Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto, at once the latest works of the
fifteenth century, and the latest works of an old man nurtured in the
traditions of Benozzo Gozzoli and of Piero della Francesca, mark the
beginning of the maturity and perfection of Italian art. From them
Michael Angelo learns what he could not be taught even by his master
Ghirlandajo, the grand and cold realist. He learns; and what he has
learned at Orvieto he teaches with doubled force in Rome; and the
ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, the superb and heroic nudities, the
majestic draperies, the reappearance in the modern art of painting of
the spirit and hand of Phidias, give a new impulse and hasten on
perfection. When the doors of the chapel are at length opened, Raphael
forgets Perugino; Fra Bartolomeo forgets Botticelli; Sodoma forgets
Leonardo; the narrower hesitating styles of the fifteenth century are
abandoned, as the great example is disseminated throughout Italy; and
even the tumult of angels in glory which the Lombard Correggio is to
paint in far-off Parma, and the daringly simple Bacchus and Ariadne with
which Tintoret will decorate the Ducal Palace more than fifty years
later--all that is great and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the
spirit of Antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renaissance art,
seems due to the impulse of Michael Angelo, and, through him, to the
example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging
angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with
exquisite limbs and head, rich with tendril-like locks, delicate against
the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated,
with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of flour in the
Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half
concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured
fountain in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, with the greenish blue sky
and hazy light of evening behind her; from the most extreme examples of
the most extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the most intense
examples of the remotest schools of Tuscany and Umbria; throughout the
art of the early sixteenth century, of those thirty years which were the
years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but always distinct,
the union of the living art born of the Middle Ages with the dead art
left by Antiquity, a union producing life and perfection, producing the
great art of the Renaissance.
This much is clear and easy of definition; but what is neither clearly
understood nor easily defined is the nature of this union, the manner in
which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to
speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated
the modern; but all this explains but little: art is not a metaphysical
figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to
speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique
with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the
Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection,
but not existing in the medieval civilization of the fifteenth century;
of elements of civilization which gave what the civilization of the
fifteenth century--which could give colour, perspective, grouping, and
landscape--could never have afforded: the nude, drapery, and gesture.
The naked human body, which the Greeks had trained, studied, and
idolized, did not exist in the fifteenth century; in its stead there was
only the undressed body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and
distorted by the garments only just cast off; cramped and bent by
sedentary occupations, livid with the plague-spots of the Middle Ages,
scarred by the whipmarks of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and
unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the eyes of others,
shivered and cowered for cold and for shame. The Giottesques ignored its
very existence, conceiving humanity as a bodiless creature, with face
and hands to express emotion, and just enough malformed legs and feet to
be either standing or moving; further, beneath the garments, there was
nothing. The realists of the fifteenth century tore off the clothes and
drew the ugly thing beneath; and bought the corpses from the
lazar-houses, and stole them from the gallows; in order to see how bone
fitted into bone, and muscle was stretched over muscle. They learned to
perfection the anatomy of the human frame, but they could not learn its
beauty; they became even reconciled to the ugliness they were accustomed
to see; and, with their minds full of antique examples, Verrocchio,
Donatello, Pollaiolo, and Ghirlandajo, the greatest anatomists of the
fifteenth century, imitated their coarse and ill-made living models when
they imagined that they were imitating antique marbles.
So much for the nude. Drapery, as the ancients understood it in the
delicate plaits of Greek chiton and tunic, in the grand folds of Roman
toga, the fifteenth century could not show; it knew only the stiff,
scanty raiment of the active classes; the shapeless masses of lined
cloth of the merchants and magistrates; the prudish and ostentatious
starched dress of the women; and the coarse, lumpish garb of the monks.
The artist of the fifteenth century knew drapery only as an exotic, an
exotic with whose representation the habit of seeing mediaeval costume
was for ever interfering; on the stripped, unseemly, indecent body he
places, with the stiffness of artificiality, drapery such as he has
never seen upon any living creature; the result is awkwardness and
rigidity. And what attitude, what gesture, can he expect from this
stripped and artificially draped model? None, for the model scarce knows
how to stand in so unaccustomed a condition of body. The artist must
seek for attitude and gesture among his townsfolk, and among them he can
find only trivial, awkward, often vulgar movement. They have never been
taught how to stand or to move with grace and dignity; the artist must
study attitude and gesture in the market-place or the bull-baiting
ground, where Ghirlandajo found his jauntily strutting idlers, and
Verrocchio his brutally staggering prize-fighters. Between the
constrained attitudinizing of Byzantine and Giottesque tradition, and
the imitation of the movements of clodhoppers and ragamuffins, the
realist of the fifteenth century would wander hopelessly were it not for
the antique. Genius and science are of no avail; the position of Christ
in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean and
servile; the movements of the "Thunder-stricken" in Signorelli's
lunettes is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic,
and the comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison
in Filippino's Liberation of St. Peter is gradually going to sleep and
collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble.
