MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM
Ghiberti, Brunellesco, and Donatello about 1400 begin to study Nature
and the Antique—The new secular spirit—Discontent with the old
pictorial style expressed in reaction by Lorenzo Monaco—in
cautious reform by Fra Angelico—and Masolino—in revolutionary
reform by Masaccio—The Cassoni painters as illustrators of
contemporary manners—Masaccio and the new structure in light and
shade—The Problem of the Brancacci Frescoes—Masaccio’s enduring
influence—The early Florentine Realists—Paolo Uccello and
Perspective—Andrea del Castagno and Anatomy—Domenico Veneziano and
Oil Painting—Alesso Baldovinetti.
In the two earlier chapters we have considered what Giorgio Vasari calls
the vigorous childhood of Italian painting. We are now to observe its
splendid youth. The story appropriately begins with three young men and
the year 1401 and with a baby, later nicknamed Masaccio, who was born
that same year. The three young Florentines represent the new
time-spirit. The lucky one, Lorenzo Ghiberti, has just won a competition
for the new bronze doors of the Baptistery, and has in that one
commission more than twenty years of happy work ahead. Ghiberti is
sensitive and thoughtful beyond the wont of the older craftsmen artists.
He writes of an antique statue: “It has sweetness of modelling which
cannot be caught either in a strong or a dim light, only the hand and
touch can find it.” Ghiberti is a critic and analyst as well as a
creator. In his “Commentaries,” a product of his old age, he writes:
“Thus I have always sought for first principles, as to how nature works
in herself, and how I may approach her, how the eye knows the varieties
of things, how our visual power works, how visual images come about, and
in what manner the theory of sculpture and painting should be framed.”
This is the mood of the Renaissance in its most serious aspect.
This student mood was fully shared by two young friends of Ghiberti.
Donatello, the sculptor, and Brunellesco, later the designer of the dome
of the Cathedral at Florence, had lost in the competition for the
Baptistery doors. They accepted defeat magnanimously, joined forces and
went to Rome, where their persistent way of poking among the ruins got
them the name of the treasure seekers. Such indeed they were, but the
treasure they sought was not gold, but the secrets of the ancient
sculptors and architects. So Donatello refined and perfected the rugged
realism he had from nature. As early as 1416 he was to carve the alert
and noble St. George for Or San Michele. Brunellesco’s life dream was
that lightest and loveliest of domes which is still the architectural
crown of Florence, and almost incidentally he threw off designs that
filled Florence with elegant colonnades and churches which renewed the
dignity and joyousness of the best Roman building. A resolute spirit,
Brunellesco once tramped the sixty miles from Florence to Cortona to see
a newly excavated statue. Not incidentally, then, but by hardest study,
Brunellesco worked out a correct practice of linear perspective. This
needed resource for the painter was now available when any one had the
sense to ask for it, and all the time young Masaccio was growing up in
San Giovanni up the Arno.
Such is the immediate background for the forward move in painting which
begins in 1422, or thereabouts, and runs through fifty years of eager
experimentation. As in the first revival the sculptors and architects
had shown the way to the painters, so it was again. But there is also a
remoter social and commercial background for the Early Renaissance which
we must consider briefly. The great plague of 1348 cuts Florentine
history sharply in two. It marked an acceleration of gayety and
worldliness, of sports and pageantry. The chronicler Matteo Villani[28]
noted with amazement that the plague had caused not repentance but
dissipation. He was shocked to see the old toga-like costume of the
Florentines give place to the bobtailed jerkins and parti-colored hose
borrowed from wicked France. Heritages were many and heirs few. You saw
the gowns of gentle and noble ladies on backs of hussies or worse—the
new wives. People ran to “the sin of gluttony, to feasts and taverns,
delicate viands and games.” As for the poor folk, they no longer wished
to work at their trades, they expected the costliest food, they married
“_ad libitum_.” So began that loosening up of the old bourgeois morals
which culminated in the carnivals of the end of the fifteenth century
and in the libertine muse of Lorenzo the Magnificent. All this meant an
inspiring spectacle for the artist to record, and plenty of lavish
patronage, but also it meant a disintegrating tendency for art. Painting
is great in Florence in the measure that it escapes the mere
expansiveness of the times and seeks discipline. As if to assert the
permanency of the spirit of discipline, the very year that set Matteo
Villani in despair, 1348, gave him also a chapter on the founding of the
Studio, a school of higher learning which eventually became the
University of Florence. And the course of art for most of the fifteenth
century was to be a constant interplay and rivalry between the Florence
of the tavern and race-course and the Florence of the Studio, with a
final victory for the latter.
Oddly enough, the new luxury and gayety and the new scholarship
conspired to make the old painting inadequate. The panoramic style of
the fourteenth century was too simple and unornate for the Frenchified
Florentines; for the new generation of strenuous artists, it was too
slight and unskilful. All the finer spirits at the beginning of the
fifteenth century are malcontents. Their unrest expressed itself,
according to temperament, in progress or reaction. The dominating artist
of the moment was a reactionary, Don Lorenzo Monaco,[29] Camaldolese
monk. Turning from the superficiality of the current Florentine style,
he sought his corrective at Siena, his birthplace, in the decorative
exquisiteness of Simone Martini and the narrative warmth and breadth of
the Lorenzetti; and he imports these qualities into Florence in an art
as aristocratic and retrospective as that of our own Pre-Raphaelites. In
his hands Gothic painting takes a new and unwarranted lease of life. He
is a brilliant colorist, a fastidious designer, an austere spirit. Even
his great Sienese exemplars have hardly surpassed his masterpiece, the
Coronation of the Virgin, in the Uffizi. It is dated 1413. In the
richness of the Gothic frame, the profusion of small incidental figures,
the festooning curves of the swaying saints and angels, and formal
symmetry of arrangement, it well represents the most florid type of
Gothic painting as developed at Siena. It is hard to realize that this
lovely mediæval work was painted at the moment when Brunellesco and his
friends were already turning sharply to nature and to the vision of
Hellas. But Lorenzo was a cloistered man, and appropriately a votary of
past perfections. His devout mood is best expressed in the gracious
Annunciation, Figure 71, which has happily never left its original altar
in the Church of the Trinità. Here Lorenzo follows the Lorenzettian
canons of space. A girlish delicacy in the obedient Virgin is a new
note, to be echoed more sweetly by Lorenzo’s best follower, Fra
Angelico. Lorenzo died in 1425. Masaccio had already created the new
style of painting, but for a couple of decades faithful disciples of Don
Lorenzo carried on his style.
A lover of Plutarchian parallels and contrasts would swiftly pass from
Don Lorenzo Monaco to Masaccio. But one may better understand the new
movement by taking first men who gradually and normally accepted the new
knowledge. Such are Fra Angelico and Masolino, who began as Gothic
painters and ended as Renaissance masters. They show us better the
average drift of the times than does so revolutionary a figure as
Masaccio.
[Illustration:
FIG. 71. Lorenzo Monaco, Annunciation.—_Trinità._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 72. Fra Angelico. Annunciation and Adoration of the Magi.—_Museum
of S. Marco._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 73. Fra Angelico. Coronation of the Virgin.—_Louvre._
]
Fra Angelico[30] was born in 1387 and at twenty entered the religious
state as a Dominican at Fiesole. How soon Fra Giovanni, not yet
nicknamed Angelico, became a painter we hardly know. But four little
pictures designed to inclose in their frames relics of the saints may
represent his beginnings. Three are at San Marco, Florence, one in Mrs.
