FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE
After Masaccio two tendencies,—towards prettiness and vivacious
narrative; towards strenuous research—Fra Filippo Lippi celebrant
of Gay Florence—Benozzo Gozzoli and Pageantry—Antonio Pollaiuolo
and human dynamics—Piero della Francesca and impersonal
observation of appearances—Dissolving tendencies in the new
panoramic style—illustrated by the early frescoes in the Sistine
Chapel—Perugino’s return to simple symmetries—The _Cassone_
painters once more—Domenico Ghirlandaio and spectacular
narrative—His portraits—The charm of the slighter narrative style.
In the last chapter we have dealt chiefly with innovators and reformers.
Whether in art or life, these are not always the most agreeable
companions. The charming person is generally a traditionalist, or a
tactful profiteer by other men’s discoveries. So the popular favor has
ever gone not to the strenuous artists of Masaccio’s type or Castagno’s,
but to devotees of the charm of common folk and things, like Fra Filippo
Lippi; to masters of pageantry and incident, like Benozzo Gozzoli; or to
chroniclers of the festal richness of Florence in her short prime, like
Domenico Ghirlandaio. These artists, while by no means giants, are
highly representative of their times. They one and all aimed to please,
and amply succeeded. Their importance in the history of art is rather
slight; in the history of taste, on the contrary, they are very
important. And it is from that point of view that we shall do well to
consider them. These three masters cover the last two-thirds of the
fifteenth century. They exemplify the taste of the new-rich merchants
who flourished under the benevolent tyranny of the Medici.
Alongside of these gracious and adaptable spirits, struggled the
continuers of the realistic reform—Antonio Pollaiuolo, who first
systematically studied the anatomy and dynamics of the human form;
Andrea Verrocchio, who imbued accuracy and power with grace; Sandro
Botticelli, who explored solitary roads of sentiment and wrought out of
the ruggedness of the realists strange forms of recondite beauty. At all
times we find the endeavor for artistic adaptation running alongside the
passion for sheer discovery, and producing its own triumphs. It is this
complicated, dual process which makes the richness and continuity of the
Early Renaissance. If we compare the seventy-two years between the
beginnings of Masaccio, say 1422, and the death of Ghirlandaio, in 1494,
with the century and a half preceding, we shall note an extraordinary
acceleration both of production and progress. There are no gaps and
rests; each generation makes its discoveries and cashes them in.
Architecture, sculpture, classical scholarship develop with a whirling
rapidity which by no means precludes taste and reflection. In an almost
reckless expansion of emotion, experience, and creative activity,
Florence keeps her head though she risks losing her soul. And the true
harbinger of this intoxicating new life is one who often lost his head
and whose soul remains enigmatic, the wayward and fascinating
painter-monk, Fra Filippo Lippi.[39]
[Illustration:
FIG. 102. Filippo Lippi. Madonna in Adoration.—_Berlin._
]
He was the first Italian painter to care greatly for the look of
everyday people. Born about the year 1400, he was early orphaned and
thrust willy-nilly into the Carmelite Order. As a young man he must have
seen Masaccio painting those titanic designs in the Brancacci Chapel.
From Masaccio Fra Filippo learned his trade, rather by observation than
by direct instruction. But he cared for far different things. He really
follows the tender narrative vein of Lorenzo Monaco. To the grandeur of
miracle-working apostles, he preferred the gentle quaintness of the old
man who kept the shops and practiced the trades of Florence; to the
matronly dignity of Masaccio’s women, he preferred the shy and alluring
sweetness of the Florentine girls about him; to the majestic sweeps of
mountain and valley in Masaccio, the intimate appeal of the cypress
groves, the little ledges and trickling springs. In technique, too, he
avoided the bold short-cuts of his master. He hung on to the line, loved
details, described everything with solicitude. It is an art of
amiability and curiosity, generally disregardful of that grand style
towards which in her greater moments Florence ever aspired. The advent
of Fra Filippo in the Florence of Giotto and Orcagna and Masaccio, was
like that of an irresistibly attractive youth in a solemn company. He
loosened everything up. Unconsciously he demoralized the assembly; for
two generations the art of Florence was to be boyish and girlish. That
is its charm and its limitation, and the difference between the Early
Renaissance and the Golden Age will be largely that the latter will
prefer to depict with the gravity of maturity a world that has grown up.
[Illustration:
FIG. 103. Fra Fillipo Lippi. Madonna and Child.—_Uffizi._
]
One of the earliest and most exquisite panels by Fra Filippo was painted
shortly after 1435 for the private chapel of Cosimo de’ Medici’s new
palace, and is now at Berlin. The theme, young Mary kneeling before her
Divine Infant, Figure 102, is a favorite with the Florentine artists of
this century. Perhaps no one has conceived it more delightfully than Fra
Filippo. The picture gets its peculiar sweetness from the gentle,
girlish figure of the Maiden Mother, its quality of romance from the
ledgy background watered by springs and spangled with modest flowers,
its tang of reality from the chubby and stolid Christchild and the
boyish St. John the Baptist. You could almost see such a thing today
along the shaded upper Mensola when a young Florentine mother has taken
the children for a Sunday picnic. For the old Gothic conventions and the
bare majesty of Masaccio’s painting, Fra Filippo has substituted the
everyday joys of a feeling eye, and the charm of closely-observed little
things.
[Illustration:
FIG. 104. Fra Filippo Lippi. Coronation of the Virgin.—_Uffizi._
]
In most of his pictures this familiar quality is marked. His saints are
not types, but people of the Florentine middle class. An early Madonna
in the Uffizi, Figure 103, shows the Virgin as a slight girl with her
ash-blond locks elaborately dressed and braided for a holiday. She is
almost overborne by her sturdy Son, an exacting brute, one may imagine,
while the attendant angel is a grinning street Arab caught in the
intervals of mischief. Such pictures with their winsomeness and
actuality worked powerfully to break down both the old Gothic decorum
and the new sublimity of Masaccio.
To grasp the novelty of Fra Filippo’s most famous panel picture, The
Coronation of the Virgin, painted for the nuns of St. Ambrogio in 1441,
Figure 104, and now in the Uffizi, one has only to recall the devoutly
formal and simple version of the subject which Fra Angelico painted
about the same time for the convent of San Marco. The composition of Fra
Filippo, on the contrary, is radiantly informal. We breathe the air of
the commencement at a very nice girls’ school, with adoring friends and
proud relatives moving at the edges of the ceremony. Indeed God the
Father has merely the air of a benevolent trustee or visiting minor
celebrity awarding a prize to the best girl. It is all like the crowning
of a _Rosière_ in a French village. Robert Browning in one of the most
admirable poems in “Men and Women” makes Fra Filippo promise
“I shall paint
God in the midst, Madonna and her Babe.
Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood,
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root
When ladies crowd to church at Midsummer.”
Our picture is evidence enough that the time has come to Florentine art
when youth shall be served.
