CHAPTER VI

THE GOLDEN AGE

RAPHAEL AND MICHELANGELO

On pride and humility in Art—The new Grand Style defined—Umbrian

humility in the Early Painters—Gentile da Fabriano—The Fifteenth

Century—Luca Signorelli—Perugino—Raphael; Early development—Roman

triumph—Michelangelesque aberrations—Michelangelo.

Whether the greatest art is grounded in pride or in humility has divided

the critics. To most it will seem evident that the artist’s assertion of

his own powers is an act of pride—a pride of person which is often

reinforced by that of nation and race. As fine a critic as John Ruskin,

on the contrary, has insisted that the greatest art springs from

humility—reverence for God, admiration of His works in nature, homage

also to one’s earthly master in art and withal to the great tradition of

one’s craft. The difference is world-wide. According to one

interpretation or the other, the work of art becomes an act of display

or of worship. Such opposites in the realm of analysis often meet

comfortably enough in the realm of practice. A haughty individualist

like Leonardo da Vinci insists that his investigations of appearance and

reality lead to that knowledge of God without which love is impossible.

And the Golden Age of painting itself, though mostly based on corporate

and individual pride, has also its infusion of humility. If Michelangelo

represents the flowering of three generations of research, of that pride

of intellect which ever ruled Florence, so equally does Raphael

represent many generations of humility and teachableness in his native

Umbria. For about ten years pride and humility worked side by side, and

that was the Golden Age. Pride prevailed over humility, and the

classical style of Central Italy sunk to a pretentious exhibitionism.

Our theme is that brief moment of accomplishment which witnessed the

rise of Rome as centre of art, and the greatest painting of Raphael and

Michelangelo. We need not hesitate to apply to it the oldfashioned term,

the Golden Age. But we shall not use it with quite the oldfashioned

unction, knowing as we do the heavy sacrifice involved in attaining the

so-called Grand Style, and the still heavier penalty it imposed upon the

art that succeeded it.

The Florentines believed that painting had reached its height in the

years 1504 and 1505, when Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were

designing the great competitive battle-pieces for the Priors’ Palace at

Florence, and Raphael was painting his loveliest Madonnas. Modern

critics might rather be inclined to date the grand climacteric from a

pathetic incident of a few years later. In 1508, when Pope Julius II

wished to decorate the new ante-rooms of the Vatican, the famous

_Stanze_ he called the best of the older painters—Sodoma, Perugino,

Signorelli, among others. No sooner had they begun to decorate the

vaults than their work seemed inadequate. They were turned off

incontinently and the young man Raphael called down from Florence to

take their place. The incident shows how suddenly the new beauty dawned

upon the world of art patronage. Vividly conscious of its advent, the

Italians were less conscious of the equally sudden waning of the great

style. With the wisdom of hindsight we can now see that the whole

development was a marvelous spurt, lasting a bare dozen years, from the

battle cartoons of 1505 to Raphael’s tapestry cartoons of 1516. Raphael

and Michelangelo, who created the lasting glory of the Renaissance, also

dug its grave. Before considering the creative and destructive energies

of these two giants, we may profitably note the characteristics of what

whether for praise or mockery has ever since been called the Grand

Style. And here I have little to do beyond condensing Professor

Wölfflin’s excellent book.

In the Grand Style the accent was on maturity, decorum, and measured

power. Vivacious and picturesque incidents are eschewed. The new art

demands simplicity and centrality. The human figure dominates the

compositions. The frame is filled densely with a complicated group. The

figures themselves are ample and mature. The Madonna is no longer a

girl, but a gracious woman of thirty years. The Christ Child is no

longer an infant, but a well-grown lad, whose supple curves harmonize

with those of grown folks. As to pose, the figures no longer are

casually arranged or in some posture required by a specific action. They

are cast in conventional poses which bring out the active beauty of the

body. Heads swing across shoulders, the upper body turns against the

thrust of the lower, the arms counter the action of the legs. Such

counterpoise is always active, implying motion. Straight lines give way

to weavings of S curves—so many springs whose tension is kept equal.

Violent motion or torsion of the body is frequent, but one motion or

torsion must be immediately taken up and balanced by some equivalent.

Following the general principle of centrality, colors are fewer and more

studied. In portraiture, for example, we no longer have landscape or

elaborate interiors, but plain dark backgrounds. At all points we have

left spontaneity and happy accident behind and have entered a world of

exquisite calculation. Society had moved with art towards ideals of

simplicity and decorum. You no longer find the braided, beribboned and

jewelled coiffures of Botticelli’s women, but serene brows with the hair

drawn back evenly from its part and disposed as a mass in a net. Young

gallants wear their abundant locks much the same way and sport

seignorial spade beards. Old men are even more magnificently provided

with beards of monumental scale. Such men are clothed no longer in

parti-colored raiment, but in richly sober black. The ideal is dignity,

composure, and magnanimity. You may trace it through all its intricacies

of casuistry in what is still one of the best pictures of what a

gentleman and lady should be, the _Cortegiano_ of Baldassare

Castiglione. It was finished in 1516 while his friend Raphael was

designing the tapestry cartoons. And you may read much of this high

teaching in Count Castiglione’s own sensitive and comprehending face,

Figure 167, as Raphael then painted it. It breathes that fine interplay

of pride and humility which was the mainspring of the Renaissance, and

it brings us back to the double origin of the Grand Style in the pride

of Florence and the humility of Umbria.

Umbria in the narrow sense includes only the lovely stretches of the

upper Tiber, and the rolling banks of Lakes Trasimene and Bolsena. But

all the way over the mountains to the Adriatic the civilization was of a

similar type, and so the art. Thus we may reckon the Adriatic Marches

from Ancona to Ravenna as Umbrian from the point of view of the

historian of painting. There were no great cities and little commerce.

It is a region of small hill-top communes within the walls of which the

peasants huddled for protection at night, going down to the fields in

the day. It was a country of hot passions and violent feuds, and equally

of religious enthusiasm and mystical piety. Great heresies had swept the

land and so had the joyous and practical Christianity of St. Francis,

greatest of Umbria’s sons. We have much of the volatility that we noted

in Siena, without, however, a capital city to centralize it, and we also

have what Siena lacked—an abiding and beautiful humility. Umbria knew

her provincial estate and accepted its limitations.

Nowhere is this more plainly shown than in her art. For two centuries

she was in the position of inducing foreign artists to come in, ever in

an attitude of admiration and docility. Thus Giunta of Pisa, Cimabue and

his Roman contemporaries; Giotto and his Florentine pupils; Simone

Martini and other Sienese painters decorated the chief monument of

Umbria, the Basilica of St. Francis at Assisi. Their work extended over

a century to say 1330. Later still Sienese artists were employed at

Perugia, among others, Taddeo Bartoli, and the region promised to become

an artistic dependency of Siena. But with the dawning of the Renaissance

and the extension of Florentine power beyond Arezzo, Florentine artists

are preferred. We find Domenico Veneziano at Perugia, in 1438, in the

pay of the ruling Baglioni. A little earlier Fra Angelico had painted

for several years at Cortona. In the early fifties Benozzo Gozzoli

painted his Franciscan frescoes at Montefalco, and was otherwise active

in the Tiber valley. In 1468 Fra Filippo Lippi was called to Spoleto.

Soon after, Umbria learned to depend on her own artists. In the Adriatic

Marches there had been a limited penetration of Giotto’s style, chiefly

by way of Padua and Rimini. By the end of the century the Lorenzettian

manner dominated. It was succeeded by the influence of the Venetian

Renaissance as exemplified by such rather backward artists as the

Vivarini and Carlo Crivelli. Still later the diffused influence of

Giovanni Bellini meets harmoniously that of Perugino.

Thus in humility and teachableness Umbria very slowly, and through most

various stages of discipleship, worked out her own originality. And when

it came one felt deeply in it the teaching of her spacious intervals and

blue mountains.

It is so with the first notable painter that Umbria produced, Gentile da

Fabriano.[61] He felt landscape as no artist before him. Born about

1360, he was trained by his fellow townsman, Alegretto Nuzi. Alegretto

had made sound studies at Florence and had also observed with admiration

the pictures of the Lorenzetti. His own altar-pieces have the Sienese

splendor with a touch of sweetness that is wholly Umbrian. His pupil

Gentile prefers more ornate and florid compositions such as we see in

his early Coronation of the Virgin at Milan. Soon Gentile gave himself

to the panoramic narrative style, outdoing the Lorenzetti in

elaboration, vivacity, and gracefulness. Superficially he resembles such

Florentine contemporaries as Lorenzo Monaco and Masolino, but his mood

is broader and more genial, and his decorative accent more splendid.

Before 1410 he was called to Venice to paint in the new Ducal Palace.

His animated historical frescoes were soon destroyed by fire, but his

sojourn was long enough to impress his manner, through his pupil Jacopo,

Bellini, and numerous imitators, on the Venetian narrative school.

[Illustration:

FIG. 168. Gentile da Fabriano. Adoration of the Magi.—_Uffizi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 169. Gentile da Fabriano. The Nativity. Predella piece from

Adoration of Magi.—_Uffizi._

]

Passing to Florence, he left there the fullest expression of his

gracious talent in the resplendent Adoration of the Kings, Figure 168,

now in the Uffizi, which was painted for Palla Strozzi’s chapel in the

Trinità. It was signed in May 1423, and perhaps because it was the

season of flowers, Gentile painted in the rich pilasters growing sprays

of morning glory, iris, anemone, and cornflower. Within its fantastic

Gothic frame we witness a pageant such as Italy often saw on holy

days—the procession of the Wise man moving through her streets. Around

the Mother and her Child devotion reigns, but soon the scene passes off

into the tumult of waiting men-at-arms, of chafing steeds, and snarling

animals of the chase. The color is a radiance of scarlet, crimson, azure

and gold, after the Gothic fashion. But the picture is more than Gothic

in the tender and almost atmospheric shading of the rolling hills in the

background. Skilfully blending Sienese idealism with narrative breadth

and vivacity, the picture is the last and most magnificent memorial to a

chivalry now merely an afterglow, but dying with all the iridescence of

the sunset hour.