And the same applies to sculptured figures or to figures standing
isolated like statues; no Greek would have ventured upon the swaggering
position, with legs apart and elbows out, of Donatello's St. George, or
Perugino's St. Michael; and a young Athenian who should have assumed the
attitude of Verrocchio's David, with tripping legs and hand clapped on
his hip, would have been sent to sit in a corner as a saucy little
ragamuffin.
Coarse nude, stiff drapery, vulgar attitude, was all that the fifteenth
century could offer to its artists; but Antiquity could offer more and
very different things: the naked body developed by the most artistic
training, drapery the most natural and refined, and attitude and gesture
regulated by an education the most careful and artistic; and all these
things Antiquity did give to the artists of the Renaissance. They did
not copy antique statues as living naked men and women, but they
corrected the faults of their living models by the example of the
statues; they did not copy antique stone draperies in coloured pictures,
but they arranged the robes on their models with the antique folds well
in their memory; they did not give the gestures of statues to living
figures, but they made the living figures move in accordance with those
principles of harmony which they had found exemplified in the statues.
They did not imitate the antique, they studied it; they obtained through
the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity,
and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the
mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian
painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is
perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is
modern; but in the earlier times, when the two elements were still
separate, we can see them opposite each other and compare them in the
works of the greatest artists. Wherever, in the paintings of the early
Renaissance, there is realism, marked by the costume of the times, there
is ugliness of form and vulgarity of movement; where there is idealism,
marked by imitation of the antique, the nude, and drapery, there is
beauty and dignity. We need only compare Filippino's Scene before the
Proconsul with his Raising of the King's Son in the Brancacci Chapel;
the grand attitude and draperies of Ghirlandajo's Zachariah with the
vulgar dress and movements of the Florentine citizens surrounding him;
Benozzo Gozzoli's noble naked figure of Noah with his ungainly,
hideously dressed figure of Cosimo de' Medici; Mantegna's exquisite
Judith with his preposterous Marquis of Mantua; in short, all the purely
realistic with all the purely idealistic painting of the fifteenth
century. We may give one last instance. In Signorelli's Orvieto frescoes
there is a figure of a young man, with aquiline features, long crisp
hair and strongly developed throat, which reappears unmistakably in all
the compositions, and in some of them twice and thrice in various
positions. His naked figure is magnificent, his attitudes splendid, his
thrown-back head superb, whether he be slowly and painfully emerging
from the earth, staggered and gasping with his newly infused life, or
sinking oppressed on the ground, broken and crushed by the sound of the
trumpet of judgment; or whether he be moving forward with ineffable
longing towards the angel about to award him the crown of the blessed;
in all these positions he is heroically beautiful. We meet him again,
unmistakable, but how different, in the realistic group of the
"Thunder-stricken "--the long, lank youth, with spindle-shanks and
egg-shaped body, bounding forward, with most grotesque strides, over the
uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses with soles and nostrils
uppermost, lying in beast-like confusion. This youth, with something of
a harlequin in his jumps and his ridiculous thin legs and preposterous
round body, is evidently the model for the naked demi-gods of the
Resurrection and the Paradise: he is the handsome boy as the fifteenth
century gave him to Signorelli; opposite, he is the living youth of the
fifteenth century idealized by the study of ancient sculpture; just as
the "Thunder-stricken" may be some scene of street massacre such as
Signorelli might have witnessed at Cortona or Perugia; while the agonies
of the "Hell" are the grouped and superb agonies taught by the antique;
just as the two archangels of the "Hell," in their armour of Baglioni's
heavy cavalry, may represent the modern element, and the same
archangels, naked, with magnificent flying draperies, blowing the
trumpets of the Resurrection, may show the antique element in
Renaissance art.
The antique influence was not, indeed, equally strong throughout Italy;
it was strongest in the Tuscan school, which, seeking for perfection of
linear form, found that perfection in the antique; it was weakest in the
Lombard and Venetian schools, which sought for what the antique could
not give, light and shade and colour; the antique was most efficacious
where it was most indispensable, and it was more necessary to a Tuscan,
strong only with his charcoal or pencil, than to Leonardo da Vinci, who
could make an imperfect figure, beckoning mysteriously from out of the
gloom, more fascinating than the finest drawn Florentine Madonna, and
could surround an insignificant childish head with the wondrous sheen
and ripple of hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was also less
necessary to Giorgione and Titian, who could hide coarse limbs beneath
their draperies of precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of
their palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess. But even the Lombards,
even the Venetians, required the antique influence. They could not
perhaps have obtained it direct like the Tuscans: the colourists and
masters of light and shade might never have understood the blank lines
and faint shadows of the marble; but they received the antique
influence, strong but modified by the medium through which it had
passed, from Mantegna; and the relentless self-sacrifice to Antiquity,
the self-paralyzation of the great artist, was not without its use: from
Venetian Padua, Mantegna influenced the Bellini and Giorgione; from
Lombard Mantua, he influenced Leonardo; and Mantegna's influence was
that of the antique.
