Mirator veterum, discipulusque memor,
Defuit mini symmetria prisca. Peregi
Quod potui; Veniam da mihi, posteritas.
--_Lionardo da Vinci's epitaph by Platino Piatto_.
Into the holy enclosure which had received the precious shiploads of
earth from Calvary, the Pisans of the thirteenth century carried the
fragments of ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from Greece; and in
the Gothic cloister enclosing the green sward and dark cypresses of the
graveyard of Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first time
face to face with the art of Antiquity. There, among pagan sarcophagi
turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on their
arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great
unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, Orcagna of Florence, or
Lorenzetti of Siena, painted the typical masterpiece of mediaeval art,
the great fresco of the Triumph of Death. With wonderful realization of
character and situation he painted the prosperous of the world, the
dapper youths and damsels seated with dogs and falcons beneath the
orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian tales and sound of
lute and psaltery, unconscious of the colossal scythe wielded by the
gigantic dishevelled Death, and which, in a second, will descend and mow
them to the ground; while the crowd of beggars, ragged, maimed,
paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on their withered limbs, see and implore
Death, and cry stretching forth their arms, their stumps, and their
crutches. Further on, three kings in long embroidered robes and
gold-trimmed shovel caps, Lewis the Emperor, Uguccione of Pisa, and
Castruccio of Lucca, with their retinue of ladies and squires, and
hounds and hawks, are riding quietly through a wood. Suddenly their
horses stop, draw back; the Emperor's bay stretches out his long neck
sniffing the air; the kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose
for the stench of death which meets him; and before them are three open
coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of corruption, from blue
and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned
corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and horrible jest of the
Middle Ages: equality in decay; kings, emperors, ladies, knights,
beggars, and cripples, this is what we all come to be, stinking corpses;
Death, our lord, our only just and lasting sovereign, reigns impartially
over all.
But opposite, all along the sides of the painted cloister, the Amazons
are wrestling with the youths on the stone of the sarcophagi; the
chariots are dashing forward, the Tritons are splashing in the marble
waves; the Bacchantae are striking their timbrels in their dance with the
satyrs; the birds are pecking at the grapes, the goats are nibbling at
the vines; all is life, strong and splendid in its marble eternity. And
the mutilated Venus smiles towards the broken Hermes; the stalwart
Hercules, resting against his club, looks on quietly, a smile beneath
his beard; and the gods murmur to each other, as they stand in the
cloister filled with earth from Calvary, where hundreds of men lie
rotting beneath the cypresses, "Death will not triumph for ever; our day
will come."
We have all seen them opposite to each other, these two arts, the art
born of Antiquity and the art born of the Middle Ages; but whether this
meeting was friendly or hostile or merely indifferent, is a question of
constant dispute. To some, mediaeval art has appeared being led,
Dante-like, by a magician Virgil through the mysteries of nature up to a
Christian Beatrice, who alone can guide it to the kingdom of heaven;
others have seen mediaeval art, like some strong, chaste Sir Guyon
turning away resolutely from the treacherous sorceress of Antiquity, and
pursuing solitarily the road to the true and the good; for some the
antique has been an impure goddess Venus, seducing and corrupting the
Christian artist; the antique has been for others a glorious Helen, an
unattainable perfection, ever pursued by the mediaeval craftsman, but
seized by him only as a phantom. Magician or witch, voluptuous,
destroying Venus or cold and ungrasped Helen, what was the antique to
the art born of the Middle Ages and developed during the Renaissance?
Was the relation between them that of tuition, cool and abstract; or of
fruitful love; or of deluding and damning example?
The art which came to maturity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries was generated in the early mediaeval revival. The seeds may,
indeed, have come down from Antiquity, but they remained for nearly a
thousand years hidden in the withered, rotting remains of former
vegetation; and it was not till that vegetation had completely
decomposed and become part of the soil, it was not till putrefaction had
turned into germination, that artistic organism timidly reappeared. The
new art-germ developed with the new civilization which surrounded it.
