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Title: Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3
       The Fine Arts

Author: John Addington Symonds

Release Date: March 13, 2004 [EBook #11559]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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RENAISSANCE IN ITALY

THE FINE ARTS

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

AUTHOR OF

"AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF DANTE", "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS" AND "SKETCHES IN ITALY AND GREECE"

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER & CO

1899

PREFACE^[1]

This third volume of my book on the "Renaissance in Italy" does not pretend to retrace the history of the Italian arts, but rather to define their relation to the main movement of Renaissance culture. Keeping this, the chief object of my whole work, steadily in view, I have tried to explain the dependence of the arts on mediæval Christianity at their commencement, their gradual emancipation from ecclesiastical control, and their final attainment of freedom at the moment when the classical revival culminated.

Not to notice the mediæval period in this evolution would be impossible; since the revival of Sculpture and Painting at the end of the thirteenth century was among the earliest signs of that new intellectual birth to which we give the title of Renaissance. I have, therefore, had to deal at some length with stages in the development of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, which form a prelude to the proper age of my own history.

In studying the architectural branch of the subject, I have had recourse to Fergusson's "Illustrated Handbook of Architecture," to Burckhardt's "Cicerone," to Grüner's "Terra-Cotta Buildings of North Italy," to Milizia's "Memorie degli Architetti," and to many illustrated works on single buildings in Rome, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Venice. For the history of Sculpture I have used Burckhardt's "Cicerone," and the two important works of Charles C. Perkins, entitled "Tuscan Sculptors," and "Italian Sculptors." Such books as "Le Tre Porte del Battistero di Firenze," Grüner's "Cathedral of Orvieto," and Lasinio's "Tabernacolo della Madonna d'Orsammichele" have been helpful by their illustrations. For the history of Painting I have made use principally of Vasari's "Vite de' più eccellenti Pittori," &c.c., in Le Monnier's edition of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's "History of Painting," of Burckhardt's "Cicerone," of Rosini's illustrated "Storia della Pittura Italiana," of Rio's "L'Art Chrétien," and of Henri Beyle's "Histoire de la Peinture en Italie." I should, however, far exceed the limits of a preface were I to make a list of all the books I have consulted with profit on the history of the arts in Italy.

In this part of my work I feel that I owe less to reading than to observation. I am not aware of having mentioned any important building, statue, or picture which I have not had the opportunity of studying. What I have written in this volume about the monuments of Italian art has always been first noted face to face with the originals, and afterwards corrected, modified, or confirmed in the course of subsequent journeys to Italy. I know that this method of composition, if it has the merit of freshness, entails some inequality of style and disproportion in the distribution of materials. In the final preparation of my work for press I have therefore endeavoured, as far as possible, to compensate this disadvantage by adhering to the main motive of my subject—the illustration of the Renaissance spirit as this was manifested in the Arts.

I must add, in conclusion, that Chapters VII. and IX. and Appendix II. are in part reprinted from the "Westminster," the "Cornhill," and the "Contemporary."

CLIFTON: March 1877.

FOOTNOTES:

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I--THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS

Art in Italy and Greece—The Leading Phase of Culture—Æsthetic Type of Literature—Painting the Supreme Italian Art—Its Task in the Renaissance—Christian and Classical Traditions—Sculpture for the Ancients—Painting for the Romance Nations—Mediæval Faith and Superstition—The Promise of Painting—How far can the Figurative Arts express Christian Ideas?—Greek and Christian Religion—Plastic Art incapable of solving the Problem—A more Emotional Art needed—Place of Sculpture in the Renaissance—Painting and Christian Story—Humanization of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art—Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to Art—Compromises effected by the Church—Fra Bartolommeo's S. Sebastian—Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and Philosophy—Recapitulation—Art in the end Paganises—Music—The Future of Painting after the Renaissance.


CHAPTER II--ARCHITECTURE

Architecture of Mediæval Italy—Milan, Genoa, Venice—The Despots as Builders—Diversity of Styles—Local Influences—Lombard, Tuscan, Romanesque, Gothic—Italian want of feeling for Gothic—Cathedrals of Siena and Orvieto—Secular Buildings of the Middle Ages—Florence and Venice—Private Palaces—Public Halls—Palazzo della Signoria at Florence—Arnolfo di Cambio—S. Maria del Fiore—Brunelleschi's Dome—Classical Revival in Architecture—Roman Ruins—Three Periods in Renaissance Architecture—Their Characteristics—Brunelleschi —Alberti—Palace-building—Michellozzo—Decorative Work of the Revival—Bramante—Vitoni's Church of the Umiltà at Pistoja—Palazzo del Te—Villa Farnesina—Sansovino at Venice—Michael Angelo—The Building of S. Peter's—Palladio—The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza—Lombard Architects—Theorists and Students of Vitruvius—Vignola and Scamozzi—European Influence of the Palladian Style—Comparison of Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.


CHAPTER III--SCULPTURE

Niccola Pisano—Obscurity of the Sources for a History of Early Italian Sculpture—Vasari's Legend of Pisano—Deposition from the Cross at Lucca—Study of Nature and the Antique—Sarcophagus at Pisa—Pisan Pulpit—Niccola's School—Giovanni Pisano—Pulpit in S. Andrea at Pistoja—Fragments of his work at Pisa—Tomb of Benedict XI. at Perugia—Bas-reliefs at Orvieto—Andrea Pisano—Relation of Sculpture to Painting—Giotto—Subordination of Sculpture to Architecture in Italy—Pisano's Influence in Venice—Balduccio of Pisa—Orcagna—The Tabernacle of Orsammichele—The Gates of the Florentine Baptistery —Competition of Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Della Quercia—Comparison of Ghiberti's and Brunelleschi's Trial-pieces—Comparison of Ghiberti and Della Quercia—The Bas-reliefs of S. Petronio—Ghiberti's Education—His Pictorial Style in Bas-relief—His Feeling for the Antique—Donatello—Early Visit to Rome—Christian Subjects—Realistic Treatment—S. George and David—Judith—Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata—Influence of Donatello's Naturalism—Andrea Verocchio—His David—Statue of Colleoni—Alessandro Leopardi—Lionardo's Statue of Francesco Sforza—The Pollajuoli—Tombs of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII.—Luca della Robbia—His Treatment of Glazed Earthenware—Agostino di Duccio—The Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia—Antonio Rossellino—Matteo Civitali—Mino da Fiesole—Benedetto da Majano—Characteristics and Masterpieces of this Group—Sepulchral Monuments—Andrea Contucci's Tombs in S. Maria del Popolo—Desiderio da Settignano—Sculpture in S. Francesco at Rimini—Venetian Sculpture—Verona—Guido Mazzoni of Modena—Certosa of Pavia—Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo—Sansovino at Venice—Pagan Sculpture—Michael Angelo's Scholars—Baccio Bandinelli—Bartolommeo Ammanati—Cellini—Gian Bologna—Survey of the History of Renaissance Sculpture.


CHAPTER IV--PAINTING

Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy—Florence and Venice —Classification by Schools—Stages in the Evolution of Painting—Cimabue —The Rucellai Madonna—Giotto—His widespread Activity—The Scope of his Art—Vitality—Composition—Colour—Naturalism—Healthiness—Frescoes at Assisi and Padua—Legend of S. Francis—The Giotteschi—Pictures of the Last Judgment—Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel—Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Pisa—Dogmatic Theology—Cappella degli Spagnuoli—Traini's "Triumph, of S. Thomas Aquinas"—Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco—Sala della Pace at Siena—Religious Art in Siena and Perugia—The Relation of the Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance.


CHAPTER V--PAINTING

Mediæval Motives exhausted—New Impulse toward Technical Perfection—Naturalists in Painting—Intermediate Achievement needed for the Great Age of Art—Positive Spirit of the Fifteenth Century—Masaccio—The Modern Manner—Paolo Uccello—Perspective—Realistic Painters—The Model—Piero della Francesca—His Study of Form—Resurrection at Borgo San Sepolcro—Melozzo da Forli—Squarcione at Padua—Gentile da Fabriano—Fra Angelico—Benozzo Gozzoli—His Decorative Style—Lippo Lippi—Frescoes at Prato and Spoleto—Filippino Lippi—Sandro Botticelli—His Value for the Student of Renaissance Fancy—His Feeling for Mythology—Piero di Cosimo—Domenico Ghirlandajo—In what sense he sums up the Age—Prosaic Spirit—Florence hitherto supreme in Painting—Extension of Art Activity throughout Italy—Medicean Patronage.


CHAPTER VI--PAINTING

Two Periods in the True Renaissance—Andrea Mantegna—His Statuesque Design—His Naturalism—Roman Inspiration—Triumph of Julius Cæsar—Bas-reliefs—Luca Signorelli—The Precursor of Michael Angelo—Anatomical Studies—Sense of Beauty—The Chapel of S. Brizio at Orvieto—Its Arabesques and Medallions—Degrees in his Ideal—Enthusiasm for Organic Life—Mode of treating Classical Subjects—Perugino—His Pietistic Style—His Formalism—The Psychological Problem of his Life—Perugino's Pupils—Pinturicchio—At Spello and Siena—Francia—Fra Bartolommeo—Transition to the Golden Age—Lionardo da Vinci—The Magician of the Renaissance—Raphael—The Melodist—Correggio—The Faun—Michael Angelo—The Prophet.


CHAPTER VII--VENETIAN PAINTING

Painting bloomed late in Venice—Conditions offered by Venice to Art—Shelley and Pietro Aretino—Political Circumstances of Venice—Comparison with Florence—The Ducal Palace—Art regarded as an adjunct to State Pageantry—Myth of Venezia—Heroic Deeds of Venice—Tintoretto's Paradise and Guardi's Picture of a Ball—Early Venetian Masters of Murano—Gian Bellini—Carpaccio's Little Angels—The Madonna of S. Zaccaria—Giorgione—Allegory, Idyll, Expression of Emotion—The Monk at the Clavichord—Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese—Tintoretto's Attempt to dramatise Venetian Art—Veronese's Mundane Splendour—Titian's Sophoclean Harmony—Their Schools—Further Characteristics of Veronese—of Tintoretto—His Imaginative Energy—Predominant Poetry—Titian's Perfection of Balance—Assumption of Madonna—Spirit common to the great Venetians.


CHAPTER VIII--LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO

Contrast of Michael Angelo and Cellini—Parentage and Boyhood of Michael Angelo—Work with Ghirlandajo—Gardens of S. Marco—The Medicean Circle—Early Essays in Sculpture—Visit to Bologna—First Visit to Rome—The Pietà of S. Peter's—Michael Angelo as a Patriot and a friend of the Medici—Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa—Michael Angelo and Julius II.—The Tragedy of the Tomb—Design for the Pope's Mausoleum—Visit to Carrara—Flight from Rome—Michael Angelo at Bologna—Bronze Statue of Julius—Return to Rome—Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—Greek and Modern Art—Raphael—Michael Angelo and Leo X.—S. Lorenzo—The new Sacristy—Circumstances under which it was designed and partly finished—Meaning of the Allegories—Incomplete state of Michael Angelo's Marbles—Paul III.—The "Last Judgment"—Critiques of Contemporaries—The Dome of S. Peter's—Vittoria Colonna—Tommaso Cavalieri—Personal Habits of Michael Angelo—His Emotional Nature—Last Illness.


CHAPTER IX--LIFE OF BENVENUTO CELLINI

His Fame—His Autobiography—Its Value for the Student of History, Manners, and Character in the Renaissance—Birth, Parentage, and Boyhood—Flute-playing—Apprenticeship to Marcone—Wanderjahr—The Goldsmith's Trade at Florence—Torrigiani and England—Cellini leaves Florence for Rome—Quarrel with the Guasconti—Homicidal Fury—Cellini a Law to Himself—Three Periods in his Manhood—Life in Rome—Diego at the Banquet—Renaissance Feeling for Physical Beauty—Sack of Rome—Miracles in Cellini's Life—His Affections—Murder of his Brother's Assassin—Sanctuary—Pardon and Absolution—Incantation in the Colosseum—First Visit to France—Adventures on the Way—Accused of stealing Crown Jewels in Rome—Imprisonment in the Castle of S. Angelo—The Governor—Cellini's Escape—His Visions—The Nature of his Religion—Second Visit to France—The Wandering Court—Le Petit Nesle—Cellini in the French Law Courts—Scene at Fontainebleau—Return to Florence—Cosimo de' Medici as a Patron—Intrigues of a Petty Court—Bandinelli—The Duchess—Statue of Perseus—End of Cellini's Life—Cellini and Machiavelli.


CHAPTER X--THE EPIGONI

Full Development and Decline of Painting—Exhaustion of the old Motives—Relation of Lionardo to his Pupils—His Legacy to the Lombard School—Bernardino Luini—Gaudenzio Ferrari—The Devotion of the Sacri Monti—The School of Raphael—Nothing left but Imitation—Unwholesome Influences of Rome—Giulio Romano—Michael Angelesque Mannerists—Misconception of Michael Angelo—Correggio founds no School—Parmigianino—Macchinisti—The Bolognese—After-growth of Art in Florence—Andrea del Sarto—His Followers—Pontormo—Bronzino—Revival of Painting in Siena—Sodoma—His Influence on Pacchia, Beccafumi, Peruzzi—Garofalo and Dosso Dossi at Ferrari—The Campi at Cremona—Brescia and Bergamo—The Decadence in the second half of the Sixteenth Century—The Counter-Reformation—Extinction of the Renaissance Impulse.


APPENDIX I—The Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello

APPENDIX II—Michael Angelo's Sonnets

APPENDIX III—Chronological Tables

CHAPTER I--THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS

Art in Italy and Greece—The Leading Phase of Culture—Æsthetic Type of Literature—Painting the Supreme Italian Art—Its Task in the Renaissance—Christian and Classical Traditions—Sculpture for the Ancients—Painting for the Romance Nations—Mediæval Faith and Superstition—The Promise of Painting—How far can the Figurative Arts express Christian Ideas?—Greek and Christian Religion—Plastic Art incapable of solving the Problem—A more Emotional Art needed—Place of Sculpture in the Renaissance—Painting and Christian Story—Humanization of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art—Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to Art—Compromises effected by the Church—Fra Bartolommeo's S. Sebastian—Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and Philosophy—Recapitulation—Art in the end Paganises—Music—The Future of Painting after the Renaissance.

It has been granted only to two nations, the Greeks and the Italians, and to the latter only at the time of the Renaissance, to invest every phase and variety of intellectual energy with the form of art. Nothing notable was produced in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art. If the methods of science may be truly said to regulate our modes of thinking at the present time, it is no less true that, during the Renaissance, art exercised a like controlling influence. Not only was each department of the fine arts practised with singular success; not only was the national genius to a very large extent absorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture; but the æsthetic impulse was more subtly and widely diffused than this alone would imply. It possessed the Italians in the very centre of their intellectual vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifestations of their thought and feeling, so that even their shortcomings may be ascribed in a great measure to their inability to quit the æsthetic point of view.

We see this in their literature. It is probable that none but artistic natures will ever render full justice to the poetry of the Renaissance. Critics endowed with a less lively sensibility to beauty of outline and to harmony of form than the Italians, complain that their poetry lacks substantial qualities; nor is it except by long familiarity with the plastic arts of their contemporaries that we come to understand the ground assumed by Ariosto and Poliziano. We then perceive that these poets were not so much unable as instinctively unwilling to go beyond a certain circle of effects. They subordinated their work to the ideal of their age, and that ideal was one to which a painter rather than a poet might successfully aspire. A succession of pictures, harmoniously composed and delicately toned to please the mental eye, satisfied the taste of the Italians. But, however exquisite in design, rich in colour, and complete in execution this literary work may be, it strikes a Northern student as wanting in the highest elements of genius—sublimity of imagination, dramatic passion, energy and earnestness of purpose. In like manner, he finds it hard to appreciate those didactic compositions on trifling or prosaic themes, which delighted the Italians for the very reason that their workmanship surpassed their matter. These defects, as we judge them, are still more apparent in the graver branches of literature. In an essay or a treatise we do not so much care for well-balanced disposition of parts or beautifully rounded periods, though elegance may be thought essential to classic masterpieces, as for weighty matter and trenchant observations. Having the latter, we can dispense at need with the former. The Italians of the Renaissance, under the sway of the fine arts, sought after form, and satisfied themselves with rhetoric. Therefore we condemn their moral disquisitions and their criticisms as the flimsy playthings of intellectual voluptuaries. Yet the right way of doing justice to these stylistic trifles is to regard them as products of an all-embracing genius for art, in a people whose most serious enthusiasms were æsthetic.

The speech of the Italians at that epoch, their social habits, their ideal of manners, their standard of morality, the estimate they formed of men, were alike conditioned and qualified by art. It was an age of splendid ceremonies and magnificent parade, when the furniture of houses, the armour of soldiers, the dress of citizens, the pomp of war, and the pageantry of festival were invariably and inevitably beautiful. On the meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and platters, door-panels and chimney-pieces, coverlets for beds and lids of linen-chests, a wealth of artistic invention was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less skilled in technical details than distinguished by rare taste. From the Pope upon S. Peter's chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every Italian was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, without which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied. During that period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for producing it in every conceivable form. As we travel through Italy at the present day, when "time, war, pillage, and purchase" have done their worst to denude the country of its treasures, we still marvel at the incomparable and countless beauties stored in every burgh and hamlet. Pacing the picture galleries of Northern Europe, the country seats of English nobles, and the palaces of Spain, the same reflection is still forced upon us: how could Italy have done what she achieved within so short a space of time? What must the houses and the churches once have been, from which these spoils were taken, but which still remain so rich in masterpieces? Psychologically to explain this universal capacity for the fine arts in the nation at this epoch, is perhaps impossible. Yet the fact remains, that he who would comprehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the labyrinthine windings of national character. He must learn to recognise that herein lay the sources of their intellectual strength as well as the secret of their intellectual weakness.

It lies beyond the scope of this work to embrace in one inquiry the different forms of art in Italy, or to analyse the connection of the æsthetic instinct with the manifold manifestations of the Renaissance. Even the narrower task to which I must confine myself, is too vast for the limits I am forced to impose upon its treatment. I intend to deal with Italian painting as the one complete product which remains from the achievements of this period, touching upon sculpture and architecture more superficially. Not only is painting the art in which the Italians among all the nations of the modern world stand unapproachably alone, but it is also the one that best enables us to gauge their genius at the time when they impressed their culture on the rest of Europe. In the history of the Italian intellect painting takes the same rank as that of sculpture in the Greek. Before beginning, however, to trace the course of Italian art, it will be necessary to discuss some preliminary questions, important for a right understanding of the relations assumed by painting to the thoughts of the Renaissance, and for explaining its superiority over the sister art of sculpture in that age. This I feel the more bound to do because it is my object in this volume to treat of art with special reference to the general culture of the nation.

