Among these multitudinous _Madonnas_, and countless _Crucifixions_, and
_Entombments_ innumerable, who shall dare award the palm for nobility of
conception? But there is a minor theme of Renaissance Art as to which I
do not hesitate. It is the _Pietà_ theme, but with angels replacing or
supplementing the Madonna who cherishes the dead Christ, and it is
significant that the finest treatment of it I have seen comes from the
greatest craftsman who treated it—to wit, Giovanni Bellini. His _Cristo
Sorretto da Angioli_ you will find painted on wood—a _tavola_—in the
Palazzo Communale of Rimini. The Christ lies limp but tranquil, in the
peace, not the rigidity, of death, and four little angels stand by, one
of them half hidden by the dead figure. The exquisite appeal of this
picture, the uniqueness of the conception, lies in the sweet sorrow of
the little angels—a sorrow as of a dog or a child that cannot fathom
the greatness of the tragedy, only knows dumbly that here is matter for
sadness. The little angels regard the wounds with grave infantile
concern. Sacred tragedy is here fused with idyllic poetry in a manner to
which I know no parallel in any other painter. The sweet perfection of
Giovanni Bellini, too suave for the grim central theme of Christianity,
here finds triumphant and enchanting justification.
It is perhaps worth while tracing how every other painter’s handling of
the theme that I have chanced on fails to reach this lyric pathos.
Bellini himself did not perhaps quite reach it again, though he reaches
very noble heights in two pictures (one now in London and the other in
Berlin), in which the reduction in the number of angels to two makes
even for enhancement of the restful simplicity, while in the Berlin
picture there is a touching intimacy of uncomprehending consolation in
the pressing of the little angelic cheeks against the dead face. But the
fact that in both pictures one angel seems to understand more or to be
more exercised than the other contributes a disturbing complicacy. The
serene unity is, indeed, preserved by Bellini in his _Pietà_ in the
Museo Correr of Venice. But here the three young angels supporting the
body are merely at peace—there is nothing of that sweet wistfulness.
For a contrary reason the woodland flavour is equally absent from its
neighbour, a picture by an unknown painter of the Paduan school. Here
the peace is exchanged, not for poetry but tragedy. The Christ is erect
in his tomb, and the two haloed baby angels who uphold his arms are the
one weeping, the other horror-struck. The horror is accentuated and the
poetry still further lessened in an anonymous painting in a chapel of S.
Anastasia in Verona, where boy angels are positively roaring with grief.
Nor is the poetry augmented in that other anonymous painting in the
Palazzo Ducale of Venice, where one angel kisses the dead hand and the
other the blood-stained linen at the foot. In Girolamo da Treviso’s
picture in the Brera one child angel examines the bloody palm and the
other lifts up the drooping left arm with its little frock. Great round
tears run down their faces, which are swollen and ugly with grief. Still
more tragic, even to grotesquerie, is an old fresco fragment in an
underground church in Brescia, where the little angels are catching the
sacred blood in cups—those cups invented by Perugino and borrowed even
by Raphael. Francesco Bissolo, in the Academy of Venice, preserves the
tranquillity of Bellini, but by making the angels older loses not only
the seductive _naïveté_ but the whole naturalness, for these angels are
old enough to know better, one feels. They have no right to such
callousness. Raphael’s father in his picture in the cathedral of Urbino
escapes this pitfall, for his adult angels bend solicitously over the
Christ and support his arms from above. But Lorenzo Lotto, though he
gives us innocent child-angels, tumbles into an analogous trap, for he
forgets that by adding a Madonna and a Magdalen in bitter tears he
transforms these untroubled little angels into little devils, who have
not even the curiosity to wonder what in heaven’s name their mortal
elders are weeping over. In Cariani’s so-called _Deposizione_ at Ravenna
one little angel does weep in imitation of the mortals, leaning his wet
cheek on the Christ’s dead hand—“tears such as angels weep”—but he
only repeats the human tragedy, and might as well be a little boy. Two
older angels howl and grimace in Marco Zoppo’s picture in the Palazzo
Almerici of Pesaro, while the haloed, long-ringleted head of the Christ
droops with slightly open mouth and a strange smile as provoking as Mona
Lisa’s. Francia in the National Gallery gives us a red-eyed Madonna with
one calm and one compassionate angel, and Zaganelli in the Brera vies
with Bellini in the vague, tender wonderment of the child angels who
lift up the arms, but the picture is second-rate and the angels are
little girls with bare arms and puffed sleeves. Nor is it a happy
innovation to show us the legs of the Christ sprawling across the tomb.