John L. Gardner’s collection at Boston. The Little Annunciation with an
Adoration of the Magi, Figure 72, may represent the work. It is refined,
tender, of jewel-like freshness of color, graceful in linear
arrangement, at first sight wholly Sienese in inspiration, and directly
dependent on Lorenzo Monaco. A kind of veracity under the richness of
the expression marks the work as after all straightforward and
Florentine. The date may be about 1425, Fra Angelico, being in his
middle thirties, and in his art about a century behind the times. In his
early Gothic manner he conceived some of his masterpieces, such as the
Coronation of the Virgin, with its glimpse of a celestial cloud land;
and the whimsically beautiful Last Judgment. Both are at the Museum of
San Marco. One can believe the report of Vasari that each day Fra
Angelico prayed before touching brush to such masterpieces. Such
pictures have the hush and charm of a celestial dreamland, a meditative
beauty quite un-Florentine.
[Illustration:
FIG. 74. Fra Angelico. Madonna dei Linaiuoli. Originally an outdoor
tabernacle.—_Museum of S. Marco._
]
All the time Fra Angelico was placidly and intelligently studying the
new realistic movement launched by Donatello and Masaccio. He adopts
what suits him, rejecting heavy shadows which would dull his Gothic
coloring, but adding freely realistic details in anatomy, drapery, and
architecture. The Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre, Figure 73,
though it may be only a few months later than that of the Uffizi, no
longer takes place in a cloudland before lucent gold, but in a quite
practicable architecture imitating the niche which Michelozzo designed
in 1423 for Donatello’s St. Louis of Toulouse. The forms too are more
substantial, more mundane. Soon the architectural accessories become of
Renaissance type, and as Mr. Langton Douglas has shown, every new
invention of Michelozzo for a space of ten years is promptly reflected
in the painting of Fra Angelico. His greatest Madonna, that of the Linen
Guild, Figure 74, painted in 1433, is almost plastic, recalling the
severe sweetness of Orcagna. The picture is really cumbered by the rich
hangings, which with the slender swaying angels in the bevel of the
frame are already an anachronism. In the Descent from the Cross, Figure
75, we find Fra Angelico skilfully adopting the new discoveries in
anatomy and landscape. The treatment is broad and panoramic in the
tradition of the Lorenzetti but all the details are carefully studied
from nature and not furnished by formula. A deeply felt scene thus gains
verisimilitude, comes out of the realm of legend and becomes an
actuality. The panel was finished in 1440, and, now that Masaccio was
gone, there was no living painter who could have put into it with equal
knowledge so much feeling.
[Illustration:
FIG. 75. Fra Angelico. Deposition.—_Uffizi._
]
The building of the great Dominican Convent of San Marco between 1437
and 1444 opened to Fra Angelico his great opportunity. It was the gift
of Cosimo de’ Medici, now unofficial ruler of Florence, who had his good
reasons for wishing to assure the occasional repose of his busy soul in
this world and its permanent repose in the next. He often sought
seclusion in the convent and doubtless saw in progress the fifty or more
frescoes that Fra Angelico made to adorn it. Fra Angelico was painting
for deeply religious men, for scholars who had the Scriptures at their
finger tips, and for this reason perhaps he rejects all smaller
realisms, reducing his compositions to the mere figures. Thus the San
Marco frescoes are more concise even than those of Giotto, and they
reach at their best a simple sublimity as yet unattained in Italian art.
Highly formal and decorative, they are free from consciously æsthetic
taint. Sometimes I think Perugino learned much at San Marco and that we
may thus regard Fra Angelico as indirectly a leading influence on
Raphael. The sparse, effective method may be illustrated in the fresco
set over the door of the guest quarters, the _Forestiera_. It represents
a pilgrim Christ being received by Dominican brothers. Figure 76. In the
stranger we entertain The Lord Himself is the simple lesson. The figures
are set against a conventional blue background but are constructed with
the authority of the new learning.
[Illustration:
FIG. 76. Fra Angelico. Dominicans receive Christ as Pilgrim. Guest
house door.—_S. Marco._
]
In the Chapter House nearby Fra Angelico painted, about 1440, a great
Crucifixion, Figure 77. The three laden crosses stand out sharply
against a murky sky. The setting is a mere platform, on which the
familiar forms of Mary and the beloved Apostles are almost lost in a
throng of witnesses of every age. We have the Latin Fathers, and their
successors—St. Dominic and St. Francis, among others. The arrangement is
highly formal, the mood that of meditation; the sharper tragedy of the
theme is not insisted on. The characterization of the saints is precise
and fine, the drawing of their forms admirable. Had the composition been
set against a Gothic, blue background, the mood would have seemed merely
sentimental. What gives it, with all its abstractness, an almost
sensational tang of reality is the arching sky, slaty above and an
ominous orange behind the figures. The expedient brings an element of
definite place and time of day for this rendezvous of saints at a
mystically renewed Calvary.
[Illustration:
FIG. 77. Fra Angelico. Mystical Crucification. Chapter House.—_S.
Marco._
]
In the cells of the convent, Fra Angelico and his helpers painted no
less than forty-three frescoes. These were intended for the private
devotions of the brother occupying the cell, and the subjects were
probably chosen not by Fra Angelico himself, but by his cloister mates.
The best are conceived like the frescoes of the lower story. The
background is just a veiled sky, there are no accessories, the figures
loom in an indefinite space. Majestic is the Transfiguration, Figure 78,
very lovely the Coronation of the Virgin. The angelic painter draws the
maximum effect from the simplest patterns and briefest means. There is
the measured and simple dignity of the early Christian mosaics with a
warmer and more personal feeling. Fra Angelico, when he wishes, can be
elaborately realistic. He is so in the garden scene where the Risen
Christ gently rebuffs the Magdalen, in the crowded Adoration of the
Magi, which tradition assigns to Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell, and in the
Annunciation, Figure 79, in the corridor with its graceful Renaissance
_loggia_. In this more circumstantial vein, Fra Angelico is delightful,
but I think below his best. In all the frescoes at S. Marco, however,
Fra Angelico appears as a wholly Florentine figure with an art based at
once on the study of nature and on an understanding admiration for the
masterpieces of Giotto and Orcagna.
[Illustration:
FIG. 78. Fra Angelico. Transfiguration, fresco in a cell at _S.
Marco_.
]
Something of his mediævalism, of his Sienese manner, persists in the
numerous little predella panels, such as those telling delightfully the
story of the doctor saints, Cosmo and Damian, and the series with the
life of Christ which adorned the doors of the plate lockers of the
Church of S. Marco. With their fully developed pictorialism, their
careful regard for the minor realisms of setting, these little pictures
are the prelude to his last phase at Rome. They are also the last
Florentine pictures that observe those traditional iconographical forms
which had persisted for four centuries.
[Illustration:
FIG. 79. Fra Angelico. Annunciation. Fresco.—_San Marco._
]
Fra Angelico ever refused to make money or accept promotion, but became
despite himself a celebrity. In 1445 he was ordered to Rome by Pope
Eugenius IV. The frescoes which Fra Angelico then made in the Vatican
are lost. There was an escape to Orvieto, where Fra Angelico painted
half the vault of the Chapel of S. Brixio, which Signorelli was later to
complete. Fra Angelico was peremptorily recalled to Rome in 1447 by the
new Pope, Nicholas V, who was planning a new chapel in the Vatican. We
see it today still radiant with the legends of St. Stephen and St.
Lawrence that Fra Angelico thoughtfully composed more than four hundred
years ago. Modern critics have generally agreed in finding Fra
Angelico’s masterpieces in this chapel. If they mean his fullest display
of knowledge, the opinion is incontestible. Nowhere else has Fra
Angelico invented such complications of architecture, interiors, street
perspectives; nowhere has he drawn better figures in greater variety.