As is usually the case, the modern contribution of the picture is

modestly made in the _predella_ panels. The Nativity, Figure 169, with

the light radiating tenderly from the Christ Child and golden stars

glimmering above the hill-top pastures is perhaps the first nocturne in

art, and still one of the loveliest. The Flight into Egypt, shows a

joyous sunrise creeping over the glad hills. The means are conventional,

the highlights are touched in with gold, but the mood and effect are

there. Young Masaccio surely considered these little panels before he

undertook his more naturalistic adventure in structural light and shade.

[Illustration:

FIG. 170. Andrea da Bologna. Madonna of Humility.—_Cleveland._

]

Soon Pope Martin V, returning from exile at Avignon and planning to

restore the splendors of Christian Rome, called Gentile and set him to

decorating the nave of St. John Lateran. Again fire has deprived us of

the monumental works which constituted Gentile’s contemporary fame. We

know that they won the praise of the greatest Flemish painter who

visited Renaissance Italy, Rogier de la Pasture of Tournai. And two

generations later crabbed Michelangelo declared almost sentimentally

that Gentile was gentle both by name and by nature. For us it is

important to note that Gentile forecast precisely the future triumphs of

Raphael, carrying the glory of Umbrian painting widely through Italy

before asserting it at Rome.

Of course such work as Gentile’s was highly exceptional in the Umbrian

Marches. The average state of things is represented by the shy and

humble Madonnas which Francescuccio Ghisi repeated indefinitely. This

type of Madonna of Humility is nowhere more delightfully represented

than in the lovely panel at the Cleveland Museum, Figure 170, for which

I have elsewhere suggested the attribution of Andrea da Bologna.[62] She

is most unlike the majestic Madonnas of Florence and Siena. To assure us

that this gentle Mother is after all Queen of Heaven and the Second Eve

come for our salvation, the artist has given her a resplendent aureole

with tiny miniatures of her champions, the apostles, and has stretched

at her feet that First Eve in whom we all sinned. The picture will have

been painted before 1380, and, with its Byzantine reminiscences, it well

exemplifies the mediævalism that held its own in the Adriatic Marches

long after Tuscany had set her face towards the Renaissance.

It would add little to our survey of Umbria to dwell on Ottaviano Nelli

at Urbino, a gently vivacious story-teller; nor yet on those early

painters at Camerino and San Severino who tinged the softer native style

with the splendid severity of the early Venetian manner. I pass their

works with regret, for they are often lovely in their frank dependence

on greater spirits. In a general survey the middle years of the

fifteenth century in Umbria show rather little to attract us until the

rise of Pietro Perugino. He emerges in an artistic world dominated in

the Tiber Valley by the Florentine, Gozzoli, and beyond the mountains by

Carlo Crivelli and the Vivarini. Such predecessor of Perugino as

Benedetto Bonfigli of Perugia need not detain us. He had learned a

little, a very little, from the Florentine, Domenico Veneziano, paints

Madonnas with a modest ideality; and narratives, the life of St.

Ercolano in the Communal Palace of Perugia, with abundant and muddled

detail, after the fashion of Gozzoli and Domenico di Bartolo. His

_bottega_ was a factory of those quaint and often terrible religious

banners, Figure 171, which the devout Umbrians carried processionally to

avert the recurrent plague. We need not dwell upon Perugino’s alleged

master, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, whose ugly and emphatic draughtsmanship

derives from Verrocchio and the Pollaiuoli. We may best appreciate

Perugino’s extraordinary originality by considering contemporaries who

came up with equal advantages. Lorenzo di San Severino exemplifies the

usual Umbrian blend of Gozzoli and Venetian influences. And in such a

picture as the Enthroned Madonna, Figure 172, in the Holden Collection,

at Cleveland, he attains an ideality of feeling and a beauty of

workmanship of the most refreshing sort. This picture must have been

painted about 1490. It may represent the high mark reached in the

Marches towards the end of the century—may thus dispense us from

considering such inherently charming painters as Girolamo da Camerino

and his fellow townsman Giovanni Boccatis.

[Illustration:

FIG. 171. Bontigli Plague Banner. The Virgin protecting her Devotees

from plague Shafts hurled by Christ.—_Chiesa del Gonfalone,

Perugia._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 172. Lorenzo di San Severino. Madonna and Saints.—_Cleveland, O._

]

A very similar training produces more ambitious but hardly more pleasing

results in Niccolò Liberatore of Foligno, (1430 to 1502). Early

influenced by Gozzoli, he later aped the intensity of the Venetian,

Carlo Crivelli. Niccolò thus chafes within the modest bounds proper to

art in Umbria. He essays tragedy and too often achieves burlesque. He

paints, like most of the Umbrians, processional banners, and also the

most complicated altar-pieces, in which cusps, carving and pinnacles

almost efface the Madonna and saints, who show a peasantlike uneasiness

amid so much splendor. Such is the character of the triptych in the

Vatican, which is dated 1466. It represents rather favorably Niccolò’s

at once slender and ambitious talent.

[Illustration:

FIG. 173. Melozzo da Forlì. Pope Sixtus IV and his Court.

Fresco.—_Vatican._

]

Such obscure artists as we have been considering[63] could maintain the

idealism out of which a Perugino should grow, could provide his

spiritual background. They could do little to nurture him on the

positive side. That task fell to men of greater power, who had saturated

themselves with Florentine realism—Melozzo da Forlì[64] and Luca

Signorelli. Both were pupils of that giant among Umbro-Florentines,

Piero della Francesca. Melozzo was born in 1438 and early employed by

the Dukes of Urbino. He practices an energetic draughtsmanship both in

decoration and portraiture, indulges the boldest foreshortening, adds a

positive athleticism to that pride of life which we have noted in more

static form in his master. Thus his frescoes for the domes of the

sacristy of the Santa Casa at Loreto, and the justly famous fragments of

playing angels from the demolished sacristy of old St. Peter’s at Rome

reveal a strength and measured audacity which at once rival the

contemporary effort of Mantegna at Mantua and forecast the more pagan

exuberance of Mantegna’s greatest pupil, Correggio. This robust and

masculine manner appears in a more restrained and traditional form in

the superb fresco portraits of Pope Sixtus IV and his Court, Figure 173,

in the Vatican. Such work transcends Umbrian standards.

[Illustration:

FIG. 174. Luca Signorelli. Pan, God of Music.—_Berlin._

]

Even more does the intense and rugged art of Melozzo’s fellow disciple,

Luca Signorelli.[65] Born at Cortona in 1441, we know little of his

early career except that he studied with Piero della Francesca, passed

to Florence and was permanently swayed by the anatomical and passionate

realism of Antonio Pollaiuolo. Signorelli’s early work is obscure to us.

We may well study him first in the pastoral mythology, Pan, God of

Harmony, Figure 174, now at Berlin. It was painted about 1490 for the

Medici, for the villa for which Botticelli designed the Primavera and

Birth of Venus. It is inferior to its companion pieces in imagination

and delicacy, and particularly in color, but in its own measured way it

echoes delightfully the poetic wistfulness of early Florentine humanism.

Similar qualities of imagination are in the great fresco The Last Days

of Moses, in the Sistine Chapel, painted in 1482 after his design. But

the vein is exceptional in Signorelli. Soon he gave himself to a rugged

realism, unpleasing in his religious themes. Meeting little favor in the

great cities, he painted many altar-pieces for the Umbrian towns. These

pictures are stern in spirit and leaden in color. There is no attempt to

please. Relentlessly Signorelli pursued his personal quest of expressive

anatomy. Legend tells us that, dry-eyed, he sketched the fair body of

his own murdered son for the picture of the Entombment at Cortona. We

see him introducing nude figures into the background of the round

Madonna at the Uffizi, Figure 175. The experimentalist dominates the

artist.

[Illustration:

FIG. 175. Signorelli. Madonna.—_Uffizi._

]

In the year 1500, being nearly sixty, he found the real use for his

truculent art. He was called to paint in the Chapel of S. Brixio, in the

Cathedral of Orvieto. The subject was the Last Judgment. More than fifty

years earlier Fra Angelico had begun the work with angel choirs in the

vaults. With a far different temper Signorelli continued the task. At

the entrance and back of the Chapel he showed mankind scourged by the

final plagues. In the four arched spaces at the sides he set The

Preaching of Antichrist, a sinister scene detailed with all the

circumstantiality of the Early Renaissance. For the three remaining

scenes, the Resurrection of the Dead, Figure 176, the Condemnation of

the Sinful, Figure 177, and the Reward of the Just, he invented new

modes both of interpretation and of composition. How far we are from the

solemn assizes of Giotto or the garden and labyrinth motives of Fra

Angelico! In every case we have in the lunette celestial figures, or at

least supernal, while below we have swarming masses of nude folk,

bewildered at the forgotten light, aspiring heavenwards or shrinking

from the clutches of the fiends.

What distinguishes these frescoes is a magnificently just

matter-of-factness. Only one question is raised by the artist. Given the

literal truth of the Book of Revelations, how would the last judgment

look, and how would one feel if he were indeed there? So he reasons it

out—the struggle of the skeletons to push up to the light, their

reinvestiture successively with sinews, muscles and skin, the

embarrassment as a half assembled body vainly seeks recognition. And all

this he contrasts with the confident, strong bearing of the archangels

above. Again in the Ascent of the Just to Heaven, the aspiration is

chiefly physical, magnificently so. These clean strong bodies chiefly

wish to escape the corruption from which the last trump has summoned

them. And even the guardian angels are less tender than jubilant at the

thought of fit recruits to replenish St. Michael’s celestial militia.

Equally the damned wince, not from conscience, but from physical dread

of the chains and claws and the imminence of the eternal fires.