Monastic vows, and in fact duties of any sort, bore lightly on Fra
Filippo. He tasted the forbidden sweets of life recklessly, and worked
only when the rare mood urged. He was in and out of the good graces of
the Medici. Called to Prato to fresco the choir of the Collegiata, in
1455, he was nine years achieving what a steady workman would have done
in two. But in the meantime Fra Filippo had run away with the nun,
Lucrezia Buti, shuffled off his monastic vows (through the indulgence of
the humanist Pope, Pius II), married and settled down as the father of a
family. His random joyous course was nearly run, and his last frescoes
at Prato show a kind of discipline that is foreign to his earlier work.
In 1464 he completed the Feast of Herod and the Funeral of St. Stephen,
frescoes which forecast the sort of narrative painting that was to mark
the close of the century.
About the brutality of the Feast of Herod, Figure 105, Fra Filippo has
cast a dreamy glamour, as indeed Giotto had before him. The youthful
guests are absorbed in Salome’s dancing. Following the sculptors of the
day, Fra Filippo has made her slight and graceful, as she trips a
careless measure. The air is simply that of a gentle society. The grim
motive of the delivery of the head of John the Baptist to Herodias is
gently emphasized by the charming act of two little handmaids who clutch
each other for fright. The sprightliness of the invention, the
generalized idyllic charm of the feeling, the rich variety of
accessories, the youthful timbre of the whole—make this not merely one
of the best but also one of the most characteristic narrative mural
paintings of the Early Renaissance. It strikes the note which will be
echoed by Fra Filippo’s apprentice, Sandro Botticelli; which will be
exaggerated by Fra Filippo’s son, Filippino, and distantly imitated by
many another Florentine successor.
[Illustration:
FIG. 105. Fra Filippo Lippi. Feast of Herod. Salome’s Dance.
Fresco.—_Collegiata. Prato._
]
If the Feast of Herod best exemplifies the element of homely poetry and
inventive grace in Fra Filippo, the Burial of St. Stephen, Figure 106,
just opposite in the choir proves that he was not oblivious to the high
and decorous prose of his master Masaccio. In formality and power of
construction few painters then living could have equalled it, and those
few could not have rivalled its spacious architectural setting and its
suggestion of atmosphere. At first sight it seems nearly equal to the
Tribute Money or at least to the Tabitha. On more careful survey it is
less noble, more insistently pathetic, and in every way more loosely
knit. In particular the portraits at the sides have little but a
mechanical relation to the theme. Masaccio himself had admitted a
similar gallery of mere bystanders in The Miracle of the Prince, but had
he lived to complete the fresco, he would doubtless have brought the
portrait figures into some relation of interest in the miracle. Fra
Filippo virtually waives that problem and merely flanks his real subject
with bordering groups of persons of contemporary importance. As a matter
of fact, the Florentine donor was no longer humble-minded and content to
appear among the saints in miniature and unobtrusive guise. He now
insisted in being painted to the life with his family, friends, and
dependents,—a complacent, incongruous apparition amid the humility or
heroism of the saints. Fra Filippo made the sensible adjustment that the
donors should serve as a sort of human frame for the religious picture
in the centre. This solution became tiresomely standard and lasted for
fifty years or so, until the High Renaissance had authority enough to
impose considerations of taste and self-effacement even upon wealthy
donors.
In 1465 Fra Filippo was called to Spoleto, and there having started a
lovely apse decoration, A Coronation, for the cathedral, he died and was
buried. Quite unconsciously he had temporarily shattered that
intellectual formalism which is the very essence of Florentine art, and
had inaugurated that moral and artistic holiday which is made visible in
the painting of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio and audible in the songs of
Lorenzo de’ Medici.
This holiday mood is strong in Benozzo Gozzoli, and he spread it through
Umbria and the Sienese country. Born in 1420, for a time an assistant of
Fra Angelico, Benozzo’s task was to depict with more vivacity than
insight the splendors and humors of life. This he does, whether his
theme be the legend of St. Francis, as at Montefalco in 1462, the
Cavalcade of the Magi, Florence, 1469, the Life of St. Augustine, San
Gimignano, 1465, or the doings of the Old Testament Patriarchs and
Matriarchs, at Pisa, 1468–1484. He is always sunny, profuse, witty in an
obvious way; and not without his tinge of the poetry of youth. He loves
gardens, courtyards, forests, and equally well palaces, colonnades,
crowds and incidents. He is indefatigably panoramic, and his frescoes,
if hardly good pictures, are at least good pickings, for their abundant
and often refreshing detail.
[Illustration:
FIG. 106. Fra Filippo Lippi. Funeral of St. Stephen.
Fresco.—_Collegiata. Prato._
]
Very splendid is that pageant of the Wise Men from the East, Figure 107,
which he painted about 1469[40] for the private chapel of Cosimo de’
Medici’s palace. The gorgeous procession winds about the walls, moving
over the mountain roads and through the forests which you may still see
up the Arno valley towards Vallombrosa. Their goal was the little panel
over the altar where Filippo Lippi painted the Madonna reverently
kneeling before her Son, Figure 102. This little picture was flanked by
choirs, in fresco, of singing angels. For the oldest of the Three Kings
Benozzo chose, according to tradition, the unfortunate Emperor John
Palaeologus, who thirty years earlier had come to Florence on the vain
mission of uniting the Eastern and Western branches of the Christian
Church. The youthful kings are said to portray Giuliano and Lorenzo de’
Medici. What we really have is a pictorial version of those religious
pageants or representations which were common at the times. Many times
Florence had seen her patricians in such a cavalcade. Benozzo’s fresco
in its undiminished loveliness of color and gold—the Medici apparently
either ordered few masses or burned few candles in their family
chapel—is a most precious relic of bygone splendors. Indeed they passed
before Benozzo himself, for he lived on till 1498, four years after
Lorenzo the Magnificent’s death, and the year of Savonarola’s martyrdom;
the year, too, when Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was being finished.
Few artists have had such emphatic intimations that their world and they
themselves were obsolete. It is in every way to be hoped in Benozzo’s
case that he was at once too cheerful and too unintelligent to grasp the
situation. This may be fairly supposed of a man who was content for
fifty years of a swiftly moving world with what could be learned from
Fra Angelico.
[Illustration:
FIG. 107. Benozzo Gozzoli. Detail from Procession of Magi.—_Riccardi
Palace._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 108. Antonio Pollaiuolo. Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.—_London._
]
Of course some painters declined to keep holiday and feverishly pursued
the lines of realistic investigation laid down by Castagno and his
contemporaries. The most notable of these is Antonio Pollaiuolo.[41] He
was trained in sculpture under Ghiberti, and worked most variously, at
sculpture, painting, engraving, glass designing, and even embroiderers’
patterns. Everywhere he pursued with an almost ferocious intensity the
secrets of anatomy and especially of the human body in violent action.