Marco Palmezzano, with inferior beauty, also trenches on Bellini’s
ground; but not only is the Christ sitting up, not quite dead, but one
of the two child angels is calling out as for aid, so that the restful
finality of Bellini is vanished. Still nearer to the Bellini idea
approaches a picture in the Academy of Venice attributed to Marco
Basaiti and an unknown Lombardian. But if this avoids tragedy, the turn
is too much in the direction of comedy. The child angels are made still
more infantine, so that there is neither horror nor even perturbation,
merely a shade of surprise at so passive a figure. One plays with the
Christ’s hair, the other with his feet—the Blake-like tenderness is not
absent, but the poetry of this utter unconsciousness is not so
penetrating as the wistful yearning of the Bellini angels before some
dim, unsounded ocean of tragedy. This precise note I did, indeed, once
catch in a corner of Domenichino’s _Madonna del Rosario_, where a baby
surveys the crown of thorns; but this is just a side-show in a joyous,
thickly populated picture, and the Christ is not dead, but a live
_bambino_, who showers down roses on the lower world of martyrdom and
sorrow.
He is almost too dead in the fading fresco of the little low-vaulted,
whitewashed, ancient church of S. Maria Infra Portas in Foligno. A great
gash mutilates his side, his head, horribly fallen back, lies on the
Madonna’s lap, his legs and arms droop. The mother’s long hair hangs
down from her halo, she clasps her hands in agony, and a child angel on
either side looks on commiseratingly. Strange to say, this conserves the
poetry, despite the horror, though the horror removes it out of
comparison with Bellini’s handling.
In Genoa I found three more variations on the theme, two in the
cathedral, the first with four angels, all gravely concerned, and the
second with quite a crowd of little boys and angels, nearly all weeping.
One of the little angels has taken off the crown of thorns—a good touch
in a bad picture. The third variant is by Luca Cambiaso, and in the
Palazzo Rosso, with a single agitated boy angel. A _Pietà_ in Pistoja
takes its main pathos from its lonely position on the staircase of the
fusty town hall: a last rose of summer, all its companions are faded and
gone, all save one pretty lady saint blooming in a vast ocean of
plaster. Even its own Madonna and Apostles are half obliterated; but the
boy angel remains in a curious posture: he has got his head betwixt the
legs of the Christ, and with his arms helps to sustain the drooping
figure. Still more original touches appear in Andrea Utili’s picture in
Faenza. Here the Christ has his arms crossed, and his halo, tilted back
over his crown of thorns, gleams weirdly in red and gold, and on his
tomb rest pincers and a hammer. The two youthful angels are deeply
moved; one holds a cross and the other three nails.
If any painter could vie in enchantment with Giovanni Bellini it is
Crivelli, and, indeed, there are fascinating things in his _Pietà_ in
the Brera, idyllic sweetness in the angels, original decorative touches
in the book and burning taper, and masterly imagination in the ghastly
lack of vitality with which each dead hand of the Christ droops on the
tender living hand of an angel. Had only the angels been a little
younger, this would have been as sweetly lyrical as Bellini. From
Michelangelo we have only a sketch of the subject, with his wingless
child angels, over whom stands the Mater Dolorosa with useless outspread
arms, that should have been helping the poor little things to support
their burden. In Guido Reni’s _Pietà_ at Bologna her hands droop in
folded resignation, while one angel weeps and one adores and pities. I
fear the presence of the Madonna and other mortals destroys the peculiar
celestial poetry, though of course the conjunction of mortals and angels
brings a poetry of its own.
Tura’s treatment of the theme in Vienna I have not seen. But Vivarini
breaks out in a new direction. His two angels fly from right and left
towards the tomb, under full canvas, so to speak. But it is a pattern
_et præterea nihil_. More poetic in its originality is a picture of the
Veronese school in the Brera, showing us two baby angels, half curious,
half apprehensive, unfolding the Christ’s winding-sheet. But it is a
dark, poorly painted picture. Another new invention is Garofalo’s in the
same gallery. He gives us a crowd of commonplace weeping figures in a
picturesque landscape, and his angel is a sweet little cherub aloft on a
pillar over the heads of the mourning mob. But the angel might be a mere
architectural decoration, for all his effect upon the picture.
Thus have we seen almost every possible variation tried—adult angels
and young angels and baby angels, calm angels and callous angels,
lachrymose angels and vociferous angels, helpless angels and hospital
angels, boy angels and girl angels, and only one artist has seen the
sole permutation which extracts the quintessential poetry of the
theme—the high celestial tragedy unadulterated by human grief, and
sweetened yet deepened by angels too young to understand and too old to
be unperturbed, too troubled for play and too tranquil for tears.