[Illustration:

FIG. 176. Luca Signorelli. The General Resurrection.—_Cathedral,

Orvieto._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 177. Luca Signorelli. The Souls of the Damned.—_Cathedral,

Orvieto._

]

This sturdy, upright art seems hardly Italian. The spirit of it is

ruthless and Northern. It mitigates nothing, tells pretty much

everything, presents the body in its ugliness, disregards obvious

considerations of style. Yet as a successful blend of a vast technical

experiment in anatomy with an honest and powerful effort of imagination,

this is one of the most remarkable achievements of the Italian

Renaissance. It has little of the Italian nobility, but it powerfully

influenced those who had. Perugino and Raphael imitated Signorelli’s

orderly arrangement of his scenes in a double, vertical order, and

Michelangelo fed his dream of a heroic world of splendid nudity from the

drastic visions of Signorelli. Over-rich and over-emphatic as Signorelli

is, he is also an elemental, tonic power. No one is quite the same after

a visit to the Chapel of S. Brixio.

If Signorelli was the greatest character in Umbria before Raphael,

Pietro Perugino was the finest intelligence and taste. He was born in

1446 at Città della Pieve and at nine years old was put with a poor

Perugian painter. His early activity is matter only of ingenious

conjecture.[66] There is an ambiguous range of pictures variously

ascribed to him and to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, a difficult and rather

unimportant problem which I willingly let alone. What is certain is that

in his early twenties Perugino was studying with Verrocchio at Florence

alongside of Leonardo da Vinci. By 1481 and 1482 Perugino emerges

artistically full-grown in the Sistine Chapel.

His superiority, as shown in the fresco of the Giving of the Keys to

Peter, Figure 118, and in numerous works of his forty-two remaining

years, is so uniform and almost monotonous that its greatness has until

recently passed unnoticed. Only such critics as Mr. Berenson and

Professor Wölfflin have done him full justice. He worked upon perfectly

clear and conscious ideals of simplicity, symmetry, and spaciousness; in

all of which he took issue with his times. Rejecting the picturesque

richness and confusion of the Early Renaissance, he took counsel of the

Byzantine painters and of Fra Angelico at San Marco. They taught him the

worth of simple geometrical forms of figure composition, and how to

sacrifice details to broad effects. That his groups disposed in simple

pyramids, oblongs, or ovals should not seem too bare, he cunningly

varied the positions of the figures, thus relieving the severity of the

underlying symmetry. Every tilted head, pointed foot and swaying thigh

has its precise compositional value. As for the figures, there is no

strenuousness of draughtsmanship, they are simply good enough. A

principle of artistic economy, alien to the spirit of the moment, rules

here as elsewhere.

[Illustration:

FIG. 178. Perugino. Mystical Crucifixion. Fresco.—_Santa Maria

Maddalena de’ Pazzi. Florence._

]

So far he appears as a critic and amender of the Early Renaissance

style. His positive contribution was a particularly spacious and lovely

sort of landscape, an immensity of light and air to set behind the

restricted patterns of his figures. This landscape is a beautiful

generalization of the scenery of the upper Tiber valley. The forms are

few. Feathery trees mark the middle distance; a river valley opens

gently with interlocking banks toward distant blue mountains. Above a

silvery horizon, the heavens gradually deepen to an intense blue,

accentuated by sparse floating clouds. There are few colors, a warm

brown, a fresh green, a paler and a deeper blue, a variety of grays.

With these simple means is attained a sense of infinite space and of

encompassing peace.

All these perfections are in the great frescoed Crucifixion Figure 178,

in the convent of Santa Maria Maddelena dei Pazzi, at Florence. The date

is 1495, Perugino’s fifty-second year. The lyrical quietism of the

effect rests on delicate evasions of the very formal symmetry. Such

features as the tilted head of the Saint John and the three trees at the

left balancing the Magdalen at the right of the cross are essential.

Indeed any slight change either in the position of the figures or the

lines of the landscape would produce a discord.

[Illustration:

FIG. 179. Perugina. Enthroned Madonna.—_Vatican._

]

We have a very similar effect with the addition of a stately and simple

architecture in the enthroned Madonna of the Vatican. Figure 179. Again

the formality of the pyramidal pattern is relieved by varied

dispositions of the figures which individually considered may seem

affected, but which are essential to the composition. More overtly

emotional but still restrained is the Deposition, Figure 180a, of the

Uffizi Gallery. It is arranged as an oval with catenary internal curves,

anticipating much more complicated patterns of Raphael. At this moment,

1494, no living artist but Leonardo could have woven this group together

with such certainty of taste, and he could have hardly equalled its

broad and serene landscape.

In the first years of the new century Perugino decorated the merchants’

exchange of Perugia, the Cambio, with frescoes partly religious, partly

moral and symbolical. The most famous represent the Virtues, Figure 180,

in pairs, hovering in the heavens with their representatives below. For

example, Prudence and Justice with the great law-givers. So Fortitude

and Temperance are represented respectively by the venerable forms of

brave Horatius, and Leonidas; of Cato and Cincinnatus. It seems that

Perugino executed most of this latter decoration through assistants, and

it has been suggested that Raphael is responsible both for the design

and painting of the beautiful Sibyls.[67]

[Illustration:

FIG. 180. Perugino. Prudence and Justice with their Representatives.

Fresco.—_Cambio, Perugia._

]

Like most of his contemporaries Perugino outlived his fame. He was

insulted by Michelangelo, criticized for repeating his figures, thrust

out of the Vatican in 1508 and superseded by his former helper, Raphael.

And his exquisite art in his later years shows a certain relaxation. He

died of the plague in 1524 and was denied Christian burial, although in

his day he had painted plague banners to protect the faithful.

The known atheism of Perugino affords a curious problem. How reconcile

it with the mild and gentle religiosity of his art? Were he a modern

artist, one might hold that he entered by æsthetic sympathy into

experiences of religion which his rational self denied. For an atheist

of the Renaissance the explanation seems too subtle. They were of tough

fibre and kept their sympathy logically in hand. Mr. Berenson has

offered the ingenious explanation that in his noble composition in space

Perugino appealed to emotions which are so nearly akin to religion as to

be readily substituted therefor. In the great spaces of Perugino the

spirit finds liberation and a sense of the infinite. Such intuition of

infinity one finds also in personal religion, and the two experiences

are in a degree interchangeable. Æsthetically satisfactory, this

explanation may fail to convince a devout person. He will want to know

how the art of an avowed atheist enthralled the pious folk inhabiting

the valley sanctified by the memory of St. Francis. Whatever be the

explanation, the space composition of Perugino later sufficed to express

Raphael’s vision of the central mystery of Christianity, of the nobility

of pagan intellect and of the serene splendor of the Grecian Olympians.

[Illustration:

FIG. 180_a._> Perugino. The Deposition.—_Uffizi._

]

Raphael Sanzio[68] is the finest example of the Umbrian virtue of

teachableness. His course is a series of exquisitely felt admirations.

His readiness to assimilate any sort of excellence was his strength, and

at times his weakness, for he was not always self-critical enough to

reject merits alien to his own personality. His admitted primacy rests

on perfection of composition, and that perfection represented a

beautiful synthesis of the methods of Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, and

Leonardo da Vinci. In dramatic power, force of draughtsmanship, and

charm of color many of his contemporaries surpassed him. His, indeed, is

a triumph of tact and judgment, and not of any single achievement. He

seems one of the young men of the Platonic dialogues come back to

earth—graciously prudent, gently effective, superior yet companionable.

He approached art as his fellow Umbrian, St. Francis, approached life,

with friendly confidence. He was equally at home with noble and artisan,

with austere prelate and libertine humanist. Men readily gave him their

loyalty and women their love.

Raphael Sanzio was born at Urbino in 1483. His father, Giovanni, a

mediocre poet and painter, left him an orphan at eleven. Raphael’s first

steps in painting were probably guided by Timoteo Viti, who practiced,

partly under Perugino’s influence, the timidly idyllic style of the

Northern Marches—Bologna and Ferrara. Such boyish efforts of Raphael as

the Orleans Madonna, the Three Graces, and the Dream of a Knight, in the

National Gallery show Raphael’s complete assimilation of this idyllic

manner. The little picture at London in which a stripling Hercules

slumbers between an attractive girlish Wisdom and a most innocent effigy

of Vice—holding the flower that signifies the primrose path—shows us

Raphael at seventeen and by no means precocious.

In the year 1500 he was called from Urbino to work in Perugino’s home

shop at Perugia, soon rising to the position of foreman. In four years

he made the most devout and complete assimilation of his master’s style.

Such pictures as the Coronation of Mary, in the Vatican, and the

Marriage of the Virgin, Figure 181, at Milan, would surely be reckoned

as consummate Perugino’s were it not for signatures and old tradition.

The Marriage of the Virgin in particular is merely a rearrangement of

Perugino’s composition for the Giving of the Keys to Peter. But Raphael

has eliminated unnecessary incidents and has outdone Perugino himself in

sweetness and calm. The picture was finished in 1504, and that year

Raphael took letters of recommendation from his first patroness, the

Duchess of Urbino, to the Magistracy of Florence.

[Illustration:

FIG. 181. Raphael. Marriage of the Virgin.—_Milan._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 182. Raphael. Maddalena Doni.—_Pitti._

]

Imagine a youngster of twenty-one who has diligently mastered a

pictorial style only to learn that it is already obsolete. That is

Raphael taking the manner of Perugino to a Florence agog over the battle

cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo. The coolness with which young

Raphael faced this emergency is characteristic. In four years he made

himself over into a realistic draughtsman. Abandoning the readymade

faces and figures of Perugino, he wisely held to Perugino’s sweetness

and spacious compositional patterns. Young Raphael achieves an

extraordinary act of criticism. He takes from the reformers just what he

needs and no more—from Leonardo his incisiveness and psychology as a

draughtsman and his dense and rich compositional patterns, from Fra

Bartolommeo his dignity and monumentality, from Michelangelo very little

as yet; and, withal, he retains whatever still seemed valuable from his

Umbrian experience. Thus with resolute and unperturbed intelligence

within four years he completely reconstructed his style, and put himself

on a parity with older contemporaries who had been experimenting for a

score of years.