Manufacture and commerce reappeared: the artizans and merchants formed
into communities; the communities grew into towns, the towns into
cities; in the city arose the cathedral; the Lombard or Byzantine
mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to figure-sculpture;
its mosaics gave birth to painting; every forward movement of the
civilization unfolded as it were a new form or detail of the art, until,
when mediaeval civilization was reaching its moment of consolidation,
when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa stood completed, when Niccolo and
Giovanni Pisano had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres; painting,
in the hands of Cimabue and Duccio, of Giotto and of Guido da Siena,
freed itself from the tradition of the mosaicists as sculpture had freed
itself from the practice of the stone-masons, and stood forth an
independent and organic art.
Thus painting was born of a new civilization, and grew by its own vital
force; a thing of the Middle Ages, original and spontaneous. But
contemporaneous with the mediaeval revival was the resuscitation of
Antiquity; in proportion as the new civilization developed, the old
civilization was exhumed; real Latin began to be studied only when real
Italian began to be written; Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio were at once
the founders of modern literature and the exponents of the literature of
antiquity; the strong young present was to profit by the experience of
the past.
As it was with literature, so likewise was it with art. The most purely
mediaeval sculpture, the sculpture which has, as it were, just detached
itself from the capitals and porches of the cathedral, is the direct
pupil of the antique; and the three great Gothic sculptors, Niccolo,
Giovanni, and Andrea of Pisa, learn from fragments of Greek and Roman
sculpture how to model the figure of the Redeemer and how to chisel the
robe of the Virgin. This spontaneous mediaeval sculpture, aided by the
antique, preceded by a full half-century the appearance of mediaeval
painting; and it was from the study of the works of the Pisan sculptors
that Cimabue and Giotto learned to depart from the mummified
monstrosities of the hieratic, Byzantine and Roman style of Giunta and
Berlinghieri. Thus, through the sculpture of the Pisans the painting of
the school of Giotto received at second-hand the teachings of Antiquity.
Sculpture had created painting; painting now belonged to the painters.
In the hands of Giotto it developed within a few years into an art which
seemed almost mature, an art dealing victoriously with its materials,
triumphantly solving its problems, executing as if by miracle all that
was demanded of it. But Giottesque art appeared perfect merely because
it was limited; it did all that was required of it, because that which
was required was little; it was not asked to reproduce the real nor to
represent the beautiful; it was asked merely to suggest a character, a
situation, a story.
The artistic development of a nation has its exact parallel in the
artistic development of an individual. The child uses his pencil to tell
a story, satisfied with balls and sticks as body, head, and legs;
provided he and his friends can associate with them the ideas in their
minds. The youth sets himself to copy what he sees, to reproduce forms
and effects, without any aim beyond the mere pleasure of copying. The
mature artist strives to obtain forms and effects of which he approves,
he seeks for beauty. In the life of Italian painting the generation of
men who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century are the
mature artists; the men of the fifteenth century are the inexperienced
youths; the Giottesques are the children--children Titanic and
seraph-like, but children nevertheless; and, like all children, learning
more perhaps in their few years than can the youth and the man learn in
a lifetime.
Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to show a situation or
express a story, and for this purpose the absolute realization of
objects was unnecessary. Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is
generalized art; it is an art of mere outline. The Giottesques could
draw with great accuracy the hand: the form of the fingers, the bend of
the limb, they could give to perfection its whole gesture and movement,
they could produce a correct and spirited outline, but within this
correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform
mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains
only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or
warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of
the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush
of Masaccio and Signorelli; or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and
warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,--this difference is typical of
the difference between the art of the fourteenth century and the art of
the fifteenth century: the first suggests, the second realizes; the one
gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible bodies. The
Giottesque cares for the figure only inasmuch as it displays an action;
he reduces it to a semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an
idea; the man of the Renaissance cares for the figure inasmuch as it is
a living organism, he gives it substance and weight, he makes it stand
out as an animate reality. Thence, despite its early triumphs, the
Giottesque style, by its inherent nature, forbade any progress; it
reached its limits at once, and the followers of Giotto look almost as
if they were his predecessors, for the simple reason that, being unable
to advance, they were forced to retrograde. The limited amount of
artistic realization required to present to the mind of the spectator a
situation or an allegory, had been obtained by Giotto himself, and
bequeathed by him to his followers; who, finding it more than sufficient
for their purposes, and having no incentive to further acquisition in
the love of form and reality for their own sake, worked on with their
master's materials, composing and recomposing, but adding nothing of
their own. Giotto had observed Nature with passionate interest, because,
although its representation was only a means to an end, it was a means
which required to be mastered; and as such became in itself a sort of
secondary aim; but the followers of Giotto merely utilized his
observations--of Nature, and in so doing gradually conventionalized and
debased these second-hand observations. Giotto's forms are wilfully
incomplete, because they aim at mere suggestion, but they are not
conventional: they are diagrams, not symbols, and thence it is that
Giotto seems nearer to the Renaissance than do his latest followers, not
excepting even Orcagna. Painting, which had made the most prodigious
strides from Giunta to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to Giotto, had got
enclosed within a vicious circle, in which it moved for nearly a century
neither backwards nor forwards: painters were satisfied with suggestion;
and as long as they were satisfied, no progress was possible.
