intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre;
their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself,
perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had
modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery;
the generation of artists who arose at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, and who opened the period of the Renaissance, were sculptors or
pupils of sculptors. When we see these vigorous lovers of Nature, these
heroic searchers after truth, suddenly pushing aside the decrepit
Giottesque allegory-mongers, we ask ourselves in astonishment whence
they have arisen, and how those broken-down artists of effete art could
have begotten such a generation of giants. Whence do they come?
Certainly not from the studios of the Giottesques; no, they issue out of
the workshops of the stone-mason, of the goldsmith, of the worker in
bronze, of the sculptor. Vasari has preserved the tradition that
Masolino and Paolo Uccello were apprentices of Ghiberti; he has remarked
that their greatest contemporary, Masaccio, "trod in the steps of
Brunelleschi and of Donatello." Pollaiolo and Verrocchio we know to have
been equally excellent as painters and as workers in bronze; sculpture,
at once more naturalistic and more constantly under the influence of the
antique, had for the second time laboured for painting. Itself a
subordinate art, without real vitality, without deep roots in the
civilization, sculpture was destined to remain the unsuccessful pupil of
the antique, and the unsuccessful rival of painting; but sculpture had
for its mission to prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting
for antique influence, and the noblest work of Ghiberti and Donatello
was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory to the Pisani had been Giotto.
With Masaccio began the study of Nature for its own sake, the desire of
reproducing external objects without any regard to their significance as
symbols or as parts of a story, the passionate wish to arrive at
absolute realization. The merely suggestive outline art of the
Giottesques had come to an end; the suggestion became a matter of
indifference; the realization became a paramount interest; the story was
forgotten in the telling, the religious thought was lost in the search
for the artistic form. The Giottesques had used debased conventionalism
to represent action with wonderful narrative and logical power; the
artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful narrators and foolish
allegorists almost in proportion as they became skilful draughtsmen and
colourists; the Saints had become to Masaccio merely so many lay
figures on to which to cast drapery; for Fra Filippo, the Madonna was a
mere peasant model; for Filippino Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle
meant merely an opportunity of congregating a number of admirable
portrait figures in the dress of the day; the Baptism for Verrocchio had
significance only as a study of muscular legs and arms; and the
sacrifice of Noah had no importance for Uccello save as a grand
opportunity for foreshortenings. In the hands of the Giottesques,
interested in the subject and indifferent to the representation,
painting had remained stationary for eighty years; for eighty years did
it develop in the hands of the men of the fifteenth century, indifferent
to the subject and passionately interested in the representation. The
unity, the appearance of relative perfection of the art had disappeared
with the limits within which the Giottesques had been satisfied to move;
instead of the intelligible and solemn conventionalism of the
Giottesques, we see only disorder, half-understood ideas and abortive
attempts, confusion which reminds us of those enigmatic sheets on which
Leonardo or Michel Angelo scrawled out their ideas, drawings within
drawings, plans of buildings scratched over Madonna heads, single
flowers upside down next to flayed arms, calculations, monsters,
sonnets, a very chaos of thoughts and of shapes, in which the plan of
the artist is inextricably lost, which mean everything and nothing, but
out of whose unintelligible network of lines and curves have issued
masterpieces, and which only the foolish or the would-be philosophical
would exchange for some intelligible, hopelessly finished and finite
illustration out of a Bible or a book of travels.
Anatomy, perspective, colour, drapery, effects of light, of water, of
shadow, forms of trees and flowers, converging lines of architecture,
all this at once absorbed and distracted the attention of the artists of
the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated,
another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to
pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the
bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx,
mysterious in its very simplicity and serenity--the antique.
The exhumation of the antique had, as we have seen, been contemporaneous
with the birth of painting; nay, the study of the remains of antique
sculpture had, in contributing to form Niccoto Pisano, indirectly helped
to form Giotto; the very painter of the "Triumph of Death" had inserted
into his terrible fresco two-winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied
without any alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in which they
may have sustained the usual _Dis Manibus Sacrum_. There had been, on
the part of both sculptors and painters, a constant study of the
antique; but during the Giottesque period this study had been limited to
technicalities, and had in no way affected the conception of art. The
mediæval artists, surrounded by physical deformities, and seeing
sanctity in sickness and dirt, little accustomed to observe the human
figure, were incapable, both as men and as artists, of at all entering
into the spirit of antique art. They could not perceive the superior
beauty of the antique; they could recognize only its superior science
and its superior handicraft, and these they studied to obtain.