He conceived the body as a powerful machine and rejoiced to display its
mechanisms—knotted muscles, straining sinews. He chose his subjects with
this sort of display in mind: Hercules and his feats, the archers
setting their bows and crossbows for the slaying of St. Sebastian, nude
men in deadly combat with dirks and axes, nude men wildly dancing.
Nearly all these works suffer from their avowed experimentalism, but all
are alive with a tingling not to say brutal energy. Antonio Pollaiuolo
is the ancestor of all the strong painters who for over four centuries
have delighted to appal the mild and sheeplike throng with wolfish
antics. He is the first artist who is a specialist, pursuing his own
ends in disregard of the surrounding public. As a matter of fact,
Antonio’s muscular paganism fitted in fairly well with the notions of a
Florence that worshipped power. The Medici ordered the twelve feats of
Hercules for their palace, about the year 1460. The great pictures are
lost, but little copies by Antonio himself give an idea of their
truculent force. In the Uffizi are Hercules crushing the breath out of
the earthborn demigod Antæus, and Hercules slaying the Hydra. The
tension, ardor, and ferocity of these tiny pictures are extraordinary.
They seem to enhance our own physical life. At New Haven is the panel of
Hercules shooting the Centaur Nessus, who races across a ford with
Deinaira on his back. The background is an exact picture of the Arno
valley looking from the west towards Florence. The representation of the
run of the river is extraordinary. Pollaiuolo had adopted Domenico
Veneziano’s miniature conception of landscape, but has introduced swing
and motion.
Equally remarkable is the Arno landscape in the Martyrdom of St.
Sebastian, Figure 108, which was painted in 1475. It has the defects of
an experimental and academic performance, is a show piece. The
executioners are even repeated, to show both front and rear aspects. All
the same, its power is impressive and beyond the range of any artist
then living, with the possible exception of Piero della Francesca. In
painting Pollaiuolo’s accomplishment is so even, and in draped figures
so ugly, that we may well pass the series of Virtues which with his
brother Piero he did in 1469 for the Mercantile Court, and consider his
great engraving known as the Ten Nudes, Figure 109, the odd decorative
disposition of which is imitated by Botticelli in the Allegory of
Spring; and the fresco of Dancing Men, in which Pollaiuolo successfully
vies with the convivial and Bacchic themes of the Greek vase painters.
The group is odd and effective as pattern, and inspired by a joyous
energy.
Painting only claimed a fraction of Antonio’s effort; often he merely
made the sketch and left the execution to his rather tame brother,
Piero. At the end of his life he was called down to Rome to make the
bronze tomb for Sixtus IV. There he died in the year 1498, being
sixty-three years old. While his own achievement was somewhat cramped
and limited, he had made the most valuable contributions to the art, or
rather to the science of painting. He had inspired a titan like
Signorelli and a poet like Botticelli, and in certain aspects Leonardo
da Vinci and Michelangelo only continued and perfected his work. As late
as Benvenuto Cellini’s day his sketches were passed about the studios
for the instruction of young painters in anatomy.
[Illustration:
FIG. 109. Antonio Pollaiuolo. Fighting Men—“The Ten Nudes.” Engraving.
]
A kindred strenuous spirit, Piero della Francesca,[42] affords an
interesting contrast to Pollaiuolo. Though an Umbrian, he belongs
spiritually to Florence. For Piero the world was a frozen thing. He
investigated with utmost zeal the mathematical basis of perspective,
producing on that topic a laborious and quite unreadable book. He
studied anatomy and construction in light and dark, and all the
atmospheric problems therewith associated. To attain atmospheric
envelopment, he sacrificed color. His pictures exist in silvery grays,
suggesting the blondness and tonal unity of modern open-air painting.
The drama of life never engrossed him. His world is passionless and
almost motionless, coldly impressive. Although he practiced all
refinements of modelling, he never made those relaxations of contour
which suggest movement. His figures are finely constructed and
beautifully placed but emotionally unrelated. They merely exist rather
splendidly, as do some of Manet’s figures. Indeed the warning of George
Moore as regards Manet applies equally to Piero. It is futile to seek
from him anything but fine painting.
[Illustration:
FIG. 110. Piero della Francesca. The Resurrection.—_Borgo S.
Sepolcro._
]
Of his origins we know next to nothing. He was born about 1410 in the
Umbrian town of Borgo San Sepolcro. For several years after 1439 we find
him at Florence as a paid assistant of Domenico Veneziano, whose pale
tonalities and topographically minute landscape reappear throughout
Piero’s work. His austere power is best represented in the bleak
Resurrection, Figure 110, which he painted in 1460 for his native city.
The stalwart Conqueror of Death has an apparitional impressiveness. He
comes with power from beyond the grave. He dominates the world as
represented by the sleeping athletes of the guard. A most potent effect
is obtained without sacrifice to sentiment. There is a similar
detachment in the Baptism of Christ, in the National Gallery, London.
Its pearly loveliness of color is in odd contrast to its evasions of
anything like warmth or tenderness. It is less an event than a
magnificently posed scene. The landscape is a liberating and informal
feature, a skilful adaptation of the method of Domenico Veneziano and
Pollaiuolo. It is as crisp and calculated as a Japanese print, yet it
gives its effect of space and breadth.
[Illustration:
FIG. 111. Piero della Francesca. Battle of Constantine, detail from
fresco.—_S. Francesco, Arezzo._
]
Piero’s great opportunity came about 1465 when he painted in the choir
of San Francesco at Arezzo ten stories from the Legend of the Holy
Cross. For stark impressiveness it is hard to match them in Italy in
this century. Only Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci will at all bear the
comparison. On analysis, the power rests mostly on the seriousness with
which Piero takes his technical problem. There is little real grief or
pathos in the Last Days of Adam, it is merely impersonally solemn. Even
of the admirable fresco which represents Constantine in the uneasy dream
in which he saw the vision of the cross, there is no warmth, no
unexpected or emotional quality. So it is throughout the series; in the
Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, even in the splendid battle-piece, the
Victory over Maxentius, Figure 111, the obvious sentiment of the theme
is ignored, the figures have a kind of splendid unrelated existence that
requires no apology or explanation. It is an effect that recalls the
best archaic Greek sculpture.
Taken all in all, Piero is a formidable and enigmatic figure, an
exception in an eager and emotional age. His truth to his vision is what
counts. One feels it in the portrait of the humanist sovereign and
captain of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro. It was painted about 1472
and is in the Uffizi, Figure 112. How sternly honest it is, and what a
presentation of a powerful and beneficent personality. Even the little
decorative picture on the back of the panel, a Triumph of Fame, has an
effect beyond its scale and obvious intention. It suggests wide
dominions and heavy responsibilities manfully met.
Piero della Francesca lived out his life mostly in Umbria and far from
the artistic centre of things. There is a self-sufficing quality in this
voluntary isolation. He lived on to great old age, dying in 1492, and
unless his declining years were perturbed by the faintly rising star of
Leonardo da Vinci, he might boast himself, in the words of his and
Leonardo’s friend, Fra Luca Pacioli, “the monarch of his times in the
science of painting.”