From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the
intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre;
their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself,
perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had
modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery;
the generation of artists who arose at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, and who opened the period of the Renaissance, were sculptors or
pupils of sculptors. When we see these vigorous lovers of nature, these
heroic searchers after truth, suddenly pushing aside the decrepit
Giottesque allegory-mongers, we ask ourselves in astonishment whence
they have arisen, and how those broken-down artists of effete art could
have begotten such a generation of giants. Whence do they come?
Certainly not from the studios of the Giottesques. No, they issue out of
the workshops of the stone-mason, of the goldsmith, of the worker in
bronze, of the sculptor. Vasari has preserved the tradition that
Masolino and Paolo Uccello were apprentices of Ghiberti; he has remarked
that their greatest contemporary, Masaccio, "trod in the steps of
Brunelleschi and of Donatello." Pollaiolo and Verrocchio we know to have
been equally excellent as painters and as workers in bronze. Sculpture,
at once more naturalistic and more constantly under the influence of the
antique, had for the second time laboured for painting. Itself a
subordinate art, without much vitality, without deep roots in the
civilization, sculpture was destined to remain the unsuccessful pupil of
the antique, and the unsuccessful rival of painting; but sculpture had
for its mission to prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting
for antique influence; and the noblest work of Ghiberti and Donatello
was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory to the Pisani had been Giotto.
With Masaccio began the study of nature for its own sake, the desire of
reproducing external objects, without any regard to their significance
as symbols, or as parts of a story; the passionate wish to arrive at
absolute realization. The merely suggestive outline art of the
Giottesques had come to an end; the suggestion became a matter of
indifference, the realization became a paramount interest; the story was
forgotten in the telling, the religious thought was lost in the search
for the artistic form. The Giottesques had used debased conventionalism
to represent action with wonderful narrative and logical power; the
artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful narrators and foolish
allegorists almost in proportion as they became skilful draughtsmen and
colourists; the saints had become to Masaccio merely so many lay figures
on to which to cast drapery; for Fra Filippo the Madonna was a mere
peasant model; for Filippino Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle meant
merely an opportunity of congregating a number of admirable portrait
figures in the dress of the day; the Baptism for Verrocchio had
significance only as a study of muscular legs and arms; and the
sacrifice of Noah had no importance for Uccello save as a grand
opportunity for foreshortenings. In the hands of the Giottesques,
interested in the subject and indifferent to the representation,
painting had remained stationary for eighty years; for eighty years did
it develope in the hands of the men of the fifteenth century,
indifferent to the subject and passionately interested in the
representation. The unity, the appearance of comparative perfection of
the art had disappeared with the limits within which the Giottesques had
been satisfied to move; instead of the intelligible and solemn
conventionalism of the Giottesques, we see only disorder,
half-understood ideas and abortive attempts, confusion which reminds us
of those enigmatic sheets on which Leonardo or Michael Angelo scrawled
out their ideas--drawings within drawings, plans of buildings scratched
over Madonna heads, single flowers upside down next to flayed arms,
calculations, monsters, sonnets; a very chaos of thoughts and of shapes,
in which the plan of the artist is inextricably lost, which mean
everything and nothing, but out of whose unintelligible network of lines
and curves have issued masterpieces, and which only the foolish or the
would-be philosophical would exchange for some intelligible, hopelessly
finished and finite illustration out of a Bible or a book of travels.
Anatomy, perspective, colour, drapery, effects of light, of water, of
shadow, forms of trees and flowers, converging lines of architecture,
all this at once absorbed and distracted the attention of the artists of
the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated,
another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to
pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the
bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx,
mysterious in its very simplicity and serenity--the Antique.