What, let us ask in the first place, was the task appointed for the fine arts on the threshold of the modern world? They had, before all things, to give form to the ideas evolved by Christianity, and to embody a class of emotions unknown to the ancients.^[2] The inheritance of the Middle Ages had to be appropriated and expressed. In the course of performing this work, the painters helped to humanise religion, and revealed the dignity and beauty of the body of man. Next, in the fifteenth century, the riches of classic culture were discovered, and art was called upon to aid in the interpretation of the ancient to the modern mind. The problem was no longer simple. Christian and pagan traditions came into close contact, and contended for the empire of the newly liberated intellect. During this struggle the arts, true to their own principles, eliminated from both traditions the more strictly human elements, and expressed them in beautiful form to the imagination and the senses. The brush of the same painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of Calvary. Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and undeterred by the dread of encouraging pagan sensuality, the artists wrought out their modern ideal of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hellenic legend. Before the force of painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed the whole cycle of thoughts and feelings that form the content of the modern mind. Throughout this performance, art proved itself a powerful co-agent in the emancipation of the intellect; the impartiality wherewith its methods were applied to subjects sacred and profane, the emphasis laid upon physical strength and beauty as good things and desirable, the subordination of classical and mediæval myths to one æsthetic law of loveliness, all tended to withdraw attention from the differences between paganism and Christianity, and to fix it on the goodliness of that humanity wherein both find their harmony.

This being in general the task assigned to art in the Renaissance, we may next inquire what constituted the specific quality of modern as distinguished from antique feeling, and why painting could not fail to take the first place among modern arts. In other words, how was it that, while sculpture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, painting became the distinguishing fine art of the modern era? No true form of figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting. The latter took up the work of investing thought with sensible shape from the dead hands of the former. Nor had the tradition that connected art with religion been interrupted, although a new cycle of religious ideas had been substituted for the old ones. The late Roman and Byzantine manners, through which the vital energies of the Athenian genius dwindled into barren formalism, still lingered, giving crude and lifeless form to Christian conceptions. But the thinking and feeling subject, meanwhile, had undergone a change so all-important that it now imperatively required fresh channels for its self-expression. It was destined to find these, not as of old in sculpture, but in painting.

During the interval between the closing of the ancient and the opening of the modern age, the faith of Christians had attached itself to symbols and material objects little better than fetishes. The host, the relic, the wonder-working shrine, things endowed with a mysterious potency, evoked the yearning and the awe of medieval multitudes. To such concrete actualities the worshippers referred their sense of the invisible divinity. The earth of Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre, the House of Loreto, the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, aroused their deepest sentiments of aweful adoration. Like Thomas, they could not be contented with believing; they must also touch and handle. At the same time, in apparent contradistinction to this demand for things of sense as signs of super-sensual power, the claims of dogma on the intellect grew more imperious, and mysticism opened for the dreaming soul a realm of spiritual rapture. For the figurative arts there was no true place in either of these regions. Painting and sculpture were alike alien to the grosser superstitions, the scholastic subtleties, and the ecstatic trances of the Middle Ages; nor had they anything in common with the logic of theology. Votaries who kissed a fragment of the cross with passion, could have found but little to satisfy their ardour in pictures painted by a man of genius. A formless wooden idol, endowed with the virtue of curing disease, charmed the pilgrim more than a statue noticeable only for its beauty or its truth to life. We all know that wunderthätige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gemälde. In architecture alone, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, their vague but potent feelings of infinity, their yearning towards a deity invisible, but localised in holy things and places, found artistic outlet. Therefore architecture was essentially a medieval art. The rise of sculpture and painting indicated the quickening to life of new faculties, fresh intellectual interests, and a novel way of apprehending the old substance of religious feeling; for comprehension of these arts implies delight in things of beauty for their own sake, a sympathetic attitude towards the world of sense, a new freedom of the mind produced by the regeneration of society through love.

The mediæval faiths were still vivid when the first Italian painters began their work, and the sincere endeavour of these men was to set forth in beautiful and worthy form the truths of Christianity. The eyes of the worshipper should no longer have a mere stock or stone to contemplate: his imagination should be helped by the dramatic presentation of the scenes of sacred history, and his devotion be quickened by lively images of the passion of our Lord. Spirit should converse with spirit, through no veil of symbol, but through the transparent medium of art, itself instinct with inbreathed life and radiant with ideal beauty. The body and the soul, moreover, should be reconciled; and God's likeness should be once more acknowledged in the features and the limbs of man. Such was the promise of art; and this promise was in a great measure fulfilled by the painting of the fourteenth century. Men ceased to worship their God in the holiness of ugliness; and a great city called its street Glad on the birthday-festival of the first picture investing religious emotion with æsthetic charm. But in making good the promise they had given, it was needful for the arts on the one hand to enter a region not wholly their own—the region of abstractions and of mystical conceptions; and on the other to create a world of sensuous delightfulness, wherein the spiritual element was materialised to the injury of its own essential quality. Spirit, indeed, spake to spirit, so far as the religious content was concerned; but flesh spake also to flesh in the æsthetic form. The incarnation promised by the arts involved a corresponding sensuousness. Heaven was brought down to earth, but at the cost of making men believe that earth itself was heavenly.

At this point the subject of our inquiry naturally divides into two main questions. The first concerns the form of figurative art specially adapted to the requirements of religious thought in the fourteenth century. The second treats of the effect resulting both to art and religion from the expression of mystical and theological conceptions in plastic form.

When we consider the nature of the ideas assimilated in the Middle Ages by the human mind, it is clear that art, in order to set them forth, demanded a language the Greeks had never greatly needed, and had therefore never fully learned. To over-estimate the difference from an æsthetic point of view between the religious notions of the Greeks and those which Christianity had made essential, would be difficult. Faith, hope, and charity; humility, endurance, suffering; the Resurrection and the Judgment; the Pall and the Redemption; Heaven and Hell; the height and depth of man's mixed nature; the drama of human destiny before the throne of God: into the sphere of thoughts like these, vivid and solemn, transcending the region of sense and corporeity, carrying the mind away to an ideal world, where the things of this earth obtained a new reality by virtue of their relation to an invisible and infinite Beyond, the modern arts in their infancy were thrust. There was nothing finite here or tangible, no gladness in the beauty of girlish foreheads or the swiftness of a young man's limbs, no simple idealisation of natural delightfulness. The human body, which the figurative arts must needs use as the vehicle of their expression, had ceased to have a value in and for itself, had ceased to be the true and adequate investiture of thoughts demanded from the artist. At best it could be taken only as the symbol of some inner meaning, the shrine of an indwelling spirit nobler than itself; just as a lamp of alabaster owes its beauty and its worth to the flame it more than half conceals, the light transmitted through its scarce transparent walls.

In ancient art those moral and spiritual qualities which the Greeks recognised as truly human and therefore divine, allowed themselves to be incarnated in well-selected types of physical perfection. The deities of the Greek mythology were limited to the conditions of natural existence: they were men and women of a larger mould and freer personality; less complex, inasmuch as each completed some one attribute; less thwarted in activity, inasmuch as no limit was assigned to exercise of power. The passions and the faculties of man, analysed by unconscious psychology, and deified by religious fancy, were invested by sculpture with appropriate forms, the tact of the artist selecting corporeal qualities fitted to impersonate the special character of each divinity. Nor was it possible that, the gods and goddesses being what they were, exact analogues should not be found for them in idealised humanity. In a Greek statue there was enough soul to characterise the beauty of the body, to render her due meed of wisdom to Pallas, to distinguish the swiftness of Hermes from the strength of Heracles, or to contrast the virginal grace of Artemis with the abundance of Aphrodite's charms. At the same time the spirituality that gave its character to each Greek deity, was not such that, even in thought, it could be dissociated from corporeal form. The Greeks thought their gods as incarnate persons; and all the artist had to see to, was that this incarnate personality should be impressive in his marble.

Christianity, on the other hand, made the moral and spiritual nature of man all-essential. It sprang from an earlier religion, that judged it impious to give any form to God. The body and its terrestrial activity occupied but a subordinate position in its system. It was the life of the soul, separable from this frame of flesh, and destined to endure when earth and all that it contains had ended—a life that upon this planet was continued conflict and aspiring struggle—which the arts, insofar as they became its instrument, were called upon to illustrate. It was the worship of a Deity, all spirit, to be sought on no one sacred hill, to be adored in no transcendent shape, that they were bound to heighten. The most highly prized among the Christian virtues had no necessary connection with beauty of feature or strength of limb. Such beauty and such strength at any rate were accidental, not essential. A Greek faun could not but be graceful; a Greek hero was of necessity vigorous. But S. Stephen might be steadfast to the death without physical charm; S. Anthony might put to flight the devils of the flesh without muscular force. It is clear that the radiant physical perfection proper to the deities of Greek sculpture was not sufficient in this sphere.

Again, the most stirring episodes of the Christian mythology involved pain and perturbation of the spirit; the victories of the Christian athletes were won in conflicts carried on within their hearts and souls—"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers," demoniac leaders of spiritual legions. It is, therefore, no less clear that the tranquillity and serenity of the Hellenic ideal, so necessary to consummate sculpture, was here out of place. How could the Last Judgment, that day of wrath, when every soul, however insignificant on earth, will play the first part for one moment in an awful tragedy, be properly expressed in plastic form, harmonious and pleasing? And supposing that the artist should abandon the attempt to exclude ugliness and discord, pain and confusion, from his representation of the Dies Iræ, how could he succeed in setting forth by the sole medium of the human body the anxiety and anguish of the soul at such a time? The physical form, instead of being adequate to the ideas expressed, and therefore helpful to the artist, is a positive embarrassment, a source of weakness. The most powerful pictorial or sculpturesque delineation of the Judgment, when compared with the pangs inflicted on the spirit by a guilty conscience, pangs whereof words may render some account, but which can find no analogue in writhings of the limbs or face, must of necessity be found a failure. Still more impossible, if we pursue this train of thought into another region, is it for the figurative arts to approach the Christian conception of God in His omnipotence and unity. Christ Himself, the central figure of the Christian universe, the desired of all nations, in whom the Deity assumed a human form and dwelt with men, is no fit subject for such art at any rate as the Greeks had perfected. The fact of His incarnation brought Him indeed within the proper sphere of the fine arts; but the religious idea which He represents removed Him beyond the reach of sculpture. This is an all-important consideration. It is to this that our whole argument is tending. Therefore to enlarge upon this point will not be useless.

Christ is specially adored in His last act of love on Calvary; and how impossible it is to set that forth consistently with the requirements of strictly plastic art, may be gathered by comparing the passion of S. Bernard's Hymn to our Lord upon the Cross with all that Winckelmann and Hegel have so truly said about the restrained expression, dignified generality, and harmonious beauty essential to sculpture. It is the negation of tranquillity, the excess of feeling, the absence of comeliness, the contrast between visible weakness and invisible omnipotence, the physical humiliation voluntarily suffered by Him that "ruled over all the angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven, whose feet were clothed with stars"—it is all this that gives their force and pathos to these stanzas:

We have never heard that Pheidias or Praxiteles chose Prometheus upon Caucasus for the supreme display of his artistic skill; and even the anguish expressed in the group of the Laocoon is justly thought to violate the laws of antique sculpture. Yet here was a greater than Prometheus—one who had suffered more, and on whose suffering the salvation of the human race depended, to exclude whom from the sphere of representation in art was the same as confessing the utter impotence of art to grasp the vital thought of modern faith. It is clear that the muses of the new age had to haunt Calvary instead of Helicon, slaking their thirst at no Castalian spring, but at the fount of tears outpoured by all creation for a stricken God. What Hellas had achieved supplied no norm or method for the arts in this new service.

From what has hitherto been advanced, we may assert with confidence that, if the arts were to play an important part in Christian culture, an art was imperatively demanded that should be at home in the sphere of intense feeling, that should treat the body as the interpreter and symbol of the soul, and should not shrink from pain and passion. How far the fine arts were at all qualified to express the essential thoughts of Christianity—a doubt suggested in the foregoing paragraphs—and how far, through their proved inadequacy to perform this task completely, they weakened the hold of mediæval faiths upon the modern mind, are questions to be raised hereafter. For the present it is enough to affirm that, least of all the arts, could sculpture, with its essential repose and its dependence on corporeal conditions, solve the problem. Sculpture had suited the requirements of Greek thought. It belonged by right to men who not unwillingly accepted the life of this world as final, and who worshipped in their deities the incarnate personality of man made perfect. But it could not express the cycle of Christian ideas. The desire of a better world, the fear of a worse; the sense of sin referred to physical appetites, and the corresponding mortification of the flesh; hope, ecstasy, and penitence and prayer; all these imply contempt or hatred for the body, suggest notions too spiritual to be conveyed by the rounded contours of beautiful limbs, too full of struggle for statuesque tranquillity. The new element needed a more elastic medium of expression. Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had somehow to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its supremacy. Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from dependence on the body in the fulness of its physical proportions. It touches our sensibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, and more multiform. Colour and shadow, aërial perspective and complicated grouping, denied to sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, have their own significance, their real relation to feelings vaguer, but not less potent, than those which find expression in the simple human form. To painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensible by sculpture. All that drapery by its partial concealment of the form it clothes, and landscape by its sympathies with human sentiment, may supply to enhance the passion of the spectator, pertains to painting. This art, therefore, owing to the greater variety of means at its disposal, and its greater adequacy to express emotion, became the paramount Italian art.

To sculpture in the Renaissance, shorn of the divine right to create gods and heroes, was left the narrower field of decoration, portraiture, and sepulchral monuments. In the last of these departments it found the noblest scope for its activity; for beyond the grave, according to Christian belief, the account of the striving, hoping, and resisting soul is settled. The corpse upon the bier may bear the stamp of spiritual character impressed on it in life; but the spirit, with its struggle and its passion, has escaped as from a prison-house, and flown else-whither. The body of the dead man, for whom this world is over, and who sleeps in peace, awaiting resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around whose tomb watch sympathising angels or contemplative genii, was, therefore, the proper subject for the highest Christian sculpture. Here, if anywhere, the right emotion could be adequately expressed in stone, and the moulded form be made the symbol of repose, expectant of restored activity. The greatest sculptor of the modern age was essentially a poet of Death.

Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned and insisted on, was the art demanded by the modern intellect upon its emergence from the stillness of the Middle Ages. The problem, however, even for the art of painting was not simple. The painters, following the masters of mosaic, began by setting forth the history, mythology, and legends of the Christian Church in imagery freer and more beautiful than lay within the scope of treatment by Romanesque or Byzantine art. So far their task was comparatively easy; for the idyllic grace of maternal love in the Madonna, the pathetic incidents of martyrdom, the courage of confessors, the ecstasies of celestial joy in redeemed souls, the loveliness of a pure life in modest virgins, and the dramatic episodes of sacred story, furnish a multitude of motives admirably pictorial. There was, therefore, no great obstacle upon the threshold, so long as artists gave their willing service to the Church. Yet, looking back upon this phase of painting, we are able to perceive that already the adaptation of art to Christian dogma entailed concessions on both sides. Much, on the one hand, had to be omitted from the programme offered to artistic treatment, for the reason that the fine arts could not deal with it at all. Much, on the other hand, had to be expressed by means which painting in a state of perfect freedom would repudiate. Allegorical symbols, like Prudence with two faces, and painful episodes of agony and anguish, marred her work of beauty. There was consequently a double compromise, involving a double sacrifice of something precious. The faith suffered by having its mysteries brought into the light of day, incarnated in form, and humanised. Art suffered by being forced to render intellectual abstractions to the eye through figured symbols.

As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the proper end of art, became more rightly understood, the painters found that their craft was worthy of being made an end in itself, and that the actualities of life observed around them had claims upon their genius no less weighty than dogmatic mysteries. The subjects they had striven at first to realise with all simplicity now became little better than vehicles for the display of sensuous beauty, science, and mundane pageantry. The human body received separate and independent study, as a thing in itself incomparably beautiful, commanding more powerful emotions by its magic than aught else that sways the soul. At the same time the external world, with all its wealth of animal and vegetable life, together with the works of human ingenuity in costly clothing and superb buildings, was seen to be in every detail worthy of most patient imitation. Anatomy and perspective taxed the understanding of the artist, whose whole force was no longer devoted to the task of bringing religious ideas within the limits of the representable. Next, when the classical revival came into play, the arts, in obedience to the spirit of the age, left the sphere of sacred subjects, and employed their full-grown faculties in the domain of myths and Pagan fancies. In this way painting may truly be said to have opened the new era of culture, and to have first manifested the freedom of the modern mind. When Luca Signorelli drew naked young men for a background to his picture of Madonna and the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of the attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the whole range of human interests. Standing before this picture in the Uffizzi, we feel that the Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas with æsthetic beauty, had encouraged a power antagonistic to her own, a power that liberated the spirit she sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the earthly paradise from which monasticism had expelled it.

Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult problem of the relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would be to shrink from the most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the Renaissance. On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages—the Jews, the iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors—were justified in their mistrust of plastic art. The spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral, but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations^[4]. It is always bringing us back to the dear life of earth, from which the faith would sever us. It is always reminding us of the body which piety bids us to forget. Painters and sculptors glorify that which saints and ascetics have mortified. The masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example, lead the soul away from compunction, away from penitence, away from worship even, to dwell on the delight of youthful faces, blooming colour, graceful movement, delicate emotion^[5]. Nor is this all: religious motives may be misused for what is worse than merely sensuous suggestiveness. The masterpieces of the Bolognese and Neapolitan painters, while they pretend to quicken compassion for martyrs in their agony, pander to a bestial blood-lust lurking in the darkest chambers of the soul^[6]. Therefore it is that piety, whether the piety of monastic Italy or of Puritan England, turns from these æsthetic triumphs as from something alien to itself. When the worshipper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite, ineffable, unrealised, how can he endure the contact of those splendid forms, in which the lust of the eye and the pride of life, professing to subserve devotion, remind him rudely of the goodliness of sensual existence? Art, by magnifying human beauty, contradicts these Pauline maxims: "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain;" "Set your affections on things above, not on things on earth;" "Your life is hid with Christ in God." The sublimity and elevation it gives to carnal loveliness are themselves hostile to the spirit that holds no truce or compromise of traffic with the flesh. As displayed in its most perfect phases, in Greek sculpture and Venetian painting, art dignifies the actual mundane life of man; but Christ, in the language of uncompromising piety, means everything most alien to this mundane life—self-denial, abstinence from fleshly pleasure, the waiting for true bliss beyond the grave, seclusion even from social and domestic ties. "He that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me," "He that taketh not his cross and followeth me, is not worthy of me." It is needful to insist upon these extremest sentences of the New Testament, because upon them was based the religious practice of the Middle Ages, more sincere in their determination to fulfil the letter and embrace the spirit of the Gospel than any succeeding age has been.^[7]

If, then, there really exists this antagonism between fine art glorifying human life and piety contemning it, how came it, we may ask, that even in the Middle Ages the Church hailed art as her coadjutor? The answer lies in this, that the Church has always compromised. The movement of the modern world, upon the close of the Middle Ages, offered the Church a compromise, which it would have been difficult to refuse, and in which she perceived art first no peril to her dogmas. When the conflict of the first few centuries of Christianity had ended in her triumph, she began to mediate between asceticism and the world. Intent on absorbing all existent elements of life and power, she conformed her system to the Roman type, established her service in basilicas and Pagan temples, adopted portions of the antique ritual, and converted local genii into saints. At the same time she utilised the spiritual forces of monasticism, and turned the mystic impulse of ecstatics to account. The Orders of the Preachers and the Begging Friars became her militia and police; the mystery of Christ's presence in the Eucharist was made an engine of the priesthood; the dreams of Paradise and Purgatory gave value to her pardons, interdictions, jubilees, indulgences, and curses. In the Church the spirit of the cloister and the spirit of the world found neutral ground, and to the practical accommodation between these hostile elements she owed her wide supremacy. The Christianity she formed and propagated was different from that of the New Testament, inasmuch as it had taken up into itself a mass of mythological anthropomorphic elements. Thus transmuted and materialised, thus accepted by the vivid faith of an unquestioning populace, Christianity offered a proper medium for artistic activity. The whole first period of Italian painting was occupied with the endeavour to set forth in form and colour the popular conceptions of a faith at once unphilosophical and unspiritual, beautiful and fit for art by reason of the human elements it had assumed into its substance. It was natural, therefore, that the Church should show herself indulgent to the arts, which were effecting in their own sphere what she had previously accomplished, though purists and ascetics, holding fast by the original spirit of their creed, might remain irreconcilably antagonistic to their influence. The Reformation, on the contrary, rejecting the whole mass of compromises sanctioned by the Church, and returning to the elemental principles of the faith, was no less naturally opposed to fine arts, which, after giving sensuous form to Catholic mythology, had recently attained to liberty and brought again the gods of Greece.

A single illustration might be selected from the annals of Italian painting to prove how difficult even the holiest-minded and most earnest painter found it to effect the proper junction between plastic beauty and pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo, the disciple of Savonarola, painted a Sebastian in the cloister of S. Marco, where it remained until the Dominican confessors became aware, through the avowals of female penitents, that this picture was a stumbling-block and snare to souls. It was then removed, and what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra Bartolommeo undoubtedly intended this ideal portrait of the martyr to be edifying. S. Sebastian was to stand before the world as the young man, strong and beautiful, who endured to the end and won the crown of martyrdom. No other ideas but those of heroism, constancy, or faith were meant to be expressed; but the painter's art demanded that their expression should be eminently beautiful, and the beautiful body of the young man distracted attention from his spiritual virtues to his physical perfections. A similar maladjustment of the means of plastic art to the purposes of religion would have been impossible in Hellas, where the temples of Eros and of Phoebus stood side by side; but in Christian Florence the craftsman's skill sowed seeds of discord in the souls of the devout^[8].

This story is but a coarse instance of the separation between piety and plastic art. In truth, the difficulty of uniting them in such a way that the latter shall enforce the former, lies far deeper than its powers of illustration reach. Religion has its proper end in contemplation and in conduct. Art aims at presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and feelings with a view to intellectual enjoyment. Now, many thoughts are incapable of sensuous embodiment; they appear as abstractions to the philosophical intellect or as dogmas to the theological understanding. To effect an alliance between art and philosophy or art and theology in the specific region of either religion or speculation is, therefore, an impossibility. In like manner there are many feelings which cannot properly assume a sensuous form; and these are precisely religious feelings, in which the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual world behind, to seek her freedom in a spiritual region.^[9] Yet, while we recognise the truth of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to maintain that, until they are brought into close and inconvenient contact, there is direct hostility between religion and the arts. The sphere of the two is separate; their aims are distinct; they must be allowed to perfect themselves, each after its own fashion. In the large philosophy of human nature, represented by Goethe's famous motto, there is room for both, because those who embrace it bend their natures neither wholly to the pietism of the cloister nor to the sensuality of art. They find the meeting-point of art and of religion in their own humanity, and perceive that the antagonism of the two begins when art is set to do work alien to its nature, and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.

At the risk of repetition I must now resume the points I have attempted to establish in this chapter. As in ancient Greece, so also in Renaissance Italy, the fine arts assumed the first place in the intellectual culture of the nation. But the thought and feeling of the modern world required an æsthetic medium more capable of expressing emotion in its intensity, variety, and subtlety than sculpture. Therefore painting was the art of arts for Italy. Yet even painting, notwithstanding the range and wealth of its resources, could not deal with the motives of Christianity so successfully as sculpture with the myths of Paganism. The religion it interpreted transcended the actual conditions of humanity, while art is bound down by its nature to the limitations of the world we live in. The Church imagined art would help her; and within a certain sphere of subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and the lives of saints, by creating new types of serene beauty and pure joy, by giving form to angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion, painting lent efficient aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very pith and kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising purists. Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, it really restored to humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty, and helped to proved the untenability of the mediæval standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and, what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty of contemplation.

The first step in the emancipation of the modern mind was taken thus by art, proclaiming to men the glad tidings of their goodliness and greatness in a world of manifold enjoyment created for their use. Whatever painting touched, became by that touch human; piety, at the lure of art, folded her soaring wings and rested on the genial earth. This the Church had not foreseen. Because the freedom of the human spirit expressed itself in painting only under visible images, and not, like heresy, in abstract sentences; because this art sufficed for Mariolatry and confirmed the cult of local saints; because its sensuousness was not at variance with a creed that had been deeply sensualised—the painters were allowed to run their course unchecked. Then came a second stage in their development of art. By placing the end of their endeavour in technical excellence and anatomical accuracy, they began to make representation an object in itself, independently of its spiritual significance. Next, under the influence of the classical revival, they brought home again the old powers of the earth—Aphrodite and Galatea and the Loves, Adonis and Narcissus and the Graces, Phoebus and Daphne and Aurora, Pan and the Fauns, and the Nymphs of the woods and the waves.

When these dead deities rose from their sepulchres to sway the hearts of men in the new age, it was found that something had been taken from their ancient bloom of innocence, something had been added of emotional intensity. Italian art recognised their claim to stand beside Madonna and the Saints in the Pantheon of humane culture; but the painters re-made them in accordance with the modern spirit. This slight touch of transformation proved that, though they were no longer objects of religious devotion, they still preserved a vital meaning for an altered age. Having personified for the antique world qualities which, though suppressed and ignored by militant and mediæval Christianity, were strictly human, the Hellenic deities still signified those qualities for modern Europe, now at length re-fortified by contact with the ancient mind. For it is needful to remember that in all movements of the Renaissance we ever find a return in all sincerity and faith to the glory and gladness of nature, whether in the world without or in the soul of man. To apprehend that glory and that gladness with the pure and primitive perceptions of the early mythopoets, was not given to the men of the new world. Yet they did what in them lay, with senses sophisticated by many centuries of subtlest warping, to replace the first, free joy of kinship with primeval things. For the painters, far more than for the poets of the sixteenth century, it was possible to reproduce a thousand forms of beauty, each attesting to the delightfulness of physical existence, to the inalienable rights of natural desire, and to the participation of mankind in pleasures held in common by us with the powers of earth and sea and air.

It is wonderful to watch the blending of elder and of younger forces in this process. The old gods lent a portion of their charm even to Christian mythology, and showered their beauty-bloom on saints who died renouncing them. Sodoma's Sebastian is but Hyacinth or Hylas, transpierced with arrows, so that pain and martyrdom add pathos to his poetry of youthfulness. Lionardo's S. John is a Faun of the forest, ivy-crowned and laughing, on whose lips the word "Repent" would be a gleeful paradox. For the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman martyrs and Olympian deities—the heroes of the Acta Sanctorum, and the heroes of Greek romance—were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the beautiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent fragrance was educed from these apparently diverse blossoms by their interminglement and fusion—how the high-wrought sensibilities of the Christian were added to the clear and radiant fancies of the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic faith—remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art of the Renaissance.

Having co-ordinated the Christian and Pagan traditions in its work of beauty, painting could advance no farther. The stock of its sustaining motives was exhausted. A problem that preoccupied the minds of thinking men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical. Without being as conscious of their hostility as we are, men felt that the Pagan ideal was opposed to the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be effected. Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for the modern synthesis. All that æsthetic handling, in this region more precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts. Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony than philosophy in the writings of Pico and Ficino. A new Catholicity, a cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was manifested in his pictures. It lay outside his power, or that of any other artist, to do more than to extract from both revelations the elements of plastic beauty they contained, and to show how freely he could use them for a common purpose. Nothing but the scientific method can in the long run enable us to reach that further point, outside both Christianity and Paganism, at which the classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored to the conscience educated by the Gospel. This, perchance, is the religion, still unborn or undeveloped, whereof Joachim of Flora dimly prophesied when he said that the kingdom of the Father was past, the kingdom of the Son was passing, and the kingdom of the Spirit was to be. The essence of it is contained in the whole growth to usward of the human mind; and though a creed so highly intellectualised as that will be, can never receive adequate expression from the figurative arts, still the painting of the sixteenth century forms for it, as it were, a not unworthy vestibule. It does so, because it first succeeded in humanising the religion of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming the true value of antique paganism for the modern mind, and in making both subserve the purposes of free and unimpeded art.

Meanwhile, at the moment when painting was about to be exhausted, a new art had arisen, for which it remained, within the æsthetic sphere, to achieve much that painting could not do. When the cycle of Christian ideas had been accomplished by the painters, and when the first passion for antiquity had been satisfied, it was given at last to Music to express the soul in all its manifold feeling and complexity of movement. In music we see the point of departure where art leaves the domain of myths, Christian as well as Pagan, and occupies itself with the emotional activity of man alone, and for its own sake. Melody and harmony, disconnected from words, are capable of receiving most varied interpretations, so that the same combinations of sound express the ecstasies of earthly and of heavenly love, conveying to the mind of the hearer only that element of pure passion which is the primitive and natural ground-material of either. They give distinct form to moods of feeling as yet undetermined; or, as the Italians put it, la musica è il lamento dell' amore o la preghiera a gli dei. This, combined with its independence of all corporeal conditions, fenders music the true exponent of the spirit in its freedom, and therefore the essentially modern art.

For Painting, after the great work accomplished during the Renaissance, when the painters ran through the whole domain of thought within the scope of that age, there only remained portraiture, history, dramatic incident, landscape, genre, still life, and animals. In these spheres the art is still exercised, and much good work, undoubtedly, is annually produced by European painters. But painting has lost its hold upon the centre of our intellectual activity. It can no longer give form to the ideas that at the present epoch rule the modern world. These ideas are too abstract, too much a matter of the understanding, to be successfully handled by the figurative arts; and it cannot be too often or too emphatically stated that these arts produce nothing really great and universal in relation to the spirit of their century, except by a process analogous to the mythopoetic. With conceptions incapable of being sensuously apprehended, with ideas that lose their value when they are incarnated, they have no power to deal. As meteors become luminous by traversing the grosser element of our terrestrial atmosphere, so the thoughts that art employs must needs immerse themselves in sensuousness. They must be of a nature to gain rather than to suffer by such immersion; and they must make a direct appeal to minds habitually apt to think in metaphors and myths. Of this sort are all religious ideas at a certain stage of their development, and this attitude at certain moments of history is adopted by the popular consciousness. We have so far outgrown it, have so completely exchanged mythology for curiosity, and metaphor for science, that the necessary conditions for great art are wanting. Our deepest thoughts about the world and God are incapable of personification by any æsthetic process; they never enter that atmosphere wherein alone they could become through fine art luminous. For the painter, who is the form-giver, they have ceased to be shining stars, and are seen as opaque stones; and though divinity be in them, it is a deity that refuses the investiture of form.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER II--ARCHITECTURE

Architecture of Mediæval Italy—Milan, Genoa, Venice—The Despots as Builders—Diversity of Styles—Local Influences—Lombard, Tuscan, Romanesque, Gothic—Italian want of feeling for Gothic—Cathedrals of Siena and Orvieto—Secular Buildings of the Middle Ages—Florence and Venice—Private Palaces—Public Halls—Palazzo della Signoria at Florence—Arnolfo di Cambio—S. Maria del Fiore—Brunelleschi's Dome—Classical Revival in Architecture—Roman Ruins—Three Periods in Renaissance Architecture—Their Characteristics—Brunelleschi —Alberti—Palace-building—Michellozzo—Decorative Work of the Revival—Bramante—Vitoni's Church of the Umiltà at Pistoja—Palazzo del Te—Villa Farnesina—Sansovino at Venice—Michael Angelo—The Building of S. Peter's—Palladio—The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza—Lombard Architects—Theorists and Students of Vitruvius—Vignola and Scamozzi—European Influence of the Palladian Style—Comparison of Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.

Architecture is always the first of the fine arts to emerge from barbarism in the service of religion and of civic life. A house, as Hegel says, must be built for the god, before the image of the god, carved in stone or figured in mosaic, can be placed there. Council chambers must be prepared for the senate of a State before the national achievements can be painted on the walls. Thus Italy, before the age of the Renaissance proper, found herself provided with churches and palaces, which were destined in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to be adorned with frescoes and statues.

It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, during the long struggle for independence carried on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany against the Empire and the nobles, that some of the most durable and splendid public works were executed. The domes and towers of Florence and of Pisa were rising above the city walls, while the burghers who subscribed for their erection were staining the waves of Meloria and the cane-brakes of the Arbia with their blood. Lombardy, at the end of her duel with Frederick Barbarossa, completed a vast undertaking, by which the fields of Milan are still rendered more productive than any other pastureland in Europe. The Naviglio Grande, bringing the waters of the Ticino through a plain of thirty miles to Milan, was begun in 1179, and was finished in 1258. The torrents of S. Gothard and the Simplon, which, after filling the Lago Maggiore, seemed destined to run wasteful through a wilderness of pebbles to the sea, were thus turned to account; and to this great engineering work, as bold as it was simple, Milan owed the wealth that placed her princes on a level with the sovereigns of Europe. At the same period she built her walls, and closed their circuit with the sixteen gates that showed she loved magnificence combined with strength. Genoa, between 1276 and 1283, protected her harbours by a gigantic mole, and in 1295 brought the streams of the Ligurian Alps into the city by an aqueduct worthy of old Rome. Venice had to win her very footing from the sea and sand. So firmly did she drive her piles, so vigilantly watch their preservation, that palaces and cathedrals of marble might be safely reared upon the bosom of the deep. Meanwhile, stone bridges began to span the rivers of Italy; the streets and squares of towns were everywhere paved with flags. Before the first years of the fourteenth century the Italian cities presented a spectacle of solid and substantial comfort, very startling to northerners who travelled from the unpaved lanes of London and the muddy labyrinths of Paris.

Sismondi remarks with just pride that these great works were Republican. They were set on foot for the public use, and were constructed at the expense of the commonwealths. It is, however, right to add that what the communes had begun the princes continued. To the splendid taste of the Visconti dynasty, for instance, Milan owed her wonderful Duomo and the octagon bell-tower of S. Gottardo. The Certosas of Pavia and Chiaravalle, the palace of Pavia, and a host of minor monuments remain in Milan and its neighbourhood to prove how much a single family performed for the adornment of the cities they had subjugated. And what is true of Milan applies to Italy throughout its length and breadth. The Despots held their power at the price of magnificence in schemes of public utility. So much at least of the free spirit of the communes survived in them, that they were always rivalling each other in great works of architecture. Italian tyranny implied æsthetic taste and liberality of expenditure.

In no way is the characteristic diversity of the Italian communities so noticeable as in their buildings. Each district, each town, has a well-defined peculiarity, reflecting the specific qualities of the inhabitants and the conditions under which they grew in culture. In some cases we may refer this local character to nationality and geographical position. Thus the name of the Lombards has been given to a style of Romanesque, which prevailed through Northern and Central Italy during the period of Lombard ascendency.^[10] The Tuscans never forgot the domes of their remote ancestors; the Romans adhered closely to Latin traditions; the Southerners were affected by Byzantine and Saracenic models. In many instances the geology of the neighbourhood determined the picturesque features of its architecture. The clay-fields of the valley of the Po produced the brickwork of Cremona, Pavia, Crema, Chiaravalle, and Vercelli. To their quarries of mandorlato the Veronese builders owed the peach-bloom colours of their columned aisles. Carrara provided the Pisans with mellow marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral; Monte Ferrato supplied Pistoja and Prato with green serpentine; while the pietra serena of the Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine buildings. Again, in other instances, we detect the influence of commerce or of conquest. The intercourse of Venice with Alexandria determined the unique architecture of S. Mark's. The Arabs and the Normans left ineffaceable traces of their sojourn on Palermo. Naples and Messina still bear marks upon their churches of French workmen. All along the coasts we here and there find evidences of Oriental style imported into mediæval Italy, while the impress of the Spaniard is no less manifest in edifices of a later period.

