stadium, of the sanctification of the body, of the apotheosis of man, of
the religion of life and nature and joy; revealed to the man of the
Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained, diseased, despised
body but a deformed piece of baseness, which his priests tell him
belongs to the worms and to Satan; who has been taught that the monk
living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out with fastings
and bleeding with flagellation, is the nearest approach to divinity; who
has seen Divinity itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding
from the cross; and who is for ever reminded that the kingdom of this
Divinity is not of this world.
What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what dawning
doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and what remorse are not
the fruit of this sight of antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist? Is he
to forget the saints and Christ and give himself over to Satan and to
antiquity? Only one man boldly said Yes. Mantegna abjured his faith,
abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time, and in
so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover, the
worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from the
antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da
Fiesoli. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other
artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of
Orcagna, but of Masaccio, of Uccello, of Poliaiolo and Donatitis. For
the mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to
leave the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced
to a mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim;
dreaded to soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black
cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd
seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags
off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering
at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body;
fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense
atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might
break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the
Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous
form, colour, and character; unsubstantial and unruffled, dreaming
feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath
their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid,
vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of
inanity; of divine dolls with pallid flaxen locks, floating between
heaven and earth, playing upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to
faint visions of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless,
meaningless, across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints
seated, arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of
liquid gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the
dearly-purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in
an æsthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a
paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating
the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless
virgins; happy in smoothing the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and
earth, and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies, and of the
iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments of music, haloes,
flowers, with threads of gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing
art to something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of pious
nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a something too
delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human wear or human
food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either in its study
of the truly existing, or in its study of antique beauty.
Mantegna, the learned, the archæological, the pagan, who renounces his
times and his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and
bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the
antique, the two extremes, are both exceptions. The innumerable artists
of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the
antique and the modern, to unite the pagan and the Christian--some, like
Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere form, encrusting
marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal house,
bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying baskets
and noble Stroggi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded over
their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and child-like
pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together
half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the
trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched
collars, among the pines and porticos, the sprawling children, barking
dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of
his Scripture histories; yet others using the antique as mere pageant
shows, allegorical mummeries destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or
Marquis of Mantua, together with hurdle races of Jews, hags, and
riderless donkeys.
Little by little the antique amalgamates with the modern; the art born
of the Middle Ages absorbs the art born of paganism; but how slowly, and
with what fantastic and ludicrous results at first; as when the
anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked Roman prize-fighters
as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian; or when the pious Perugino (pious at
least with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic, beardless archangels
as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling beatically on thin
little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath their wondrously
ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at Perugia; when he
masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as Socrates and haggard
anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of all, when he attires in
scantiest of clinging antique drapery his mild and pensive Madonnas,
and, with daintily-pointed toes, places them to throne bashfully on
allegorical chariots as Venus or Diana.
Long is the period of amalgamation, and little are the results
throughout that long early Renaissance. Mantegna, Piero della Francesca,
Melozzo, Ghirlandajo, Filippino, Botticelli, Verrocchio, have none of
them shown us the perfect fusion of the two elements whose union is to
give us Michel Angelo, Raphael, and all the great perfect artists of the
early sixteenth century; the two elements are for ever ill-combined and
hostile to each other; the modern vulgarizes the antique, the antique
paralyzes the modern. And meanwhile the fifteenth century, the century
of study, of conflict, and of confusion, is rapidly drawing to a close;
eight or ten more years, and it will be gone. Is the new century to find
the antique still dead and the modern still mediæval?
The antique and the modern had met for the first time and as
irreconcileable enemies in the cloisters of Pisa; and the modern had
triumphed in the great mediæval fresco of the Triumph of Death. By a
strange coincidence, by a sublime jest of accident, the antique and the
modern were destined to meet again, and this time indissolubly united,
in a painting representing the Resurrection. Yes, Signorelli's fresco in
Orvieto Cathedral is indeed a resurrection, the resurrection of human
beauty after the long death-slumber of the Middle Ages. And the artist
would seem to have been dimly conscious of the great allegory he was
painting. Here and there are strewn skulls; skeletons stand leering by,
as if in remembrance of the ghastly past, and as a token of former
death; but magnificent youths are breaking through the crust of the
earth, emerging, taking shape and flesh; arising, strong and proud,
ready to go forth at the bidding of the Titanic angels who announce from
on high with trumpet sound and waving banners that the death of the
world has come to an end, and that humanity has arisen once more in the
youth and beauty of antiquity.
II.