The exhumation of the antique had, as we have seen, been contemporaneous
with the birth of painting; nay, the study of the remains of antique
sculpture had, in contributing to form Niccolo Pisano, indirectly helped
to form Giotto; the very painter of the Triumph of Death had inserted
into his terrible fresco two-winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied
without any alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in which they
may have sustained the usual _Dis Manibus Sacrum_. There had been, on
the part of both sculptors and painters, a constant study of the
antique; but during the Giottesque period this study had been limited to
technicalities, and had in no way affected the conception of art. The
mediaeval artists, surrounded by physical deformities, and seeing
sanctity in sickness and dirt, little accustomed to observe the human
figure, were incapable, both as men and as artists, of at all entering
into the spirit of antique art. They could not perceive the superior
beauty of the antique; they could recognize only its superior science
and its superior handicraft, and these alone they studied to obtain.
Giovanni Pisano sculpturing the unfleshed, caried carcases of the devils
who leer, writhe, crunch, and tear on the outside of Orvieto Cathedral;
and the Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated Christs,
hanging livid and broken from the cross, which abound in Tuscany and
Umbria; the artists who produced these loathsome and lugubrious works
were indubitably students of the antique; but they had learned from it
not a love for beautiful form and noble drapery, but merely the general
shape of the limbs and the general fall of the garments: the anatomical
science and technical processes of Antiquity were being used to produce
the most intensely un-antique, the most intensely mediaeval works. Thus
matters stood in the time of Giotto. His followers, who studied only
arrangement, probably consulted the antique as little as they consulted
nature; but the contemporary sculptors were brought by the very
constitution of their art into close contact both with Nature and with
the antique; they studied both with determination, and handed over the
results of their labours to the sculptor-taught painters of the
fifteenth century.
Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of the
Renaissance--the study of nature, and the study of the Antique: both
understand slowly, imperfectly; the one counteracting the effect of the
other; the study of nature now scaring away all antique influence, the
study of the antique now distorting all imitation of nature; rival
forces confusing the artist and marring the work, until, when each could
receive its due, the one corrected the other, and they combined,
producing by this marriage of the living reality with the dead but
immortal beauty, the great art of Michael Angelo, of Raphael, and of
Titian: double, like its origin, antique and modern, real and ideal.
The study of the antique is thus placed opposite to the study of nature,
the comprehension of the works of Antiquity is the momentary antagonist
of the comprehension of the works of nature. And this may seem strange,
when we consider that antique art was itself due to perfect
comprehension of nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The
study of nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the
study of effects which had remained unnoticed by Antiquity; and the
study of the statue,--colourless, without light, shade, or perspective,
hampered, and was hampered by, the study of colour, of light and shade,
of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to
learn from nature. Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization
of the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from the Middle
Ages, was entirely at variance with the influence of antique
civilization through the medium of ancient art; the Middle Ages and
Antiquity, Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed to each
other than could be the statue and the easel picture, the fresco and the
bas-relief.
First, then, we have the hostility between painting--and sculpture,
between the _modus operandi_ of the modern and the _modus operandi_ of
the ancient art. Antique art is, in the first place, purely linear art,
colourless, tintless, without light and shade; next, it is essentially
the art of the isolated figure, without background, grouping, or
perspective. As linear art it could directly affect only that branch of
painting which was itself linear; and as art of the isolated figure it
was ever being contradicted by the constantly developing arts of
perspective and landscape. The antique never' directly influenced the
Venetians, not from reasons of geography and culture, but from the fact
that Venetian painting, founded from the earliest times upon a system of
colour, could not be affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system
of modelled, colourless form; the men who saw form only through the
medium of colour could not learn much from purely linear form; hence it
is that even after a certain amount of antique imitation had passed into
Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, the Venetian painters
display comparatively little antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio,
Cima, and other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are mainly
modern and Venetian; and Giorgione, Titian, and even the eclectic
Tintoret, were more interested in the bright lights of a steel
breastplate than in the shape of a limb; and preferred in their hearts a
shot brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery ever
modelled by an ancient.
The antique influence was naturally strongest among the Tuscan schools;
because the Tuscan schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the
draughtsman recognized in antique sculpture the highest perfection of
that linear form which was his own domain. Yet while the antique
appealed most to the linear schools, even in these it could strongly
influence only the purely linear part; it is strong in the drawings and
weak in the paintings. As long as the artists had only the pencil or
pen, they could reproduce much of the linear perfection of the antique;
they were, so to speak, alone with it; but as soon as they brought in
colour, perspective, and scenery, the linear perfection was lost in
attempts at something new; the antique was put to flight by the modern.
Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost antique; his tempera
picture of Venus, with the pale blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the
flower-embroidered garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively
mediaeval; Pinturicchio's sketch of Pans and satyrs contrasts strangely
with his frescoes in the library of Siena; Mantegna himself,
supernaturally antique in his engravings, becomes comparatively trivial
and modern in his oil-paintings. Do what they might, draw from the
antique and calculate its proportions, the artists of the Renaissance
found themselves baffled as soon as they attempted to apply the result
of then linear studies to coloured pictures; as soon as they tried to
make the antique unite with the modern, one of the two elements was sure
to succumb. In Botticelli, draughtsman and student though he was, the
modern, the mediaeval, that part of the art which had arisen in the
Middle Ages, invariably had the upper hand; his Venus, despite her forms
studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier
discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, has the woe-begone prudery of a
Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her
unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up
from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in
the pallid tempera colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea,
this mediaeval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is no very pleasing
sight. In the Allegory of Spring in the Academy of Florence, we again
have the antique; goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the
gentle Sandro Botticelli has assuredly studied from some old statue of
Agrippina or Faustina; but what strange livid tints are there beneath
those draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a
green, ghostlike light illumines this garden of Venus Are these
goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or
are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines,
incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist?
In Sandro Botticelli the teachings of the statue are forgotten or
distorted when the artist takes up his palette and brushes; in his
greater contemporary, Andrea Mantegna, the ever-present antique chills
and arrests the vitality of the modern. Mantegna, the pupil of the
ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop even more than the pupil of
Donatello, studies for his paintings not from nature, but from
sculpture; his figures are seen in strange projection and
foreshortening, like figures in a high relief seen from below; despite
his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn out of the background;
despite the rich colours which he displays in his Veronese altar-piece,
they look like painted marbles, with their hard clots of stonelike hair
and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies,
clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They
are beautiful petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's
masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite,
pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless
out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even
the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine
Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of
three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and
even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton,
sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his
finned horse, preparing to strike his adversary with a bunch of fish
which he brandishes above him; on him is rushing, careering on an
osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury stretching every
tendon, his long-clawed feet striking into the flanks of his steed, his
sharp, reed-crowned head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his
opponent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run down his enemy
as a ship runs down another; and further off a young Triton, with
clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the
rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying
Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard,
vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity,
unaccountably antique. The other print, called the Bacchanal, has no
background: half a dozen male figures stand separate and naked as in a
bas-relief. Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub; a satyr, with
acanthus-leaves growing wondrously out of him, half man, half plant, is
emptying a cup; a heavy Silenus is prone upon the ground; a faun, seated
upon the vat, is supporting in his arms a beautiful sinking youth;
another youth, grand, muscular, and grave as a statue, stands on the
further side. Is this really a bacchanal? Yes, for there is the paunchy
Silenus, there are the fauns, there the vat and vine-wreaths and
drinking-horns. And yet it cannot be a bacchanal. Compare with it one of
Rubens's orgies, where the overgrown, rubicund men and women and fauns
tumble about in tumultuous, riotous intoxication: that is a bacchanal;
they have been drinking, those magnificent brutes, there is wine firing
their blood and weighing down their heads. But here all is different, in
this so-called Bacchanal of Mantegna. This heavy Silenus is supine like
a mass of marble; these fauns are shy and mute; these youths are grave
and sombre; there is no wine in the cups, there are no lees in the vat,
there is no life in these magnificent colossal forms; there is no blood
in their grandly bent lips, no light in their wide-opened eyes; it is
not the drowsiness of intoxication which is weighing down the youth
sustained by the faun; it is no grapejuice which gives that strange,
vague glance. No; they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink; the
grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat contains no fruits that
have ripened beneath our sun. These strange, mute, solemn revellers have
drunk of Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of death and of
marble; they are the ghosts of the dead ones of antiquity, revisiting
the artist of the Renaissance, who paints them, thinking he is painting
life, while that which he paints is in reality death.