Existing thus in the midst of many potent influences, and surrounded by the ruins of past civilisations, the Italians recombined and mingled styles of marked variety. The Roman, Byzantine, Saracenic, Lombard, and German traditions were blended in their architecture, as the presiding genius of each place determined. It followed that master-works of rare and subtle invention were produced, while no one type was fully perfected, nor can we point to any paramount Italian manner. In Italy what was gained in richness and individuality was lost in uniformity and might. Yet we may well wonder at the versatile appreciation of all types of beauty that these monuments evince. How strange, for example, it is to think of the Venetians borrowing the form and structure of their temple from the mosques of Alexandria, decking its façade with the horses of Lysippus, and panelling the sanctuary with marbles from the harem-floors of Eastern emperors; while at the other end of Italy, at Palermo, close beside the ruined colonnades of Greek Segesta, Norman kings were embroidering their massive churches with Saracenic arabesques and Byzantine mosaics, interspersing delicate Arabian tracery with rope-patterns and monsters of the deep, and linking Cuphic sentences with Scandinavian runes. Meanwhile, at Rome, tombs, baths, and theatres had been turned into fortresses. The Orsini held the Mole of Hadrian; the Savelli ensconced themselves in the Theatre of Marcellus, and the Colonnesi in the Mausoleum of Augustus; the Colosseum and the Arches of Constantine and Titus harboured the Frangipani; the Baths of Trajan housed the Capocci; while the Gaetani made a castle of Cæcilia Metella's tomb. Under those vast resounding vaults swarmed a brood of mediæval bravi—like the wasps that hang their pear-shaped combs along the cloisters of Pavia. There the ghost of the dead empire still sat throned and sceptred. The rites of Christianity were carried on beneath Agrippa's dome, in Diocletian's baths, in the Basilicas. No other style but that of the imperial people struck root near the Eternal City. Among her three hundred churches, Rome can only show one Gothic building. Further to the north, where German influences were more potent, the cathedrals still displayed, each after its own kind, a sunny southern waywardness. Glowing with marbles and mosaics, glittering with ornaments, where the foliage of the Corinthian acanthus hides the symbols of the Passion, and where birds and Cupids peep from tangled fruits beneath grave brows of saints and martyrs; leaning now to the long low colonnades of the Basilica, now to the high-built arches of the purely Pointed style; surmounting the meeting point of nave and transept with Etruscan domes; covering the façade with bas-reliefs, the roof with statues; raising the porch-pillars upon lions and winged griffins; flanking the nave with bell-towers, or planting them apart like flowers in isolation on the open square—these wonderful buildings, the delight and joy of all who love to trace variety in beauty, and to note the impress of a nation's genius upon its art, seem, like Italy herself, to feel all influences and to assimilate all nationalities.

Amid the many styles of architecture contending for mastery in Italy, three, before the age of the Revival, bid fair to win the battle. These were the Lombard, the Tuscan Romanesque, and the Gothic. Chronologically the two former flourished nearly during the same centuries, while Gothic, coming from without, suspended their development. But chronology is of little help in the history of Italian architecture; its main features being, not uniformity of progression, but synchronous diversity and salience of local type. What remained fixed through all changes in Italy was a bias toward the forms of Roman building, which eventually in the Renaissance, becoming scientifically apprehended, determined the taste of the whole nation.

It is, perhaps, not wholly fanciful to say that, as the Lombards just failed to mould the Italians by conquest into an united people, so their architecture fell short of creating one type for the peninsula.^[11] From some points of view the historian might regret that Italy did not receive that thorough subjugation in the eighth century, which would have broken down local distinctions. Such regrets, however, are singularly idle; for the main currents of the world's history move not by chance; and how, moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers forms of political existence that made her what she was? Yet, standing before some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians which the Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over France and England?^[12] The pyramidal façade common in these buildings, the campanili that suspend aërial lanterns upon plain square towers, the domes rising tier over tier from the intersection of nave and transept to end in minarets and pinnacles, the low long colonnades of marble pilasters, the open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious blending of baked clay and rosy-tinted stone, the bold combination of round and pointed arches, and the weird invention whereby every string-course and capital has been carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour—all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style. As it is, the churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful. Their peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue hills and snowy Alps that constitute the charm of Lombard landscape.

If Lombard architecture, properly so-called, was partial in its influence and confined to a comparatively narrow local sphere, the same is true of the Tuscan Romanesque. The church of Samminiato, near Florence [about 1013], and the cathedral of Pisa [begun 1063], not to mention other less eminent examples at Lucca and Pistoja, are sufficient evidences that in the darkest period of the Middle Ages the Italians were aiming at an architectural Renaissance. The influence of classical models is apparent both in the construction and the detail of these basilicas; while the deeply grounded preference of the Italian genius for round arches, for colonnades of pillars and pilasters, and for large rectangular spaces, with low roofs and shallow tribunes, finds full satisfaction in these original and noble buildings. It is impossible to refrain from deploring that the Romanesque of Tuscany should have been checked in its development by the intrusion of the German Gothic. Had it run its course unthwarted, a national style suited to the temperament of the people might have been formed, and much that was pedantic in the revival of the fifteenth century have been obviated.

The place of Gothic architecture in Italy demands fuller treatment. It was due partly to the direct influence of German emperors, partly to the imperial sympathies of the great nobles, partly to the Franciscan friars, who aimed at building large churches cheaply, and partly to the admiration excited by the grandeur of the Pointed style as it prevailed in Northern Europe, that Gothic—so alien to the Italian genius and climate—took root, spread widely, and flourished freely for a season. In thus enumerating the conditions favourable to the spread of Gottico-Tedesco, I am far from wishing to assert that this style was purely foreign. Italy, in common with the rest of Europe, passed by a natural process of evolution from the Romanesque to the Pointed manner, and treated the latter with an originality that proves a certain natural assimilation. Yet the first Gothic church, that of S. Francis at Assisi, was designed by a German; the most splendid, that of Our Lady at Milan, is emphatically German.^[13] During the comparatively brief period of Gothic ascendency the Italians never forgot their Latin and Lombard sympathies. The mood of mind in which they Gothicised was partial and transient. The evolution of this style was, therefore, neither so spontaneous and simple, nor yet so uninterrupted and complete, in Italy as in the North. While it produced the church of S. Francesco at Assisi and the cathedrals of Siena, Orvieto, Lucca, Bologna, Florence, and Milan, together with the town-halls of Perugia, Siena, and Florence, it failed to take firm hold upon the national taste, and died away before the growing passion for antiquity that restored the Italians to a sense of their own intellectual greatness. It is clear that, as soon as they were conscious of their vocation to revive the culture of the classic age, they at once and for ever abandoned the style appropriate to northern feudalism. They seem to have adopted it half-unwillingly and to have understood it only in the imperfect way in which they comprehended chivalry.

The Italians never rightly apprehended the specific nature of Gothic architecture. They could not forget the horizontal lines, flat roofs, and blank walls of the Basilica. Like their Roman ancestors, they aimed at covering the ground with the smallest possible expenditure of construction; to enclose large spaces within simple limits was their first object, and the effect of beauty or sublimity was gained by the proportions given to the total area. When, therefore, they adopted the Gothic style, they failed to perceive that its true merit consists in the negation of nearly all that the Latin style holds precious. Horizontal lines are as far as possible annihilated; walls are lost in windows; aisles and columns, apses and chapels, are multiplied with a view to complexity of architectonic effect; flat roofs become intolerable. The whole force employed in the construction has an upward tendency, and the spire is the completion of the edifice; for to the spire its countless soaring lines—lines not of stationary strength, but of ascendent growth—converge. All this the Italians were slow to comprehend. The campanile, for example, never became an integral part of their buildings. It stood alone, and was reserved for its original purpose of keeping the bells. The windows, for a reason very natural in Italy, where there is rather too much than too little sunlight, were curtailed; and instead of the multiplied bays and clustered columns of a northern Gothic aisle, the nave of so vast a church as S. Petronio at Bologna is measured by six arches raised on simple piers. The façade of an Italian cathedral was studied as a screen, quite independently of its relation to the interior; in the beautiful church of Crema, for example, the moon at night looks through the upper windows of a frontispiece raised far above the low roof of the nave. For the total effect of the exterior, as will be apparent to anyone who observes the Duomo of Orvieto from behind, no thought was taken. In this way the Italians missed the point and failed to perceive the poetry of Gothic architecture. Its symbolical significance was lost upon them; perhaps we ought to say that the Italian temperament, in art as in religion, was incapable of assimilating the vague yet powerful mysticism of the Teutonic races.

On the other hand, what they sacrificed of genuine Gothic character, was made good after their own fashion. Surface decoration, whether of fresco or mosaic, bronze-work or bas-relief, wood-carving or panelling in marble, baked clay or enamelled earthenware was never carried to such perfection in Gothic buildings of the purer type; nor had sculpture in the North an equal chance of detaching itself from the niche and tabernacle, which forced it to remain the slave of architecture. Thus the comparative defects of Italian Gothic were directly helpful in promoting those very arts for which the people had a genius unrivalled among modern nations.

It is only necessary to contrast the two finest cathedrals of this style, those of Siena and Orvieto, with two such buildings as the cathedrals of Rheims and Salisbury, in order to perceive the structural inferiority of the former, as well as their superiority for all subordinate artistic purposes. Long straight lines, low roofs, narrow windows, a façade of surprising splendour but without a strict relation to the structure of the nave and aisles, a cupola surmounting the intersection of nave, choir, and transepts; simple tribunes at the east end, a detached campanile, round columns instead of clustered piers, a mixture of semicircular and pointed arches; these are some of the most salient features of the Sienese Duomo. But the material is all magnificent; and the hand, obedient to the dictates of an artist's brain, has made itself felt on every square foot of the building. Alternate courses of white and black marble, cornices loaded with grave or animated portraits of the Popes, sculptured shrines, altars, pulpits, reliquaries, fonts and holy-water vases, panels of inlaid wood and pictured pavements, bronze candelabra and wrought-iron screens, gilding and colour and precious work of agate and lapis lazuli—the masterpieces of men famous each in his own line—delight the eye in all directions. The whole church is a miracle of richness, a radiant and glowing triumph of inventive genius, the product of a hundred master-craftsmen toiling through successive centuries to do their best. All its countless details are so harmonised by the controlling taste, so brought together piece by piece in obedience to artistic instinct, that the total effect is ravishingly beautiful. Yet it is clear that no one paramount idea, determining and organising all these marvels, existed in the mind of the first architect. In true Gothic work the details that make up the charm of this cathedral would have been subordinated to one architectonic thought; they would not have been suffered to assert their individuality, or to contribute, except as servants, to the whole effect. The northern Gothic church is like a body with several members; the southern Gothic church is an accretion of beautiful atoms. The northern Gothic style corresponds to the national unity of federalised races, organised by a social hierarchy of mutually dependent classes. In the southern Gothic style we find a mirror of political diversity, independent personality, burgher-like equality, despotic will. Thus the specific qualities of Italy on her emergence from the Middle Ages may be traced by no undue exercise of the fancy in her monuments. They are emphatically the creation of citizens—of men, to use Giannotti's phrase, distinguished by alternating obedience and command, not ranked beneath a monarchy, but capable themselves of sovereign power.^[14]

What has been said of Siena is no less true of the Duomo of Orvieto. Though it seems to aim at a severer Gothic, and though the façade is more architecturally planned, a single glance at the exterior of the edifice shows that the builders had no lively sense of the requirements of the style they used. What can be more melancholy than those blank walls, broken by small round recesses protruding from the side chapels of the nave, those gaunt and barren angles at the east end, and those few pinnacles appended at a venture? It is clear that the spirit of the northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived. On the other hand, the interior is noble. The feeling for space possessed by the architect has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed, though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive by its severe harmony. But the real attractions of the church are isolated details. Wherever the individual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge, there our gaze is riveted, our criticism challenged, our admiration won. The frescoes of Signorelli, the bas-reliefs of the Pisani, the statuary of Lo Scalza and Mosca, the tarsia of the choir stalls, the Alexandrine work and mosaics of the façade, the bronzes placed upon its brackets, and the wrought acanthus scrolls of its superb pilasters—these are the objects for inexhaustible wonder in the cathedral of Orvieto. On approaching a building of this type, we must abandon our conceptions of organic architecture: only the Greek and northern Gothic styles deserve that epithet. We must not seek for severe discipline and architectonic design. Instead of one presiding, all-determining idea, we must be prepared to welcome a wealth of separate beauties, wrought out by men of independent genius, whereby each part is made a masterpiece, and many diverse elements become a whole of picturesque rather than architectural impressiveness.

It would not be difficult to extend this kind of criticism to the Duomo of Milan. Speaking strictly, a more unlucky combination of different styles—the pyramidal façade of Lombard architecture and the long thin lights of German Gothic, for example—a clumsier misuse of ill-appropriated details in the heavy piers of the nave, or a more disastrous adjustment of the monster windows to the main lines of the nave and aisles, could scarcely be imagined. Yet no other church, perhaps, in Europe leaves the same impression of the marvellous upon the fancy. The splendour of its pure white marble, blushing with the rose of evening or of dawn, radiant in noonday sunlight, and fabulously fairy-like beneath the moon and stars, the multitudes of statues sharply cut against a clear blue sky, and gazing at the Alps across that memorable tract of plain, the immense space and light-irradiated gloom of the interior, the deep tone of the bells above at a vast distance, and the gorgeous colours of the painted glass, contribute to a scenical effect unparalleled in Christendom.

The two styles, Lombard and Gothic, of which I have been speaking, were both in a certain sense exotic. Within the great cities the pith of the population was Latin; and no style of building that did not continue the tradition of the Romans, in the spirit of the Roman manner, and with strict observance of its details, satisfied them. It was a main feature of the Renaissance that, when the Italians undertook the task of reuniting themselves by study with the past, they abandoned all other forms of architecture, and did their best to create one in harmony with the relics of Latin monuments. To trace the history of this revived classic architecture will occupy me later in this chapter; but for the moment it is necessary to turn aside and consider briefly the secular buildings of Italy before the date of the Renaissance proper.

About the same time that the cathedrals were being built, the nobles filled the towns with fortresses. These at first were gaunt and unsightly; how overcrowded with tall bare towers a mediæval Italian city could be, is still shown by San Gemignano, the only existing instance where the torroni have been left untouched.^[15] In course of time, when the aristocracy came to be fused with the burghers, and public order was maintained by law in the great cities, these forts made way for spacious palaces. The temper of the citizens in each place and the local character of artistic taste determined the specific features of domestic as of ecclesiastical architecture. Though it is hard to define what are the social differences expressed by the large quadrangles of Francesco Sforza's hospital at Milan, and the heavy cube of the Riccardi palace at Florence, we feel that the genius loci has in each case controlled the architect. The sunny spaces of the one building, with its terra-cotta traceries of birds and grapes and Cupids, contrast with the stern brown mouldings and impenetrable solidity of the other. That the one was raised by the munificence of a sovereign in his capital, while the other was the dwelling of a burgher in a city proud of its antique sobriety, goes some way to explain the difference. In like manner the court-life of a dynastic principality produced the castle of Urbino, so diverse in its style and adaptation from the ostentatious mansions of the Genoese merchants. It is not fanciful to say that the civic life of a free and factious republic is represented by the heavy walls and narrow windows of Florentine dwelling-places. In their rings of iron, welded between rock and rock about the basement, as though for the beginning of a barricade—in their torch-rests of wrought metal, gloomy portals and dimly-lighted courts, we trace the habits of caution and reserve that marked the men who led the parties of Uberti and Albizzi. The Sienese palaces are lighter and more elegant in style, as belonging to a people proverbially pleasure-loving; while a still more sumptuous and secure mode of life finds expression in the open loggie and spacious staircases of Venice. The graceful buildings which overhang the Grand Canal are exactly fitted for an oligarchy, sure of its own authority and loved of the people. Feudal despotism, on the contrary, reigns in the heart of Ferrara, where the Este's stronghold, moated, draw-bridged, and portcullised, casting dense shadow over the water that protects the dungeons, still seems to threaten the public square and overawe the homes of men.

To the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, again, we owe the town halls and public palaces that form so prominent a feature in the city architecture of Italy. The central vitality of once powerful States is symbolised in the broletti of the Lombard cities, dusty and abandoned now in spite of their clear-cut terra-cotta traceries. There is something strangely melancholy in their desolation. Wandering through the vast hall of the Ragione at Padua, where the very shadows seem asleep as they glide over the wide unpeopled floor, it is not easy to remember that this was once the theatre of eager intrigues, ere the busy stir of the old burgh was utterly extinguished. Few of these public palaces have the good fortune to be distinguished, like that of the Doge at Venice, by world-historical memories and by works of art as yet unrivalled. The spirit of the Venetian Republic still lives in that unique building. Architects may tell us that its Gothic arcades are melodramatic; sculptors may depreciate the decorative work of Sansovino; painters may assert that the genius of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese shines elsewhere with greater lustre. Yet the poet clings with ever-deepening admiration to the sea-born palace of the ancient mistress of the sea, and the historian feels that here, as at Athens, art has made the past towards which he looks eternal.

Two other great Italian houses of the Commonwealth, rearing their towers above the town for tocsin and for ward, owe immortality to their intrinsic beauty. These are the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Few buildings in Europe are more picturesquely fascinating than the palace of Siena, with its outlook over hill and dale to cloud-capped Monte Amiata. Yet, in spite of its unparalleled position on the curved and sloping piazza, where the contrade of Siena have run their palio for centuries, this palace lacks the vivid interest attaching to the home Arnolfo raised at Florence for the rulers of his native city. During their term of office the Priors never quitted the Palace of the Signory. All deliberations on state affairs took place within its walls, and its bell was the pulse that told how the heart of Florence throbbed. The architect of this huge mass of masonry was Arnolfo del Cambio, one of the greatest builders of the Middle Ages, a man who may be called the Michael Angelo of the thirteenth century^[16]. In 1298 he was ordered to erect a dwelling-place for the Commonwealth, to the end that the people might be protected in their fortress from the violence of the nobles. The building of the palace and the levelling of the square around it were attended with circumstances that bring forcibly before our minds the stern conditions of republican life in mediæval Italy. A block of houses had to be bought from the family of Foraboschi; and their tower, called Torre della Vacca, was raised and turned into the belfry of the Priors. There was not room enough, however, to construct the palace itself with right angles, unless it were extended into the open space where once had stood the houses of the Uberti, "traitors to Florence and Ghibellines." In destroying these, the burghers had decreed that thenceforth for ever the feet of men should pass where the hearths of the proscribed nobles once had blazed. Arnolfo begged that he might trespass on this site; but the people refused permission. Where the traitors' nest had been, there the sacred foundations of the public house should not be laid. Consequently the Florentine Palazzo is, was, and will be cramped of its correct proportions^[17].