What would have been the art of the Renaissance without the antique? The
speculation is vain, for the antique had influenced it, had been goading
it on ever since the earliest times; it had been present at its birth,
it had affected Giotto through Niccolo Pisano, and Masaccio through
Ghiberti; the antique influence cannot be conceived as absent in the
history of Italian painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, the
speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had it not been
influenced by the antique would be childishly useless. But lest we
forget that this antique influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and
blind, we refuse it its immense share in producing Michael Angelo,
Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like
Italian art, in the Middle Ages; like it, full of strength and power of
self-development, but which, unlike Italian art, was not influenced by
the antique. This art is the great German art of the early sixteenth
century; the art of Martin Schongauer, of Aldegrever, of Altdorfer, of
Wohlgemuth, of Kranach, of Albrecht Duerer and Hans Holbein, whom they
resemble as Pinturicchio and Lo Spagna resemble Perugino, as Palma and
Paris Bordone resemble Titian. This is an art born in a civilization
less perfect indeed than that of Italy, narrower, as Nuernberg or Basle
is narrower than Florence; but resembling it in habits, dress, religion,
above all, the main characteristic of being mediaeval; and its masters,
as great as their Italian contemporaries in all the technicalities of
the art, and In absolute honesty of endeavour, may show what the Italian
art of the sixteenth century might have been without the antique. Let us
therefore open a portfolio of those wonderful minute yet grand
engravings of the old Germans. They are for the most part Scriptural
scenes or allegories, quite analogous to those of the Italians, but
purely realistic, conscious of no world beyond that of an Imperial City
of the year 1520. Here we have the whole turn-out, male and female, of a
German free-town, in the shape of scenes from the lives of the Virgin
and saints; here are short fat burghers, with enormous blotchy, bloated
faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge stomachs protruding from
under their jackets; here are blear-eyed ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled
though not old, with figures like hungry harpies, stalking about in high
headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by the side of lean and stunted
pages, singing (with dolorous voice) to lutes; or promenading under
trees with long-shanked, high-shouldered gentlemen, with vacant sickly
face and long scraggy hair and beard, their bony elbows sticking out of
their slashed doublets. These courtly figures culminate in Duerer's
magnificent plate of the wild man of the woods kissing the hideous,
leering Jezebel in her brocade and jewels. These aristocratic women are
terrible; prudish, malicious, licentious, never modest because they are
always ugly. Even the poor Madonnas, seated in front of village hovels
or windmills, smile the smile of starved, sickly sempstresses. It is a
stunted, poverty-stricken, plague-sick society, this mediaeval society of
burghers and burghers' wives; the air seems bad and heavy, and the light
wanting physically and morally, in these old free-towns; there is
intellectual sickness as well as bodily in those musty gabled houses;
the mediaeval spirit blights what revival of healthiness may exist in
these commonwealths. And feudalism is outside the gates. There are the
brutal, leering men-at-arms, in slashed, puffed doublets and heavy
armour, face and dress as unhuman as possible, standing grimacing at the
blood spirting from John the Baptist's decapitated trunk, as in
Kranach's horrible print, while gaping spectators fill the castle-yard;
there are the castles high on rocks amidst woods, with miserable
villages below, where the Prodigal Son wallows among the swine, and the
tattered boors tumble about in drunkenness, or rest wearied on their
spades. There are the Middle Ages in full force. But had these Germans
of the days of Luther really no thought beyond their own times and their
own country? Had they really no knowledge of the antique? Not so; they
had heard from their learned men, from Willibald Pirkheimer and Ulrich
von Hutten, that the world had once been peopled with naked gods and
goddesses. Nay, the very year perhaps that Raphael handed to his
engraver, Marc Antonio, his magnificent drawing of the Judgment of
Paris, Lukas Kranach bethought him to represent the story of the good
Knight Paris giving the apple to the Lady Venus. So Kranach took up his
steady pencil and sharp chisel, and in strong, clear, minute lines of
black and white showed us the scene. There, on Mount Ida, with a
castellated rock in the distance, the charger of Paris browses beneath
some stunted larches; the Trojan knight's helmet, with its monstrous
beak and plume, lies on the ground; and near it reclines Paris himself,
lazy, in complete armour, with frizzled fashionable beard. To him, all
wrinkled and grinning with brutal lust, comes another bearded knight,
with wings to his vizored helmet, Sir Mercury, leading the three
goddesses, short, fat-cheeked German wenches, housemaids stripped of
their clothes, stupid, brazen, indifferent. And Paris is evidently
prepared with his choice: he awards the apple to the fattest, for among
a half-starved, plague-stricken people like this, the chosen of gods and
men must needs be the fattest.