We must leave for the Umbrian chapter such sturdy continuers of Piero
della Francesca’s experimentalism as Melozzo da Forlì and Luca
Signorelli. What is more important to note in leaving him is that such
triumphs as his in fresco painting were highly exceptional in the second
half of the fifteenth century. The successes of the period are in the
minor art of panel painting. The fantasies of Botticelli, the best
portraits of Ghirlandaio, the early panels of Perugino and Signorelli
and Leonardo da Vinci—these are the outstanding things. In mural
painting Florence actually retrograded, not merely as compared with the
days of Masaccio, Fra Filippo and Fra Angelico, but even as compared
with the earlier days of Andrea Bonaiuti, Agnolo Gaddi and Spinello
Aretino. The fact has been obscured by the superficial gain in small
realism, in sprightliness, and mere prettiness, but in all the serious
qualities of monumental design the decadence is unmistakable. The
favorite decorators simply executed on a large scale the sort of
compositions that would have been charming on the front of a
bride-chest. In the general enthusiasm for the parts of pictures the
sense of pictures as a whole seemed in danger of being lost. The
undiscriminating enthusiasm for the primitive painting of the Early
Renaissance which has ruled for two generations has so clouded critical
opinion on this point, that I must be at some pains to make my case
good.
Perhaps I can do no better than to review some of the frescoes which
Pope Sixtus IV ordered about 1481 for the new chapel of the Vatican
Palace.[43] He summoned to the Sistine Chapel the best available artists
from both Tuscany and Umbria. By the measure of their success we may
estimate the mural painting of the time.
[Illustration:
FIG. 112. Piero della Francesca. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, despot of
Urbino.—_Uffizi._
]
Originally the decorative scheme, later amplified by Michelangelo,
required sixteen scriptural stories, in which the deeds of Moses were
parallelled by those of Christ. The two first and two last subjects, on
the end walls, have been destroyed, but we still see the twelve on the
side walls. In general they all show the old Gothic coloring, are mostly
vivacious in a confused and over-rich way, and lack unity of pattern and
dramatic coherence.
[Illustration:
FIG. 113. Assistant of Perugino. Baptism. Fresco.—_Sistine Chapel._
]
One of the most admired is the Baptism of Christ, Figure 113, by
Pintorricchio, (or, as Venturi suggests, Andrea of Assisi) who here
works as Perugino’s assistant. The story is told in the centre and
reinforced by a spacious landscape which is confusingly full of
attractive features. The theme is mechanically stretched to fill the
space by adding at both flanks groups which have slight or no connection
with the subject. These groups are interestingly diversified with fine
portraits of the Pope’s relatives, the Roveres, and by the alert forms
of children. The effect is fairly restful and idyllic, but the pattern
is mechanical, and the emotional effect of the real theme is frittered
away in the accessories. The method of enlarging a stock composition by
adding portrait groups is standard for the Sistine Chapel and for the
period. Masaccio had tried it more effectively in the Miracle of the
Boy, and Filippo Lippi had made it seem almost organic in The Funeral of
St. Stephen. Pintorricchio, if it be he, is more superficially alluring
for his richness and variety, but really stands on a far lower plane of
design than his predecessors.
[Illustration:
FIG. 114. Botticelli. Moses in the Land of Midian. Fresco.—_Sistine
Chapel, Rome._
]
If this mechanical symmetry is the standard method, there are
significant exceptions in the Sistine Chapel. The more sensitive
spirits, Botticelli and Luca Signorelli, reject so trite a solution.
Botticelli’s Moses in Midian, Figure 114, offers a delicate evasion, by
promoting a minor motive to be the central theme. All the incidents that
are dramatically important—the slaying of the Egyptian taskmaster, and
the adoration of the Burning Bush from which Jehovah spoke—are done with
the most energetic feeling, but are relegated to the background and
edges of the composition. The picture is really the fine grove in which
Moses gallantly helps the nymph-like daughters of Jethro to draw water.
A fantastic idyl is foisted off on us as a substitute for one of the
decisive moments in the Providential order. Botticelli is so winning in
his evasion, that it seems almost unfeeling to note that no Gothic
painter would have done anything so shifty. His success is not merely at
the expense of the expression of his real theme, but also at the expense
of the order and dignity proper to mural design. Having ordered a canto
of an epic, the Pope received a delicious madrigal. His contentment is
characteristic of the æsthetic casualness of the times.
[Illustration:
FIG. 115. Signorelli, Design only. Last Days of Moses.
Fresco.—_Sistine Chapel, Rome._
]
Signorelli, in the Last Days of Moses, Figure 115, makes a similar but
less egregious evasion. His centre of interest is the nude youth in the
foreground, but he does give a certain prominence to the scenes where
Moses invests Joshua with authority, and where both view the Promised
Land from Mount Horeb. Though without much emotional accent, the crowds
are agreeably disposed and diversified by graceful forms of women and
children. Only the design is by Signorelli, the execution being by an
assistant, Don Bartolommeo della Gatta. The picture is more delightful
for such passages as the Apollo-like nude youth and the mother with her
children in the right foreground than it is as a whole, though it is
full of idyllic charm, and inadequate only when one considers the
gravity of its theme.
[Illustration:
FIG. 116. Ghirlandaio. Christ calling Peter and Andrew.
Fresco.—_Sistine Chapel, Rome._
]
In his Calling of Peter and Andrew, Figure 116, to be fishers of men,
Domenico Ghirlandaio makes a skilful and impressive use of that approved
mechanical symmetry which has already been noticed in Pintorricchio’s
Baptism. Everything is well centralized, the river view is a welcome
outlet, the stereotyped bystanders on the flanks at least are telling
portraits and, while not bound into the central motive, have withal a
gravity that sufficiently accords with it. The arrangement is lucid, and
the surplus accessories fairly well subordinated. A rather perfunctory
quality in the central scene of homage and dedication reveals
Ghirlandaio’s scanty imagination. His impressiveness has a certain
dullness about it.
Few words need be spent on the picturesque and irresponsible confusion
which reigns in Cosimo Rosselli’s Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army in the
Red Sea, Figure 117. Cosimo was one of the older painters in the chapel,
forty-two years old. Yet a juvenile sensationalism and uncalculated
restlessness prevail, and his attempts at vivacity and grace are as
unhappy as his striving for effects of terror. It may well be that his
eccentric young pupil, Piero di Cosimo, gave this fresco its febrile
energy and its theatrical landscape. Certain it is that the three other
frescoes by Cosimo are unmitigatedly dull. Oddly it was he alone who won
the praise of Pope Sixtus, mostly for his profuse introduction of gold
ornament.
[Illustration:
FIG. 117. Cosimo Rosselli. Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army.