No Italian architect has enjoyed the proud privilege of stamping his own individuality more strongly on his native city than Arnolfo; and for this reason it may be permitted to enlarge upon his labours here. When we take our stand upon the hill of Samminiato, the Florence at our feet owes her physiognomy in a great measure to this man. The tall tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the bulk of the Duomo, and the long low oblong mass of Santa Croce are all his. His too are the walls that define the city of flowers from the gardens round about her.^[18] Even the master-works of his successors subordinate their beauty to his first conception. Giotto's campanile, Brunelleschi's cupola, and Orcagna's church of Orsammichele, in spite of their undoubted and authentic originality, are placed where he had planned.

In 1294 the Florentines determined to rebuild their mother-church upon a scale of unexampled grandeur. The commission given to their architect displays so strikingly the lordly spirit in which these burghers set about the work, that, though it has been often quoted, a portion of the document shall be recited here. "Since the highest mark of prudence in a people of noble origin is to proceed in the management of their affairs so that their magnanimity and wisdom may be evinced in their outward acts, we order Arnolfo, head-master of our commune, to make a design for the renovation of Santa Reparata in a style of magnificence which neither the industry nor the power of man can surpass, that it may harmonise with the opinion of many wise persons in this city and state, who think that this commune should not engage in any enterprise unless its intention be to make the result correspond with that noblest sort of heart which is composed of the united will of many citizens."^[19] From Giovanni Villani we learn what taxes were levied by the Wool-Guild, and set apart in 1331 for the completion of the building. They were raised upon all goods bought or sold within the city in two separate rates, the net produce amounting in the first year to 2,000 lire.^[20] The cathedral designed by Arnolfo was of vast dimensions: it covers 84,802 feet, while that of Cologne covers 81,461 feet; and, says Fergusson, "as far as mere conception of plan goes, there can be little doubt but that the Florentine cathedral far surpasses its German rival."^[21] Nothing, indeed, can be imagined more noble than the scheme of this huge edifice. Studying its ground-plan, and noting how the nave unfolds into a mighty octagon, which in its turn displays three well-proportioned apses, we are induced to think that a sublimer thought has never been expressed in stone. At this point, however, our admiration receives a check. In the execution of the parts the builder dwarfed what had been conceived on so magnificent a scale; aiming at colossal simplicity, he failed to secure the multiplicity of subordinated members essential to the total effect of size. "Like all inexperienced architects, he seems to have thought that greatness of parts would add to the greatness of the whole, and in consequence used only four great arches in the whole length of his nave, giving the central aisle a width of fifty-five feet clear. The whole width is within ten feet of that of Cologne, and the height about the same; and yet, in appearance, the height is about half, and the breadth less than half, owing to the better proportion of the parts and to the superior appropriateness in the details on the part of the German cathedral."^[22] The truth of these remarks will be felt by every one on whom the ponderous vacuity of the interior has weighed. Other notable defects there are too in this building, proceeding chiefly from the Italian misconception of Gothic style. The windows are few and narrow, so that little light even at noonday struggles through them; and broad barren spaces of grey walls oppress the eye. Externally the whole church is panelled with parti-coloured marbles, according to Florentine custom; but this panelling bears no relation to the structure: it is so much surface decoration possessing value chiefly for the colourist. Arnolfo died before the dome, as he designed it, could be placed upon the octagon, and nothing is known for certain about the form he meant it to assume. It seems, however, probable that he intended to adopt something similar to the dome of Chiaravalle, which ends, after a succession of narrowing octagons, in a slender conical pyramid.^[23] Subordinate spires would then have been placed at each of the four angles where the nave and transepts intersect; and the whole external effect, for richness and variety, would have outrivalled that of any European building. It is well known that the erection of the dome was finally entrusted to Brunelleschi in 1420. Arnolfo's church now sustains in air an octagonal cupola of the simplest possible design, in height and size rivalling that of S. Peter's. It was thus that the genius of the Renaissance completed what the genius of the Middle Ages had begun. But in Italy there was no real break between the two periods. Though Arnolfo employed the Pointed style in his design, we find nothing genuinely Gothic in the church. It has no pinnacles, flying buttresses, side chapels, or subordinate supports. To use the phrase of Michelet, who has chosen the dramatic episode of Brunelleschi's intervention in the rearing of the dome for a parable of the Renaissance, "the colossal church stood up simply, naturally, as a strong man in the morning rises from his bed without the need of staff or crutch."^[24] This indeed is the glory of Italian as compared with Northern architecture. The Italians valued the strength of simple perspicuity: all the best works of their builders are geometrical ideas of the purest kind translated into stone. It is, however, true that the gain of vast aërial space was hardly sufficient to compensate for the impression of emptiness they leave upon the senses. We feel this very strongly when we study the model prepared by Bramante's pupil, Cristoforo Rocchi, for the cathedral of Pavia; yet here we see the neo-Latin genius of the Italian artist working freely in an element exactly suited to his powers. When the same order of genius sought to express its conception through the language of the Gothic style, the result was invariably defective.^[25]

The classical revival of the fifteenth century made itself immediately felt in architecture; and Brunelleschi's visit to Rome in 1403 may be fixed as the date of the Renaissance in this art. Gothic, as we have already seen, was an alien in Italy. Its importation from the North had checked the free development of national architecture, which in the eleventh century began at Pisa by a conscious return to classic details. But the reign of Gothic was destined to be brief. Petrarch and Boccaccio, as I showed in my last volume, turned the whole intellectual energy of the Florentines into the channels of Latin and Greek scholarship.^[26] The ancient world absorbed all interests, and the Italians with one will shook themselves free of the medieval style they never rightly understood, and which they henceforth stigmatised as barbarous.^[27]

The problem that occupied all the Renaissance architects was how to restore the manner of ancient Rome as far as possible, adapting it to the modern requirements of ecclesiastical, civic, and domestic buildings. Of Greek art they knew comparatively nothing: nor indeed could Greek architecture have offered for their purpose the same plastic elements as Roman—itself a derived style, admitting of easier adjustment to modern uses than the inflexibly pure art of Greece. At the same time they possessed but imperfect fragments of Roman work. The ruins of baths, theatres, tombs, temple-fronts, and triumphal arches, were of little immediate assistance in the labour of designing churches and palaces. All that the architects could do, after familiarising themselves with the remains of ancient Rome, and assimilating the spirit of Roman art, was to clothe their own inventions with classic details. The form and structure of their edifices were modern; the parts were copied from antique models. A want of organic unity and structural sincerity is always the result of those necessities under which a secondary and adapted style must labour; and thus the pseudo-Roman buildings even of the best Renaissance period display faults similar to those of the Italian Gothic. While they are remarkable for grandeur of effect in all that concerns the distribution of light and shade, the covering and enclosing of space, and the disposition of masses, they show at best but a superficial correspondence between the borrowed forms and the construction these are used to mask.^[28] The edifices of this period abound in more or less successful shams, in surface decoration more or less pleasing to the eye; their real greatness, meanwhile, consists in the feeling for spatial proportions and for linear harmonies possessed by their architects.

Three periods in the development of Renaissance architecture may be roughly marked.^[29] The first, extending from 1420 to 1500, is the age of experiment and of luxuriant inventiveness. The second embraces the first forty years of the sixteenth century. The most perfect buildings of the Italian Renaissance were produced within this short space of time. The third, again comprising about forty years, from 1540 to 1580, leads onward to the reign of mannerism and exaggeration, called by the Italians barocco. In itself the third period is distinguished by a scrupulous purism bordering upon pedantry, strict adherence to theoretical rules, and sacrifice of inventive qualities to established canons. To do more than briefly indicate the masterpieces of these three periods, would be impossible in a work that does not pretend to treat of architecture exhaustively: and yet to omit all notice of the builders of this age and of their styles, would be to neglect the most important art-phase of the time I have undertaken to illustrate.

In the first period we are bewildered by the luxuriance of creative powers and by the rioting of the fancy in all forms of beauty indiscriminately mingled. In general we detect a striving after effects not fully realised, and a tendency to indulge in superfluous ornament without regard for strictness of design. The imperfect comprehension of classical models and the exuberant vivacity of the imagination in the fifteenth century account for the florid work of this time. Something too is left of mediæval fancy; the details borrowed from the antique undergo fantastic transmutation at the hands of men accustomed to the vehement emotion of the romantic ages. Whatever the Renaissance took from antique art, it was at first unable to assimilate either the moderation of the Greeks or the practical sobriety of the Romans. Christianity had deepened and intensified the sources of imaginative life; and just as reminiscences of classic style impaired Italian Gothic, so now a trace of Gothic is perceptible in the would-be classic work of the Revival. The result of these combined influences was a wonderful and many-featured hybrid, best represented in one monument by the façade of the Certosa at Pavia. While characterising the work of the earlier Renaissance as fused of divers manners, we must not forget that it was truly living, full of purpose, and according to its own standard sincere. It was a new birth; no mere repetition of something dead and gone, but the product of vivid forces stirred to original creativeness by admiration for the past. It corresponded, moreover, with exquisite exactitude to the halting of the conscience between Christianity and Paganism, and to the blent beauty that the poets loved. On reeds dropped from the hands of dead Pan the artists of this period, each in his, own sphere, piped ditties of romance.

To these general remarks upon the style of the first period the Florentine architects offer an exception; and yet the first marked sign of a new era in the art of building was given at Florence. Purity of taste and firmness of judgment, combined with scientific accuracy, were always distinctive of Florentines. To such an extent did these qualities determine their treatment of the arts that acute critics have been found to tax them—and in my opinion justly—with hardness and frigidity.^[30] Brunelleschi in 1425 designed the basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and correctness. What he had learned from the ruins of Rome he here applied in obedience to his own artistic instinct. S. Lorenzo is a columnar edifice with round arches and semicircular apses. Not a form or detail in the whole church is strictly speaking at variance with Roman precedent; and yet the general effect resembles nothing we possess of antique work. It is a masterpiece of intelligent Renaissance adaptation. The same is true of S. Spirito, built in 1470, after Brunelleschi's death, according to his plans. The extraordinary capacity of this great architect will, however, win more homage from ordinary observers when they contemplate the Pitti Palace and the cupola of the cathedral. Both of these are master-works of personal originality. What is Roman in the Pitti Palace, is the robust simplicity of massive strength; but it is certain that no patrician of the republic or the empire inhabited a house at all resembling this. The domestic habits of the Middle Ages, armed for self-defence, and on guard against invasion from without, still find expression in the solid bulk of this forbidding dwelling-place, although its majesty and largeness show that the reign of milder and more courtly manners has begun. To speak of the cupola of the Duomo in connection with a simple revival of Roman taste, would be equally inappropriate. It remains a tour de force of individual genius, cultivated by the experience of Gothic vault-building, and penetrated with the greatness of imperial Rome. Its spirit of dauntless audacity and severe concentration alone is antique.

Almost contemporary with Brunelleschi was Leo Battista Alberti, a Florentine, who, working upon somewhat different principles, sought more closely to reproduce the actual elements of Roman architecture.^[31] In his remodelling of S. Francesco at Rimini the type he followed was that of the triumphal arch, and what was finished of that wonderful façade, remains to prove how much might have been made of well-proportioned pilasters and nobly curved arcades.^[32] The same principle is carried out in S. Andrea at Mantua. The frontispiece of this church is a gigantic arch of triumph; the interior is noticeable for its simple harmony of parts, adopted from the vaulted baths of Rome. The combination of these antique details in an imposing structure implied a high imaginative faculty at a moment when the rules of classic architecture had not been as yet reduced to method. Yet the weakness of Alberti's principle is revealed when we consider that here the lofty central arch of the façade serves only for a decoration. Too high and spacious even for the chariots of a Roman triumph, it forms an inappropriate entrance to the modest vestibule of a Christian church.

Like Brunelleschi, Alberti applied his talents to the building of a palace in Florence that became a model to subsequent architects. The Palazzo Rucellai retains many details of the mediæval Tuscan style, especially in the windows divided by slender pilasters. But the three orders introduced by way of surface decoration, the doorways, and the cornices, are transcripts from Roman ruins. This building, one of the most beautiful in Italy, was copied by Francesco di Giorgio and Bernardo Fiorentino for the palaces they constructed at Pienza.

This was the age of sumptuous palace-building; and for no purpose was the early Renaissance style better adapted than for the erection of dwelling-houses that should match the free and worldly splendour of those times. The just medium between mediæval massiveness and classic simplicity was attained in countless buildings beautiful and various beyond description. Bologna is full of them; and Urbino, in the Ducal Palace, contains one specimen unexampled in extent and unique in interest. Yet here, as in all departments of fine art, Florence takes the lead. After Brunelleschi and Alberti came Michellozzo, the favourite architect of Cosimo de' Medici; Benedetto da Majano; Giuliano and Antonio di San Gallo; and Il Cronaca. Cosimo de' Medici, having said that "envy is a plant no man should water," denied himself the monumental house designed by Brunelleschi, and chose instead the modest plan of Michellozzo. Brunelleschi had meant to build the Casa Medici along one side of the Piazza di S. Lorenzo; but when Cosimo refused his project, he broke up the model he had made, to the great loss of students of this age of architecture. Michellozzo was then commissioned to raise the mighty, but comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace at the corner of the Via Larga, which continued to be the residence of the Medici through all their chequered history, until at last they took possession of the Palazzo Pitti.^[33] The most beautiful of all Florentine dwelling-houses designed at this period is that which Benedetto da Majano built for Filippo Strozzi. Combining the burgher-like austerity of antecedent ages with a grandeur and a breadth of style peculiar to the Renaissance, the Palazzo Strozzi may be chosen as the perfect type of Florentine domestic architecture.^[34] Other cities were supplied by Florence with builders, and Milan owed her fanciful Ospedale Maggiore at this epoch to Antonio Filarete, a Florentine. This great edifice illustrates the emancipation from fixed rule that distinguishes much of the architecture of the earlier Renaissance. The detail is not unfrequently Gothic, especially in the pointed windows; but the feeling of the whole structure, in its airy space and lightness, delicate terra-cotta mouldings, and open loggie, is truly Cinque Cento.^[35]

In no other style than this of the earlier Renaissance is the builder more inseparably connected with the decorator. The labours of the stone-carver, who provided altars chased with Scripture histories in high relief, pulpits hung against a column of the nave, tombs with canopies and floral garlands, organ galleries enriched with bas-reliefs of singing boys, ciboria with kneeling and adoring angels, marble tabernacles for relics, vases for holy water, fonts and fountains, and all the indescribable wealth of scrolls and friezes around doors and screens and balustrades that fence the choir, are added to those of the bronze-founder, with his mighty doors and pendent lamps, his candelabra sustained by angels, torch-rests and rings, embossed basements for banners of state, and portraits of recumbent senators or prelates.^[36] The wood carver contributes tarsia like that of Fra Giovanni da Verona.^[37] The worker in wrought iron welds such screens as guard the chapel of the Sacra Cintola at Prato. The Robbias prepare their delicately-toned reliefs for the lunettes above the doorways. Modellers in clay produce the terra-cotta work of the Certosa, or the carola of angels who surround the little cupola behind the church of S. Eustorgio at Milan.^[38] Meanwhile mosaics are provided for the dome or let into the floor;^[39] agates and marbles and lapis lazuli are pieced together for altar fronts and panellings;^[40] stalls are carved into fantastic patterns, and heavy roofs are embossed with figures of the saints and armorial emblems.^[41] Tapestry is woven from the designs of excellent masters;^[42] great painters contribute arabesques of fresco or of stucco mixed with gilding, and glass is coloured from the outlines of such draughtsmen as Ghiberti.

Some of the decorative elements I have hastily enumerated, will be treated in connection with the respective arts of sculpture and painting. The fact, meanwhile, deserves notice that they received a new development in relation to architecture during the first period of the Renaissance, and that they formed, as it were, an integral part of its main æsthetical purpose. Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of ornamental adjuncts, and an uninteresting shell is left: what, for instance, would the façades of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without their sculptured and inlaid marbles? The genius of the age found scope in subordinate details, and the most successful architect was the man who combined in himself a feeling for the capacities of the greatest number of associated arts. As the consequence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on every detail, the monuments of architecture belonging to the earlier Renaissance have a poetry that compensates for structural defects; just as its wildest literary extravagances—the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, for instance—have a charm of wanton fancy and young joy that atones to sympathetic students for intolerable pedantries.

In the second period the faults of the first group of Renaissance builders were in a large measure overcome, and their striving after the production of new yet classic form was more completely realised. The reckless employment of luxuriant decoration yielded to a chastened taste, without the sacrifice of beauty or magnificence. Style was refined; the construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more true.

To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place among the architects of the golden age.^[43] Though little of his work survives entire and unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest influence over both successors and contemporaries. What they chiefly owed to him, was the proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity and to unity of effect. He came at a moment when constructive problems had been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister arts had reached their highest point. His early training in Lombardy accustomed him to the adoption of clustered piers instead of single columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to the free use of minor cupolas—elements of design introduced neither by Brunelleschi nor by Alberti into the Renaissance style of Florence, but which were destined to determine the future of architecture for all Italy. Nature had gifted Bramante with calm judgment and refined taste; his sense of the right limitations of the pseudo-Roman style was exquisite, and his feeling for structural symmetry was just. If his manner strikes us as somewhat cold and abstract when compared with the more genial audacities of the earlier Renaissance, we must remember how salutary was the example of a rigorous and modest manner in an age which required above all things to be preserved from its own luxuriant waywardness of fancy. It is hard to say how much of the work ascribed to Bramante in Northern Italy is genuine; most of it, at any rate, belongs to the manner of his youth. The Church of S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi, the palace of the Cancelleria at Rome, and the unfinished cathedral of Pavia, enable us to comprehend the general character of this great architect's refined and noble manner. S. Peter's, it may be said in passing, retains, in spite of all subsequent modifications, many essentially Bramantesque features—especially in the distribution of the piers and rounded niches.