Such frescoes as the lunette with St. Stephen defending himself before
the Jewish doctors and preaching to the people, Figure 80, or that
depicting St. Lawrence giving alms to cripples and poor folk before a
basilica, are learned and rich. But does not their very richness obscure
both the decorative and emotional appeal? Personally I tend to lose the
figures in the complexity of the setting. Any of Fra Angelico’s little
predellas tells its story more feelingly and clearly, and no less ably.
Under the pressure of competition at Rome, Fra Angelico for the first
time is ostentatious. To please the Pope he revives in more specious
form the trivialities of the old panoramic style. Had he grasped
Masaccio’s invention of aerial perspective and construction in light and
dark, Fra Angelico might have carried off his elaborate settings
successfully. As it is, they confuse the eye by too many linear
elements, and only mildly delight the mind. Even the sensitive mood of
legend, which is noteworthy in these frescoes, is better represented in
the smaller panels. In fairness of Gothic fresco coloring, however, they
are unsurpassed.
[Illustration:
FIG. 80. Fra Angelico. St. Stephen Preaching, the Saint before the
Council. Fresco.—_Chapel of Nicholas V., Vatican._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 81. Masolino. Annunciation.—_Henry Goldman, Esq. New York._
]
From the point of view of tendency, these frescoes are profoundly
instructive. They show the irresistible drift towards the formation of a
new panoramic style, a drift that even Fra Angelico, cloistered saint
and exquisite self-critic, was unable to escape. In spite of his record
and better knowledge, he becomes an inaugurator of that picturesque,
undisciplined, and decentralized manner of narrative which was to be
represented by Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and their contemporaries.
In his later years Fra Angelico declined the archbishopric of Florence
and died at Rome in 1455. The tombstone which shows the emaciation of
his perishable form is in the Roman Church of the Minerva; his
imperishable monument is his frescoed convent home of S. Marco at
Florence.
Of the traditional artists Fra Angelico is by far the most important,
but his contemporary Masolino of Panicale must be considered, partly
because tradition makes him the master of Masaccio, partly because of
the problems which cluster about his work. The picture which is here
drawn of him represents my own investigations, and differs at several
points from the views of Berenson and Toesca. If we judge Masolino only
by the work that is unquestionably his, he is not an impressive figure.
He inherits the grace of the late Gothic style, and he adds rather
partially and inconsequentially the new discoveries in anatomy and
linear perspective. Chance took him away from the centre of things,
Florence. He worked mostly in Lombardy, distant Hungary, provincial
Tuscany, and Rome. He has industry and charm, but nowhere shows much
intelligence. On the whole he is a poorer story-teller than his Gothic
predecessors, and only their fair equal in panel painting. Had Vasari
not ascribed to him, I believe erroneously, the early miracles of St.
Peter in the Church of The Carmine, at Florence, the general historian
of art would need to pay little attention to Masolino. But he has been
entangled in one of the most important of artistic problems, that of
Masaccio, so we cannot ignore him.
Masolino[31] was born in 1384, and, according to Vasari, was trained by
the mysterious Starnina. We have no very early works to show his
progress, and it is merely a good guess that the radiant Annunciation,
Figure 81, in the possession of Mr. Henry Goldman, New York, may be
considerably earlier than 1420. It shows the gentleness and animation
which are constant in Masolino. It combines the Sienese calligraphic
manner with those smaller realisms of inscenation which ultimately
derive from Duccio. It has coloristic audacities of its own in the
spotting of brightest vermillion. It gives small hint of the
Renaissance. At a later date than 1420, by which time ordinary
perspective began to be understood, I doubt if Masolino would have
indulged in that preposterous and unnecessary central pillar which
starts above in middle distance and ends below in the picture plane. A
Madonna at Bremen, dated 1423, shows him still as Gothic as Lorenzo
Monaco, who indeed seems to have influenced him dominatingly.
In this same year, it is likely that he painted the frescoes in the
Collegiate Church at Castiglione d’Olona, a lovely village at the foot
of the Alps. Masolino had to deal with refractory spaces, the narrow
triangular sectors of the apse. This has caused elongation of the
figures and piling up of fantastic architecture merely to fill the
spaces. The mood is gentle and graceful, the treatment quite Gothic.
These six stories of the Virgin must have satisfied Masolino’s humanist
patron, Cardinal Branda Castiglione; for several years later he
re-employed the painter to decorate the adjoining Baptistery. Masolino
at forty, in the Collegiate Church, was still completely Gothic. If we
may believe Vasari, at that age he suddenly mastered the new style. Only
on such a theory can he have painted the Adam and Eve and the St. Peter
reviving Tabitha, in the Brancacci Chapel, which are in the new
chiaroscuro technic. Since Masolino, years after the time when he was
working in that chapel, is still incompletely modern as regards light
and shade, it is easier to suppose that what he actually painted in the
Brancacci Chapel, about 1424, was merely the vault and the three
lunettes, which have since been destroyed. Thus all the frescoes now
visible in this famous chapel would be by Masaccio or his continuer,
Filippino Lippi. Such was the view of the excellent critic Cavalcaselle
more than fifty years ago. However that be, Masolino by 1427 was at Buda
(now Budapest), where he worked for that extraordinary Florentine exile
and soldier of fortune, Pippo Spano. After that trip, we hear no more of
Masolino at Florence—rather oddly, since the Brancacci Chapel, which he
had begun, still had three unpictured spaces after Masaccio’s death in
1428. Apparently the Brancacci family did not consider Masolino
competent to complete the work he had begun. If so, they were wise.
[Illustration:
FIG. 82. Masolino. Baptism of Christ, detail of fresco.—_Baptistery,
Castiglione d’Olona._
]
We next find Masolino, after an interval of more than ten years,
decorating the Baptistery at Castiglione d’Olona for his old patron,
Cardinal Branda. The date is 1435. By this time Masolino had learned a
good deal, but had hardly assimilated his new attainments. Whether as
decoration or as story-telling, the stories of St. John the Baptist are
at once confused and pretentious, with little to recommend them save the
loveliness of their Gothic color, the prettiness of the heads, and
certain vivacious and well-observed gestures. In the great fresco of the
Baptism of Christ, Figure 82, the incidental nudes are so carefully
anatomized that they distract from the general effect, while the deep
river valley unhappily draws the eye away from the figures in the
foreground. A similarly pictorially inept use of foreshortened
Renaissance colonnades appears in the opposite fresco depicting the
Feast of Herod and the delivery of the head of St. John to Herodias. If
it were not for the physical discomfort of travelling to the end of
those interminable colonnades and returning to note what is happening
nearby in them, these stories themselves would seem vivacious and
well-conceived, the female heads attractive, the color gay and pleasing.
The method of composition is still Lorenzettian and the modern
architectural features inorganic.
[Illustration:
FIG. 83. Masolino. St. Catherine disputing with the Pagan Doctors.
Fresco.—_S. Clemente, Rome._
]
A few years later Masolino was swept to Rome by the great wave of
rebuilding and redecorating which accompanied Pope Martin V’s return
from Avignon. There in the Chapel of the Sacrament, in the venerable
Basilica of S. Clemente, which had formerly been Cardinal Branda’s
titular Church, Masolino achieved his maturest work. Completely
repainted, we may still see the legends of St. Catherine, and a finely
theatrical Calvary by Masolino, and as well legends of St. Ambrose by a
follower of Masaccio. Here Masolino’s gift as a story-teller is at its
best. He has learned to subordinate his accessories, and the childlike
character of his themes enlists his talent in its most engaging aspect.