No, such pagan scenes are mere burlesques, coarse mummeries, such as may
have amused Nuernberg and Augsburg during Shrovetide, when drunken louts
figured as Bacchus and sang drinking songs by Hans Sachs. There is no
reality in all this; there is no belief in pagan gods. If we would see
the haunting divinity of the German Renaissance, we shall find him
prying and prowling in nearly every scene of real life; him, the ever
present, the king of the Middle Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the
cloister wall at Pisa, the Lord Death. His fleshless face peers from
behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever-stricken lady and imbecile
gentleman; he sits grinning on a tree in Orso Grafs allegory, while the
cynical knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack dirty jokes with the
fat, brutish woman squatted below; he puts his hand into the basket of
Duerer's tattered pedlar; he leers hideously at the stirrup of Duerer's
armed and stalwart knight. No gods of youth and nature, no Hercules, no
Hermes, no Venus, have invaded his German territories, as they invaded
even his own palace, the burial-ground at Pisa; the antique has not
perverted Duerer and his fellows, as it perverted Masaccio and Signorelli
and Mantegna, from the mediaeval worship of Death.
The Italians had seen the antique and had let themselves be seduced by
it, despite their civilization and their religion. Let us only rejoice
thereat. There are indeed some, and among them the great English critic
who is irrefutable when he is a poet, and irrational when he becomes a
philosopher;--there are some who tell us that in its union with antique
art, the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and rotted away
ever after. There are others, more moderate but less logical, who would
teach us that in uniting with the antique, the mediaeval art of the
fifteenth century purified and sanctified the beautiful but evil child
of Paganism; that the goddess of Scopas and the athlete of Polyclete
were raised to a higher sphere when Raphael changed the one into a
Madonna, and Michael Angelo metamorphosed the other into a prophet. But
both schools of criticism are wrong. Every civilization has its inherent
evil; Antiquity had its inherent evils, as the Middle Ages had theirs;
Antiquity may have bequeathed to the Renaissance the bad with the good,
as the Middle Ages had bequeathed to the Renaissance the good with the
bad. But the art of Antiquity was not the evil, it was the good of
Antiquity; it was born of its strength and its purity only, and it was
the incarnation of its noblest qualities. It could not be purified,
because it was spotless; it could not be sanctified, because it was
holy. It could gain nothing from the art of the Middle Ages, alternately
strong in brutal reality, and languid in mystic inanity; the men of the
Renaissance could, if they influenced it at all, influence the antique
only for evil; they belonged to an inferior artistic civilization, and
if we conscientiously seek for the spiritual improvements brought by
them into antique types, we shall see that they consist in spoiling
their perfect proportions; in making necks longer and muscles more
prominent; in rendering more or less flaccid, or meagre or coarse, the
grand and delicate forms of antique art. And when we have examined into
this purified art of the Renaissance, when we have compared coolly and
equitably, we may perhaps confess that, while the Renaissance added
immense wealth of beauty in colour, perspective, and grouping, it took
away something of the perfection of simple lines and modest light and
shade of the antique; we may admit to ourselves that the grandest saint
by Raphael is meagre and stunted; and the noblest Virgin by Titian is
overblown and sensual by the side of the demi-gods and amazons of
antique sculpture.
The antique perfected the art of the Renaissance, it did not corrupt it.
The art of the Renaissance fell indeed into shameful degradation soon
after the period of its triumphant union with the antique; and Raphael's
grand gods and goddesses, his exquisite Eros and radiant Psyche of the
Farnesina, are indeed succeeded but too soon by the Olympus of Giulio
Romano, an Olympus of harlots and acrobats, who smirk and mouth and
wriggle and sprawl ignobly on the walls and ceilings of the dismantled
palace which crumbles away among the stunted willows, the stagnant
pools, and rank grass of the marshes of Mantua. But this is no more the
fault of Antiquity than it is the fault of the Middle Ages; it is the
fault of that great principle of life and of change which makes all
things organic, be they physical or intellectual, germinate, grow,
attain maturity, and then fade, wither, and rot. The dead art of
Antiquity could never have brought the art of the Renaissance to an
untimely end; the art of the Renaissance decayed because it was mature,
and died because it had lived.