The steps of this re-education are most interesting. In 1505 he did the

portraits of Agnolo Doni and his wife Maddalena, Figure 182. The posture

of the woman is that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The draughtsmanship and

characterization are severe, the hint of Umbrian landscape is a

survival. In later portraits we shall see the elimination of

accessories, the line yielding to the most refined modelling in light

and dark, the effect concentrated without insistency. A comparison of

the Doni portraits with those of ten years later, the Julius II and the

Fornarina, will tell better than words of the tendency of Raphael’s

portraiture towards its ultimate mastery.

In 1505 Raphael returned for a time to Perugino to paint the fresco of

the Trinity at the Convent of San Severo. In the splendid geometrical

pattern he has already improved on the flat groupings of Perugino. The

consistory of Saints bends back in depth after the fashion of a

semi-dome. Raphael borrows the new motive from Fra Bartolommeo’s fresco

of the Last Judgment painted in 1499 for the Florentine Hospital of

Santa Maria Nuova. Sixteen years later Perugino added the languid saints

at the base of the Trinity, a touching reversal of the natural relations

of master and pupil. As for Raphael, in a single experiment he has

mastered the sort of symmetrical composition in depth which should

suffice within five years for his masterpiece, the Disputa.

[Illustration:

FIG. 183. Raphael. Madonna del Granduca.—_Pitti._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 184. Raphael. La Belle Jardinière.—_Louvre._

]

The matronly sweetness of Raphael’s early madonnas has won them

affection from the first. With increasing dignity, they retain a hint of

the girlish refinement of their predecessors of the Early Renaissance.

But they are less assertively fastidious, more normal and natural. All

these obvious reasons for liking them are sound, and these pictures

afford as well an insight into Raphael’s consciously directed studies.

The effect is ever towards richer and more complicated composition, and

towards more interesting and stylistic dispositions of the figures. The

naturalness is that of taste and calculation. Near the beginning of the

series we have the lovely Madonna of the Grand Duke, 1505, Figure 183.

The upright, frontal position and form and serene oval of the face

recall Perugino. But reality has supervened,—Perugino never painted such

a Bambino,—and for the sake of concentration the background is kept

plain. We see in the Madonna of the Tempi Family, at Munich, the Madonna

turned in three-quarters position, the pose energized, the body swaying

in a slight counterpoise. Then he tries seated poses which offer the

triangular pattern of Leonardo. Perhaps the earliest of this series is

the lovely Cowper Madonna, now in the Widener Collection. Soon he adds

figures, constructs the pyramids more ornately and restores the

background of landscape. At the head of this line is the Madonna of the

Finch in the Pitti. It illustrates that gracious formality which

Leonardo established in the Madonna of the Rocks. Finding the balance of

the two standing nude children a little too obvious, Raphael carries the

motive to its perfection in the Belle Jardinière of the Louvre. Figure

184. Here, to break the rigid symmetry, the St. John kneels, and

superfluous trees have been cleared away from the background. He seeks

further to enrich the pyramid, and in the Madonna of the Canigiani

family, at Munich, Figure 185, finished in 1507, we have at once the

densest of symmetries and the stylistic handling of all the figures in

active and counterpoised attitudes. In two years the process is

complete. Later, in the Madonna of the Fish and of the Pearl, executed

by students, Raphael will adopt diagonal arrangements, he will take up

the old Circular form in the Madonna of the Chair, and will amplify the

simple patterns of Perugino in the Sistine Madonna and the Madonna of

Foligno. The forms and faces will become graver, nobler, more mature,

but the whole course is fully anticipated in the joyous and lucid years

of experiment from 1505 to 1507.

[Illustration:

FIG. 185. Raphael. Canigiani Holy Family.—_Munich._

]

In that year Raphael pulled himself together to produce a masterpiece

and signally failed. So far he must have seemed only a charming painter,

a more gracious Fra Bartolommeo or a more learned Albertinelli, he will

now surpass Leonardo and equal Michelangelo—a perilous competition for a

man of twenty-five. In 1507 Atalanta Baglioni of Perugia ordered a

Deposition to be set over the tomb of her murdered son, the tyrant

Astorre. Raphael, in a theme properly lyrical and pathetic, tries to add

tumult and drama—tries too hard. At first he adopted a scheme very

similar to that of Perugino’s masterpiece, with the dead Christ on the

ground, a quietly mourning group and a spacious landscape. The design is

shown in a pen sketch at Oxford. He rejects this motive as too quiet and

familiar. By successive efforts and exaggerations he arrives at the

picture which we now see in the Borghese Gallery. Figure 186. It has

become a disagreeable tangle of legs, a display of over-muscular arms

which support nothing—a welter of histrionic gestures. The clew to the

trouble is in the effective but meaningless pose of the woman at the

right, which is borrowed directly from Michelangelo’s Madonna of the

Doni Family. Figure 195. The landscape no longer liberates the spirit,

but almost crowds the figures out of the frame. Doubtless so

self-critical an artist as Raphael learned much from this failure. It

must have shown him that the rich density and measured dramatic effect

of Leonardo were not as accessible as he had thought, and he accordingly

restudied the whole problem of energetic monumental design. Moreover it

showed him, at least for some years, that Michelangelo was the worst of

models for him and threw him back upon his proper exemplars, Perugino

and Fra Bartolommeo—in short, upon that native humility which was at

once his charm as a man and his strength as an artist.

[Illustration:

FIG. 186. Raphael. The Entombment.—_Borghese, Rome._

]

In 1508 Raphael was called to Rome through the influence of a former

Urbino friend, Bramante, now the architect of new St. Peter’s. The task

set by Pope Julius II was the decoration of the four new antechambers

called the _Stanze_. About the same time Michelangelo began on the

ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Thus the two artists worked within two

hundred feet of each other, but held apart partly by a natural rivalry,

and even more by the irascible and suspicious nature of Michelangelo.

And two masterpieces were produced as from two different

worlds—Michelangelo’s all tragic and perturbed, Raphael’s all hopeful

and serene. Between 1509 and 1511 Raphael frescoes the Camera della

Segnatura, mostly with his own hand. The scheme comprised the finest

leading ideals of contemporary humanism, and the little room is the most

important of documents for the student of the Renaissance. Religious

authority, legal justice, secular philosophy and science, the arts—such

are the four great themes impersonated on the side walls, and echoed in

symbol and human illustration on the beautiful ceiling; these are the

props of a perfect society.

Religious authority and theology are represented by the famous fresco

called erroneously the Dispute concerning the Sacrament, Figure 187.

Christ, as the fully revealed member of the Trinity, sits in a heaven

rayed and studded with gold; beside him sit the prophets and

apostles—the actual witnesses of his passion. The seated group sweeps

grandly back describing a sort of semi-dome in space. Below and

precisely in the centre, on an altar, glitters the wafer which in the

recurrent miracle of the Mass becomes Christ’s body. To right and left

of the altar are closely compacted and agitated groups insisting on the

truth of the miracle of transubstantiation. These are the martyrs and

church doctors, those who after the apostolic age either in experience

or divine intuition certified to the central mystery of the Church. The

upper group is composed after the fashion of Fra Bartolommeo and

Perugino, is a mere expansion of Raphael’s fresco at San Severo; the

lower group is held together after the fashion of Leonardo da Vinci’s

Last Supper, the vehemence of the particular gestures being assimilated

in a running balance of thrust against thrust, so that the whole effect

is of a rich and energetic harmony. The figures themselves are

established adequately, but in draughtsmanship are inferior either to

Leonardo’s or Michelangelo’s. With the thriftiness of a born decorator,

Raphael makes the figure count in its place and beyond that takes no

unnecessary pains. It might indeed be argued that the decoration would

be worse as a whole if the parts were more perfect. Finally, note how

essentially classical, Roman, juridical the motive is; how concrete and

material. Raphael seeks to express nothing more mystical than the

obvious equation of Christ and the host, and he merely cites a multitude

of witnesses to prove that the equation is true. This very simplicity of

motive has thoroughly humanized what might have been a tenuous theme.

The picture is a magnificent conclave out of many ages, a symbol of the

cumulative splendor of the Catholic tradition.

[Illustration:

FIG. 187. Raphael. La Disputa—The Truth of the Eucharist.

Fresco.—_Vatican._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 188. Raphael. The School of Athens. Fresco.—_Vatican._

]

On the opposite wall, in the School of Athens, Figure 188, Raphael

pictures a similar continuity of human thought on the secular plane. The

arched space opens into a vast basilica whose gods, represented as

colossal statues at the sides, are Apollo and Minerva. Raphael has

studied the Basilica of Constantine and has modestly scanned Bramante’s

plans for new St. Peter’s. He invents a vaulted interior more impressive

than any that man has ever built. Within finite bounds he suggests the

infinity of Umbrian space. Without the figures, or with quite other

figures, we should still have a great picture. But the group is as nobly

disposed as the architecture. You may imagine a foreshortened ring of

which the reverend forms of Plato and Aristotle are the twin jewels.

Aristotle at the right is in the vigor of middle age as a scientist

should be. His disciples crowd towards him or gather in secondary groups

about some leader. Science is social and co-operative. Raphael puts

himself in this group. Plato at the left is immensely old and feeble.

Speculative philosophy requires only strength of spirit. His disciples

are generally isolated in personal meditation. Philosophical truth is

arrived at not in society but in solitude. Certain ardent young faces

recall Leonardo da Vinci, and the construction of the group is his. We

have linking motives, like that of sprawling Diogenes on the steps,

curves that repeat or counter the vault above, turns and thrusts of

bodies in active balance, an energetic variety within a serene harmony.

The mood is less agitated than that of the Disputa, while the

composition is freer. Human science and philosophy are at once less

bound than is theology, and move more equably because they strive for

more readily attainable ends. Like its companion piece, the School of

Athens is both a citation of witnesses and a profession of faith, of

faith in the capacity of the human mind.