Such a fresco as St. Catherine urging the mysteries of the faith before
the Roman doctors, Figure 83, is well-felt and skilfully composed, and
withal most flimsily drawn. It is incredible that a man who could do the
Tabitha in the Brancacci Chapel at forty should have relapsed to this
level at fifty-five. The evidence of the armor[32] worn by the horsemen
in the Calvary proves that that fresco, and presumably the entire
decoration of the chapel, cannot be earlier than 1440, while of course
it cannot be later than Masolino’s own death in 1447.
To this later period belongs, I believe, the diptych at Naples which
represents two themes rare in early Florentine painting, the Assumption
of the Virgin, and the Miracle of the Snow, Figure 84. The latter scene
shows Pope Liberius tracing the foundations of the Basilica of Santa
Maria Maggiore which were indicated by a miraculous snow-fall in
midsummer. It is delightful as story-telling, and some of the minor
figures are entrancing, as is the landscape. Since Michelangelo and
Giorgio Vasari once admired this picture together at Rome, we should not
grudge it our admiration. Nor should we fail to note the curious defects
in construction. The heads of the attendant figures are set on the
shoulders like a ball on a post. You could blow any of these heads off
without overtaxing your lungs. The picture shows the utmost of which
Masolino was capable. It reveals him as lightly touched by the new
learning and faithful to the old panoramic ideals of narrative which had
come down from Taddeo Gaddi and the Lorenzetti.
[Illustration:
FIG. 84. Masolino. Pope Liberius tracing the snow-marked plan of Santa
Maria Maggiore.—_Naples._
]
Logically we should next consider Masaccio, but first we may well give
an eye to a minor sort of narrative painting which worked in the
direction of contemporary realism. This was domestic painting as
distinguished from ecclesiastical or civic.[33] In a prosperous
Florentine home the chest was the most important article of furniture.
In the fifteenth century its front was pictured with races, pageants,
feasts, battles, or the new themes from classical mythology. Every
patrician bride normally received two such painted cassoni to contain
her trousseau. For example,[34] Giovanna di Filippo Aldobrandini when
she married Tommaso di Berto Fini, in 1418, received two bride chests
depicting the races on St. John’s day. A complete chest in the Bargello,
Florence, shows the riders carrying to the Baptistery the _palii_, or
lengths of brocade which were the prizes. The front panel of the
companion chest is in the Holden Collection, at Cleveland, and
commemorates with extraordinary vivacity and fidelity the race itself,
Figure 85. The winner is just preparing to touch the _palio_ which hangs
from the ceremonial car at the finish. Jesters, policemen, eager women,
and impatient urchins who pelt the losers make up a remarkable picture
of contemporary customs. Besides the pictured chests, a well appointed
room had at the height of a sitter’s shoulder similar but larger panels
which were called _Spalliere_. And still higher there was, on a still
larger scale, what were called cornice panels. These too were
contemporary or mythological in subject matter. Where many a room thus
had three courses of pictures from the floor to the ceiling there was
abundant opportunity for the narrative painter and remarkable stimulus
to invention. The richness and complexity of this household decoration
doubtless influenced all narrative painting, making for the
sprightliness which dominates the end of the century.
[Illustration:
FIG. 85. School of Uccello. A Horse Race. Detail from a _Cassone_
Front.—_Cleveland, O._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 86. Masaccio. Birth of St. John Baptist.—_Desco da Parto.
Berlin._
]
Besides these chest and wall panels, pictured salvers were prepared to
celebrate the birth of a patrician child. Such wooden salvers were used
to convey the congratulatory gifts which were offered with appalling
promptness to every young mother. These _Deschi da parto_, or birth
plates, as the Italians called them, bore pictures alluding either to
love and beauty or to childbirth. One of the earlier mythological
salvers is in the Bargello and represents the Judgment of Paris. As yet
the artist is not sufficiently audacious to display the goddesses in
classical nudity. The most famous of all birth-plates may serve as our
introduction to the greatest artist of the first half of the century,
Masaccio. It is in the Berlin Museum, the subject is the Birth of St.
John the Baptist, Figure 86, and the date should be about 1422. In the
excellent proportions of the Renaissance portico, in the gravity and
mass of the figures, it shows the beginnings of a new and more truthful
style, based not on previous artistic formulas but on direct and
masterful observation of nature. Mr. Berenson justly calls it “a little
giant of a picture.”
Masaccio[35] was born December 21, 1401, at San Giovanni up the Arno.
His real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Tommaso Guidi. And the
slightly slurring character of his nickname was apparently given for
absent-mindedness, untidiness, and a certain clumsiness of person.
Tradition as late as Vasari declared that Masaccio lived in a world of
intense speculation concerning his art. Contemporary tax-returns show
that he died deeply in debt and that he never really knew how much he
owed. Tradition again insists that he never troubled to collect payments
due him unless his need of money were extreme.
All the same he was one of the most original minds of all ages, and on
the formal side, one of the most revolutionary. He came to Florence
early, probably learned his elements under Masolino, but really drew
more from the sculptor naturalists of Donatello’s sort. In particular he
frequented the surly architect Brunellesco and from him learned the new
art of perspective. January 7, 1422, being twenty-one years old,
Masaccio was matriculated in the Druggists’ Guild as a licensed painter.
By this time he surely had made his great discovery and taken his great
decision. Reviewing the painting of his contemporaries and predecessors,
he judged that it was all based on unnatural conventions. We can imagine
him in the Spanish Chapel viewing the carefully charted and contoured
and colored groups, and saying impatiently “things don’t look like
that.” And in truth the older painting at its best was a select
inventory or formal description of what the artist saw, and not a
representation. One can imagine Masaccio exclaiming, as Francisco Goya
was to do more than three centuries later, “Lines, always lines, I don’t
see them in nature.” And, as a matter of fact, there are no lines in
nature, just the meeting of areas variously colored and lighted,
contrasts of tone which the eye instantaneously interprets as form.
Young Masaccio, then, makes the radical innovation that the brush should
work according to nature’s laws, distributing color and light and dark
so as to give the swiftest and truest representation of mass and
distance. Besides functional light and shade, Masaccio introduced into
painting the idea of aerial perspective. He saw that distant objects
diminished not merely in size but also in definition. He felt the air as
a palpable veil between the object and the eye, and he painted not
simply the object but, as well, its veil. By a swift impulse of sheer
genius this moody lad fixed ideals of naturalistic painting which were
to remain until yesterday and the Impressionists. In fundamental
principles Velasquez marks no great advance on Masaccio.
It is only in fresco painting that Masaccio fully reveals his powers. So
passing with mere mention such panels as The Healing of a Demoniac, in
the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, the widely scattered parts
of the altar-piece for the Carmelites at Pisa, dated 1426, and the grim
Madonna with St. Ann in the Uffizi, the student will best turn directly
to the Carmelite Church at Florence and enter that sanctuary of art, the
Chapel of the Brancacci. The Church itself was dedicated April 19, 1422.
Shortly after that date, young Masaccio did in fresco the dedicatory
procession with many portraits. Its realism produced a profound
impression. Nevertheless it was heedlessly destroyed after a century or
so. By 1424, according to all probability, Masaccio was associated with
Masolino in the decoration of the Brancacci Chapel. It was dedicated to
St. Peter, and the prescribed subjects were drawn from the “Acts of the
Apostles” and “The Golden Legend.” The vaults which contained the four
evangelists and the three lunettes, which depicted The Calling of Peter
and Andrew, the Tempest-tossed Ship of the Apostles on Galilee, and
Peter denying his Lord, were by Masolino. Unhappily these upper frescoes
have been destroyed. The Chapel now has only two rows of frescoes in
twelve pictures. Of these three and a part of a fourth, all in the lower
row, are certainly by Filippino Lippi, who about 1484 completed the
chapel, probably with the aid of Masaccio’s designs. Three in the upper
row, are ascribed by many critics to Masolino. According to this view,
which is largely based on the opinion of Vasari, Masaccio would be
responsible for only five pictures and most of a sixth. Other critics,
whose views I share, believe that Masaccio painted eight of the pictures
and most of a ninth. The difference of opinion, then, concerns three
pictures which many think unworthy of Masaccio’s genius. The problem
cannot be fully debated here. The grounds of my opinion, which was that
of the great Italian critic Cavalcaselle, will appear as we review the
frescoes themselves.