Bramante formed no school strictly so called, though his pupils, Cristoforo Rocchi and Ventura Vitoni, carried out his principles of building at Pavia and Pistoja. Vitoni's church of the Umiltà in the latter city is a pure example of conscientious neo-Roman architecture. It consists of a large octagon surmounted by a dome and preceded by a lofty vaulted atrium or vestibule. The single round arch of this vestibule repeats the testudo of a Roman bath, and the decorative details are accurately reproduced from similar monuments. Unfortunately, Giorgio Vasari, who was employed to finish the cupola, spoiled its effect by raising it upon an ugly attic; it is probable that the church, as designed by Vitoni, would have presented the appearance of a miniature Pantheon. At Rome the influence of Bramante was propagated through Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Baldassare Peruzzi. Raphael's claim to consideration as an architect rests upon the Palazzi Vidoni and Pandolfini, the Cappella Chigi in S. Maria del Popolo, and the Villa Madama. The last-named building, executed by Giulio Romano after Raphael's design, is carried out in a style so forcible as to make us fancy that the pupil had a larger share in its creation than his teacher. These works, however, sink into insignificance before the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, the masterpiece of Giulio's genius. This most noble of Italian pleasure-houses remains to show what the imagination of a poet-artist could recover from the splendour of old Rome and adapt to the use of his own age. The vaults of the Thermæ of Titus, with their cameos of stucco and frescoed arabesques, are here repeated on a scale and with an exuberance of invention that surpass the model. Open loggie yield fair prospect over what were once trim gardens; spacious halls, adorned with frescoes in the vehement and gorgeous style of the Roman school, form a fit theatre for the grand parade-life of an Italian prince. The whole is Pagan in its pride and sensuality, its prodigality of strength and insolence of freedom. Having seen this palace, we do not wonder that the fame of Giulio flew across the Alps and lived upon the lips of Shakspere: for in his master-work at Mantua he collected, as it were, and epitomised in one building all that enthralled the fancy of the Northern nations when they thought of Italy.

A pendant to the Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on the banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow townsman Agostino Chigi of Siena. It is an idyll placed beside a lyric ode, gentler and quieter in style, yet full of grace, breathing the large and liberal spirit of enjoyment that characterised the age of Leo. The frescoes of Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael and his pupils, have made this villa famous in the annals of Italian painting. The memory of the Roman banker's splendid style of living marks it out as no less noteworthy in the history of Renaissance manners.^[44]

Among the great edifices of this second period we may reckon Jacopo Sansovino's buildings at Venice, though they approximate rather to the style of the earlier Renaissance in all that concerns exuberance of decorative detail. The Venetians, somewhat behind the rest of Italy in the development of the fine arts, were at the height of prosperity and wealth during the middle period of the Renaissance; and no city is more rich in monuments of the florid style. Something of their own delight in sensuous magnificence they communicated even to the foreigners who dwelt among them. The court of the Ducal Palace, the Scuola di S. Rocco, the Palazzo Corner, and the Palazzo Vendramini-Calergi, illustrate the, strong yet fanciful bravura style that pleased the aristocracy of Venice. Nowhere else does the architecture of the Middle Ages melt by more imperceptible degrees into that of the Revival, retaining through all changes the impress of a people splendour-loving in the highest sense. The Library of S. Mark, built by Sansovino in 1536, remains, however, the crowning triumph of Venetian art. It is impossible to contemplate its noble double row of open arches without feeling the eloquence of rhetoric so brilliant, without echoing the judgment of Palladio, that nothing more sumptuous or beautiful had been invented since the age of ancient Rome.

Time would fail to tell of all the architects who crowd the first half of the sixteenth century—of Antonio di San Gallo, famous for fortifications; of Baccio d'Agnolo, who raised the Campanile of S. Spirito at Florence; of Giovanni Maria Falconetto, to whose genius Padua owed so many princely edifices; of Michele Sanmicheli, the military architect of Verona, and the builder of five mighty palaces for the nobles of his native city. Yet the greatest name of all this period cannot be omitted: Michael Angelo must be added to the list of builders in the golden age. In architecture, as in sculpture, he not only bequeathed to posterity masterpieces of individual energy and original invention, in their kind unrivalled; but he also prepared for his successors a false way of working, and justified by his example the extravagances of the decadence. Without noticing the façade designed for S. Lorenzo at Florence, the transformation of the Baths of Diocletian into a church, the remodelling of the Capitoline buildings, and the continuation of the Palazzo Farnese—works that either exist only in drawings or have been confused by later alterations—it is enough here to mention the Sagrestia Nuova of S. Lorenzo and the cupola of S. Peter's. The sacristy may be looked on either as the masterpiece of a sculptor who required fit setting for his statues, or of an architect who designed statues to enhance the structure he had planned. Both arts are used with equal ease, nor has the genius of Michael Angelo dealt more masterfully with the human frame than with the forms of Roman architecture in this chapel. He seems to have paid no heed to classic precedent, and to have taken no pains to adapt the parts to the structural purpose of the building. It was enough for him to create a wholly novel framework for the modern miracle of sculpture it enshrines, attending to such rules of composition as determine light and shade, and seeking by the slightness of mouldings and pilasters to enhance the terrible and massive forms that brood above the Medicean tombs. The result is a product of picturesque and plastic art, as true to the Michaelangelesque spirit as the Temple of the Wingless Victory to that of Pheidias. But where Michael Angelo achieved a triumph of boldness, lesser natures were betrayed into bizarrerie; and this chapel of the Medici, in spite of its grandiose simplicity, proved a stumbling-block to subsequent architects by encouraging them to despise propriety and violate the laws of structure. The same may be said with even greater truth of the Laurentian Library and its staircase. The false windows, repeated pillars, and barefaced aiming at effect, that mark the insincerity of the barocco style, are found here almost for the first time.

What S. Peter's would have been, if Michael Angelo had lived to finish it, can be imagined from his plans and elevations still preserved. It must always remain a matter of profound regret that his project was so far altered as to sacrifice the effect of the dome from the piazza. This dome is Michael Angelo's supreme achievement as an architect. It not only preserves all that is majestic in the cupola of Brunelleschi; but it also avoids the defects of its avowed model, by securing the entrance of abundant light, and dilating the imagination with the sense of space to soar and float in. It is the dome that makes S. Peter's what it is—the adequate symbol of the Church in an age that had abandoned mediævalism and produced a new type of civility for the modern nations. On the connection between the building of S. Peter's and the Reformation I have touched already.^[45] This mighty temple is the shrine of Catholicity, no longer cosmopolitan by right of spiritual empire, but secularised and limited to Latin races. At the same time it represents the spirit of a period when the Popes still led the world as intellectual chiefs. As the decree for its erection was the last act of the Papacy before the schism of the North had driven it into blind conflict with advancing culture, so S. Peter's remains the monument to after ages of a moment when the Roman Church, unterrified as yet by German rebels, dared to share the mundane impulse of the classical revival. She had forgotten the catacombs and ruthlessly destroyed the Basilica of Constantine. By rebuilding the mother church of Western Christianity upon a new plan, she broke with tradition; and if Rome has not ceased to be the Eternal City, if all ways are still leading to Rome, we may even hazard a conjecture that in the last days of their universal monarchy the Popes reared this fane to be the temple of a spirit alien to their own. It is at any rate certain that S. Peter's produces an impression less ecclesiastical, and less strictly Christian, than almost any of the elder and far humbler churches of Europe. Raised by proud and secular pontiffs in the heyday of renascent humanism, it seems to wait the time when the high priests of a religion no longer hostile to science or antagonistic to the inevitable force of progress will chaunt their hymns beneath its spacious dome.

The building of S. Peter's was so momentous in modern history, and so decisive for Italian architecture, that it may be permitted me to describe the vicissitudes through which the structure passed before reaching completion. Nicholas V., founder of the secular papacy and chief patron of the humanistic movement in Rome, had approved a scheme for thoroughly rebuilding and refortifying the pontifical city.^[46] Part of this plan involved the reconstruction of S. Peter's. The old basilica was to be removed, and on its site was to rise a mighty church, shaped like a Latin cross, with a central dome and two high towers flanking the vestibule. Nicholas died before his project could be carried into effect. Beyond destroying the old temple of Probus and marking out foundations for the tribune of the new church, nothing had been accomplished;^[47] nor did his successors until the reign of Julius think of continuing what he had begun. In 1506, on the 18th of April, Julius laid the first stone of S. Peter's according to the plans provided by Bramante. The basilica was designed in the shape of a Greek cross, surmounted by a colossal dome, and approached by a vestibule fronted with six columns. As in all the works of Bramante, simplicity and dignity distinguished this first scheme.^[48] For eight years, until his death in 1514, Bramante laboured on the building. Julius, the most impatient of masters, urged him to work rapidly. In consequence of this haste, the substructures of the new church proved insecure, and the huge piers raised to support the cupola were imperfect, while the venerable monuments contained in the old church were ruthlessly destroyed.^[49] After Bramante's death Giuliano di S. Gallo, Fra Giocondo, and Raphael successively superintended the construction, each for a short period. Raphael, under Leo X., was appointed sole architect, and went so far as to alter the design of Bramante by substituting the Latin for the Greek cross. Upon his death, Baldassare Peruzzi continued the work, and supplied a series of new designs, restoring the ground-plan of the church to its original shape. He was succeeded in the reign of Paul III. by Antonio di S. Gallo, who once more reverted to the Latin cross, and proposed a novel form of cupola with flanking towers for the façade, of bizarre rather than beautiful proportions. After a short interregnum, during which Giulio Romano superintended the building and did nothing remarkable, Michael Angelo was called in 1535 to undertake the sole charge of the edifice. He declared that wherever subsequent architects had departed from Bramante's project, they had erred. "It is impossible to deny that Bramante was as great in architecture as any man has been since the days of the ancients. When he first laid the plan of S. Peter's, he made it not a mass of confusion, but clear and simple, well lighted, and so thoroughly detached that it in no way interfered with any portion of the palace."^[50] Having thus pronounced himself in general for Bramante's scheme, Michael Angelo proceeded to develop it in accordance with his own canons of taste. He retained the Greek cross; but the dome, as he conceived it, and the details designed for each section of the building, differed essentially from what the earlier master would have sanctioned. Not the placid and pure taste of Bramante, but the masterful and fiery genius of Buonarroti, is responsible for the colossal scale of the subordinate parts and variously broken lineaments of the existing church. In spite of all changes of direction, the fabric of S. Peter's had been steadily advancing. Michael Angelo was, therefore, able to raise the central structure as far as the drum of the cupola before his death. His plans and models were carefully preserved, and a special papal ordinance decreed that henceforth there should be no deviation from the scheme he had laid down. Unhappily this rule was not observed. Under Pius V., Vignola and Piero Ligorio did indeed continue his tradition; under Gregory XIII., Sixtus V., and Clement VIII., Giacomo della Porta made no substantial alterations; and in 1590 Domenico Fontana finished the dome. But during the pontificate of Paul V., Carlo Maderno resumed the form of the Latin cross, and completed the nave and vestibule, as they now stand, upon this altered plan (1614). The consequence is what has been already noted—at a moderate distance from the church the dome is lost to view; it only takes its true position of predominance when seen from far. In the year 1626, S. Peter's was consecrated by Urban VIII., and the mighty work was finished. It remained for Bernini to add the colonnades of the piazza, no less picturesque in their effect than admirably fitted for the pageantry of world-important ceremonial. At the end of the eighteenth century it was reckoned that the church had cost but little less than fifty million scudi.

Michael Angelo forms the link between the second and third periods of the Renaissance. Among the architects of the latter age we have to reckon those who based their practice upon minute study of antique writers, and who, more than any of their predecessors, realised the long-sought restitution of the classic style according to precise scholastic canons.^[51] A new age had now begun for Italy. The glory and the grace of the Renaissance, its blooming time of beauty, and its springtide of young strength, were over. Strangers held the reins of power, and the Reformation had begun to make itself felt in the Northern provinces of Christendom. A colder and more formal spirit everywhere prevailed. The sources of invention in the art of painting were dried up. Scholarship had pined away into pedantic purism. Correct taste was coming to be prized more highly than originality of genius in literature. Nor did architecture fail to manifest the operation of this change. The greatest builder of the period was Andrea Palladio of Vicenza, who combined a more complete analytical knowledge of antiquity with a firmer adherence to rule and precedent than even the most imitative of his forerunners. It is useless to seek for decorative fancy, wealth of detail, or sallies of inventive genius in the Palladian style. All is cold and calculated in the many palaces and churches of this master which adorn both Venice and Vicenza; they make us feel that creative inspiration has been superseded by the labour of the calculating reason. One great public building of Palladio's, however—the Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza—may be cited as, perhaps, the culminating point of pure Renaissance architecture. In its simple and heroical arcades, its solid columns, and noble open spaces, the strength of Rome is realised to the eyes of those who do not penetrate too far inside the building.^[52] Here, and here only, the architectural problem of the epoch—how to bring the art of the ancients back to life and use again—was solved according to the spirit and the letter of the past. Palladio never equalled this, the earliest of all his many works.

In the first half of the sixteenth century the dictatorship of art had been already transferred from Florence and Rome to Lombardy.^[53] The painters who carried on the great traditions were Venetian. Among the architects, Palladio was a native of Vicenza; Giacomo Barozzi, the author of the "Treatise on the Orders," took the name by which he is known from his birthplace, Vignola; Vincenzo Scamozzi was a fellow-townsman of Palladio; Galeazzo Alessi, though born at Perugia, spent his life and developed his talents in Genoa; Andrea Formigine, the palace-builder, was a Bolognese; Bartolommeo Ammanati alone at Florence exercised the arts of sculpture and architecture in their old conjunction. Vignola, Palladio's elder by a few years, displays in his work even more of the scholastically frigid spirit of the late Renaissance, the narrowing of poetic impulse, and the dwindling of vitality, that sadden the second half of the sixteenth century in Italy. Scamozzi, labouring at Venice on works that Sansovino left unfinished, caught the genial spirit of the old Venetian style. Alessi, in like manner, at Genoa, felt the influences of a rich and splendour-loving aristocracy. His church of S. Maria di Carignano is one of the most successful ecclesiastical buildings of the late Renaissance, combining the principles of Bramante and Michael Angelo in close imitation of S. Peter's, and adhering in detail to the canons of the new taste.

These canons were based upon a close study of Vitruvius. Palladio, Vignola, and Scamozzi were no less ambitious as authors than as architects;^[54] their minute analysis of antique treatises on the art of construction led to the formation of exact rules for the treatment of the five classic orders, the proportions of the chief parts used in building, and the correct method of designing theatres and palaces, church-fronts and cupolas. Thus architecture in its third Renaissance period passed into scholasticism.

The masters of this age, chiefly through the weight of their authority as writers, exercised a wider European influence than any of their predecessors. We English, for example, have given Palladio's name to the Italian style adopted by us in the seventeenth century. This selection of one man to represent an epoch was due partly no doubt to the prestige of Palladio's great buildings in the South, but more, I think, to the facility with which his principles could be assimilated. Depending but little for effect upon the arts of decoration, his style was easily imitated in countries where painting and sculpture were unknown, and where a genius like Jean Goujon, the Sansovino of the French, has never been developed. To have rivalled the façade of the Certosa would have been impossible in London. Yet here Wren produced a cathedral worthy of comparison with the proudest of the late Italian edifices. Moreover, the principles of taste that governed Europe in the seventeenth century were such as found fitter architectural expression in this style than in the more genial and capricious manner of the earlier periods.

After reviewing the rise and development of Renaissance architecture, it is almost irresistible to compare the process whereby the builders of this age learned to use dead forms for the expression of their thoughts, with the similar process by which the scholars accustomed themselves to Latin metres and the cadences of Ciceronian periods.^[55] The object in each case was the same—to be as true to the antique as possible, and without actually sacrificing the independence of the modern mind, to impose upon it the limitations of a bygone civilisation. At first the enthusiasm for antiquity inspired architects and scholars alike with a desire to imitate per saltum, and many works of fervid sympathy and pure artistic intuition were produced. In course of time the laws both of language and construction were more accurately studied; invention was superseded by pedantry; after Poliziano and Alberti came Bembo and Palladio. In proportion as architects learned more about Vitruvius, and scholars narrowed their taste to Virgil, the style of both became more cramped and formal. It ceased at last to be possible to express modern ideas freely in the correct Latinity required by cultivated ears, while no room for originality, no scope for poetry of invention, remained in the elaborated method of the architects. Neo-Latin literature dwindled away to nothing, and Palladio was followed by the violent reactionaries of the barocco mannerism.

In one all-important respect this parallel breaks down. While the labours of the Latinists subserved the simple process of instruction, by purifying literary taste and familiarising the modern mind with the masterpieces of the classic authors, the architects created a new common style for Europe. With all its defects, it is not likely that the neo-Roman architecture, so profoundly studied by the Italians, and so anxiously refined by their chief masters, will ever wholly cease to be employed. In all cases where a grand and massive edifice, no less suited to purposes of practical utility than imposing by its splendour, is required, this style of building will be found the best. Changes of taste and fashion, local circumstances, and the personal proclivities of modern architects may determine the choice of one type rather than another among the numerous examples furnished by Italian masters. But it is not possible that either Greek or Gothic should permanently take the place assigned to neo-Roman architecture in the public buildings of European capitals.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER III--SCULPTURE

Niccola Pisano—Obscurity of the Sources for a History of Early Italian Sculpture—Vasari's Legend of Pisano—Deposition from the Cross at Lucca—Study of Nature and the Antique—Sarcophagus at Pisa—Pisan Pulpit—Niccola's School—Giovanni Pisano—Pulpit in S. Andrea at Pistoja—Fragments of his work at Pisa—Tomb of Benedict XI. at Perugia—Bas-reliefs at Orvieto—Andrea Pisano—Relation of Sculpture to Painting—Giotto—Subordination of Sculpture to Architecture in Italy—Pisano's Influence in Venice—Balduccio of Pisa—Orcagna—The Tabernacle of Orsammichele—The Gates of the Florentine Baptistery —Competition of Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Della Quercia—Comparison of Ghiberti's and Brunelleschi's Trial-pieces—Comparison of Ghiberti and Della Quercia—The Bas-reliefs of S. Petronio—Ghiberti's Education—His Pictorial Style in Bas-relief—His Feeling for the Antique—Donatello—Early Visit to Rome—Christian Subjects—Realistic Treatment—S. George and David—Judith—Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata—Influence of Donatello's Naturalism—Andrea Verocchio—His David—Statue of Colleoni—Alessandro Leopardi—Lionardo's Statue of Francesco Sforza—The Pollajuoli—Tombs of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII.—Luca della Robbia—His Treatment of Glazed Earthenware—Agostino di Duccio—The Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia—Antonio Rossellino—Matteo Civitali—Mino da Fiesole—Benedetto da Majano—Characteristics and Masterpieces of this Group—Sepulchral Monuments—Andrea Contucci's Tombs in S. Maria del Popolo—Desiderio da Settignano—Sculpture in S. Francesco at Rimini—Venetian Sculpture—Verona—Guido Mazzoni of Modena—Certosa of Pavia—Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo—Sansovino at Venice—Pagan Sculpture—Michael Angelo's Scholars—Baccio Bandinelli—Bartolommeo Ammanati—Cellini—Gian Bologna—Survey of the History of Renaissance Sculpture.