The fresco of Parnassus repeats approximately the grouping of the School

of Athens, but changes the mood to one of lyrism, and shifts the scene

to a hill top. About Apollo and the Muses wander the forms of the elder

and recent poets. Often the faces are a bit insipid, but no one thinks

of that, so easy are the postures, so gracious the whole effect, so

instinct with the quiet good breeding of an academic pastoral. All the

Umbrian reticence and discretion and humility of Raphael are in this

beautifully calculated work. It betrays, too, certain ominous symptoms

of display, in the way, for example, in which the figures at the window

protrude beyond the wall. Primarily this is only a way of softening two

ugly angles of the window opening, but it is also a concession to

Michelangelo’s dangerous habit of painting away the architecture. All

the forms have an amplitude and dignity akin to that of classical

sculpture. Hellas is for Raphael no longer a far-away, inaccessible

world, as it was, for example, to Botticelli. Raphael has effectively

reconstructed it, in part by a gracious act of intuition, in part by

study of the wall paintings and statues of old Rome.

[Illustration:

FIG. 189. Raphael. Prudence, Temperance, Force—generally called

Jurisprudence. Fresco.—_Vatican._

]

The decoration of the Camera della Segnatura was completed triumphantly

with the fresco symbolizing Jurisprudence, Figure 189, in which Raphael

invents a new and beautiful compositional formula. Having to deal with a

lunette awkwardly shortened by the window, he used three seated figures

signifying the judging, restraining and rewarding aspects of justice.

There is no strict centrality and no exact symmetry. The large curves of

the figures play off from each other in a continuous rhythm melting into

the bounding curve. One may conceive it in terms of the growth of

plants, as so many sprays meeting, diverging, opposing each other, and

all managing to conform to the line of an arch. It is a type of

composition that Raphael will develop with still greater subtlety in the

Sibyls of the Madonna della Pace.

When Raphael finished the Camera della Segnatura he was about

twenty-eight years old. His remaining nine years added certain

remarkable portraits, the Castiglione, the Leo X, Figure 190, the

Fornarina and the young Cardinal at Madrid, one sublime altar-piece, in

the Sistine Madonna; a dramatic masterpiece in the Transfiguration, and

a few frescoes. But in the main these are years of retrogression. His

popularity had got beyond his power to utilize it. Michelangelo in 1512

had unveiled the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Raphael, with all Rome,

felt qualities of energy and grandeur which he himself lacked, and, with

less than his usual intelligence, began a fruitless emulation. The last

three _Stanze_ show in their very look that Raphael is no longer his

unperturbed self. The figures no longer hold up their place on the wall,

they crowd out toward the spectator appallingly. The compositions no

longer show restful patterns which conform to the flatness of the wall.

There are disturbing flashes of light and obscure gaps. The figures

themselves are contorted and vehement; straining sinews and knotted

muscles are advertised for their own sake. Emulating the sublimity of

Michelangelo, Raphael only achieves sensationalism. Then he is no longer

a painter but a director of painting. Nothing but the designs are now

his own. The working sketches and cartoons are by his pupils, who work

under the sway of a young Mantuan of facile and brutal talent, Giulio

Romano. One passes through the last three Stanze with mixed feelings.

The high pleasures of art are left behind; remains the spell of great

power and intelligence now almost untouched by taste.

[Illustration:

FIG. 190. Raphael. Pope Leo X.—_Pitti._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 191. Raphael. Heliodorus driven from the Temple by a Celestial

Horseman. Fresco.—_Vatican._

]

The Stanza of Heliodorus finished in 1514 contains a superbly dramatic

fresco of Heliodorus, Figure 191, thrust by a celestial horseman from

the temple he would profane. The execution is mostly by Giulio Romano.

Raphael himself appears in one of his most massive designs, the Mass of

Bolsena. The theme is a sceptical priest persuaded of the truth of the

sacramental miracle through the bleeding of the wafer. The miracle takes

place in the presence of Pope Julius II. There is a weight of character

in the picture which is unique in Raphael’s mural painting. The

adjustment of masses is in an impeccable symmetry all the more difficult

that the space is irregular and refractory. The fine figures that carry

the theme down into the narrow rectangles alongside the window are in

part repainted by a young rival of Raphael, Michelangelo’s protegé,

Sebastiano del Piombo.

The Chamber of the _Incendio_, finished in 1517, shows even more plainly

the devastating influence of Michelangelo. The subject is a fire

arrested miraculously by Pope Leo IV, Figure 192. It is a magnificent

display of poses and anatomy, an artistic show window rather than a

decoration. The eye wanders in bewilderment to find the picture and

finds nothing but isolated, splendid forms posing superbly or simulating

unfelt emotions. From the point of view of decoration, the space has

been systematically violated. Again the remorseless hand of Giulio

Romano is everywhere felt. This is the last anteroom of the Vatican

which Raphael saw finished, though he left to his helpers many sketches

for the two remaining _Stanze_.

[Illustration:

FIG. 192. Raphael’s Design executed by Giulio Romano. Il Borgo. The

Fire at Rome.—_Vatican._

]

In 1516 and 1517 Raphael is superintending half a dozen great tasks at

once. From the early months of 1515 he had been Bramante’s successor as

architect of new St. Peter’s, the same year he became superintendent of

all archæological excavations at Rome. To these heavy administrative

charges he adds the decoration of the Farnesina, the continuation of the

_Stanze_, designs for mosaics in Santa Maria del Popolo, plans for two

private palaces, sixteen cartoons for the Vatican tapestries, and the

preliminary studies for the Loggia of the Vatican. He designs half a

dozen great altar-pieces and paints with his own hand the Portrait of

Leo X, the marvelous St. Cecilia at Bologna, the Sibyls of the Pace, and

the Sistine Madonna. He was rich and beloved, great nobles pressed him

with social attentions, and a cardinal vainly sought to ally him with

his family by marriage.

We can consider these multiform activities of the later years only in

general terms. The tapestry cartoons at South Kensington representing

the miracles of St. Peter and St. Paul complete that magnificent line of

narrative painting that begins with Giotto. Raphael works for simplicity

and concentration and dignity in an eminently classic spirit. One feels

the influence of Masaccio. Though rudely executed to guide the Flemish

weavers and executed by the assistant, Penni, the mind of Raphael

controls the form throughout. Such designs as the Miraculous Draught of

Fishes, Paul Preaching at Athens, the Death of Ananias, the Blinding of

the Sorcerer Elymas are among the marvels of our art. Yet many of these

designs are over-studied, and few I feel fully bear the comparison with

the best of Giotto and Masaccio. A little over-emphasis of style recalls

the bitter word of Michelangelo concerning Raphael—that he succeeded not

by grace of nature but by study.

The frescoes of the Life of Psyche, in the Farnesina, are beautiful in

arrangement and full of a robust paganism. But the wall is overcharged

with the weight of figures which too often show Giulio Romano’s heavy

and insolent hand. All the same, the whole effect is gracious and the

garlanded borders of the coves and spandrels by Giovanni da Udine are

delightful. To realize how much these frescoes lost from student

execution one has only to consider the Galatea, Figure 192a, in the same

Palace, which Raphael painted himself in 1514. It is on the verge of

over-ripeness, but keeps its saving element of restraint. In answer to

an inquiry from that great diplomat and gentleman, Count Baldassare

Castiglione, Raphael wrote that though beautiful models were not rare,

for the Galatea as for other figures, he had followed only an idea; and

indeed the mind’s eye is what ever counts with Raphael.

[Illustration:

FIG. 192_a._> Raphael. Galatea. Fresco.—_Farnesina, Rome._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 193. Raphael. The Sistine Madonna.—_Dresden._

]

Raphael’s final work for the Vatican was the decoration of an open,

vaulted Loggia. He invented fifty-two little Bible stories, leaving most

of the painting to his assistant, Penni, and he drew about the arches,

pilasters and window frames the most delicious arabesques. From study of

similar decoration in the Baths of Titus he worked out a style, crisp,

formal and sophisticated, and as various as Gothic ornament itself.

Geometrical, animal, and plant forms meet and blend audaciously. There

is interplay of spiral and angular motives, the whole effect is highly

playful and ingenious. The style has had vogue to our own day and still

speaks to us charmingly of the unserious side of Raphael.

[Illustration:

FIG. 194. Raphael. The Transfiguration.—_Vatican._

]

Perhaps in the harassed, competitive years we have been describing,

Raphael turned occasionally upon his own ingenuity, and refreshed

himself by renewing these simple and gracious modes in which he had been

bred. Such a theory would account for the Sistine Madonna, Figure 193,

and in part for his last picture, the Transfiguration. The most

memorable of Raphael’s Madonnas is based on the lucid symmetry of

Perugino. Although, for greater concentration, the background is merely

a sky, the hovering figures are easily spaced in the usual triangle. The

effect is ineffably grand and gentle. A quiet silvery cloudland is

created and filled by the devotion of the attendant saints and the

inspired glance of the Virgin and her Son. With all the resources of the

Renaissance, Raphael has expressed an emotion as intense and reverent as

that of Fra Angelico. It is an amazing act of the sympathetic

intelligence, for there is no reason to suppose that the painter was

ever a deeply religious spirit.

Almost as traditional was the unfinished picture before which in

springtime of 1520 Raphael’s body lay in state. The Transfiguration,

Figure 194, repeats the method of the Disputa. The celestial group of

Christ and Moses and Elijah is disposed as Perugino would have

counselled, in a swaying triangular group set before the gulf of the

firmament. Raphael painted this part with his own hand. The lower part,

which was left to Giulio Romano to finish, rests on the maxims and

practice of Leonardo. An energetic variety compelled into a close

balance is the ideal, a formal order which contains and softens

otherwise extravagant expressions and gestures. There is perhaps

intended not merely an illustration of the Gospel text, but also the

contrast between that life of contemplation towards which the soul

aspires, and that world of suffering of mind and body which presses

closely upon our rare moments of spiritual escape.