This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the works of both
Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly technical; the antique is frustrated
in Botticelli, not so much by the Christian, the mediaeval, the modern
mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which
disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests
Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of Paganism
deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture
hampering painting. But this technical contest between two arts, the one
not yet fully developed, the other not yet fully understood, is as
nothing compared with the contest between the two civilizations, the
antique and the modern; between the habits and tendencies of the
contemporaries of the artists of the Renaissance and of the artists
themselves, and the habits and tendencies of the antique artists and
their contemporaries. We are apt to think of the Renaissance as of a
period closely resembling antiquity, misled by the inevitable similarity
between southern and democratic countries of whatever age; misled still
less pardonably by the Ciceronian pedantries and pseudo-antique
obscenities of a few humanists, and by the pseudo-Corinthian arabesques
and capitals of a few learned architects. But all this was mere
archaeological finery borrowed by a civilization in itself entirely
unlike that of ancient Greece.
The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the flowering time of that
great mediaeval movement which had germinated early in the twelfth
century; it was merely a more advanced stage of the civilization which
had produced Dante and Giotto, of the civilization which was destined to
produce Luther and Rabelais. The fifteenth century was merely the
continuation of the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had been of
the thirteenth; there had been growth and improvement; development of
the more modern, diminishing of the more mediaeval elements; but, despite
growth and the changes due to growth, the Renaissance was part and
parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits
were mediaeval; opposed to the open-air life, the physical training and
the materialistic religion of Antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio
and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those
of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly
impressions given by the Renaissance to its artists. Large towns, in
which thousands of human beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy
streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the projecting roofs;
and in these cities an incessant commercial activity, with no relief
save festivals at the churches, brawls at the taverns, and carnival
buffooneries. Men and women pale and meagre for want of air, and light,
and movement; undeveloped, untrained bodies, warped by constant work at
the loom or at the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the soldier
and the vulgar nimbleness of the prentice. And these men and women
dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but
heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous in form; citizens
in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps; ladies in stiff and foldless
brocade hoops and stomachers; artizans in striped and close-adhering
hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering armour-plates,
ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather, a shapeless shell of iron, bulging
out and angular, in which the body was buried as successfully as in the
robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the
Renaissance in the works of all its painters: heavy in Ghirlandajo,
vulgarly jaunty in Filippino, preposterously starched and prim in
Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; while mediaeval
stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the
little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo
Gozzoli's Building of Babel. These are the prosperous townsfolk, among
whom the Renaissance artist is but too glad to seek for models; but
besides these there are lamentable sights, mediaeval beyond words, at
every street corner: dwarfs and cripples, maimed and diseased beggars of
all degrees of loathsomeness, lepers and epileptics, and infinite
numbers of monks, brown, grey, and black, in sack-shaped frocks and
pointed hoods, with shaven crown and cropped beard, emaciated with
penance or bloated with gluttony. And all this the painter sees, daily,
hourly; it is his standard of humanity, and as such finds its way into
every picture. It is the living; but opposite it arises the dead. Let us
turn aside from the crowd of the mediaeval city, and look at what the
workmen have just laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought from
Rome or from Greece. Look at this: it is corroded by oxides, battered by
ill-usage, stained with earth: it is not a group, not even a whole
statue, it has neither head nor arms remaining; it is a mere broken
fragment of antique sculpture,--a naked body with a fold or two of
drapery; it is not by Phidias nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be
Greek; it may be some cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, in the
days of Hadrian. But to the artist of the fifteenth century it is the
revelation of a whole world, a world in itself. We can scarcely realize
all this; but let us look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have
felt the man of the Renaissance in the presence of that mutilated,
stained, battered torso. He sees in that broken stump a grandeur of
outline, a magnificence of osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and
sinew, a smooth, firm covering of flesh, such as he would vainly seek in
any of his living models; he sees a delicate and infinite variety of
indentures, of projections, of creases following the bend of every limb;
he sees, where the surface still exists intact, an elasticity of skin, a
buoyancy of hidden life such as all the colours of his palette are
unable to imitate; and in this piece of drapery, negligently gathered
over the hips or rolled upon the arm, he sees a magnificent alternation
of large folds and small plaits, of straight lines, and broken lines,
and curves. He sees all this; but he sees more: the broken torso is, as
we have said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation of a
world. It is the revelation of antique civilization, of the palaestra
and the stadium, of the sanctification of the body, of the apotheosis of
man, of the religion of life and nature and joy; revealed to the man of
the Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained, diseased,
despised body but a deformed piece of baseness, which his priests tell
him belongs to the worms and to Satan; who has been taught that the monk
living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out with fastings
and bleeding with flagellation, is the nearest approach to divinity; who
has seen Divinity itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding
from the cross; and who is for ever reminded that the kingdom of this
Godhead is not of this world.