Giovanni Pisano, sculpturing the unfleshed, carved carcases of the
devils who leer, writhe, crunch, and tear on the outside of Orvieto
Cathedral, and the Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated
Christs, hanging livid and broken from the cross, which abound in
Tuscany and Umbria, the artists who produced these loathsome and
lugubrious works were indubitably students of the antique; but they had
learned from it not a love for beautiful form and noble drapery, but
merely the general shape of the limbs and the general fall of the
garments; the anatomical science and technical processes of antiquity
were being used to produce the most intensely un-antique, the most
intensely mediæval works. Thus matters stood in the time of Giotto. His
followers, who studied only arrangement, probably consulted the antique
as little as they consulted Nature; but the contemporary sculptors were
brought by the very constitution of their art into close contact both
with Nature and with the antique; they studied both with determination,
and handed over the results of their labours to the sculptor-taught
painters of the fifteenth century.
Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of the
Renaissance--the study of Nature, and the study of the antique; both
understood slowly, imperfectly; the one counteracting the effect of the
other; the study of Nature now scaring away all antique influence; the
study of the antique now distorting all imitation of Nature; rival
forces confusing the artist and marring the work, until, when each could
receive its due, the one corrected the other, and they combined,
producing by this marriage of the living reality with the dead but
immortal beauty, the great art of Michel Angelo, of Raphael, and of
Titian: double like its origin, antique and modern, real and ideal.
The study of the antique is thus placed opposite to the study of Nature,
the comprehension of the works of antiquity is the momentary antagonist
of the comprehension of Nature. And this may seem strange, when we
consider that antique art was itself due to perfect comprehension of
Nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The study of Nature,
as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the study of effects
which had remained unnoticed by antiquity; and the study of the statue,
colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, interfered with, and
was interfered with by, the study of colour, of light and shade, of
perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to
learn from Nature. Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization
of the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from the Middle
Ages, was entirely at variance with the influence of antique
civilization through the medium of ancient art; the Middle Ages and
antiquity, Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed to each
other than could be the statue and the easel picture, the fresco and
the bas-relief.
First, then, we have the hostility between painting and sculpture,
between the _modus operandi_ of the modern and the _modus operandi_ of
the ancient art. Antique art is in the first place purely linear art,
colourless, tintless, without light and shade; next, it is essentially
the art of the isolated figure, without background, grouping, or
perspective. As linear art it could directly affect only that branch of
painting which was itself linear, and as art of the isolated figure it
was ever being contradicted by the constantly developing arts of
perspective and landscape. The antique never directly influenced the
Venetians, not from reasons of geography and culture, but from the fact
that Venetian painting, founded from the earliest times upon a system of
colour, could not be affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system
of modelled, colourless forms; the men who saw form only through the
medium of colour could not learn much from purely linear form; hence it
is that even after a certain amount of antique imitation had passed into
Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, the Venetian painters
display comparatively little antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio,
Cima, and other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are mainly
modern and Venetian; and Giorgione, Titian, and even the eclectic
Tintoret were more interested in the bright lights of a steel
breastplate than in the shape of a limb, and preferred in their hearts a
shot brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery modelled by
an ancient.
The antique influence was naturally strongest among the Tuscan schools;
because the Tuscan schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the
draughtsman only recognized in antique sculpture the highest perfection
of that linear form which was his own domain. The antique not only
appealed most to the linear schools, but even in them it could strongly
influence only the purely linear part; it is strong in the drawings and
weak in the paintings. As long as the artists had only the pencil or
pen, they could reproduce much of the linear perfection of the antique;
they were, so to speak, alone with it; but as soon as they brought in
colour, perspective, and scenery, the linear perfection was lost in
attempts at something new; the antique was put to flight by the modern.
Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost antique, his tempera
picture of Venus, with the pale blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the
flower-embroidered garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively
mediæval; Pinturricchio's sketch of fauns and satyrs contrasts strangely
with his frescos in the library of Silena; Mantegna himself,
supernaturally antique in his engravings, becomes almost trivial and
modern in his oil paintings. Do what they might, draw from the antique,
calculate its proportions, the artists of the Renaissance found
themselves baffled as soon as they attempted to apply the result of
their linear studies to coloured pictures; as soon as they tried to
make the antique unite with the modern, one of the two elements was sure
to succumb. In Botticelli, draughtsman and student though he was, the
modern, the mediæval, that part of the art which had arisen in the
Middle Ages, invariably had the upper hand; his Venus has, despite her
forms studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some
earlier discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, the woe-begone prudery of
a Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her
unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up
from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in
the paled tempera colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea,
this mediæval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is no pleasing sight.
In the Allegory of Spring in the Academy of Florence, we again have the
antique; goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the gentle Sandro
Botticelli has assuredly studied from some old statue of Agrippina or
Faustina; but what strange livid tints are there beneath those
draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a
green, ghostlike light illumines the garden of Venus! Are these
goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or
are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines,
incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist?
In Sandro Botticelli the teachings of the statue are forgotten or
distorted when the artist takes up his palette and brushes; in his far
greater contemporary, Andrea Mantegna, the ever-present antique chills
and arrests the vitality of the modern. Mantegna, the pupil of the
ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop even more than the pupil of
Donatello, studies for his paintings not from Nature, but from
sculpture; his figures are seen in strange projection and
foreshortening, like figures in a high relief seen from below; despite
his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn out of the background;
despite the rich colours which he displays in his Veronese altar-piece,
they look like painted marbles, with their hard clots of stone-like hair
and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies,
clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They
are beautiful petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's
masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite,
pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless
out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even
the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine
Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of
three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and
even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton,
sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his
finned horse, preparing to strike his adversary with a bunch of fish
which he brandishes above him; on him is rushing, careering on an
osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury stretching every
tendon, his long clawed feet striking into the flanks of his steed, his
sharp, reed-crowned head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his
opponent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run down his enemy
as a ship runs down another; and further off a young Triton, with
clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the
rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying
Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard,
vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity,
unaccountably antique. The other print, called the Bacchanal, has no
background: half-a-dozen male figures stand separate and naked as in a
bas-relief. Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub; a satyr, with
acanthus-leaves growing wondrously out of him, half man, half plant, is
emptying a cup; a heavy Silenus is prone upon the ground; a faun, seated
upon the vat, is supporting in his arms a beautiful sinking youth;
another youth, grand, muscular and grave as a statue, stands on the
further side. Is this really a bacchanal? Yes, for there is the paunchy
Silenus, there are the fauns, there the vat and vine-wreaths and
drinking-horns. And yet it cannot be a bacchanal. Compare with it one of
Rubens's orgies, where the overgrown, rubicund men and women and fauns
tumble about in tumultuous, riotous intoxication: that is a bacchanal;
they have been drinking, those magnificent brutes, there is wine firing
their blood and weighing down their heads. But here all is different, in
this so-called Bacchanal of Mantegna. This heavy Silenus is supine like
a mass of marble; these fauns are shy and mute; these youths are grave
and sombre; there is no wine in the cups, there are no lees in the vat,
there is no life in these magnificent colossal forms; there is no blood
in their grandly bent lips, no light in their wide-opened eyes; it is
not the drowsiness of intoxication which is weighing down the youth
sustained by the faun; it is no grape-juice, which gives that strange,
vague glance. No; they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink; the
grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat contains no fruits that
have ripened beneath our sun. These strange, mute, solemn revellers have
drunk of Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of death and of
marble; they are the ghosts of the dead ones of antiquity, revisiting
the artist of the Renaissance, who paints them, thinking he is painting
life, while that which he paints is in reality death.