And it is to that incarnation of evil, Sigismondo Malatesta, that we owe
this masterpiece of lyric simplicity, for ’twas the Magnificent Monster
himself that commissioned it—His rolling and reverberating
Magnificence, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo—whose
polyphonous, orotund name and the black and white elephants of whose
crest pervade the splendid temple which he remodelled at Rimini for the
glory of God. And lest the world should forget ’twas he to whom heaven
owed the delicious Pagan reliefs by the pillars, or the now-faded
ultramarine and starry gold of the chapels, each first pilaster bears in
Greek the due inscription:
TO THE IMMORTAL GOD
SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA DI PANDOLFO
(Pray do not pause here—epigraphs, like telegrams, are not punctuated)
PRESERVED FROM MANY OF THE GREATEST PERILS OF THE ITALIAN WAR
ERECTED AND BEQUEATHED MAGNIFICENTLY LAVISH
AS HE HAD VOWED IN THE VERY MIDST OF THE STRUGGLE
AN ILLUSTRIOUS AND HOLY MEMORIAL
No less reflexive was his apotheosis of the frail Isotta, of whom he
first made an honest woman and then a goddess. What wonder if his
critics carped at the “Disottæ,” the “divine Isotta,” he wrote over her
tomb, in lieu of the conventional “Dominæ Isottæ Bonæ Memoriæ”! But one
must do the bold, bad condottiere the justice to say that while two
angels bear this inscription over her in gold, his own tomb is
comparatively modest. It is Isotta whose tomb is supported by
shield-bearing elephants and culminates in flourishes as of elephants’
trunks, Isotta who stands over her altar in the guise of a gold-winged
angel. Malatesta’s patronage of Giovanni Bellini was not his only
contribution to the arts, for a cluster of poets found hospitality at
his court and burial at his temple—with a careful inscription that it
was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo who buried them—though
these seem to have plied the trade of Laureate, if I may judge from the
volume published at Paris, “L’Isotteo.” I cannot pretend to be read in
Porcellio de’ Pandone or Tommaso Seneca or Basinio of Parma. But
Bellini’s _tavola_ suffices to make me say with riddling Samson, “Out of
the strong cometh forth sweetness.”
For this is perhaps the teleological purpose of the Magnificent Ones, to
play the Mæcenas to some starveling artist or penurious poet. There is
in the santuario of the Malatesta temple a fresco of this Sigismondo. He
is seen in the flush of youth, gay in a brocaded mantle and red hose,
but somewhat disconcertingly on his knees before a crowned figure—his
patron saint according to some, the Emperor Sigismondo more probably.
Let us call it that sovereign fate to which even megaphonious
Magnificence must bow. Almost divine in his lifetime, within a few years
the Magnificent One’s character commences to decay, as if that too could
not resist the corruption of death. Happy the prince of whom some not
malodorous shred of reputation remains a century after his death. The
evil that men do lives after them, the good they have _not_ done is oft
interred with their bones.
Yes, there is a pathos in the Magnificent Ones. When I consider how
their autocosm ensnared them with a sense of their own perdurability,
lured them into engaging painters and architects and statuaries to
express their triumphant sense of timeless energising, and then ebbed
away from them, leaving them putrid carbonates, phosphates, and
silicates, while the work of Beauty lived on and lives, having used
these momentarily swollen creatures as its channel and tool, then I find
it in me to pity these frog-bulls of egotism, so cruelly bemocked and
deluded.
Before parting with the _Pietà_ theme I would remark that in the Italian
galleries the name _Pietà_ is often—with apparent inaccuracy—given to
pictures of the dead Christ alone in his tomb. One of the most curious
pictures of this sort I came upon in the gallery of Faenza, where Christ
stands in his tomb, yet still nailed on the Cross, from either end of
which depends a scourge. I found the same design in the centre of a
little stone shield over a building marked as the “Mons Pietatis” of
Faenza. And this set me speculating whether such an image as a symbol of
the Monte di Pietà was due to the mere suggestiveness of the word
_Pietà_, or whether there was a more mystical connection implied between
the Crucifixion and the loan-offices instituted in Italy by Bernardino
da Feltre to frustrate the usury of the Jews. It is the Monte di Pietà
of Treviso that shelters the _Entombment_ ascribed to Giorgione. It
seems a long way from Golgotha to the pawn-shop, yet we still talk of
pledges being redeemed.