In general color effect these frescoes are strangely unlike their Gothic
predecessors. They have nothing of the flower-bed gayety of the Spanish
Chapel, of Lorenzo Monaco, or of Masolino elsewhere. The effect is of a
very rich smokiness, a kind of monochrome from which only subdued colors
emerge. Yellow-browns and silvery grays predominate. There are no hard
contours. The relief is salient, but one form blends insensibly into
another. The edges of the figures are established not by lines but by
contrast of values, the contour is often completely lost. The strong
assertion of light and dark in a few structural planes builds out the
forms from an investing shadow. Indeed the whole chapel recalls not the
Gothic fresco painters, but such far later artists as Velasquez,
Rembrandt, or even Whistler. The method of the painter, whoever he was,
is completely modern, and uniform throughout the chapel. He sacrifices
minute definition to generalizations for mass; and color, to emphatic
construction in light and shade. To obtain relief in the figures and
distance in the backgrounds is the main concern. It is in intention a
luminist art and a modelling art. The procedure is nearly uniform
throughout the Brancacci Chapel, though it grows abler from fresco to
fresco. It is a method that Masolino never commanded, not at Castiglione
d’Olona ten years later, nor still ten years later at San Clemente,
Rome. Hence I can only believe that the admitted inequalities in the
Brancacci Chapel merely represent the swift development of Masaccio’s
genius, and certain interruptions in the work itself.
The first fresco, in the nave alongside, the entrance of the chapel,
depicts our first parents at the moment of the Temptation in the Garden
of Eden, Figure 87. It is stilted and awkward, yet withal dignified. The
theme, which indeed has seldom been a happy one for any artist, has not
greatly interested the painter. He has made it an occasion for studying
the nude. We have what the modern student calls an academy. As such, it
is able. The construction is highly simplified and is wholly in masses
of light and dark, the contour is freely effaced. The mystery of
background foliage is well suggested, the placing of the head of the
serpent between the tree and the figures is a perfect example of the new
art of aerial perspective. No painter but Masaccio had even the notion
of such an effect at this moment. Technically the handling of this
detail is just the same as that of the vastly more beautiful angel in
the Expulsion from Eden, Figure 91. Finally, the impassive mask of the
Eve is identical with that of the Virgin, in Masaccio’s panel in the
Uffizi. We presumably have to do with an experimental phase of Masaccio
about the year 1423–5. About that time Masolino probably was called to
Buda to work for the extraordinary Florentine soldier of fortune,
Filippo Scolari, better known by his nickname of Pippo Spano. If Vasari
is right, Masaccio had been required to prove his ability to continue
the work by painting a St. Paul near the bell-cord of the Church, in
competition with a St. Jerome by Masolino. Both are lost.
[Illustration:
FIG. 87. Masaccio. The Temptation.—_Brancacci Chapel._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 91. Masaccio. The Expulsion.—_Brancacci Chapel._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 88. Masaccio. St. Peter raising Tabitha and healing the
Cripple.—_Brancacci Chapel._
]
However that be, Masaccio probably succeeded to the work in 1425, his
twenty-fourth year, and the next fresco after the Adam and Eve may well
have been the adjoining subjects of Peter raising Tabitha from the Dead
and healing a Cripple, Figure 88. As a whole the composition is somewhat
marred by inadvertences and afterthoughts. It shows the influence of
Masolino in the trite and conventional gestures of the mourners about
the bier, and in certain strained facial expressions, notably that of
the turbaned bystander. Such survivals are precisely what one would
expect in a young painter just emancipated from his master. The entirely
Masolino-like pair of strollers in the centre seem to be due to an
afterthought. The first intention is registered in the unnaturally
straight back of St. Peter’s companion, in the centre. The fresco was
apparently to have been cut into two compartments by a pilaster at that
point.[36] When the plan was abandoned in favor of putting two episodes
in one space, the two unrelated figures had to be added to fill space
and provide a transition. One is a little ashamed of pointing out small
defects in what in all essentials is a noble and impassioned work.
Technically there is nothing better in the Chapel than the establishing
of the city background. It has scale, admirable atmospheric placing,
dignity and pictorial significance. How anybody who knows Masolino’s
niggling and haphazard treatment of such architectural features at
Castiglione d’Olona can imagine that he had earlier created this
grandiose setting remains a mystery to me. Even more remarkable are the
gravity and grandeur of the Peter and the Tabitha. Here we are reminded
of Giotto. Masaccio must often have pored over the Stories of St. John
in Santa Croce, and while he by no means adopted Giotto’s shorthand
indications for mass, he did adopt Giotto’s sense for classic dignity,
beautifully calculated order, and moderation. As we continue through
these remarkable frescoes we shall see continually that the quite
ruthless innovator that was Masaccio was also a reverent traditionalist.
The particular form of his art was settled between nature and himself,
as Leonardo da Vinci later justly observed; the spirit of his art
derived mostly from Giotto. It was highly important for the whole
ongoing of art in Italy that so revolutionary a spirit was tempered by
the finest respect for the great classic tradition. And in this great
fresco of St. Peter’s miracles one may see how a quite homely and
drastic realism can be invested with abstract power and dignity. How
different it all is from the small and often charming vivacity which
Masolino displays at Castiglione d’Olona and at Rome.
Like the Temptation, the Tabitha is more linear and colorful than the
other frescoes of the Chapel. The painter has not quite mastered the
radically new method of construction in light and shade. Thus there is a
technical break between the Tabitha and the frescoes on the back wall,
which are in a more developed manner. We may assume an interruption in
the work. Indeed we need not assume it, for records prove that for most
of the year 1426 Masaccio was occupied with the great altar-piece for
the Carmelites at Pisa. On October 15, 1426, Masaccio solemnly engaged
not to do any other work until the altar-piece should be finished. We
may believe then that the work in the Brancacci Chapel was taken up anew
towards 1427.
The four frescoes on the back wall, which are divided into two groups by
the window, are the first of the new work. Of these the most remarkable
is St. Peter Baptizing, Figure 89. The drawing is magnificent. Light and
dark, without aid of the line, create so many bosses and pits which not
merely establish form but suggest the gravest emotions. A few well
chosen and well placed figures give the sense of a multitude. Mountains
tower in gigantic scale, one feels the run of the little river from its
distant source amid high ravines. The simplest modulations of light and
dark, so many sweeps of a broad brush, establish the constructional
planes of the figures and the mountains. All the early Italian writers
mark with wondering admiration the expressiveness of the shivering man
waiting his turn at the left. It is the smallest merit of the picture.
Masaccio in this great composition commands a homely and impressive
majesty, and therein shows himself true successor of Giotto, but he also
reveals a power of synthesis entirely modern and hardly excelled since
his day. One has only to turn to Masolino’s Baptism at Castiglione
d’Olona, Figure 82, with its niggling insistence on details, to
appreciate the gulf between the master and the pupil.