Even that world of facts had been very kind to Raphael. It was fitting

then that in his last days he should forget the haunting spectre of

Michelangelo’s sublimity, and should use his last forces in an imitation

which was a sort of gratitude to those two great masters who had set him

on the right way. One would like to believe that the Sistine Madonna and

the Transfiguration are the sign that Raphael when overtaken by an

untimely death was purging himself of an unfruitful rivalry, and

becoming once more master of his own soul. Yet since even Michelangelo

shipwrecked on the Michelangelesque, it is an open question whether

Raphael could ever have permanently recovered his natural equipoise.

However that be, Raphael in the glorious years from 1500 to 1512 resumes

and perfects every gentle, orderly, and reasonable strain in Italian

painting. Whether in portraiture or narrative, in mythology or

symbolism, in pictures of the Madonna or in pure decoration, he gave to

Italian painting its final stamp. He achieved a grandeur of space

composition akin to the movement of a symphony, a hidden structure more

appealing than any separate hue or form. His best work rests on a great

humility, and his later pride went far towards undoing him as an artist.

Such pride was the breath of life and the source of strength to his

rival Michelangelo, the fulfiller and perfector of everything that had

been insurgent, unbounded and not quite reasonable in the art of

Florence.

By a peculiar irony all that was valuable in such truculent and

self-sufficing predecessors as Donatello and Bertoldo, Andrea del

Castagno, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli was finally

concentrated in the small and ill-favored body of a neurasthenic. There

is the tragedy of Michelangelo[69] in its simplest terms. A Titan in

capacity to feel and work, he lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and

fear. Thrice he ran away from physical danger, once was virtually a

military deserter. To unworthy dependent relatives he gave lavishly,

scolding and fretting as he gave. He deliberately affronted two of the

most courteous and accomplished colleagues, Leonardo da Vinci and

Perugino. He suspected the worst of his gracious and generous rival,

Raphael. From a Roman studio as unkempt and filthy as its owner, he

snarled at the world and himself like a dog from a kennel.

Yet, note the paradox, this snarling is embodied in fine poetry, and

this haggard and more than untidy artist is the friend of such elect

spirits as Tommaso Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. Transient solaces.

Near the end of his long life he writes:—

“Alas! Alas! again and once again

I see my past and there I find not one—

In all, not one whole day that has been mine.”

These were the words of a man who was admired like a god and had

achieved a lifework of unexampled copiousness and athleticism.

The great enigma, how Michelangelo converted what are usually weaknesses

into sources of artistic strength, may best be faced in his life and

works. He was born at Caprese in 1475, soon taken back to Florence and

put to nurse with a stonecutter’s wife, with whose milk he later used to

say he sucked in the mallets and chisels he wielded so powerfully. At

thirteen he was articled to Ghirlandaio as a paid assistant and

doubtless did some minor work on those prettiest of frescoes in the

choir of Santa Maria Novella. Extricating himself from an uncongenial

task, he became one of the protegés of Lorenzo de’ Medici, studying the

antique marbles of the Medici Gardens under the kindly guidance of old

Bertoldo. There he mingled freely for three years in the most learned

and gentle society of the time. He mastered anatomy and modelling,

searched the compositional secrets of Masaccio. Soon Savonarola’s

revolution dismantled that artistic paradise which had been the Medici

Gardens, and Michelangelo became what he frequently was afterwards, a

fugitive and a solitary man, without either fixed friendships or abiding

place.

[Illustration:

FIG. 195. Michelangelo. Holy Family of the Doni.—_Uffizi._

]

How he made himself great in sculpture is not our theme. He was thirty

and already the master of the David and the Pietà before he began to be

a painter. His first commission, in 1505, was for a Holy Family, Figure

195, in medallion form for Agnolo Doni, who at the same time was having

his portrait painted by Raphael. The picture as we see it in the Uffizi

shows a master who thinks in fresco. The brown flesh, the dull yellows

and blues of the draperies could have come from the Brancacci chapel.

Remarkable is the complete waiver of charm and sweetness. The superb

figures are skilfully contorted into interesting poses, the circle is

densely filled and the few interstices left by the main figures are

filled with athletic nudes. The aim, which is successfully attained, is

an austere grandeur. There is to be no ordinary human appeal in our

youthful Lord and his parents.

[Illustration:

FIG. 196. Michelangelo. Detail from Cartoon of the Bathers, by the

contemporary engraver, Marcantonio.

]

At this moment Leonardo was already well advanced on the cartoon for the

Battle of the Standard, treating it in terms of literal narrative. In

1505 Michelangelo received a signal honor in the commission for the

companion fresco, the Battle of Pisa. Both were for the Hall of the

Great Council. We can imagine Michelangelo casting about for a reason to

abandon a narrative treatment and to find one that could be expressed by

the nude. He found it in an incident in Leonardo Aretino’s Chronicle. It

seemed that the trumpet found the Florentine men-at-arms bathing in the

Arno. Here was the theme of what was properly called The Bathers. Great

muscular forms are drawing themselves up the bank, and are hurrying into

clothes and armor. We have not a fight, but its alarm and imminence, a

fine imaginative substitute for the obvious event. The picture was never

executed, and the cartoon, which was the marvel of its day, was soon

destroyed, but Michelangelo’s sketches tells us something of the

composition, and the contemporary engraver, Marcantonio, Figure 196, has

left us a masterly print of the central group. It is plain that

Michelangelo made a display of minute anatomy that put his

contemporaries to shame, plain also that he subordinated this feature to

monumental effect. The failure to execute the fresco and the destruction

of the cartoon must count among the capital losses in the history of

art.

Burdened already with the impossible task of the tomb of Julius II,

Michelangelo was called to Rome to fresco the vault of the Sistine

Chapel. Contemporary gossip believed that he was proposed by the jealous

and shifty Bramante, architect of St. Peter’s, in the hope of

discrediting him. If so, Bramante reckoned ill. At first Michelangelo

planned a very modest scheme of colossal figures of Apostles in the

twelve spandrels. Soon, dismissing his incompetent helpers, he attacked

single-handed the present great scheme. He worked at it four bitter

years, and came out of it temporarily crippled and with eyes distorted

from the constant strain of looking upwards. The ceiling was unveiled on

All Saint’s Day of 1512 and has been a portent ever since.

[Illustration:

FIG. 197. Michelangelo. The two Western Compartments of the Ceiling of

the Sistine Chapel: God parting Light from Darkness; God creating

the Sea and Plants. Example of the Decorative Scheme.

]

Enter the Sistine Chapel, turn your back to the overwhelming apparition

of the Last Judgment, and your eye will naturally seek the lightest part

of the rich decoration. In a long strip, down the centre of the ceiling,

made up of nine oblongs alternately large and small, colossal figures

stand out against the sky. We see the drama of the Creation and Fall of

man. Nude titans play the minor parts in so many simultaneous scenes.

The gigantic, draped form of the Eternal dominates the first five. We

see him an aged athlete, an expression of utmost physical force, rending

chaos asunder into light and darkness; by his touch illumining the sun

and moon; Figure 197, drawing out the plants from the earth. I know no

more sublime conception in painting than the figure of God assigning the

oceans their place, Figure 198. Here is a form that would weigh tons

hovering with the lightness of an eagle in space, with extended

beneficent arms as solid as reality but coaxed out of the wet plaster

with touch and hues as delicate as those of a Whistler symphony. A

miracle of conception and of workmanship.

[Illustration:

FIG. 198. Michelangelo. God hovering over the Waters. Shows the

decorative use of the so-called “Slaves.”—_Vatican._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 199. Michelangelo. Creation of Adam.

]

The eye will dwell longest on the great fresco of the Creation of Adam,

Figure 199. It is all noble energy in the figure of God giving life by

His touch, all noble languor in the relaxed form of Adam only dimly

conscious of himself and wistful. There could be no truer or more

striking illustration of the pessimistic view that life was imposed upon

the earth and brought sadness with it. The titan form of Adam has a

singular and enigmatic relaxation. He undergoes a gift he has never

besought and faces it with something between confusion, mistrust and

resignation. Perhaps the splendid body would have been more at ease, had

the soul not been added. So in a spirit of Christian pessimism

Michelangelo represents Deity sharing its divine powers with the first

man.

At the centre of the ceiling is the creation of Eve, again an

extraordinary study in lassitude, but with a significant difference in

the figure of Eve. The woman, the chosen receptacle and transmitter of

life, accepts the gift eagerly. She presses up to God in thankful

adoration. No doubts or ambiguities here. And what a figure—fit to be

the mother of a race, exulting already in a fecundity that is to be most

grievous. Compare her action with the languid and almost disdainful

gesture of Adam in the last fresco, and learn that if the world is still

peopled it is due to the unreflective and unshaken fealty to life of all

Eve’s true daughters.

[Illustration:

FIG. 200. Michelangelo. The Temptation and Expulsion from Eden.

]

Perhaps the most decorative subject, if one may use the word of themes

so morally impressive, is that which represents the sin of the forbidden

fruit and the expulsion from Eden, Figure 200. The elements of pathos

which are strong in the story of Genesis are absent. Michelangelo has

not deigned to show us a habitable or desirable Eden. We see instead the

swiftly changing episodes of a great doom, which culminates in this

scene. Marvelous are the paired groups, superb the contrast between

careless appetite under the tree of knowledge and utter shame in the

exiled pair. One feels that Eve, who shrinks most, will soonest recover.

Her mission is still valid in the world of sin and shame. The

composition is the first one made up entirely of nudes.

We may pass quickly over the three compartments devoted to the story of

Noah. The scale of the figures, especially in the Deluge, is too small

to count at the distance from the eye. These three frescoes were the

beginning of the work, the proper scale being arrived at through trial

and error. Inherently the two small oblongs are among the most beautiful

in the ceiling, having a stylistic grace that is less marked in the

earlier more august themes. With the charm of Greek intaglios these

stories of Noah combine monumentality.