Signorelli's fresceos at Orvieto, at once the latest works of the
fifteenth century, and the latest works of an old man nurtured in the
traditions of Benozzo Gozzoli and of Piero della Francesca, mark the
beginning of the maturity and perfection of Italian art. From them
Michel Angelo learns what he could not be taught even by his master
Ghirlandajo, the grand and cold realist; he learns, and what he has
learned at Orvieto he teaches with doubled force in Rome; and the
ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, the superb and heroic nudities, the
majestic draperies, the reappearance in the modern art of painting of
the spirit and hand of Phidias, give a new impulse and hasten on
perfection. When the doors of the chapel are at length opened, Raphael
forgets Perugino; Fra Bartolomeo forgets Botticelli; Sodoma forgets
Leonardo; the narrower hesitating styles of the fifteenth century are
abandoned, as the great example is disseminated throughout Italy; and
even the tumult of angels in glory which the Lombard Correggio is to
paint in far-off Parma, and the daringly simple Bacchus and Ariadne with
which Tintoret will decorate the Ducal palace more than fifty years
later, all that is great and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the
spirit of antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renaissance art,
seems due to the impulse of Michel Angelo, and, through him, to the
example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging
angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with
delicate limbs and exquisite head, rich with tendril-like locks against
the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated,
with the head and drapery of a Niobe, on the sack of flour in the
Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half
concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured
fountain in Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love," with the greenish blue
sky and hazy light of evening behind her; from the most extreme
examples of the most extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the
most intense examples of the remotest schools of Tuscany and Umbria,
throughout the art of the early sixteenth century, of those thirty years
which were the years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but
always distinct, the union of the living art born of the Middle Ages
with the dead art left by antiquity, a union producing life and
perfection, the great art of the Renaissance.
This much is clear and easy of definition; but what is neither clearly
understood nor clearly defined is the nature of this union, the manner
in which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to
speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated
the modern; but all this explains but little; art is not a metaphysical
figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to
speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique
with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the
Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection,
but not existing in the mediæval civilization of the fifteenth century;
of elements of civilization which gave what the civilization of the
fifteenth century,--which could give colour, perspective, grouping, and
landscape,--could never have afforded: the nude, drapery, and gesture.
The naked human body, which the Greeks, had trained, studied and
idolized, did not exist in the fifteenth century; in its stead there was
only the undressed body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and
distorted by the garments only just cast off, cramped and bent by
sedentary occupations, livid with the plague-spots of the Middle Ages,
scarred by the whip-marks of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and
unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the eyes of others,
shivered and cowered for cold and for shame. The Giottesques ignored its
very existence, conceiving humanity as a bodiless creature, with face
and hands to express emotion, and just enough malformed legs and feet to
be either standing or moving; further, beneath the garments there was
nothing. The realists of the fifteenth century tore off the clothes and
drew the ugly thing beneath, and brought the corpses from the
lazar-houses, and stole them from the gallows, in order to see how bone
fitted into bone, and muscle was stretched over muscle. They learned to
perfection the anatomy of the human frame, but they could not learn its
beauty; they became even reconciled to the ugliness they were accustomed
to see, and, with their minds full of antique examples, Verrocchio,
Donatello, Pollaiolo, and Ghirlandajo, the greatest anatomists of the
fifteenth century, imitated their coarse and ill-made living models when
they imagined that they were imitating antique marbles.
So much for the nude. Drapery, as the ancients understood it in the
delicate plaits of Greek chiton and tunic, in the grand folds of Roman
toga, the fifteenth century could not show; it knew only the stiff,
scanty raiment of the active classes, the shapeless masses of lined
cloth of the merchants and magistrates, the prudish and ostentatious
starched dress of the women, and the coarse, lumpish garb of the monks.
The artist of the fifteenth century knew drapery only as an exotic, an
exotic with whose representation the habit of seeing mediæval costume
was for ever interfering; on the stripped, unseemly, indecent body he
places, with the stiffness of artificiality, drapery such as he has
never seen upon any living creature; the result is awkwardness and
rigidity. And what attitude, what gesture, can he expect from this
stripped and artificially draped model? None, for the model scarce knows
how to stand in so unaccustomed a condition of body. The artist must
seek for attitude and gesture among his townsfolk, and among them he can
find only trivial, awkward, often vulgar movement. They have never been
taught how to stand or to move with grace and dignity; the artist must
study attitude and gesture in the marketplace or the bull-baiting
ground, where Ghirlandajo found his jauntily strutting idlers, and
Verrocchio his brutally staggering prize-fighters. Between the
constrained attitudinizing of Byzantine and Giottesque tradition, and
the imitation of the movements of clodhoppers and ragamuffins, the
realist of the fifteenth century would wander hopelessly were it not for
the antique. Genius and science are of no avail; the position of Christ
in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean and
servile; the movements of the "Thunderstricken" in Signorelli's lunettes
is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic, and the
comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison in
Filippino's "Liberation of St. Peter" is gradually going to sleep and
collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble.