Across the window from Masaccio’s Baptism is St. Peter Preaching. The
same towering, mountain background is used. The somewhat linear
treatment of the faces has led Mr. Berenson, with other critics, to
ascribe this fresco to Masolino. It seems to me merely less strenuously
seen, because the subject offers little inspiration. Masaccio has lent
the theme real dignity, and, in the eager face of the nun at the front
of the audience achieves an unusual sweetness. Technically there are
good but not compelling reasons for supposing this fresco may have been
done among the first, about 1425.
The lower scenes at the back of the Chapel are, at your right, St. Peter
healing the Sick, by the mere fall of his shadow and, at the left, St.
Peter giving Alms. In both cases we have Florentine street scenes with a
classic air lent by the solemn figures of the apostles. We feel the
figures as far or near, and the air that veils them. There is great
intentness in the poor folk, and a rugged impersonality in St. Peter and
St. James. They are not indulging personal compassion so much as
fulfilling a divine mission. Again the combination of a drastic realism
with a stylistic majesty is what makes these frescoes unique. They
contain vivid portraits, among these the traditional portrait of
Masolino, a gentle, heavy, middle-aged face, bearded, and crowned with a
sort of tuque—just the man to have conceived the charming but loosely
organized compositions at Castiglione d’Olona.
What Masaccio looked like we may see in the upper fresco on the right
wall. He is the alert and determined figure impersonating St. Thomas, at
the left of the group. The story of the Tribute Money, Figure 90, is one
of the grandest creations of European art. If, as Leonardo da Vinci
asserts, the highest task of painting is to show by the pose and
gestures of the body the emotions of the soul, this is one of the
greatest paintings. It is remarkable for the dignity lent to an
apparently unpromising theme. The story is simply that Christ is
required to pay the _denarius_ when there is no money in the company. By
a miracle Peter finds the coin in the mouth of a fish and pays it to the
tax-gatherer. How the creative imagination has magnified this slender
theme! Masaccio has formed a group of potent and formidable individuals,
these simple men are fit to shake a world. He has shown them in a moment
in which discouragement and determination blend. A technicality
threatens to check the salvation of the world. He has discriminated
between the assured authority of the Christ and the wrathful energy of
St. Peter. He has invested the majestic forms with massive draperies
grandly disposed in simple folds. He has given even the tax-gatherer the
grace of a Roman athlete. Finally he has set the austere company before
a noble river plain upon which press the slopes of lofty mountains,
while the undulating crest of a remoter range almost bars off the sky.
All objects, human and inanimate, bear firmly on the ground and are
wrapped in an enveloping atmosphere. In the quality and arrangement of
the figures, it all derives from Giotto; in the vastness of the scale,
the introduction of mystery and distance, it is wholly Masaccio’s own.
Vasari rightly praised the harmony and discretion with which these
powerful assertions of form are made, and sees here the beginnings of
the modern style of painting.
[Illustration:
FIG. 90. Masaccio. The Tribute Money.—_Brancacci Chapel._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 89. Masaccio. St. Peter Baptizing.—_Brancacci Chapel._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 92. Masaccio. The Trinity, Fresco.—_Santa Maria Novella._
]
The organizing power of Masaccio is at its height in the Tribute Money.
His emotional intensity is fully involved only in the Expulsion from
Eden, Figure 91, the adjoining fresco in the nave of the church. Before
the sword of a serenely inexorable angel, Adam and Eve stalk forth into
the unknown. Their bodies cringe as they move, with shame and grief. An
ominous light reduces their bodies to so many pits of shadow and bosses
of light. Drawing of such accurate economy will only rarely reappear in
the world, in Leonardo da Vinci, in Rembrandt, in Honoré Daumier. The
desperate emotion is well contained within the oblong, in a monumental
balance. Remorse in the two first sinners has its shades. The man’s head
is pressed into his hands in an attempt at restraint, while Eve’s is
thrown back in anguished ululation. The high emotional pressure is new,
and symptomatic, and significantly it is contained within monumental
bounds. The Italian Renaissance in its striving for expressiveness will
rarely fail to keep expression noble. The ingrained classicism of the
Florentine point of view is never more favorably represented than in a
subject like this which seeks a maximum emotion on terms of order and
lucidity.
What remains of Masaccio is in a sense anti-climax. Very stately is the
fresco in this chapel, of the Resurrection of the Prince of Tyre and St.
Peter enthroned. The beauty is that of fine arrangement and
characterization. The graceful nude boy and about ten distinguished
figures behind him were added to the composition, presumably from
Masaccio’s designs, full fifty years later. They are the work of
Filippino Lippi, who also added some portraits at the left of this
fresco. He also filled the three unpainted panels, in an excellent
imitation of Masaccio’s style. Evidently Masaccio was called rather
abruptly to his last sojourn at Rome. For the fresco of the Raising of
the Boy could have been finished in a fortnight.
I have omitted a fine fresco of a Pietà in the Collegiate Church at
Empoli, though I believe it to be a splendid example of Masaccio’s early
style, and I can only mention for its magnificent architectural setting
in Brunellesco’s new style the fresco of the Trinity in Santa Maria
Novella, Figure 92. It is of his latest manner and of extraordinary
gravity and mass.
In 1428, being only twenty-six years old, Masaccio drops out of sight at
Rome. Some report that he was poisoned, others that he was slain in a
street brawl. We really know nothing about it. What we do know is that
in the recorded history of art no painter had achieved so greatly in so
short a time. Within six short years Masaccio created that method of
painting which stood uncontested till the advent of luminism only forty
years ago. And he not merely illustrated the method of construction in
light and dark, painting in atmospheric values rather than in lines and
charted areas, but he also expressed in the new technic both the noblest
traditional emotions as also poignant new emotions quite his own. In one
superb aggressive he had moved three generations into the future. For a
hundred years the most intelligent and ambitious artists in Florence as
a matter of course studied and copied in the Brancacci Chapel to form
their style. Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo,
Raphael, Andrea del Sarto thus paid homage to the untidy youth from
Castel San Giovanni, and even the iconoclasts of today, for whom
Leonardo da Vinci and his peers are scarcely artists at all, envy the
gravity and force of Masaccio. He is the real father of modern painting,
which is most true to itself when it tempers an ardent curiosity as
regards natural appearances with a respect for the great traditions of
moderation and taste.
Masaccio’s successors, very wisely, did not closely imitate him. They
saw he was an unsafe and unapproachable model. By a swift impulse of
genius, and apparently without analytical study of anatomy and
topography, he had mastered the broad effects that register form.
Details he neglected. He gives the action of hands and feet, not their
articulations, the scale of landscape and not its component parts. For
men of lesser genius, these short-cuts were dangerous. While using
Masaccio as inspiration, they had to verify his discoveries through
analytical studies before those innovations could become generally
available. The process of verification and minute research occupied
about fifty years and may be said to be complete with the maturity of
Leonardo da Vinci, say about the date of The Last Supper, 1498.
The successors of Masaccio may be divided into two groups as they
quietly adopted and popularized the immediately available part of his
discoveries, or strenuously carried his work forward. To the moderate
progressive group belong Fra Filippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli, and
still later Ghirlandaio; the experimentalists are birds of quite a
different feather.
These Florentine realists may be divided into two generations. The first
asserts itself before the middle of the fifteenth century, and is
trained chiefly under the influence of such sculptors as Donatello,
Brunellesco and Ghiberti. These painters work at the problem of light
and shade, anatomy, and perspective, accepting in their art the guidance
of sculpture. The second generation of realists come to their own after
the middle of the century, are mostly trained as silversmiths, and work
at the new technic of oil painting, at landscape and at the figure in
action. Both groups relatively neglected the important matter of
composition. Most of the realists sacrificed pictorial effect the better
to master detail, but they also accumulated that vast body of knowledge
upon which rests the glory of the High Renaissance, and nobody can
understand the progress of Florentine painting without following
sympathetically their great effort.