[Illustration:

FIG. 201. Michelangelo. The Prophet Jeremiah.

]

I have tried to put myself in the position of a visitor to the Sistine

Chapel following the instincts of his eye. At this point, having glanced

over the ceiling, his mind might well come in and ask the meaning of a

whole of which he is becoming dimly aware. The nine scenes above are

simply the historic axioms upon which the Christian scheme of redemption

is based. The abstract sparseness of the nine episodes from Genesis is

justified by the fact that they are less human events than terms in a

great argument, which runs as follows: We were created innocent, sinned

in our first parents, were spared in the world-flood and promised

eventual redemption.

This prolonged drama of redemption is witnessed by a solemn chorus of

draped male and female figures enthroned impressively in the spandrels.

Here, representing respectively the pagan and Hebrew world, are seven

sibyls and five prophets who had the dim but certain vision of a coming

Redeemer. These figures as Hawthorne has well said are “necessarily so

gigantic because the weight of thought within them is so massive.” They

brood quietly or sway with the burden of yearning. They are

magnificently draped and contrast most decoratively with the many nudes

of the ceiling. They vary in age and disposition. Contrast the actively

inspired and youthful Daniel, or the fiery Ezechiel with the ponderous

gravity of Jeremiah, Figure 201. What shades of delicate

characterization are in the athletic loveliness of the Delphic Sibyl,

Figure 202, the powerfully concentrated senility of The Cumean Sibyl,

she who predicted to Virgil the new era of salvation, and the

aristocratic aloofness of the Libyan seeress, Figure 203, most daintily

preparing her day’s work in divination.

[Illustration:

FIG. 202. Michelangelo. The Delphic Sibyl.

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 203. Michelangelo. The Libyan Sibyl.

]

Magnificent is the indignant sprawling form of the unwilling prophet

Jonah, remanded by the sea to an ungrateful mission. He is the active

counterpart of the passive Adam on the ceiling. He obeys under protest.

The form itself, foreshortened against the curve of the spandrel, is a

masterpiece of draughtsmanship. Decoratively it is the link between the

nudes of the ceiling and the draped prophets and sibyls.

Below the prophetic figures, in the older frescoes of the side walls,

are set the foreshadowing of the work of salvation in the life of Moses

and its accomplishment in the life of Christ, and the drama closes with

Michelangelo’s Last Judgment on the altar wall. There Christ separates

eternally the saved from the damned, echoing the definitive gesture with

which God in the adjoining ceiling separates light from darkness. So the

scheme closes with the inexorable logic with which it began.

The decorative task of Michelangelo was to mediate between the prophets

and sibyls and the ceiling frescoes above, and likewise to link the

great figures with the side walls below. Above, he set a multitude of

nude forms. On the massive sides of the twelve thrones are four

caryatids in two pairs. At the top of these piers are seated the lithe

forms of nude youths, Figure 198, forty in all, supporting medallions

and bent into every conceivable attitude that might set off the

flexibility and power of these superb young bodies. But however

extravagant any single pose may be, it is immediately balanced by an

opposing thrust from some other body, so that the whole composition is

locked together into an active and thrilling equilibrium. Even the

triangles over the coves are filled with huddled nudes most adroitly

disposed in the narrow and refractory spaces.

Below the prophets and sibyls, the linking motives are made up of draped

figures. Weakest are the caryatid geniuses below each throne. The

triangular splays at the corners contain those four bloody and

sensational acts which assured the perpetuity of God’s Chosen People—the

Raising of the Brazen Serpent, the Slaying of Goliath and of

Holophernes, the Hanging of Haaman.

[Illustration:

FIG. 204. Michelangelo. Decoration of Cove over Window.

]

In the triangles roofing the coves and in the lunettes about the arched

window heads are family groups of the ancestors and precursors of

Christ. Figure 204. The mood of anticipation which has been calm and

official in the prophets becomes agitated, passionate, personal in these

half hidden groups. So many pilgrims of eternity yearn for the

fulfillment that shall give meaning to their wanderings—a promised goal

and rest. Very subtle and beautiful is the contrast between the groups

sundered by the window heads, individually meditative, and those which

blend their longing in the close relations forced by the triangular

coves. What has begun as noble abstraction finishes in terms of almost

inexpressible tenderness. In color the whole gigantic composition is

unified by a sonorous chord of yellow and violet which is moderately

asserted in the ceiling and pushed to the utmost in the spandrels. Of

the color John La Farge has written: “The unity is so great, the balance

of effects so harmonious, that it is only by study that we see expressed

in the methods of the painting the ancient rules, handed down by

practice, which unite with the latest teaching of modern scientific

coloring.” What a mind it took to hold the tumultuous and pathetic

details of this great work within an enveloping order and calm!

[Illustration:

FIG. 205. Michelangelo. The Last Judgment.

]

In framing his great work out of nudes relieved by draped figures,

Michelangelo renewed the Grecian practice. Precisely the difference

between the Sistine ceiling and the metopes of the Parthenon, or the

frieze of Pergamon, raises the question—What does the nude of

Michelangelo express? I do not find in it, at least in the Sistine

ceiling, much of that terribleness, _terribiltà_, which has been

remarked by critics from Vasari to Henri Beyle. It seems to me rather an

art of lassitude and relaxation, the reluctantly awaking Adam being the

clue to the mood. Except for the gestures of God and Eve, the gestures

and poses are unspecific. The lithe bodies of the slaves are twisted

only that they may attain consciousness of powers which have no use. The

relaxation which marks nearly all the nudes, whether in the stories or

in the incidental ornament, is not that of fatigue after action, nor yet

that of preparation for an ordeal. In barren lassitude we have expressed

powers which do not imply action or use, but breathe a great melancholy.

We are far from the splendors of passion and achievement, we see

humanity confused at a fate that calls itself God, a passive factor in

an arbitrary process that makes the glory of the flesh a vain thing. As

a humanist, Michelangelo asserts that failing glory, as a Christian he

accepts the nothingness of mankind and the rightness of God’s

inscrutable and apparently cruel designs. Perhaps the spell of

Michelangelo, his æsthetic, to put it pedantically, is simply the noble

resignation with which the humanist accepts the Christian pessimism as

regards this world. And here I may note that Rodin has significantly

shown that even the forms of Michelangelo are not uprising and resilient

like the antique, but compressed and yielding like those of the

Christian Gothic sculptors.

Twenty-one years after the Sistine ceiling was unveiled, Michelangelo

began reluctantly the great fresco of the Last Judgment, Figure 205. He

worked on it for seven years, and it was unveiled on Christmas Day of

1541. How the choristers had the heart to chant the angelic message of

peace and good will before it, I cannot imagine. Michelangelo was

sixty-six years old, a disillusioned and embittered man, an alien in the

corrupt and pleasure loving Rome of Paul III. He has put into the Christ

all his contempt for mankind. The Christ who earlier wrathfully hurled

the darts in the Umbrian plague banners has become a far darting Apollo,

Figure 206, rejoicing in his dire task. Behind him the murky air is full

of hurtling contorted angels, in aspect quite indistinguishable from

fiends, who bear the implements of the Passion. Below, the just and

unjust rise or fall in knots and festoons of writhing nude bodies all

equally sinister. The conception is violently corporeal, and never

elsewhere in painting has the human body been used with such ingenuity

and power. But it is a power that defeats itself. I believe the

spectator is not so much appalled as confused before the Last Judgment.

Its vehemence seems so unrelieved and insensate. If this be indeed the

goal of mankind, no wonder moody Adam in the ceiling above faces his

Creator with doubt and a hint of distrust.

[Illustration:

FIG. 206. Michelangelo. Christ with the Virgin and the Apostles. From

the Last Judgment.

]

Its sheer display of force won all contemporaries, and the French critic

and superman, Stendhal, has highly praised the work for its burning

energy. While not sharing his enthusiasm, I gladly refer the reader to

his admirable pages. In my own opinion the creative ardor of

Michelangelo had waned by this time. He offers, instead, his spleen,

which is more valuable than most men’s genius, and his amazing technical

skill. Michelangelo has become Michelangelesque. That is deplorably true

in the frescoes for the Pauline Chapel which were finished in 1547, his

seventy-second year. Nothing is left but sensationalism, and the Pope

does well not to exhibit these works. As regards humanity,

Michelangelo’s vein is completely exhausted. He still is capable of

exquisite calculation, as in the design for the dome of St. Peter’s,

still retains a dæmonic capacity for work and emotion, but the sculptor

in him is nearly dead and the painter completely so. The poet of the

rugged sonnets has superseded them both. When he died at 89, in 1564,

the little ill-favored body was honored like that of a king. His sheer

power had swept the whole rising generation of artists under his sway.

To their own hurt and to the bankruptcy of the Golden Age.

Such forms as Michelangelo’s are tolerable only when possessed by that

melancholy poetry of his which gives them meaning. If the serene

intelligence of a Raphael had not found emotions to fill such forms, if

Michelangelo himself in his later years falls back on a monotonous

formula of terribleness, what hope was there for such uninspired

imitators as the Venustis, Volterras, and Vasaris? One and all, they

entertained monstrous delusions of effortless attainment—cleverly

contorted their nudes, shrewdly calculated their terrors. And the Roman

art of the Golden Age, forgetting both the wise humility of Umbria and

the reasonable pride of Florence, suddenly collapsed in the ugliest and

most irrational ostentation. Michelangelo had passed—to fulfill and to

destroy.

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VI

A CONTEMPORARY LIST OF GREAT ARTISTS, BEFORE 1510

In an offhand mention in _The Courtier_ Baldasarre Castiglione tells

us who seemed to be great artists to a cultured and well-informed

gentleman about the year 1508. Titian had not yet emerged and of the

older men only Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna are remembered. As

seniors, they are the first mentioned.

“Again various things give equal pleasure to the eyes, so that we can

with difficulty decide what are more pleasing to them. You know that

in painting Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo,

Giorgio da Castelfranco are very excellent, yet they are all unlike in

their work; so that no one of them seems to lack anything in his own

manner, since each is known as the most perfect in his style.”