This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the works of both
Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly technical; the antique is frustrated
in Botticelli, not so much by the Christian, the mediæval, the modern
mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which
disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests
Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of paganism
deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture
hampering painting. But this technical contest between two arts, the one
not yet fully developed, the other not yet fully understood, is as
nothing compared with the contest between the two civilizations, the
antique and the modern; between the habits and tendencies of the
contemporaries of the artists of the Renaissance and of the artists
themselves, and the habits and tendencies of the antique artists and
their contemporaries. We are apt to think of the Renaissance as of a
period closely resembling antiquity, misled by the inevitable similarity
between southern and democratic countries of whatever age; misled still
less pardonably by the Ciceronian pedantries and pseudo-antique
obscurities of a few humanists, and by the pseudo-Corinthian arabesques
and capitals of a few learned architects. But all this was mere
archæological finery borrowed by a civilization in itself entirely
unlike that of ancient Greece.
The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the flowering time of that
great mediæval movement which had germinated early in the twelfth
century; it was merely a more advanced stage of the civilization which
had produced Dante and Giotto, of the civilization which was destined to
produce Luther and Rabelais. The fifteenth century was merely the
continuation of the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had been of
the thirteenth; there had been growth and improvement; development of
the more modern, diminishing of the more mediæval elements; but, despite
growth and the changes due to growth, the Renaissance was part and
parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits
were mediæval, opposed to the open-air life, the physical training, and
the materialistic religion of antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio
and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those
of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly
impressions given by the Renaissance to its artists. Large towns, in
which thousands of human beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy
streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the projecting roofs;
and in these cities an incessant commercial activity, with no relief
save festivals at the churches, brawls at the taverns, and carnival
buffooneries. Men and women pale and meagre for want of air, and light,
and movement; undeveloped, untrained bodies, warped by constant work at
the loom or at the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the soldier
and the vulgar nimbleness of the 'prentice. And these men and women
dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but
heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous in form; citizens
in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps; ladies in stiff and foldless
brocade hoops and stomachers; artisans in striped and close-adhering
hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering armour-plates,
ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather, a shapeless shell of iron, bulging
out and angular, in which the body was buried as successfully as in the
robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the
Renaissance in the works of all its painters; heavy in Ghirlandajo,
vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in
Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediæval stiffness,
awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys,
companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's
Building of Babel.
These are the prosperous townsfolk, among whom the Renaissance artist
is but too glad to seek for models; but besides these there are
lamentable sights, mediæval beyond words, at every street corner--dwarfs
and cripples, maimed and diseased beggars of all degrees of
loathsomeness, lepers and epileptics, and infinite numbers of monks,
brown, grey and black, in sack-shaped frocks and pointed hoods, with
shaven crown and cropped beard, emaciated with penance or bloated with
gluttony. And all this the painter sees, daily, hourly; it is his
standard of humanity, and as such finds its way into every picture. It
is the living; but opposite it arises the dead. Let us turn aside from
the crowd of the mediæval city, and look at what the workmen have just
laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought from Rome or from
Greece. Look at this: it is corroded by oxides, battered by ill-usage,
stained with earth: it is not a group, not even a whole statue, it has
neither head nor arms remaining; it is a mere broken fragment of antique
sculpture,--a naked body with a fold or two of drapery; it is not by
Phidias nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be Greek; it may be some
cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, in the days of Hadrian. But to
the artist of the fifteenth century it is the revelation of a whole
world, a world in itself. We can scarcely realize all this; but let us
look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have felt the man of the
Renaissance in the presence of that mutilated, stained, battered torso.
He sees in that broken stump a grandeur of outline, a magnificence of
osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and sinew, a smooth, firm
covering of flesh, such as he would vainly seek in any of his living
models; he sees a delicate and infinite variety of indentures, of
projections, of creases following the bend of every limb; he sees, where
the surface still exists intact, an elasticity of skin, a buoyancy of
hidden life such as all the colours of his palette are unable to
imitate; and in this piece of drapery, negligently gathered over the
hips or robed upon the arm, he sees a magnificent alternation of large
folds and small creases, of straight lines, and broken lines, and
curves. He sees all this; but he sees more: the broken torso is, as we
have said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation of a world.