[Illustration:
FIG. 93. Paolo Uccello. Battle of Cavalry.—_Louvre._
]
Of the first generation, the quaintest figure is Paolo Uccello. Born in
1397, he soon gave himself fanatically to the study of the new science
of perspective, especially to feats of foreshortening. His pictures are
so many experiments and have a petrified inertness. Yet at his best he
commands dignity and a considerable decorative power. About the year
1435 he painted for the Medici palace several battle scenes, three of
which are respectively in the Louvre, Figure 93, National Gallery and
Uffizi. The last, representing the Florentine victory of San Romano,
shows the style. The forms are squared, in a fashion anticipating modern
Cubism, in order to simplify the problem of placing and foreshortening.
Corpses and lances are deliberately pointed at the spectator to offer so
many problems in perspective. The landscape is minute and topographical.
The decorative coloring is bold and original with interesting
dissonances of oranges, russets, and greens. It is quite splendid after
the unreal fashion of a tapestry.
Paolo’s masterpiece is the equestrian portrait of Sir John Hawkwood,
Figure 94, the English soldier of fortune and occasional captain of the
Florentine army, which is in the Cathedral. It is painted in gray-green
touched with color, and simulates a tomb. The date is 1437. Since Roman
times no equestrian monument of equal dignity had been created, and one
is inclined to suspect that Uccello profited by preliminary studies of
Donatello, his close friend, which later developed into the superb
Gattamelata statue at Padua. Uccello has a lighter vein illustrated by
furniture panels at Oxford, (a Hunt), at Paris, and Vienna, (St. George
and the Dragon), but his most ambitious work is the decoration of the
lunettes in the great cloister of Santa Maria Novella. The stories are
drawn from the Old Testament, were started by Paolo, about the year
1446, and continued by several assistants. The medium was gray-green,
_terra verde_, and the place accordingly is called the Green Cloister.
Uccello’s manner may be best sensed in the fresco of the Deluge, in
which the endeavor to set problems in perspective clashes unhappily with
the desire to present a scene of terror. The figures are felt one at a
time, there is little relation between them, and the picture has small
merit apart from its probity in the rendering of details and a sort of
abstract earnestness.
Uccello lived on till 1475, an indulged eccentric, ignored by the public
and ridiculed by his greater friends. His zeal for perspective was
unabated with age, and many a night his much-tried wife lost sleep as he
murmured in the small hours—“O! thou dear perspective!”
[Illustration:
FIG. 94. Paolo Uccello. Tomb Portrait of Sir John
Hawkwood.—_Cathedral._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 96. Andrea del Castagno. Portrait of a young man.—_J. P. Morgan
Coll., N. Y._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 95. Andrea del Castagno. Pippo Spano.—_Sant’ Apollonia._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 97. Andrea del Castagno. Tomb portrait of Niccolò da
Tolentino.—_Cathedral._
]
Far the most powerful of these early realists is Andrea del
Castagno.[37] His aggressive and truculent forms savor of Donatello
without Donatello’s fineness. He searches the secrets of anatomy,
locates and describes the muscles and sinews, depicts a world ruled by
force of arm. Although he builds in heavy shadows, after Masaccio’s
fashion, he retains an outline that vibrates with nervous strength. His
truthful sternness still wins approbation. He was born about 1390. We
meet him first in full maturity, perhaps about the year 1435, as
decorator of the Villa of the Pandolfini. To strengthen the ambition of
that proud race, he painted in their great hall nine figures of heroes
and heroines noted in war or in the arts. Recently transferred to the
Convent of Sant’ Apollonia, which already had a Last Supper and a
Calvary by Andrea, you may see the austere forms of Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio, of Esther, Queen Thomyris and the Cumean Sibyl, of the
warrior Farinata degli Uberti, Niccolò Accaiuoli, and Filippo Scolari.
This potent and melancholy figure of Pippo Spano, Figure 95, whom we
already know as the patron of Masolino, at Buda, is the most striking
representation that painting has given us of those masterful Italian
soldiers of fortune who managed war and government for the less advanced
nations. Pippo Spano had gone to Buda as a clerk and had quickly become
a generalissimo, Obergespann of Temesvár. For King Sigismund of Hungary
he stemmed the Turkish onslaught, did much to save Central Europe for
Christianity. As he stands thoughtfully confident, holding the scimitar,
the weapon of his foes, he is the beau ideal of that Italy soon to be
immortalized by Machiavelli, in which virtue meant successful force, and
both were on sale. A man’s portrait, Figure 96, in the collection of Mr.
J. P. Morgan, New York, has an even more sinister intensity. Equally
remarkable for its heroic aggressiveness in the young David adorning a
tournament shield in the Widener Collection, Figure 70.
In the fresco of the Crucifixion, now in the Uffizi, Andrea reveals
great knowledge linked to tragic expressiveness. No tenderness veils the
appalling theme. An athlete suffers stoically while his mother and
cousin shudder with grief. Of its ruthless kind it is a great
masterpiece and quite unforgettable.
In 1456 Andrea painted for the Cathedral the equestrian portrait of the
partisan leader, Niccolò da Tolentino, Figure 97. It is a companion
piece to Uccello’s Hawkwood, and like it simulates statuary, in
monochrome. It is more martial and restless, in the toss of the horse’s
head and the snap of the rider’s cloak. It suggests not ceremonious
dignity, but noise and impending action. It may very powerfully have
influenced Verrocchio twenty years later when he modelled for Venice the
Colleoni statue.
The truculence of Andrea’s manner led to a false and scandalous
tradition, promulgated by Vasari, that he slew his rival Domenico
Veneziano out of jealousy. As a matter of prosaic record, Domenico
Veneziano survived his alleged assassin’s death, in 1457, by all of four
years.
Domenico came down from Venice somewhere about 1438 and brought with him
a new technical method. He finished the pictures, which he began in
tempera, with veilings or glazes in an oil or varnish medium. He avoided
the old frank Gothic coloring in favor of pale tonalities which oddly
forecast our modern open-air school. The new method permitted of bolder
brushwork and successive over paintings. For the moment it wrought havoc
with the old conventional beauty, but it offered the painter new
resources and refinements, and eventually made possible the triumphs of
Leonardo and Titian.
[Illustration:
FIG. 98. Domenico Veneziano. Madonna with St. Lucy.—_Uffizi._
]
On the whole, Domenico is merely the shadow of a great name, for we have
only a handful of works by him, and those perhaps unrepresentative. The
altar-piece of St. Lucy, in the Uffizi, Figure 98, is novel only in its
acid and original dissonance of deep rose and pale green. The rugged St.
John the Baptist shows an attempt to obtain force of modelling without
exaggerating the shadows. This tendency persists in such disciples of
Domenico as Baldovinetti and Piero della Francesca, and rules in
Florence until Leonardo’s definitive application of Masaccio’s methods.
In the profile portraiture of the period Domenico was a master, as shown
in an admirable female portrait in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection,
Figure 99. Many similar heads, which we can hardly ascribe to particular
masters, seem to derive from Domenico. One of the most beautiful is in
the Poldi Pezzoli Museum at Milan. All of Domenico’s pupils and
imitators excel in a minute and topographical style of landscape of
which he was probably the inventor. It may be studied in Piero della
Francesca, in the Pollaiuoli, in Baldovinetti, and there is even a trace
of it in the spacious Alpine background of the Mona Lisa.
[Illustration:
FIG. 99. Domenico Veneziano. Portrait of a Girl.—_Coll. Mrs. John L.