Fresco.—_Sistine Chapel._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 118. Perugino. Christ giving the Keys to Peter. Fresco.—_Sistine
Chapel, Rome._
]
We have seen in the Sistine Chapel a mechanical and rather perfunctory
symmetry, various clever evasions of an idyllic sort, and a picturesque
disorder side by side. The most ambitious decorative scheme of the time
seems to result in a kind of artistic bankruptcy. But fortunately the
Sistine Chapel contains its own self-criticism and remedy, in the
extraordinary fresco by Pietro Perugino, Christ delivering the Keys to
Peter, Figure 118. Perugino is an Umbrian from Città della Pieve,
thirty-five years old, and with a certain amount of Florentine training.
He has, like Masaccio sixty years before, looked at the art of his times
and found it wanting. He has had the lucidity to see that the malady is
surplusage and disorder. Hence, he argues, the remedy is simplicity and
order. To this he adds a sense of vastness. In this picture the temple
platform, a vastness made by man, is set within the vastness of a river
valley made by nature. The foreground group is arranged in a formal half
military order which is cunningly made easy and flexible by differences
of posture and gesture. Every tilted head and pointed foot has its
reason. Without undue insistence, all the apostles are interested in the
rite which ordains their chief. Here is no casual pleasure ground in
which you may delightfully look about, here is a definite vision of a
momentous act which you must see swiftly, completely, and precisely as
the artist intends you shall see. It is the only well-considered design
among these frescoes. It points the simplest and surest way by which the
exuberance of the Early Renaissance might be disciplined into a noble
order, and within twenty years the lesson was to be reread for all Italy
by young Raphael of Urbino. Meanwhile the somewhat irresponsible
exuberance of the new narrative painting has after all its winning
aspect, is a sign of an energy and enthusiasm that need not so much to
be tamed as to be intellectualized.
In discussing the last twenty years of the fifteenth century in Florence
I am embarrassed by the richness of the field. Beside such typical
figures as Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, we have to do with such sensitive
and morbid spirits as Filippino Lippo and Piero di Cosimo; with Andrea
Verrocchio and a group of imitators of his fastidious manner, notable
among them young Leonardo da Vinci; with a host of secondary painters,
particularly of furniture panels, and small altar-pieces, while if we
consider rather artistic training than accident of birth, we must reckon
with the Florentine achievement the rugged triumphs of Luca Signorelli.
But since the more distinctive and progressive of these artists are
really precursors of the Golden Age, or symptomatic of the unrest that
was its prelude, they may best be treated later. That will leave us only
the painters who are fully representative of the festal moment of
Lorenzo the Magnificent’s greatness—the furniture painters and
Ghirlandaio.
Those excesses of vivacity, those extravagances of invention, those
juvenile graces which were a weakness in mural painting, were admirably
in place in the decoration of chests and wainscots. The greater artists
gladly accepted this little work, and some painters painted exclusively
trousseau chests (_cassoni_) for young brides—an enviable occupation,
for surely these fair young creatures had to be personally consulted.
The subjects glorify love, magnify valor, celebrate the festal life of
the day, its pageants, feasts, and dances. Of professional _cassoni_
painters Francesco Pesellino[44] (1422–1457) is the most famous. He is
bewitching in variety and sensitiveness of invention, in refinement of
story telling, and in glamour of color. Two admirable _cassone_ fronts
by him are owned by Mrs. John L. Gardner, Figure 119. They represent the
six triumphs described by Petrarch in so many _Canzoni_. Love, Chastity,
Death, Time, Fame, and Eternity are figured forth much as these themes
were embodied in contemporary pageants, about the year 1450. The
subjects were favorites for _cassoni_ less because of their grave moral
import than because Petrarch was Love’s accredited Poet Laureate.
[Illustration:
FIG. 119. Francesco Pesellino. Cassone Front. Triumphs of Love,
Chastity, and Death.—_Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston._
]
We have in the New York Historical Society the superb salver, Figure
119a, which was prepared against the birth of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Appropriately it shows knights acclaiming fame. The date is 1448, the
painter of the school of Domenico Veneziano.
We often see the Queen of Sheba reverently approaching Solomon. It is
the admonition that a young bride should seek wisdom. Battles and Roman
triumphs are tediously common. They set a mark of valor for the
bridegroom. Wedding Feasts are almost tautological on a bride-chest, but
they afford charming pictures of the Florence that amused itself.
[Illustration:
FIG. 119_a._> Follower of Domenico Veneziano, perhaps Baldovinetti.
Triumph of Fame. Birth Salver for Lorenzo de’ Medici.—_N. Y.
Historical Society._
]
Mythology often dignifies these painted stories, the reference being
generally to that beauty which is institutional in brides. Thus we have
in a _spalliera_ panel in the Fogg Museum the Judgment of Paris, with
the competing goddesses more modestly clothed than Ovid’s record
justifies. The work is possibly an exceptionally amiable product of
Cosimo Rosselli, and the date may be about 1475. The Rape of Helen,
which was of course due to her fatal beauty, is a common if unedifying
subject for bride-chests. So is Actæon torn by the hounds of the Divine
Huntress for his temerity in surprising Diana at her bath. A delightful
panel in the possession of Mr. Martin Ryerson at Chicago recounts in
many episodes the adventures of Ulysses from his escape from Polyphemus
to his home-coming at Ithaca. The dalliances of the much-experienced
wanderer are by no means concealed, but at least the scene opens with
prominent display of the episode most creditable to him as a married
man, the baffling of the Sirens, and closes with the exemplary figure of
constant Penelope weaving her interminable web.
[Illustration:
FIG. 120. Bartolommeo di Giovanni under Botticelli’s direction.
Nastagio degli Onesti’s Feast. Spalliera panel.—_Spiridon Coll.,
Paris._
]
In furniture painting we are generally in the realm of comedy. But we
touch pathos in Boccaccio’s story of patient Griselda, at Bergamo,
Modena, and elsewhere; while we approach tragedy in the many versions of
chaste Susanna assailed and traduced by the elders, and attain to
notable melodrama in Boccaccio’s grim vision of the spirit lover
eternally harrying the miserable ghost of his merciless lady through the
pine wood of Ravenna. The best of these panels is in the Spiridon
Collection, Paris. The ghostly scene of the chase takes place before the
picnic party, Figure 120, artfully arranged by Nastagio degli Onesti to
prove to his unfeeling lady that there is a penalty in the next world
for being too cruel to a lover in this. The lesson Boccaccio tells us
was effective, and they lived happily together ever afterwards. The
panel was designed by Botticelli and painted by his assistant,
Bartolommeo di Giovanni, for the wedding of a Bini groom and a Pucci
bride in the year 1487.
With it we take leave of Florentine furniture painting, an art too
unpretentious to be considered at length in a general survey, yet too
charming in itself and too representative of the heyday of Florentine
wealth and gayety to be wholly neglected.
Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio mark in very different
fashions the culmination and the close of the Early Renaissance in
Florence. Botticelli is the poet of its nostalgia. He expresses not its
joyous average, but the erotic and mystical subtilities of Lorenzo de’
Medici’s Platonic Academy, and later the Apocalyptic hopes and despairs
that gathered around Savonarola. He utters a discontent and ideality
which in part are completely contained in his work and in part were only
fulfilled in the rapidly approaching Golden Age. He is aristocratic and
individual, hence we shall consider him in connection with his fellow
_intellectuel_, Leonardo da Vinci. Domenico Ghirlandaio,[45] on the
contrary, is the most completely contented creature, imaginable. He
never even dreamt of anything desirable beyond his Florence. He loved
the local spectacle too dearly to represent it literally. He generally
prettified it, more rarely he glorified it. Its mundane ideals were his.
Towards its people, its young men and maidens and grave merchants and
magistrates he brought, without Fra Filippo Lippi’s sensitiveness, an
equal curiosity and admiration. And Florence fairly deserved the
adoration of such a man as was he. Wisely and generously ruled by
Lorenzo de’ Medici, who exemplified not merely the practical virtues of
the city but also her more engaging vices, author of wise policy and of
wittily dissolute songs; combining the self-respecting appearances of
liberty with the advantages of benevolent despotism, abounding in new
wealth, lavish in pleasure and spectacle, unrestrained by a religion
which was becoming merely a social decency and a form of fire-insurance
against a not impossible hell—Florence had reached a pitch of
complacency and worldly well-being the like of which the world has
perhaps never seen before or since. The menacing sword of the spirit was
already swaying over it in the eloquence of a young Dominican monk at
Ferrara. But Florence trod the primrose path unconscious of the doom at
hand for her. And Ghirlandaio was present to immortalize everything that
was pleasant in her short prime.
[Illustration:
FIG. 121. Domenico Ghirlandaio. St. Jerome. Fresco.—_Ognissanti._
]
He was born in 1449, his father appropriately being a garland-maker for
gay Florence. He was trained under Alesso Baldovinetti, but prudently
declined to compromise his own bright coloring with the new technic of
oil painting. He studied with profit the ornate narratives of Benozzo
Gozzoli. One of his earliest frescoes, painted about 1470 in Ognissanti,
already reveals the grounds of his later popularity. The vivid portraits
of the Vespucci family so crowd about a Madonna of Pity as to make her
seem quite secondary.
Somewhat later he painted the legend of Santa Fina at San Gimignano.
Here Gozzoli’s simpler vein is imitated, and the effect has a rusticity
befitting the theme. Soon the _bottega_ at Florence flourished mightily.
There were two younger brothers to help, and all commissions were
executed with businesslike dispatch. About 1480 we find him once more
painting for the Church of Ognissanti. His St. Jerome there, Figure 121,
is a beautifully groomed old prelate in a wonderfully kept study. The
Saint is caught in an interval of work, searching perhaps for the right
Latin word to render the Hebrew text before him. He is grave and not too
stern. The colors are vivid without much regard for harmony. Very little
of the fire of the missionary who declined to subject the mysteries of
God to the rules of the grammarian Donatus is suggested. One has only to
look at Botticelli’s St. Augustine, opposite in the church, agonized by
the burden of thought, to realize that Ghirlandaio has cared nothing for
the psychology of his theme, but has given us any comfortable old
Florentine scholar placidly occupied in his _scriptorium_.
[Illustration:
FIG. 122. Ghirlandaio. The Last Supper. Fresco.—_Refectory,
Ognissanti._
]
A similar lack of emotional content mars the otherwise delightful Last
Supper, Figure 122, which was painted that same year for the refectory
of Ognissanti. Pathos, not to say tragedy, is carefully kept out of the
most solemn of scenes. The eye is likely to go first to the tree-tops
and flying birds seen above the screen, then it becomes vaguely aware of
a gentle company quietly feasting. Except for a faint trace of
classicism in the costumes, it could be any governing board of any
religious confraternity of the day, decorously enjoying its annual
dinner. The qualities and defects of Ghirlandaio are fully apparent in
this fresco—his lucidity and sweetness, his emotional nullity.
The next year, 1481, Ghirlandaio painted in the Sistine Chapel at Rome
Christ Calling Peter and Andrew. We have already considered this his
nearest approach to monumental design. Shortly before the Roman trip he
married, and when his wife Costanza died, after a decent interval, he
repeated the adventure. The two wedlocks were blessed by nine children
of whom one, Ridolfo, was to become in turn a notable painter. Such
fecundity was worthy of the man who once sighed for a commission to
fresco the seven-mile circuit of the walls of Florence. On his return
from Rome Ghirlandaio decorated the great hall of the Palace of the
Priors, and from now on merely a list of his commissions and patrons
would be a blue book of the old aristocracy and new wealth of Florence.
[Illustration:
FIG. 123. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Miracle of the Spini Boy.
Fresco.—_Trinità._
]
Thus in 1485 he contracted with Francesco Sassetti to do a chapel in the
Trinità with Stories of St. Francis. Sassetti was confidential treasurer
for Lorenzo the Magnificent, about the most important financial position
in the world at the moment; a selfmade and ambitious man. He had tried
in vain to get a finer chapel in a bigger church, but the patrician
vested interests prevented. Still the chapel to the right of the Choir
of the Trinità was no mean place, this Vallombrosan foundation being one
of the oldest in Florence. Ghirlandaio took special pains with the
frescoes, studying with intelligence Giotto’s famous versions of the
stories at Santa Croce. He is most nearly monumental where he follows
Giotto, as in the Death of St. Francis, but he also shows surprising
felicities of his own. The scene where Pope Honorius III constitutes St.
Francis and his fellows a monastic order, is remarkable for not only
fine incidental portraiture, but for a nobility of space composition
faintly anticipating Raphael. One scarcely realizes the subject as such.
All the dramatic features with which Giotto emphasized the eagerness of
the saint, the humility of his companions, the professional dignity of
the Pope and the half-veiled hostility of the papal court are absent.
One’s eyes go over the group to the familiar grandiose prospect of the
Piazza della Signoria at Florence, and one feels that never till now has
he rightly apprehended its amplitude and splendor. Then there are sharp
pleasant surprises. At the left is the ugly and fascinating figure of
Lorenzo de’ Medici and behind him the gross apparition of Francesco
Sassetti himself. And in front there are people coming up from a lower
level, only their heads and shoulders emerging. The swarthy man who
leads is Angelo Poliziano, greatest of humanistic poets, tutor of
Lorenzo’s sons. And the boys are these gifted children destined to be
popes, and granddukes. The combination of great spaciousness and
centrality with casual unexpected graces is so piquant and original,
that I suppose Ghirlandaio may have hit upon it almost accidentally,
owing to the inevitable relations of his Gothic lunette to the
architectural forms in the fresco. In any case Ghirlandaio never again
did anything as impressive. It is his greatest hymn of praise to the
Florence that he so dearly loved.
