoes to save them, in order to go into the free
galleries and look at the pictures; and somehow, without money, nor
credit, nor introduction, he got into the studio of a good master, and
became a great artist. Mantegna may have done the same. At all events,
he became old Squarcione's favourite pupil.
But when he was inside the studio, he found there a vast collection of
antique fragments of sculpture, which the master had got together from
all sources, and which the pupils were drawing. He was set to drawing
them, too, as the best way of learning how to paint.
That was the logical manifestation and characteristic expression of
Renascence, which was a second birth of Greek and Roman art, science and
literature--one might call it, in Italy, the second birth of civilized
man. It brought with it the desire and craving for something more than
realism, together with the means of raising all art to the higher level
required in order to produce beautiful illusions. Men had found time to
enjoy as well as to fight and pray. In other words, they fought and
prayed less, and the result was that they had more leisure. The women
had begun to care for artistic things much earlier, and they had taught
their children to care for them, and the result was a general tendency
of taste to a higher level. Genius may be an orphan and a foundling, but
taste is the child of taste. Genius is the crude, creative force; but
the gentle sense of appreciation, neither creative nor crude, but
receptive, is most often acquired at home and in childhood. A full-grown
man may learn to be a judge and a critic, but he cannot learn to have
taste after he is once a man. Taste belongs to education rather than to
instruction, and it is the mother that educates, not the schoolmaster.