And the same applies to sculptured figures or to figures standing
isolated like statues; no Greek would have ventured upon the swaggering
position, with legs apart and elbows out, of Donatello's "St. George,"
or Perugino's "St. Michael;" and a young Athenian who should have
assumed the attitude of Verrocchio's "David," with tripping legs and
hand clapped on his hip, would have been sent away from school as a
saucy little ragamuffin.
Coarse, nude, stiff drapery, vulgar attitude, was all that the fifteenth
century could offer to its artists; but antiquity could offer more and
very different things--the naked body developed by the most artistic
training, drapery the most natural and refined, and attitude and gesture
regulated by an education the most careful and artistic; and all these
things antiquity gave to the artists of the Renaissance. They did not
copy antique statues as living naked men and women, but they corrected
the faults of their living models by the example of the statues; they
did not copy antique stone draperies in coloured pictures, but they
arranged the robes on their models with the antique folds well in their
memory; they did not give the gestures of statues to living figures, but
they made the living figures move in accordance with those principles of
harmony which they had found exemplified in the statues.
They did not imitate the antique, they studied it; they obtained through
the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity,
and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the
mediæval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian
painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is
perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is
modern; but in the earlier times, when the two elements were still
separate, we can see them opposite each other and compare them in the
works of the greatest artists. Wherever, in the paintings of the early
Renaissance, there is realism, marked by the costume of the times, there
is ugliness of form and vulgarity of movement; where there is idealism,
marked by imitation of the antique, the nude, and drapery, there is
beauty and dignity. We need only compare Filippino's "Scene before the
Proconsul" with his "Raising of the King's Son" in the Brancacci Chapel;
the grand attitude and draperies of Ghirlandajo's "Zachariah" with the
vulgar dress and movements of the Florentine citizens surrounding him;
Benozzo Gozzoli's noble naked figure of Noah with his ungainly,
hideously dressed figure of Cosimo de' Medici; Mantegna's exquisite
Judith with his preposterous Marquis of Mantua; in short all the purely
realistic with all the purely idealistic art of the fifteenth century.
We may give one last instance. In Signorelli's Orvieto frescoes there is
a figure of a young man, with aquiline features, long crisp hair and
strongly developed throat, which reappears unmistakably in all the
frescoes, and in some of them twice and thrice in various positions. His
naked figure is magnificent, his attitudes splendid, his thrown-back
head superb, whether he be slowly and painfully emerging from the earth,
staggered and gasping with his newly-infused life, or sinking oppressed
on the ground, broken and crushed by the sound of the trumpet of
judgment; or whether he be moving forward with ineffable longing towards
the angel about to award him the crown of the blessed; in all these
positions he is heroically beautiful.
We meet him again, unmistakable, but how different, in the realistic
group of the "Thunderstricken,"--the long, lank youth, with
spindle-shanks and egg-shaped body, bounding forward, with most
grotesque strides, over the uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses
with soles and nostrils uppermost, lying in beast-like confusion. This
youth, with something of a harlequin in his jumps and in his ridiculous
thin legs and preposterous round body, is evidently the model for the
naked demi-gods of the "Resurrection" and the "Paradise:" he is the
handsome boy as the fifteenth century gave him to Signorelli; opposite,
he is the living youth of the fifteenth century idealized by the study
of ancient sculpture; just as the "Thunderstricken" may be some scene of
street massacre such as Signorelli may have witnessed at Cortona or
Perugia, while the agonies of the "Hell" are the grouped and superb
agonies taught by the antique; just as the two archangels of the "Hell,"
in their armour of Baglioni's heavy cavalry, may represent the modern
element, and the same archangels, naked, with magnificent flying
draperies, blowing the trumpets of the Resurrection, may show the
antique element in Renaissance art. The antique influence was not,
indeed, equally strong throughout Italy; it was strongest in the Tuscan
school which, seeking for perfection of linear form, found that
perfection in the antique; it was weakest in the Lombard and Venetian
schools, which sought for what the antique could not give, light and
shade and colour; the antique was most efficacious where it was most
indispensable, and it was more necessary to a Tuscan, strong only with
his charcoal or pencil than to Leonardo da Vinci, who could make an
imperfect figure, smiling mysteriously from out of the gloom, more
fascinating than the finest drawn Florentine Madonna, and could surround
an insignificant childish head with the wondrous sheen and ripple of
hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was also less necessary to
Giorgione and Titian, who could hide coarse limbs beneath their
draperies of precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of their
palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess.
But even the Lombards, even the Venetians, required the antique
influence. They could not perhaps have obtained it direct like the
Tuscans; the colourists and masters of light and shade might never have
understood the blank lines and faint shadows of the marble: they
received the antique influence, strong but modified by the medium
through which it had passed, from Mantegna; and the relentless
self-sacrifice to antiquity, the self-paralyzation of the great artist,
was not without its use; from Venetian Padua, Mantegna influenced the
Bellini and Giorgione; from Lombard Mantua, he influenced Leonardo; and
Mantegna's influence was that of the antique.