[Illustration:
FIG. 124. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Adoration of the Magi.—_Innocenti._
]
In the same chapel is a remarkable picture representing the Piazza of
the Trinità with St. Francis resuscitating a boy of the Spini family,
Figure 123. It has extraordinary bits of invention, but lacks the
organization of the fresco just discussed. The altar-piece for the
chapel, an Adoration of the Shepherds, now in the Uffizi, represents the
graciousness of Ghirlandaio in familiar narrative his willing acceptance
of the panoramic richness of the age, and his exceptional power of
portraiture in these rustics painted from himself and from members of
the Sassetti family. The ruggedness of the characterization suggests
Flemish painting. Ghirlandaio may well have been influenced by the great
Nativity with Portraits which Hugo van der Goes sent down from Ghent, in
1476, to the Hospital Church of Santa Maria Nuova.
Ghirlandaio’s altar-pieces are many. They are brilliant without real
harmony of color; pretty, without much insight, in the types of the
Virgin and youthful saints. The most elaborate of these panels, An
Adoration of the Magi, Figure 124, was finished in 1488 for the
Foundling Hospital dedicated to the Massacred Innocents of Bethlehem. It
still stands on its original altar in the chapel of the Innocenti, and
is a radiant thing. The crowded group of adorers in the foreground is
well knit together. Ghirlandaio had taken a shrewd look at Botticelli’s
Epiphany (now at Petrograd), or at Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished
masterpiece. By a touching and appropriate invention, Ghirlandaio has
set two of the martyred Innocents kneeling in white robes and crowned
with a saint’s nimbus among the Wise Men. There are, as usual, many
portraits, including Ghirlandaio’s own, by the pillar at the right. The
deep river valley, suggested by northern paintings or engravings,
relieves the somewhat congested character of the figure arrangement. The
girlish Madonna would do no discredit to the front cover of a
nation-wide periodical today. So gracious and ingenious is this picture
that one regrets to note that it is rather cleverly staged than deeply
felt, its manifold prettiness and picturesqueness, of a quite obvious
character.
As Ghirlandaio had moved from success to success, so he was destined to
end in his day of highest glory. In 1485 he signed a contract with
Giovanni Tornabuoni, of the old nobility, to decorate the choir of the
most aristocratic church in Florence, Santa Maria Novella. The subjects,
the Life of the Virgin and St. John the Baptist, were already on the
wall in the guise of water-soaked and ruined frescoes by Andrea Orcagna.
Ghirlandaio provided pastoral scenes with wide landscapes, city
prospects with charming girls plentiful in foreground, rich patrician
interiors with graceful women and their attendants making visits of
ceremony, rare religious events with heavy magistrates and dignitaries
standing inattentively by—everything in short that a prosperous and
well-bred Florentine of the moment was accustomed to think desirable in
beauty, gentleness, or worldly estate. Characteristic are the Salutation
of Mary and Elizabeth, a picture in which the solemnity of the scene, so
magnificently asserted by Giotto at Padua, slips away into mere
spectacle and civility; the Birth of Saint John, Figure 125, with a
young girl of the Tornabuoni family making her visit with her maids, and
all manner of graceful and rich accessories; or again, the Presentation
in The Temple, with a whole tribe of Tornabuonis and Ghirlandaios in
negligent attendance on the sacred rite. These may stand for the whole.
For their casual and mundane richness John Ruskin has poured upon these
frescoes his double-distilled vials of wrath. What he says as to their
superficiality and emptiness of religious feeling is true enough, yet
his denunciatory rhetoric serves but as a trip-hammer to demolish an
eggshell which has after all its iridescent frail beauty. Gentler
methods are better with so gently mundane a creature as Ghirlandaio. The
Lord’s people, as he saw them about him, were good enough for him and
for his art. Criticism should rather insist that, being worldly, he was
not worldly enough to be strong and lucid, but too readily had recourse
to promiscuous richness and perfunctory ideals of prettiness. Still, it
does not befit the age or race whose characteristic art product is the
smiling or pensive girl on the cover of the popular magazine to throw
the first stone at Domenico Ghirlandaio.
[Illustration:
FIG. 125. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Birth of St. John.—_Santa Maria
Novella._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 126. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Old Man and Boy.—_Paris._
]
Whatever the verdict as to his nominally religious painting, in
portraiture Ghirlandaio is one of the greatest figures of his time.
Portraits of the finest qualities abound in his frescoes, and he has
left a few incomparable things on panel. Few Renaissance portraits have
the authority of the amazing old man, Figure 126, in the Louvre, who
fondles an adoring boy. In this picture, deformity becomes a grace, and
the spiritual and material interpretation are of equal incisiveness and
beauty. As fine in another vein is the profile of Giovanna degli Albizzi
in the J. P. Morgan Collection, Figure 101. It is dated in 1488. It is
the supreme portrait of a Florentine beauty of a passing and lovely
moment. An instant of time, when the old simplicity had enriched itself
with new learning; when with the new humanism the tournament and court
of love persisted; when courtly manners had become an ideal without
freezing into an official code—all this is for a sensitive and informed
observer in this placid well-poised head of an ill-starred Florentine
bride. She died in 1488, a little before the overthrow of the Florence
she typifies. Her accomplished young husband, Lorenzo Tornabuoni,
equally adequate in the tilt yard, the study, or the council hall, lived
on for nine years and shared the death agony of the society of which he
was a chief ornament. When his head fell under Savonarola’s orders, a
splendid chapter of early Florentine humanism closed. Thus these young
people died with their Florence, leaving no descendants, but a memory
eternally fragrant.
The year of Giovanna’s death, 1488, Ghirlandaio, being thirty-nine years
old, took a new wife, and continued diligently at the frescoes of Santa
Maria Novella. Not being overburdened with imagination, he probably
never guessed he was occupied with a memorial of a society already
doomed. Doubtless he followed the fashionable throng to San Marco where
for a year Fra Girolamo Savonarola had been preaching against the
current vanities. Ghirlandaio presumably approved the oratory, with a
comfortable sense that while unworldliness might very properly be
preached, no sensible city could ever be induced to practice it. Perhaps
he never woke up to the appalling fact that Savonarola literally meant
business both evangelically and politically.
So Ghirlandaio’s Florence moved swiftly to its doom, and the while he
saved much of its look and grace on the walls of his choir. For a year a
touchy and ugly little boy who carried the disproportionately great name
of Michelangelo Buonarotti scrambled discontentedly about the
scaffolding of the choir, lending a hand here and there, and learning
the old art of fresco painting. Ghirlandaio of course never knew that in
the restless apprentice he was training a titan. He probably thought him
a nuisance. By the end of 1493 the frescoes of the Virgin and St. John
the patron of Florence were nearly finished, and the altar-piece, an
Assumption, was already planned. At forty-four Ghirlandaio had at once
reached his climax and painted himself down an anachronism. Of course he
didn’t know it; such self-knowledge is mercifully spared us. The luck of
Ghirlandaio was extraordinarily constant. Nowhere is it more signally
shown than in the date of his death. Some inkling that things were going
ill under Piero de’ Medici’s fitful rule must have come to him, but he
died in January 1494, a good ten months before the Medici were expelled,
their palaces sacked, and Savonarola in charge of a Florence terrified
into sobriety.