In the procession of the fine arts, sculpture always follows close upon the steps of architecture, and at first appears in some sense as her handmaid. Mediæval Italy found her Pheidias in a great man of Pisan origin, born during the first decade of the thirteenth century. It was Niccola Pisano, architect and sculptor, who first breathed with the breath of genius life into the dead forms of plastic art. From him we date the dawn of the æsthetical Renaissance with the same certainty as from Petrarch that of humanism; for he determined the direction not only of sculpture but also of painting in Italy. To quote the language of Lord Lindsay's panegyric: "Neither Dante nor Shakspere can boast such extent and durability of influence; for whatever of highest excellence has been achieved in sculpture and painting, not in Italy only but throughout Europe, has been in obedience to the impulse he primarily gave, and in following up the principle which he first struck out."^[56] In truth, Niccola Pisano put the artist on the right track of combining the study of antiquity with the study of nature; and to him belongs the credit not merely of his own achievement, considerable as that may be, but also of the work of his immediate scholars and of all who learned from him to portray life. From Niccola Pisano onward to Michael Angelo and Cellini we trace one genealogy of sculptors, who, though they carried art beyond the sphere of his invention, looked back to him as their progenitor. The man who first emancipated sculpture from servile bondage, and opened a way for the attainment of true beauty, would by the Greeks have been honoured with a special cultas as the Hero Eponym of art. It remains for us after our own fashion to pay some such homage to Pisano.

The chief difficulty with which the student of early art and literature has to deal, is the insufficiency of positive information. Instead of accurate dates and well-established facts he finds a legend, rich apparently in detail, but liable at every point to doubt, and subject to attack by plausible conjecture. In the absence of contemporary documents and other trustworthy sources of instruction, he is tempted to substitute his own hypotheses for tradition and to reconstruct the faulty outlines of forgotten history according to his own ideas of fitness. The Germans have been our masters in this species of destructive, dubitative, restorative criticism; and it is undoubtedly flattering to the historian's vanity to constitute himself a judge and arbiter in cases where tact and ingenuity may claim to sift the scattered fragment of confused narration. Yet to resist this temptation is in many cases a plain and simple duty. Tradition, when not positively disproved, should be allowed to have its full value; and a sounder historic sense is exercised in adopting its testimony with due caution, than in recklessly rejecting it and substituting guesses which the lack of knowledge renders unsubstantial. Tradition may err about dates, details, and names. It is just here that antiquarian research can render valuable help. But there are occasions when the perusal of documents and the exercise of what is called the higher criticism afford no surer basis for opinion. If in such cases a legend has been formed and recorded, the student will advance further toward comprehending the spirit of his subject by patiently considering what he knows to be in part perhaps a mythus, than by starting with the foregone conclusion that the legend must of necessity be worthless, and that his cunning will suffice to supply the missing clue.^[57]

Thus much I have said by way of preface to what follows upon Niccola Pisano. Almost all we know about him is derived from a couple of inscriptions, a few contracts, and his Life by Giorgio Vasari. It is clear that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places, and taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions. Much of Niccola's biography reads like a legend in his pages—the popular and oral tradition of a great man, whose panegyric it was more easy in the sixteenth century to adorn with rhetoric than to chronicle the details of his life with scrupulous fidelity. A well-founded conviction of Vasari's frequent inaccuracy has induced recent critics to call in question many hitherto accepted points about the nationality and training of Pisano. The discussion, of their arguments I leave for the appendix, contenting myself at present with relating so much of Vasari's legend as cannot, I think, reasonably be rejected.^[58]

Before the sculptor appeared in Niccola Pisano, he was already a famous architect; and it must always be remembered that he and his school subordinated the plastic to the constructive arts. It was not until the year 1233, or 1237, according to different modern calculations, that he executed his first masterpiece in sculpture.^[59] This was a "Deposition from the Cross," in high relief, placed in a lunette over one of the side doors of S. Martino at Lucca. The noble forms of this group, the largeness of its style, the breadth of drapery and freedom of action it displays, but, above all, the unity of its design, proclaimed that a new era had begun for art. In order to appreciate the importance of this relief, it is only necessary to compare it with the processional treatment of similar subjects upon early Christian sarcophagi, where each figure stands up stiff and separate, nor can the controlling and combining artist's thought be traced in any effort after composition. Ever since the silver age of Hadrian, when a Bithynian slave by his beauty gave a final impulse to the Genius of Greece, sculpture had been gradually declining until nothing was left but a formal repetition of conventional outlines. The so-called Romanesque and Byzantine styles were but the dotage of second childhood, fumbling with the methods and materials of an irrecoverable past. It is true, indeed, that unknown mediæval carvers had shown an instinct for the beautiful as well as great fertility of grotesque invention. The façades of Lombard churches are covered with fanciful and sometimes forcibly dramatic groups of animals and men in combat; and contemporaneously with Niccola Pisano, many Gothic sculptors of the North were adorning the façades and porches of cathedrals with statuary unrivalled in one style of loveliness.^[60] Yet the founder of a line of progressive artists had not arisen, and, except in Italy, the conditions were still wanting under which alone the plastic arts could attain to independence. A fresh start, at once conscious and scientific, was imperatively demanded. This new beginning sculpture took in the brain of Niccola Pisano, who returned from the bye-paths of his predecessors to the free field of nature, and who learned precious lessons from the fragments of classical sculpture existing in his native town. As though to prove the essential dependence of the modern revival upon the recovery of antique culture, we find that his genius, in spite of its powerful originality and profoundly Christian bias, required the confirmation which could only be derived from Græco-Roman precedent. In the Campo Santo at Pisa may still be seen a sarcophagus representing the story of Hippolytus and Phædra, where once reposed the dust of Beatrice, the mother of the pious Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Studying the heroic nudities and noble attitudes of this bas-relief, Niccola rediscovered the right way of art—not by merely copying his model, but by divining the secret of the grand style. His work at Pisa contains abundant evidence that, while he could not wholly free himself from the defects of the later Romanesque manner, betrayed by his choice of short and square-set types, he nevertheless learned from the antique how to aim at beauty and freedom in his imitation of the living human form. A marble vase, sculptured with Indian Bacchus and his train of Mænads, gave him further help. From these grave or graceful classic forms, satisfied with their own goodliness, and void of inner symbolism, the Christian sculptor drank the inspiration of Renaissance art. In the "Adoration of the Magi," carved upon his Pisan pulpit, Madonna assumes the haughty pose of Theseus' wife; while the high priest, in the "Circumcision," displays the majesty of Dionysus leaning on the neck of Ampelus. Nor again is the naked vigour of Hippolytus without its echo in the figure of the young man—Hercules or Fortitude—upon a bracket of the same pulpit. These sculptures of Pisano are thus for us a symbol of what happened in the age of the Revival. The old world and the new shook hands; Christianity and Hellenism kissed each other. And yet they still remained antagonistic—fused externally by art, but severed in the consciousness that, during those strange years of dubious impulse, felt the might of both. Monks leaning from Pisano's pulpit preached the sinfulness of natural pleasure to women whose eyes were fixed on the adolescent beauty of an athlete. Not far off was the time when Filarete should cast in bronze the legends of Ganymede and Leda for the portals of S. Peter's, when Raphael should mingle a carnival of more than pagan sensuality with Bible subjects in Leo's Loggie, when Guglielmo della Porta should place the naked portrait of Giulia Bella in marble at the feet of Paul III. upon his sepulchre.^[61]

Niccola, meanwhile, did not follow his Roman models in any slavish spirit. They were neither numerous nor excellent enough to compel blind imitation or to paralyse inventive impulse. The thoughts to be expressed in marble by the first modern artist were not Greek. This in itself saved him from that tendency to idle reproduction which proved the ruin of the later neo-pagan sculptors. Yet the fragments of antique work he found within his reach, helped him to struggle after a higher quality of style, and established standards of successful treatment. For the rest, his choice of form and the proportions of his figures show that Niccola resorted to native Tuscan models. If nothing of his handiwork were left but the bas-relief of the "Inferno" on the Pisan pulpit, the torsos of the men struggling with demons in that composition would prove this point. It remains his crowning merit to have first expressed the mythology of Christianity and the sentiment of the Middle Ages with the conscious aim of a real artist. And here it may be noticed that, a true Italian, he infused but little of intense or mystical emotion into his art. Niccola is more of a humanist, if this word may be applied to a sculptor, than some of his immediate successors. The hexagonal pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa, the octagonal pulpit in the cathedral of Siena, the fountain in the marketplace of Perugia, and the shrine of S. Dominic at Bologna, all of them designed and partly finished between 1260 and 1274 by Niccola and his scholars, display his mastery over the art of sculpture in the maturity of his genius. So highly did the Pisans prize their fellow-townsman's pulpit that a law was passed and guardians were appointed for its preservation—much in the same way as the Zeus of Pheidias was consigned to the care of the Phaidruntai.

Niccola Pisano founded a school. His son Giovanni, and the numerous pupils employed upon the monuments just mentioned at Siena, Bologna, and Perugia, carried on the tradition of their master, and spread his style abroad through Italy. Giovanni Pisano, to whom we owe the Spina Chapel and the Campo Santo at Pisa, the façade of the Sienese Duomo, and the altar-shrine of S. Donato at Arezzo—four of the purest works of Gothic art in Italy—showed a very decided leaning to the vehement and mystic style of the Transalpine sculptors. We trace a dramatic intensity in Giovanni's work, not derived from his father, not caught from study of the antique, and curiously blended with the general characteristics of the Pisan school. In spite of the Gothic cusps introduced by Niccola into his pulpits, the spirit of his work remained classical. The young Hercules holding the lion's cub in his right hand upon his shoulder, while with his left he tames the raging lioness, has the true Italian instinct for a return to Latin style. The same sympathy with the past is observable in the self-restraint and comparative coldness of the bas-reliefs at Pisa. The Junonian attitude of Madonna, the senatorial dignity of Simeon, the ponderous folding of the drapery, and the massive carriage of the neck throughout, denote an effort to revivify an antique manner. What, therefore, Niccola effected for sculpture was a classical revival in the very depth of the Middle Ages. The case is different with his son Giovanni. Profiting by the labours of his father, and following in his footsteps, he carried the new art into another region, and brought a genius of more picturesque and forcible temper into play. The value of this new direction given to sculpture for the arts of Italy, especially for painting, cannot be exaggerated. Without Giovanni's intervention, the achievement of Niccola might possibly have been as unproductive of immediate results as the Tuscan Romanesque, that mediæval effort after the Renaissance, was in architecture.^[62]

The Gothic element, so cautiously adopted by Niccola, is used with sympathy and freedom by his son, whose masterpiece, the pulpit of S. Andrea at Pistoja, might be selected as the supreme triumph of Italian Gothic sculpture. The superiority of that complex and consummate work of plastic art over the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery, in all the most important qualities of style and composition, can scarcely be called in question. Its only serious fault is an exaggeration of the height of the pillars in proportion to the size of the hexagon they support. Like the pulpits of the Baptistery, of the Duomo of Pisa, and of the Duomo of Siena, it combines bas-reliefs and detached statues, carved capitals, and sculptured lions, in a maze of marvellous invention; but it has no rival in the architectonic effect of harmony, and the masterly feeling for balanced masses it displays. The five subjects chosen by Giovanni for his bas-reliefs are the "Nativity," the "Adoration of the Magi," the "Massacre of the Innocents," the "Crucifixion," and the "Last Judgment." In the "Nativity" our Lady is no longer the Roman matron of Niccola's conception, but a graceful mother, young in years, and bending with the weakness of childbirth. Her attitude, exquisite by the suggestion of tenderness and delicacy, is one that often reappears in the later work of the Pisan school—for example, in the rough abozzamento in the Campo Santo at Pisa, above the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, and at Orvieto on the façade of the cathedral; but it has nowhere else been treated with the same sense of beauty. The "Massacre of the Innocents," compared with this relief, is a tragedy beside an idyll. Here the whole force of Giovanni's eminently dramatic genius comes into full play. Not only has he treated the usual incidents of mothers struggling with soldiers and bewailing their dead darlings, but he has also introduced a motive, which might well have been used by subsequent artists in dealing with the same subjects. Herod is throned in one corner of the composition; before him stand a group of men and women, some imploring the tyrant for mercy, some defying him in impotent despair, and some invoking the curse of God upon his head. In the "Adoration of the Magi," again, Giovanni shows originality by the double action he has chosen to develop. On one side the kings are sleeping, while an angel comes to wake them, pointing out the star. On the other side they fall at the feet of the Madonna. It will be gathered even from these bare descriptions that Giovanni introduced a stir of life and movement, and felt his subjects with a poetic intensity, alien to the ideal of Græco-Roman sculpture. He effected a fusion between the grand style revived by Niccola and the romantic fervour of the modern imagination. It was in this way that the tradition handed down by him proved inestimably serviceable to the painters.

The bas-reliefs, however, by no means form the chief attraction of this pulpit. At each of its six angles stand saints, evangelists, and angels, whose symbolism it is not now so easy to decipher. The most beautiful groups are a company of angels blowing the judgment trumpets, and a winged youth standing above a winged lion and bull. These groups separate the several compartments of the bas-reliefs, and help to form the body of the pulpit. Beneath, on capital's of the supporting pillars, stand the Sibyls, each with her attendant genius, while prophets lean or crouch within the spandrils of the arches. Thus every portion of this master-work is crowded with figures—some detached, some executed in relief; and yet, amid so great a multitude, the eye is not confused; the total effect is nowhere dissipated. The whole seems governed by one constructive thought, projected as a perfect unity of composition.^[63]

A later work of Giovanni Pisano was the pulpit executed for the cathedral of Pisa, now unfortunately broken up. An interesting fragment, one of the supporting columns of the octagon which formed the body of this structure, still exists in the museum of the Campo Santo. It is an allegorical statue of Pisa. The Ghibelline city is personified as a crowned woman, suckling children at her breast, and standing on a pedestal supported by the eagle of the Empire. She wears a girdle of rope seven times knotted, to betoken the rule of Pisa over seven subject islands. At the four corners of her throne stand the four human virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude, distinguished less by beauty of shape than by determined energy of symbolism. Temperance is a naked woman, with hair twisted in the knots and curls of a Greek Aphrodite. Justice is old and wrinkled, clothed with massive drapery, and holding in her hand the scales. Throughout this group there is no attempt to realise forms pleasing to the eye; the sculptor has aimed at suggesting to the mind as many points of intellectual significance as possible. In spite of ugliness and hardness, the "Allegory of Pisa" commands respect by vigour of conception, and rivets attention by force of execution.

A more popular and pleasing monument by Giovanni Pisano is the tomb of Benedict XI. in the church of S. Domenico at Perugia. The Pope, whose life was so obnoxious to the ambition of Philip le Bel that his timely death aroused suspicion of poison, lies asleep upon his marble bier with hands crossed in an attitude of peaceful expectation.^[64] At his head and feet stand angels drawing back the curtains that would else have shrouded this last slumber of a good man from the eyes of the living.^[65] A contrast is thus established between the repose of the dead and the ever-watchful activity of celestial ministers. Sleep so guarded, the sculptor seeks to tell us, must have glorious waking; and when those hands unfold upon the Resurrection morning, the hushed sympathy of the attendant angels will break into smiles and singing, as they lead the just man to the Lord he served in life.

Whether Giovanni Pisano had any share in the sculpture on the façade of the cathedral at Orvieto, is not known for certain. Vasari asserts that Niccola and his pupils worked upon this series of bas-reliefs, setting forth the whole Biblical history and the cycle of Christian beliefs from the creation of the world to the last judgment. Yet we know that Niccola himself died at least twelve years before the foundation of the church in 1290; nor is there any proof that his immediate scholars were engaged upon the fabric. The Orvietan archives are singularly silent with regard to a monument of so large extent and vast importance, which must have taxed to the uttermost the resources of the ablest stone-carvers in Italy.^[66] Meanwhile, what Vasari says is valuable only as a witness to the fame of Niccola Pisano. His manner, as continued and developed by his school, is unmistakable at Orvieto: but in the absence of direct information, we are left to conjecture the conditions under which this, the closing if not the crowning achievement of thirteenth-century sculpture, was produced.

When the great founder of Italian art visited Siena in 1266 for the completion of his pulpit in the Duomo, he found a guild of sculptors, or taglia-pietri, in that city, numbering some sixty members, and governed by a rector and three chamberlains. Instead of regarding Niccola with jealousy, these craftsmen only sought to learn his method. Accordingly it seems that a new impulse was given to sculpture in Siena; and famous workmen arose who combined this art with that of building. The chief of these was Lorenzo Maitani, who died in 1330, having designed and carried to completion the Duomo of Orvieto during his lifetime.^[67] While engaged in this great undertaking, Maitani directed a body of architects, stone-carvers, bronze-founders, mosaists, and painters, gathered together into a guild from the chief cities of Tuscany. It cannot be proved that any of the Pisani, properly so called, were among their number. Lacking evidence to the contrary, we must give to Maitani, the master-spirit of the company, full credit for the sculpture carried out in obedience to his general plan. As the church of S. Francis at Assisi formed an epoch in the history of painting, by concentrating the genius of Giotto on a series of masterpieces, so the Duomo of Orvieto, by giving free scope to the school of Pisa, marked a point in the history of sculpture. It would be difficult to find elsewhere even separate works of greater force and beauty belonging to this, the first or architectural, period of Italian sculpture; and nowhere has the whole body of Christian belief been set forth with method more earnest and with vigour more sustained.^[68] The subjects selected by these unknown craftsmen for illustration in marble, are in many instances the same as those afterwards painted in fresco by Michael Angelo and Raphael at Borne. Their treatment, for example, of the creation of Adam and Eve, adopted in all probability from still earlier and ruder workmen, after being refined by the improvements of successive generations, may still be observed in the triumphs of the Sistine Chapel and the Loggie.^[69] It was the practice of Italian artists not to seek originality by diverging from the traditional modes of presentation, but to prove their mastery by rendering these as perfect and effective as the maturity of art could make them. For the Italians, as before them for the Greeks, plagiarism was a word unknown, in all cases where it was possible to improve upon the invention of less fortunate predecessors. The student of art may, therefore, now enjoy the pleasure of tracing sculpturesque or pictorial motives from their genesis in some rude fragment to their final development in the master-works of a Lionardo or a Raphael, where scientific grouping of figures, higher idealisation of style, the suggestion of freer movement, and more varied dramatic expression yield at last the full flower that the simple germ enfolded.