What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what dawning
doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and what remorse are not the
fruit of this sight of Antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist? Is he to
forget the saints and Christ, and give himself over to Satan and to
Antiquity? Only one man boldly answered, Yes. Mantegna abjured his
faith, abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time;
and in so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover,
the worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from
the antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da
Fiesole. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other
artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of
Orcagna, but of Masaccio and Uccello, of Pollaiolo and Donatello. For the
mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to leave
the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced to a
mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim; dreaded to
soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a
spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in
the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the
beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the
thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of
every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his
chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the
well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist
for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour and character,
unsubstantial and unruffled; dreaming feebly and sweetly of
transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of
smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze,
seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of inanity; of
divine dolls with pallid flaxen locks, floating between heaven and
earth, playing upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to faint visions
of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless, meaningless,
across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints seated,
arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid
gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly
purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an
aesthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a
paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating
the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless
virgins; happy in smoothing the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and
earth, and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies, and of the
iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments of music, halos,
flowers, with threads of gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing
art to--something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of
pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a
something too delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human
wear or human food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either
in its study of the existing reality, or in its study of antique beauty.
Mantegna, the learned, the archaeological, the pagan, who renounces his
times and his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and
bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the
antique; the two extremes, are both exceptions. The innumerable artists
of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the
antique and the modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian--some, like
Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere artistic science,
encrusting marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal
house, bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying
baskets, and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded
over their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and childlike
pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together
half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the
trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched
collars, among the pines, and porticos, the sprawling children, barking
dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of
his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows,
allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis
of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews, hags, and riderless
donkeys.
Thus little by little the antique amalgamates with the modern; the art
born of the Middle Ages absorbs the art born of Paganism; but how
slowly, and with what fantastic and ludicrous results at first; as when
the anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked Roman
prize-fighters as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian; or when the pious
Perugino (pious at least with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic,
beardless archangels as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling
beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath
their wondrously ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at
Perugia; when he masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as
Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of
all, when he attires in scantiest of--clinging antique drapery his mild
and pensive Madonnas, and, with daintily pointed toes, places them to
throne bashfully on allegorical chariots as Venus or Diana.
Long is the period of amalgamation, and small are the results throughout
that long early Renaissance. Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Melozzo,
Ghirlandajo, Filippino, Botticelli, Verrocchio, have none of them shown
us the perfect fusion of the two elements whose union is to give us
Michael Angelo, Raphael, and all the great perfect artists of the early
sixteenth century; the two elements are for ever ill-combined and
hostile to each other; the modern vulgarizes the antique, the antique
paralyzes the modern. And meanwhile the fifteenth century, the century
of study, of conflict, and of confusion, is rapidly drawing to a close;
eight or ten more years, and it will be gone. Is the new century to find
the antique still dead and the modern still mediaeval?
The antique and the modern had met for the first time and as
irreconcilable enemies in the cloisters of Pisa; and the modern had
triumphed in the great mediaeval fresco of the Triumph of Death. By a
strange coincidence, by a sublime jest of accident, the antique and the
modern were destined to meet again, and this time indissolubly united,
in a painting representing the Resurrection. Yes, Signorelli's fresco in
Orvieto Cathedral is indeed a resurrection, the resurrection of human
beauty after the long death-slumber of the Middle Ages. And the artist
would seem to have been dimly conscious of the great allegory he was
painting. Here and there are strewn skulls; skeletons stand leering by,
as if in remembrance of the ghastly past, and as a token of former
death; but magnificent youths are breaking through the crust of the
earth, emerging, taking shape and flesh; arising, strong and proud,
ready to go forth at the bidding of the Titanic angels who announce from
on high with trumpet blast and waving banners, that the death of the
world has come to an end, and that humanity has arisen once more in the
youth and beauty of Antiquity.