To those painters from Fra Filippo to Ghirlandaio who caught the look
and unpretentious poetry of Medicean Florence we owe an especial
gratitude. They are not in the direct line of progress and they none of
them reached the heights of art. But for centuries they have never
failed to give delightful information, while infallibly touching average
human sympathies. We do ill to idolize them, for they were after all
rather small men, but we do well also to honor them according to their
accomplishment. They did their particular task of enlivening decoration
with illustrative episodes, with tact, refinement and knowledge; with
all the sympathy of the modestly observant eye. Most of their work had
to be undone before the Grand Style was possible, but it all evinces the
vitality and variety without which as preliminary training the Grand
Style itself could hardly have attained its elaborate and strictly
ordered composure. We do well to take Vasari’s general view of these
artists of the human spectacle—not considering them so much as weak
links in a mighty chain, but as complete in themselves, as a youth may
be complete even though the young man dies in the glory of his
unfolding. Why expect prematurely the sedate splendors of middle age?
Take then this art for what it offers—an unsystematic fairy land which
is yet half real, and keep your higher standards in reserve for artists
who better deserve them. For austere standards are held by a truly
civilized person for purposes of discriminate praise and not as a ready
means of promiscuous blame.
ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER I
PAGEANTRY IN OLD FLORENCE
The art of Gozzoli and the _cassone_ painters, and, in part, that of
Filippo Lippi and Ghirlandaio implies the background of public
pageantry at Florence. There is a precious piece of old doggerel which
describes the festivities, in May 1459, for the reception of Pope Pius
II and Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan. The palaces and churches
were completely hung with rich stuffs, the sumptuary laws were
suspended in favor of the fair sex; besides many processions and
feasts, there was bear baiting in the Piazza della Signoria, an all
night open-air ball in the Mercato Nuovo, and a tournament in the
Piazza di Santa Croce. I paraphrase the verses which describe the
pageant of a Triumph of Love which was conducted by ten year old
Lorenzo de’ Medici. The subject is common in _cassoni_ and _deschi da
parto_. The boy Lorenzo mounted on a marvellously caparisoned horse
headed the pageant, and while all the people whispered their
admiration—
“As prudent and wise lad he conducted the Triumph of the God of
Love.... In all triumph he made Cupid come, who so gently smites the
gentle heart. Upon a car I saw him, and so I tell, most marvellously
adorned and wrought, how it was made I dare not say. On four wheels it
was finely adorned with a raised stand and fixed on every corner
thereof as a column the form and fashion of an angel. And I who saw it
thought of a castle. Upon the four columns was a great ball and above
it another ornamented piece. This was gilded everywhere ... so that it
sparkled like the sun. I cannot tell of such beauties, but I can tell
about the top part which was most delightful. Above all ... I saw
stand a youth, with two great wings of many colors on his shoulders
and all the rest nude, holding that bow with which he wounds all
hearts, and playfully puts venom therein, so that while burning
within, nothing shows without. This Triumph so marvellous and so
invested with colors, its adornment very glorious—with so many pearls,
carbuncles and sapphires—I couldn’t reckon how many florins that
Triumph was worth I say.”
The whole poem is a real treasure of such lore and should be
translated. It is found in the new edition of Muratori, _Rerum
Italicarum Scriptores_, Tom. XXVII. The quotation is from page 31,
lines 1330–1363.
THE PROCESSION OF THE MAGI
On St. John’s Day, 1354, Matteo Palmieri tells us in his _Annals_,
there were many religious representations of which the most
interesting to us, as a probable inspirer of Gozzoli’s frescoes, is
that of the Three Kings from the East. There was—
“A magnificent and triumphant temple for the habitation [stage
setting] of the Magi, in which was inclosed an octagonal temple
adorned with the seven Virtues, and on the east side the Virgin with
the New Born Christ. [Probably figures in a tableau vivant]
“The three Magi with a cavalcade of more than 200 horse adorned with
many splendors came to make offerings to the New Born Christ.”
New ed. of Muratori, Tom. XXII, p. 173.
Probably all the artists mentioned in this chapter saw these two
splendid pageants and many more. Such sights count for much in the
alert and profusely ornamented painting of the fifteenth century.
PAGEANTS IN 1466
Piero de’ Medici “in order to give men something to think about which
should take their thoughts from the state, and a year having passed
since Cosimo had died, seized the occasion to enliven the city and
ordered two elaborate celebrations, following the others that are
customary in that city. One which represented, when the three Kings,
the Magi, came from the East behind the star which showed the birth of
Christ; the which was of such pomp and so magnificent, that in
arranging and holding it the entire city was occupied for several
months.”
Machiavelli, _Istorie fiorentine_, Lib. VII, cap. xii.
“The other [festival, Machiavelli continues] was a tournament (for so
they used to call a spectacle, which represented a cavalry skirmish)
where the first youths of the city exercised themselves against the
most famous knights of Italy; and among the young men of Florence the
most in repute was Lorenzo, first-born son of Piero, who not by favor,
but by his own valor carried off the first honours.”
Lorenzo was then a likely lad of seventeen.
A SIDE-LIGHT ON GHIRLANDAIO’S PATRONS
_A Trick for getting a Family Chapel in 1488_
The choir of Santa Maria Novella was under the patronage of the Ricci
family, but they were poor and had been unable to repair the
waterstained frescoes of Orcagna, which had been painted a century and
a quarter earlier. So Giovanni Tornabuoni got permission to redecorate
the chapel on condition of setting the Ricci arms “in the most
conspicuous and honourable place in that chapel.” And so the contract
was drawn. Domenico Ghirlandaio actually set the Tornabuoni arms in
huge scale on the side pilasters, whereas he painted the Ricci arms
half a foot high on the door of the ciborium in the centre of the base
of his altar-piece. The rest in Vasari’s words (de Vere’s translation,
Vol. III, p. 224):
“And a fine jest it was at the opening of the chapel, for these Ricci
looked for their arms with much ado, and finally, not being able to
find them, went off to the Tribunal of Eight, contract in hand.
Whereupon the Tornabuoni showed that these arms had been placed in the
most conspicuous and honourable part of the work; and although the
others exclaimed that they were invisible, they were told that they
were in the wrong, and that they must be content, since the Tornabuoni
had caused them to be placed in so honourable a position as the
neighborhood of the most Holy Sacrament. And so it was decided by that
tribunal that they should be left untouched, as they may be seen
today. Now, if this should appear to anyone to be outside the scope of
the Life that I have to write, let him not be vexed, for it all flowed
naturally from the tip of my pen. And it should serve, if for nothing
else, at least to show how easily poverty falls a prey to riches, and
how riches, if accompanied by discretion, achieve without censure
anything that a man desires.”
[Illustration:
FIG. 127. Leonardo da Vinci. Cartoon of Madonna and St.
Ann.—_Burlington House, London._
]