I
Here have I been in Italy half a book, and scarcely a page about the
Pictures or the “National Monuments.” _Ci vuol pazienza._ I fear you
will soon cry “hold enough,” as I have cried many a time in these
endless galleries congested with bad pictures, yet apparently never to
be weeded. For the bad Masters were just as prolific as the good,
besides having the advantage of numbers. Civerchio, Crespi, Garofalo,
the Caracci, Penni, Guercino, Domenichino—the very names recall acres
of vast glaring canvases, and the memory of Pistoja with only one
picture to see—and that a Lorenzo di Credi—is as the shadow of a great
rock in a weary land. Berenson, that prince of connoisseurs and creative
critics, has done brave service both in dethroning and uplifting. Yet am
I convinced there is still a wilderness of invaluable pictures by
unvalued artists, who, to-day obscure, shall to-morrow be exalted in
glory. Mutations of taste are not yet foreclosed: Michelangelo himself
with his Super-statues, may recede and rejoin the mellifluous Raphael,
while Siena replaces Florence. The art of Japan may win further
victories, or we may follow the great expounder of Renaissance painting
to his Chinese Canossa. Or the revolt against anecdote may spread to
sacred anecdote, and disestablish the bulk of Christian art. I can
imagine a newer Pre-Raphaelitism ruling the vogue, and Stefano da
Zevio’s _St. Catherine in the Rose-Garden_ becoming the centre of the
world’s desire. I have a weakness myself for this Veronese picture, just
because it is so frankly free from so many artistic virtues, so
unpretentious of reality, so candidly a pattern, a reverie in roses and
birds and angels and gold, a poem, a melting music. I like this new
chord of roses and haloes, it is a rare harmony, a lovely marriage of
heaven and earth. I can well imagine a visual art arising which will
repudiate realities altogether. The cinematograph has come to complete
the lesson of the camera, and to throw back the artist on his own soul.
But whatever revolutions in taste await us, my peregrinations have
convinced me that there is no single consciousness in the world that
holds a knowledge of the treasure of art, even though we limited the art
to Italian, nay though we omitted sculpture and architecture and
tapestries, and the delicious terra-cottas of Luca della Robbia, and
ivories and bronzes and goldsmiths’ work, and the majolicas of Urbino
and Pesaro, and cameos and medallions and glass-work, and book-binding
and furniture, and the _intarsiatura_ of _cassoni_ and pulpits and
choir-stalls and lecterns, and the pavement art of the graffiti, and
everything save drawing and painting. For when every church, house, and
gallery in the world had been ransacked for every trace of Italian brush
or pencil on plaster, canvas or paper, and all this registered in the
one poor human brain, there would still remain the unexplored ocean of
illumination—the manuscript books and missals, and decrees and charters
of guilds and confraternities and Monti di Pietà, and lists of monks and
rules of monasteries, and matricular books of Drapers and Mercers, and
even decorative wills and deeds of gift—all that realm of beauty so
largely extinguished by printing.
Upon which fathomless ocean embarking, we may well behold without too
much of awe or envy the sails of the master-mariners. Sufficient to
drift and anchor at the first enchanted isle.
Less enchanted, however, are even the galleries of masterpieces than the
quiet bowers one finds for oneself—like that chapel in Arona where,
unveiling an altar-picture in despite of a tall candle-stick, I caught
my breath at the sudden serene beauty of Gaudenzio Ferrari’s _Holy
Family_; or like that reclusive Venetian church, where the luminous
unity of Bellini’s _Madonna and Saints_ pierces the religious gloom.
Pictures in collections are as unreal as objects in museums, less so
perhaps to-day than when each was painted for a definite altar,
refectory, wall or ceiling, yet none the less destroying one another’s
beauties. ’Tis only in the visual arts that we surrender ourselves to a
chaos of impressions; imagine Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi, Rossini, Gounod,
sounding simultaneously. I could have wept to see how Simone Martini’s
_Annunciation_ in the Uffizi had suffered by being transplanted to more
gilded society. Gone was that golden and lilied purity which used to
illumine the corridor.
And yet to see a picture in its own place is often equally
heartbreaking. Some of the greatest pictures have carefully selected the
most sombre and inaccessible situations.
Europe has perhaps no more melancholy chamber than that art-shrine in
Rome in which the pleasure-pilgrims of the world crick their necks or
catch bits of frescoed ceiling in hand-mirrors. ’Tis not merely the bad
light—for even in the best morning light the Sistine Chapel is
fuscous—nor the sombre effect of the discoloured and chaotic _Last
Judgment_, with its bluish streakiness and dark background—nor the dull
painted hangings, nor the overcrowding of the ceiling with its Titanic
episodes and figures, nor even the Signorellis and Botticellis round the
walls, though all contribute to the stuffy sublimity.
The oppressiveness is partially due to the fact that the architectural
ceiling that Michelangelo painted—as artificial as the hangings—has
faded rather more than the frescoes themselves, so that the figures seem
to droop higgledy-piggledy upon the spectator’s head instead of standing
out statuesque in their panels and spandrils. I dismiss the specious
theory of a painting friend that they thus only hover the better, as
prophets and patriarchs should. I refuse to be crushed even by
Michelangelo. I know that a ceiling can soar, not menace, for have I not
expanded under the gay lightness of the Pintoricchio ceiling in the
Borgia apartments! Even the heavy and gilded ceiling of the Scuola di
San Rocco at Venice, sombre enough in all conscience, by preserving
architectural plausibility, and resting on painted pillars, escapes
seeming to fall upon one’s head. Yet at best a ceiling is a poor place
for any save the most simple design. Michelangelo, or rather his papal
employer, went against the principle of decoration. A room with such
massive masterpieces on its ceiling could not but be top-heavy. Moreover
the art feeling can only be received in comfort. If we are to be
transported outside our bodies, we must not be distressfully reminded of
them by the straining of neck muscles. How foolish and provoking of
Correggio to put his finest soaring figures not only into a cathedral
cupola, but into a cupola lit only by a few round windows. And his
frescoes in the other dome at Parma are equally invisible. One is
reduced to enjoying them in the copies. Michelangelo himself undertook
the dizzying task of vault-painting with vast reluctance, and complained
in a sonnet that he had grown a goitre, and that his belly had been
driven close beneath his chin. He achieved a miracle of art—in the
wrong place. Perhaps Julius II was not so Philistine in thinking more
ultramarine and gold-leaf would have brightened it up.