Gardner, Boston._
]
Domenico died in 1461. By that time Florentine realism was emerging from
its first phase, and was beginning to investigate with its new resources
the facts of motion. It was the moment, too, when certain realists
sought to regain the grace which had largely been sacrificed in the
struggle for sheer knowledge.
[Illustration:
FIG. 100. A. Baldovinetti. Madonna.—_Louvre._
]
Alesso Baldovinetti[38] well represents this moment in a lovely Madonna
in the Louvre, Figure 100, which shows in perfection the new
topographical landscape and that juvenile graciousness which was to be
the staple of the coming generation of artists. Baldovinetti was born in
1425, and this loveliest of all his pictures may represent him about the
year 1460. He had been an assistant of Fra Angelico, but in a long
career, he died in 1499, he fell behind the times. He taught Domenico
Ghirlandaio his elements, and profoundly influenced Andrea Verrocchio
and Antonio Pollaiuolo. Thus he keeps a sure if modest place in the
progress of Florentine art.
In this chapter we have been dealing in a rough way with the Florence of
Cosimo de’ Medici. Under his astute and delicate rule from behind the
political scenes, Florence developed in wealth, splendor, and
worldliness. The old piety was waning or assuming merely æsthetic forms.
Greek studies were beginning to pave the way for an enlightened and
sceptical humanism and, withal, a revival of the pagan sense of beauty.
And when the new beauty came, it was gratefully mindful of those who had
made it possible. Leonardo de Vinci lauds Masaccio. He expresses the
immense debt that art owes to the first conscious realists. They did
good and harm, but to Florence at least they opened the only way of
progress. For whatever art may be elsewhere, in Florence it was fruitful
only as it was intellectualized. Good theory, good practice—such was the
creed imposed by the early realists and later formulated by their great
scion, Leonardo. I do not offer it as a universal formula, but in these
days when pure spontaneity—that is no theory—and false theory divide the
field, the old Florentine credo is at least worthy of consideration by
all who produce art and by all who love it. Baldovinetti was untouched
by these new stirrings which are associated with the rule of Lorenzo de’
Medici, but he dimly forecasts the grace that was soon to come. This new
spirit and its exponents must be the theme of our next chapter.
ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER III
VASARI ON MASACCIO
Vasari’s general estimate of Masaccio’s importance is still sound.
“With regard to the good manner of painting, we are indebted above all
to Masaccio, seeing that he, as one desirous of acquiring fame,
perceived that painting is nothing but the counterfeiting of all the
things of nature, vividly and simply, with drawing and with colours,
even as she produced them for us.... This truth, I say, being
recognized by Masaccio, brought it about that by means of continuous
study he learned so much that he can be numbered among the first who
cleared away, in a great measure, the hardness, the imperfections, and
the difficulties of the art, and that he gave a beginning to beautiful
attitudes, movements, liveliness, and vivacity, and to a certain
relief truly characteristic and natural; which no painter up to his
time had done.... And he painted his works with good unity and
softness, harmonizing the flesh-colours of the heads and of the nudes
with the colours of the draperies, which he delighted to make with few
folds and simple, as they are in life and nature....
“For this reason that chapel has been frequented continually up to our
own day [1554] by innumerable draughtsmen and masters; and there still
are therein some heads so life-like and so beautiful, that it may
truly be said that no master of that age approached so nearly as this
man did to the moderns. His labours, therefore, deserve infinite
praise, and above all because he gave form in his art to the beautiful
manner of the times.”
Vasari then names twenty-five artists who studied Masaccio’s frescoes.
From De Vere’s translation of the _Lives_, Vol. II, p. 189, 90.
LEONARDO DA VINCI ON MASACCIO
Leonardo da Vinci uses Masaccio as the example of a painter who goes
to nature rather than to other men’s painting.
=That Painting declines and deteriorates from age to age, when
painters have no standard but painting already done.=
“Hence the painter will produce pictures of small merit if he takes
for his standard the pictures of others. But if he will study from
natural objects he will bear good fruit; as was seen in the painters
after the Romans who always imitated each other, and so their art
declined from age to age. After these came Giotto the Florentine
who—not content with imitating the works of Cimabue; his master—being
born in the mountains and in a solitude inhabited only by goats and
such beasts, and being guided by nature to his art, began by drawing
on the rocks the movements of the goats of which he was keeper. And
thus he began to draw all the animals which were to be found in the
country, and in such wise that after much study he excelled not only
all the masters of his time but all those of many bygone ages.”
“Afterwards this art declined again, because everyone imitated the
pictures that were already done; thus it went on from century to
century until Tomaso, of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his
perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but
nature—the mistress of all masters—weary themselves in vain.”
J. P. Richter “_Literary Works of L. da V._,” Vol. I. p. 660.
But Leonardo approves also imitation of antiquity (Richter, Vol. II,
¶1445). “The imitation of antique things is better than that of modern
things.” He would probably have sanctioned Masaccio’s devout study of
Giotto. The warning is against slavish imitation of immediate
predecessors.
VASARI ON PAOLO UCCELLO
The admirable and self sacrificing ardor of these first realists is
best exemplified in the case of Paolo Uccello.
“For the sake of these investigations [in perspective] he kept himself
in seclusion and almost a hermit, having little intercourse with
anyone, and staying weeks and months in his house without shaving
himself. And although those were difficult and beautiful problems, if
he had spent that time in the study of figures, he would have brought
them to absolute perfection; for even so he made them with passing
good draughtsmanship. But, consuming his time in these researches, he
remained throughout his whole life more poor than famous; wherefore
the sculptor Donatello, who was very much his friend, said to him very
often—when Paolo showed him Mazzocchi (facetted head-fillets) with
pointed ornaments, and squares drawn in perspective from diverse
aspects; spheres with seventy-two diamond-shaped facets, with
wood-shavings wound round sticks on each facet; and other fantastic
devices on which he spent and wasted his time—‘Ah, Paolo, this
perspective of thine makes thee abandon the substance for the shadow;
those are things that are only useful to men who work at the inlaying
of wood, seeing that they fill their borders with chips and shavings,
with spirals both round and square, and with other similar things.’”
Vasari, in Schele de Vere’s translation; Vol. II. p. 132, 3.
AN APPRAISAL OF BALDOVINETTI’S FRESCOES
Here I may illustrate a common practice of the times in an appraisal
of Baldovinetti’s frescoes in the choir of the Trinità by fellow
artists including Benozzo Gozzoli, Cosimo Rosselli and Pietro
Perugino.
“In the name of God—on the 19 of January 1496 (n. s. ’97)
We Benozzo di Lese, painter; and Piero di Cristofano da Castel della
Pieve, painter; and Cosimo di Lorenzo Rosselli, painter, chosen by
Alesso di Baldovinetti, painter, to see and judge and set a price
on—empowered by a contract which said Alesso has with M. Bongianni
de’Gianfigliazzi and his heirs—a chapel pictured in Santa Trinità of
Florence—that is the choir of the said church, having seen, all
together and agreeing, having examined all the costs of lime, azure,
gold and all other colours, scaffolds and everything else, including
his work, we judge from all this that the aforesaid Alesso should have
one thousand broad gold florins.
“And for clearness and truth of the said judgment I Cosimo di Lorenzo
aforesaid have made this writing with my own hand this aforesaid day,
and so I judge; and here at the foot they will sign with their own
hands that they are agreed with what is above written, and so judge.
Benozzo di Lese &c.
I Piero Perugino &c.
Translated from Herbert Horne’s edition of Alesso’s _Ricordi_ in
_Burlington Magazine_, Vol. II. (1903) p. 383.
[Illustration:
FIG. 101. Ghirlandaio. Giovanna degli Albizzi.—_J. P. Morgan Coll.,
New York._
]