_The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldesar Castiglione_, translated

by Leonard Ekstein Opdycke, New York, 1903, p. 50.

MICHELANGELO ON RENAISSANCE COUNTERPOISE

It is said then that Michelangelo once gave his advice to Marcoda

Siena, his pupil, that “one should make the figure pyramidal, spiral,

(_serpentinata_) and multiplied by one, two, and three.” Lomazzo

_Trattato_, Milan, 1484, p. 23. The pose, that is, should be contained

geometrically, should display opposing thrusts, and should be

mathematically proportioned within the inclosing geometrical form.

VASARI ON THE “MODERN STYLE”

Vasari’s account of the Grand Style or “Third Manner,” in the Preface

to Part III (De Vere’s translation, Vol. IV, pp. 79–85) is still

authoritative. He praises the artists before Leonardo, but finds in

them a certain hardness, lack of finish and uncertainty of

proportions. The change to the perfect manner was caused by the

discovery of ancient marbles.

“After them [the predecessors of Leonardo], their successors were able

to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain

antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the

Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise

the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others,

which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy

roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with

certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure but

only a movement of certain parts, which are revealed with a most

perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness,

hardness, and sharpness of manner....

[He mentions the contemporary admiration of such precursors as Francia

and Perugino.]

“But their error was afterwards clearly proved by the works of

Leonardo da Vinci, who, giving a beginning to that third manner which

we propose to call the modern—besides the force and boldness of his

drawing, and the extreme subtlety wherewith he counterfeited all the

minutenesses of nature exactly as they are—with good rule, better

order, right proportion, perfect drawing, and divine grace, abounding

in resources and having a most profound knowledge of art, may be truly

said to have endowed his figures with motion and breath.

“There followed after him, although at some distance, Giorgione da

Castelfranco, who obtained a beautiful gradation of colour in his

pictures ...; and not inferior to him in giving force, relief,

sweetness, and grace to his pictures, with his colouring, was Fra

Bartolommeo di San Marco. But more than all did the most gracious

Rafaello da Urbino, who, studying the labours of the old masters and

those of the Moderns, took the best from them, and, having gathered it

together, enriched the art of painting with that complete perfection

which was shown in ancient times by the figures of Apelles and Zeuxis,

nay, even more, if we may make bold to say it, as might be proved if

we could compare their works with his. Wherefore nature was left

vanquished by his colours....

“In the same manner, but sweeter in colouring and not so bold, there

followed Andrea del Sarto, who may be called a rare painter, for his

works are free from errors.

* * * * *

“But he who bears the palm from both the living and the dead,

transcending and eclipsing all others, is the divine Michelangelo

Buonarotti, who holds the sovereignty not merely of one of these arts,

but of all three together. This master surpasses and excels not only

all those moderns who have almost vanquished nature, but even those

most famous ancients who without a doubt did so gloriously surpass

her; and in his own self he triumphs over moderns, ancients, and

nature, who could scarcely conceive anything so strange and so

difficult that he would not be able, by the force of his most divine

intellect and by means of his industry, draughtsmanship, art, judgment

and grace, to excel it by a great measure; and that not only in

painting and in the use of colours under which title are comprised all

forms, and all bodies upright or not upright, palpable or impalpable,

visible or invisible, but also in the highest perfection of bodies in

the round, with the point of his chisel.”

UNITY OF DESIGN IN THE RENAISSANCE

The humanist Benedetto Varchi, renewing the debate which Leonardo da

Vinci had started concerning the relative rank of sculpture and

painting, sent the text of his lecture to Michelangelo and asked for

his opinion. The sculptor writes in 1549:

“In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion

as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be

considered bad as it approaches the effect of painting. I used to

consider that sculpture was the lantern of painting and that between

the two things there was the same difference as that between the sun

and the moon. But now that I have read your book, in which, speaking

as a philosopher, you say that things which have the same end are

themselves the same, I have changed my opinion; and I now consider

that painting and sculpture are one and the same thing, unless greater

nobility be imparted by the necessity for a keener judgment, greater

difficulties of execution, stricter limitations and harder work. And

if this be the case, no painter ought to think less of sculpture than

of painting and no sculptor less of painting than of sculpture. By

sculpture I mean the sort that is executed by cutting away from the

block: the sort that is executed by building up resembles painting.

That is enough, for as one and the other, that is to say, both

painting and sculpture proceed from the same faculty, it would be an

easy matter to establish harmony between them and to let such disputes

alone, for they occupy more time than the execution of the figures

themselves. As to that man [Leonardo da Vinci] who wrote saying that

painting was more noble than sculpture, as though he knew as much

about it as he did of the other subjects on which he has written, why

my serving-maid would have written better!”

From Robert W. Carden, _Michelangelo, a Record of his Life_, Boston

and New York, 1913, a book which from Michelangelo’s letters gives a

very intimate view of the sculptor’s character.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS ON THE GRAND STYLE

No critic of art has better expressed the ideal of the Grand Style

than Sir Joshua Reynolds. I quote from the third of his _Discourses_,

in the admirable edition of Roger E. Fry, New York, 1906. pp. 51 ff.

“Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The

_gusto grande_ of the Italians, the _beau idéal_ of the French and the

_great style_, _genius_ and _taste_ among the English, are but

different appellations of the same thing. It is this intellectual

dignity, they say, that ennobles the Painter’s Art; that lays the line

between him and the mere mechanic: and produces those great effects in

an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts,

are scarcely able to retain....” [The grand style is seen to rest upon

a sort of generalizing tendency.] “The whole beauty and grandeur of

the Art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all

singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every

kind.” [The artist] “being enabled to distinguish the accidental

deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their

general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more

perfect than any one original; and, what may seem a paradox, he learns

to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object.”

[Sir Joshua advocates the study of the antique, not to imitate any

single work, but to master the principle that underlies them all.]

“Beauty and simplicity have so great a share in the composition of the

great style, that he who has acquired them has little else to learn.

It must not, indeed, be forgotten that there is a nobleness of

conception, which goes beyond any thing in the mere exhibition of

perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures

with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of

philosophic wisdom, or heroic virtue. This can only be acquired by him

that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of

knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of

ancient and modern poetry.”

KENYON COX ON THE CLASSIC SPIRIT

The ideals of the High Renaissance are eloquently, if incidentally,

defined by the late Kenyon Cox in _The Classic Point of View_, New

York, 1911. pp. 3–5.

“The Classic spirit is the disinterested search for perfection; it is

the love of clearness and reasonableness and self-control; it is,

above all, the love of permanence and of continuity. It asks of a work

of art, not that it shall be novel or effective, but that it shall be

fine and noble. It seeks not merely to express individuality or

emotion, but to express disciplined emotion and individuality

restrained by law. It strives for the essential rather than the

accidental, the eternal rather than the momentary—loves impersonality

more than personality, and feels more power in the orderly succession

of the hours and the seasons than in the violence of earthquake or of

storm. And it loves to steep itself in tradition. It would have each

new work connect itself in the mind of him who sees it with all the

noble and lively works of the past, bringing them to his memory and

making their beauty and charm a part of the beauty and charm of the

work before him. It does not deny originality and individuality—they

are as welcome as inevitable. It does not consider tradition as

immutable or set rigid bounds to invention. But it desires that each

new presentation of truth and beauty shall show us the old truth and

the old beauty, seen only from a different angle and colored by a

different medium. It wishes to add link by link to the chain of

tradition, but it does not wish to break the chain.”

THE END OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE COMING OF FEAR

An artistic collapse whether in an artist or a nation is usually due

to a prior collapse in morale. Florence suffered such loss of face

when the Imperialists stormed the city and crushed the Republic. We

may study the disaster in Michelangelo’s personal case and in its

effect on the citizenry at large. Michelangelo was military engineer.

Writing from Venice, Sept. 25, 1529, he describes his desertion with

singular objectivity:

“I had intended to remain in Florence to the end of the war, having no

fears for my own safety. But on Tuesday morning, the 21st of

September, a certain person came out by the Porta a San Nicolò while I

was engaged in inspecting the bastions, and whispered in my ear that I

must remain there no longer if I valued my life. He accompanied me to

my house, dined there, brought me horses, and never left my side until

he had carried me out of Florence, declaring that it was for my good

that he so acted. Whether it were God or the devil I cannot say.”

From Robert W. Carden, _Michelangelo, a Record of his Life_, Boston

and New York, 1913, p. 168.

Florence suffered not from hallucinations, as this seems to have been,

but from the humiliation and confusion incident upon defeat and

foreign occupation. I translate from Benedetto Varchi’s _Storia_, the

extract in Ancona and Bacci’s _Manuele della Letteratura Italiana_,

Vol. II, p. 506.

“The city of Florence when her liberty was lost was full of such

sorrow, of such terror, of such confusion, that it can hardly be

described or even imagined.... The nobles were indignant among

themselves and inwardly resented being scorned and vilified by the

lowest classes; the plebeians in extreme need, would not refrain at

least from relieving their minds about the nobility; the rich, how

they could manage not to lose their property; the poor, day and night,

what they should do not to die utterly and of famine; the citizens

were dismayed and desperate, because they had spent and lost a lot:

the peasants, much more, because there remained for them nothing at

all; the priests were ashamed of having deceived the laity; the laity

grieved at having believed the priests; men had become extraordinarily

suspicious and covetous; women immeasurably incredulous and

distrustful: finally, every one with lowered face and staring eyes,

seemed beside himself, and all without exception pallid and bewildered

feared at all times every sort of ill.”

From such a shell-shocked community as this, no serene or noble art

was to be expected. It was much that Florence in bondage still could

nurture the exquisitely morbid art of a Pontormo and the aristocratic

detachment and _finesse_ of a Bronzino.

[Illustration:

FIG. 207. Giovanni Bellini. St. Francis receiving the Stigmata.—_H. C.

Frick Coll., New York._

]