Among the most distinguished scholars of Niccola Pisano's tradition must now be mentioned Andrea da Pontadera, called Andrea Pisano, who carried the manner of his master to Florence, and helped to fulfil the destiny of Italian sculpture by submitting it to the rising art of painting. Under the direction of Giotto he carved statues for the Campanile and the façade of S. Maria del Fiore; and in the first gate of the Baptistery, he bequeathed a model of bas-relief in bronze, which largely influenced the style of masters in the fifteenth century. To overpraise the simplicity and beauty of design, the purity of feeling, and the technical excellence of Andrea's bronze-work, would be difficult. Many students will always be found to prefer his self-restraint and delicacy to the more florid manner of Ghiberti.^[70] What we chiefly observe in this gate is the control exercised by the sister art of painting over his mode of conception and treatment. If Giovanni Pisano developed the dramatic and emphatic qualities of Gothic sculpture, Andrea was attracted to its allegories; if Giovanni infused romantic vehemence of feeling into the frigid classicism of his father, Andrea diverged upon another track of picturesque delineation. A new sun had now arisen in the heavens of art. This was the sun of Giotto, whose genius, eminently pictorial, brought the Italians to a true sense of their æsthetical vocation, illuminating with its brightness the elder and more technically finished craft of the stone-carver. Sculpture, which in the school of Niccola Pisano had been subordinate to architecture, became a sub-species of painting in the hands of Andrea.

It was thus, as I have elsewhere stated, that the twofold doom of plastic art in Italy was accomplished. In order to embody the ideas of Christianity, art had to think more of expression than of pure form. Expression is the special sphere of painting; and therefore sculpture followed the lead of the sister art, as soon as painting was strong enough to give that lead, instead of remaining, as in Greece, the mistress of her own domain. On the deeper reasons for this subordination of sculpture to painting I have dwelt already, while showing that a large class of subjects, where physical qualities are comparatively indifferent and of no account, were forced upon the artist by Christianity.^[71] Humility and charity may be found alike in blooming youth or in ascetic age; nor is it possible to characterize saints and martyrs by those corporeal characteristics which distinguish a runner from a boxer, or a chaste huntress from a voluptuous queen of love. Italian sculpture abandoned the presentation of the naked human body as useless. The emotions written on the face became of more importance than the modelling of the limbs, and recourse was had to allegorical symbols or emblematic attitudes for the interpretation of the artist's thought. Andrea Pisano's figure of Hope, raising hands and eyes toward an offered crown, seems but a repetition of the motive expressed by Giotto in the chiaroscuro frescoes of the Arena chapel.^[72] Owing to similar causes, drapery, which in Greece had served to illustrate the structure or the movement of the body it clothed, was used by the Italian sculptors to conceal the limbs, and to enhance by flowing skirt or sinuous fold or agitated scarf some quality of the emotions. The result was that sculpture assumed a place subordinate to painting, and that the masterpieces of the early Italian carvers are chiefly bas-reliefs—pictures in bronze or marble.^[73]

In a like degree, though not for the same reason, sculpture in Italy remained subordinate to architecture, until such time as the neo-Hellenism of the full Renaissance produced a crowd of pseudo-classic statues, destined to take their places—not in churches, but in the courtyards of palaces and on the open squares of cities. The cause of this fact is not far to seek. In ancient Greece the temple had been erected for the god, and the statue dwelt within the cella like a master in his house. Christianity forbade an image of the living God; consequently the Church had another object than to roof the statue of a deity. It was the meeting-place of a congregation bent on worshipping Him who dwells not in houses made with hands, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. The vast spaces and aërial arcades of mediæval architecture had their meaning in relation to the mystic apprehension of an unseen power. It followed of necessity that the carved work destined to decorate a Christian temple could never be the main feature of the building. It existed for the Church, and not the Church for it.^[74]

Through Andrea Pisano the style of Niccola was extended to Venice. There is reason to believe that he instructed Filippo Calendario, to whom we should ascribe the sculptured corners of the Ducal Palace. Venice, however, invariably exercised her own controlling influence over the arts of aliens; so we find a larger, freer, richer, and more mundane treatment in these splendid carvings than in aught produced by Pisan workmen for their native towns of Tuscany.

Nino, the sculptor of the "Madonna della Rosa," the chief ornament of the Spina chapel, and Tommaso, both sons of Andrea da Pontadera, together with Giovanni Balduccio of Pisa, continued the traditions of the school founded by Niccola. Balduccio, invited by Azzo Visconti to Milan, carved the shrine of S. Peter Martyr in the church of S. Eustorgio, and impressed his style on Matteo da Campione, the sculptor of the shrine of S. Augustine at Pavia.^[75] These facts, though briefly stated, are not without significance. Travellers who have visited the churches of Pavia and Milan, after studying the shrine, or arca as Italians call it, of S. Dominic at Bologna, must have noticed the ascendency of Pisan style in these three Lombard towns, and have felt how widely Niccola's creative genius was exercised. Traces of the same influence may perhaps be observed in the tombs of the Scaligers at Verona.^[76]

The most eminent pupil of Andrea Pisano, however, was a Florentine—the great Andrea Arcagnuolo di Cione, commonly known as Orcagna. This man, like the more illustrious Giotto, was one among the earliest of those comprehensive, many-sided natures produced by Florence for her everlasting glory. He studied the goldsmith's craft under his father, Cione, passing the years of his apprenticeship, like other Tuscan artists, in the technical details of an industry that then supplied the strictest method of design. With his brother, Bernardo, he practised painting. Like Giotto, he was no mean poet;^[77] and like all the higher craftsmen of his age, he was an architect. Though the church of Orsammichele owes its present form to Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna, as capo maëstro after Gaddi's death, completed the structure; and though the Loggia de' Lanzi, long ascribed to him by writers upon architecture, is now known to be the work of Benci di Cione, yet Orcagna's Loggia del Bigallo, more modest but not less beautiful, prepared the way for its construction. Of his genius as a painter, proved by the frescoes in the Strozzi chapel, I shall have to speak hereafter. As a sculptor he is best known through the tabernacle of Orsammichele, built to enshrine the picture of the Madonna by Ugolino da Siena.^[78]

In this monument Orcagna employed carved bas-reliefs and statuettes, intaglios and mosaics, incrustations of agates, enamels, and gilded glass patterns, with a sense of harmony so refined, and a mastery over each kind of workmanship so perfect, that the whole tabernacle is an epitome of the minor arts of mediæval Italy. The subordination of sculpture to architectural effect is noticeable; and the Giottesque influence appears even more strongly here than in the gate of Andrea Pisano. This influence Orcagna received indirectly through his master in stone carving; it formed, indeed, the motive force of figurative art during his lifetime. The subjects of the "Annunciation," the "Nativity," the "Marriage of the Virgin," and the "Adoration of the Three Kings," framed in octagonal mouldings at the base of the tabernacle, illustrate the domination of a spirit distinct both from the neo-Romanism of Niccola and the Gothicism of Giovanni Pisano. That spirit is Florentine in a general sense, and specifically Giottesque. Charity, again, with a flaming heart in her hand, crowned with a flaming brazier, and suckling a child, is Giottesque not only in allegorical conception but also in choice of type and treatment of drapery.

While admiring the tabernacle of Orsammichele, we are reminded that Orcagna was a goldsmith to begin with, and a painter. Sculpture he practised as an accessory. What the artists of Florence gained in delicacy of execution, accuracy of modelling, and precision of design by their apprenticeship to the goldsmith's trade, was hardly perhaps sufficient to compensate for loss of training in a larger style. It was difficult, we fancy, for men so educated to conceive the higher purposes of sculpture. Contented with elaborate workmanship and beauty of detail, they failed to attain to such independence of treatment as may be reached by sculptors who do not carry to their work the preconceptions of a narrower handicraft. Thus even Orcagna's masterpiece may strike us not as the plaything of a Pheidian genius condescending for once to "breathe through silver," but of a consummate goldsmith taxing the resources of his craft to form a monumental jewel.^[79]

The façade of Orvieto was the final achievement of the first or architectural period of Italian sculpture. Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Orcagna, formed the transition to the second period. To find one characteristic title for the style of the fifteenth century is not easy, since it was marked by many distinct peculiarities. If, however, we choose to call it pictorial, we shall sufficiently mark the quality of some eminent masters, and keep in view the supremacy of painting at this epoch. A great public enterprise at Florence brings together in honourable rivalry the chief craftsmen of the new age, and marks the advent of the Renaissance. When the Signory, in concert with the Arte de' Mercanti, decided to complete the bronze gates of the Baptistery in the first year of the fifteenth century, they issued a manifesto inviting the sculptors of Italy to prepare designs for competition. Their call was answered by Giacomo della Quercia of Siena, by Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo di Cino Ghiberti of Florence, and by two other Tuscan artists of less note. The young Donatello, aged sixteen, is said to have been consulted as to the rival merits of the proofs submitted to the judges. Thus the four great masters of Tuscan art in its prime met before the Florentine Baptistery.^[80] Giacomo della Quercia was excluded from the competition at an early stage; but the umpires wavered long between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, until the latter, with notable generosity, feeling the superiority of his rival, and conscious perhaps that his own laurels were to be gathered in the field of architecture, withdrew his claim. In 1403, Ghiberti received the commission for the first of the two remaining gates. He afterwards obtained the second; and as they were not finished until 1452, the better part of his lifetime was spent upon them. He received in all a sum of 30,798 golden florins for his labour and the cost of the material employed.

The trial-pieces prepared by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti are now preserved in the Bargello.^[81] Their subject is the "Sacrifice of Isaac;" and a comparison of the two leaves no doubt of Ghiberti's superiority. The faults of Brunelleschi's model are want of repose and absence of composition. Abraham rushes in a frenzy of murderous agitation at his son, who writhes beneath the knife already at his throat. The angel swoops from heaven with extended arms, reaching forth one hand to show the ram to Abraham, and clasping the patriarch's wrist with the other. The ram meanwhile is scratching his nose with his near hind leg; one of the servants is taking a thorn from his foot, while the other fills a cup from the stream at which the ass is drinking. Thus each figure has a separate uneasy action. Those critics who contend that the unrest of sixteenth-century sculpture was due to changes in artistic and religious feeling wrought by the Renaissance, would do well to examine this plate, and see how much account must be taken of the artist's temperament in forming their opinion. Brunelleschi adhered to the style and taste of the fifteenth century at its commencement; but the too fervid quality of his character impaired his work as a sculptor. Ghiberti, on the other hand, translated the calm of his harmonious nature into his composition. The angel leans from heaven and points to the ram, which is seated quietly and out of sight of the main actors. Isaac kneels in the attitude of a submissive victim, though his head is turned aside, as if attracted by the rush of pinions through the air; while Abraham has but just lifted his hand, and the sacrifice is only suggested as a possibility by the naked knife. The two servants are grouped below in conversation, one on each side of the browsing ass. This power of telling a story plainly, but without dramatic vehemence; of eliminating the painful details of the subject, and combining its chief motives into one agreeable whole, gave peculiar charm to Ghiberti's manner. It marked him as an artist distinguished by good taste.

How Delia Quercia treated the "Sacrifice of Isaac" we do not know. His bas-reliefs upon the façade of S. Petronio at Bologna, and round the font of S. John's Chapel in the cathedral of Siena, enable us, however, to compare his style with that of Ghiberti in the handling of a subject common to both, the "Creation of Eve."^[82] There is no doubt but that Della Quercia was a formidable rival. Had the gates of the Baptistery been entrusted to his execution, we might have possessed a masterpiece of more heroic style. While smoothness and an almost voluptuous suavity of outline distinguish Ghiberti's naked Eve, gliding upheld by angels from the side of Adam at her Maker's bidding, Della Quercia's group, by the concentration of robust and rugged power, anticipates the style of Michael Angelo. Ghiberti treats the subject pictorially, placing his figures in a landscape, and lavishing attendant angels. Della Quercia, in obedience to the stricter laws of sculpture, restrains his composition to the three chief persons, and brings them into close connection. While Adam reclines asleep in a beautiful and highly studied attitude, Eve has just stepped forth behind him, and God stands robed in massive drapery, raising His hand as though to draw her into life. There is, perhaps, an excess of dramatic action in the lifted right leg of Eve, and too much of pantomimic language in the expressive hands of Eve and her Creator. The robe, again, in its voluminous and snaky coils, and the triangular nimbus of the Deity, convey an effect of heaviness rather than of majesty. Yet we feel, while studying this composition, that it is a noble and original attempt, falling but little short of supreme accomplishment. Without this antecedent sketch, Michael Angelo might not have matured the most complete of all his designs in the Sistine Chapel. The similarity between Delia Quercia's bas-relief and Buonarroti's fresco of Eve is incontestable. The young Florentine, while an exile in Bologna, and engaged upon the shrine of S. Dominic, must have spent hours of study before the sculptures of S. Petronio; so that this seed of Della Quercia's sowing bore after many years the fruit of world-renowned achievement in Rome.

Two other memorable works of Della Quercia must be parenthetically mentioned. These are the Fonte Gaja on the public square of Siena, now unhappily restored, and the portrait of Ilaria del Carretto on her tomb in the cathedral of Lucca. The latter has long been dear to English students of Italian art through words inimitable for their strength of sympathetic criticism.^[83]

Ghiberti was brought up as a goldsmith by his stepfather, and it is said that while a youth he spent much of his leisure in modelling portraits and casting imitations of antique gems and coins for his friends. At the same time he practised painting. We find him employed in decorating a palace at Rimini for Carlo Malatesta, when his stepfather recalled him to Florence, in order that he might compete for the gate of the Baptistery. It is probable that from this early training Ghiberti derived the delicacy of style and smoothness of execution that are reckoned among the chief merits of his work. He also developed a manner more pictorial than sculpturesque, which justifies our calling him a painter in bronze. When Sir Joshua Reynolds remarked, "Ghiberti's landscape and buildings occupied so large a portion of the compartments, that the figures remained but secondary objects,"^[84] his criticism might fairly have been taxed with some injustice even to the second of the two gates. Yet, though exaggerated in severity, his words convey a truth important for the understanding of this period of Italian art.

The first gate may be cited as the supreme achievement of bronze-casting in the Tuscan prime. In the second, by the introduction of elaborate landscapes and the massing together of figures arranged in multitudes at three and sometimes four distances, Ghiberti overstepped the limits that separate sculpture from painting. Having learned perspective from Brunelleschi, he was eager to apply this new science to his own craft, not discerning that it has no place in noble bas-relief. He therefore abandoned the classical and the early Tuscan tradition, whereby reliefs, whether high or low, are strictly restrained to figures arranged in line or grouped together without accessories. Instead of painting frescoes, he set himself to model in bronze whole compositions that might have been expressed with propriety in colour. The point of Sir Joshua's criticism, therefore, is that Ghiberti's practice of distributing figures on a small scale in spacious landscape framework was at variance with the severity of sculptural treatment. The pernicious effect of his example may be traced in much Florentine work of the mid Renaissance period which passed for supremely clever when it was produced. What the unique genius of Ghiberti made not merely pardonable but even admirable, became under other hands no less repulsive than the transference of pictorial effects to painted glass.^[85]

That Ghiberti was not a great sculptor of statues is proved by his work at Orsammichele. He was no architect, as we know from his incompetence to do more than impede Brunelleschi in the building of the dome. He came into the world to create a new and inimitable style of hybrid beauty in those gates of Paradise. His susceptibility to the first influences of the classical revival deserves notice here, since it shows to what an extent a devotee of Greek art in the fifteenth century could worship the relics of antiquity without passing over into imitation. When the "Hermaphrodite" was discovered in the vineyard of S. Celso, Ghiberti's admiration found vent in exclamations like the following: "No tongue could describe the learning and art displayed in it, or do justice to its masterly style." Another antique, found near Florence, must, he conjectures, have been hidden out of harm's way by "some gentle spirit in the early days of Christianity." "The touch only," he adds, "can discover its beauties, which escape the sense of sight in any light."^[86] It would be impossible to express a reverential love of ancient art more tenderly than is done in these sentences. So intense was Ghiberti's passion for the Greeks, that he rejected Christian chronology and reckoned by Olympiads—a system that has thrown obscurity over his otherwise precious notes of Tuscan artists. In spite of this devotion, he never appears to have set himself consciously to reproduce the style of Greek sculpture, or to have set forth Hellenic ideas. He remained unaffectedly natural, and in a true sense Christian. The paganism of the Renaissance is a phrase with no more meaning for him than for that still more delicate Florentine spirit, Luca della Robbia; and if his works are classical, they are so only in Goethe's sense, when he pronounced, "the point is for a work to be thoroughly good, and then it is sure to be classical."

One great advantage of the early days of the Renaissance over the latter was this, that pseudo-paganism and pedantry had not as yet distorted the judgment or misdirected the aims of artists. Contact with the antique world served only to stimulate original endeavour, by leading the student back to the fountain of all excellence in nature, and by exhibiting types of perfection in technical processes. To ape the sculptors of Antinous, or to bring to life again the gods who died with Pan, was not yet longed for. Of the impunity with which a sculptor in that period could submit his genius to the service and the study of ancient art without sacrificing individuality, Donatello furnishes a still more illustrious example than Ghiberti. Early in his youth Donatello journeyed with Brunelleschi to Rome, in order to acquaint himself with the monuments then extant. How thoroughly he comprehended the classic spirit is proved by the bronze patera wrought for his patron Ruberto Martelli, and by the frieze of the triumphant Bacchus.^[87] Yet the great achievements of his genius were Christian in their sentiment and realistic in their style. The bronze "Magdalen" of the Florentine Baptistery and the bronze "Baptist" of the Duomo at Siena^[88] are executed with an unrelenting materialism, not alien indeed to the sincerity of classic art, but divergent from antique tradition, inasmuch as the ideas of repentant and prophetic asceticism had no place in Greek mythology.

Donatello, with the uncompromising candour of an artist bent on marking character, felt that he was bound to seize the very pith and kernel of his subject. If a Magdalen were demanded of him, he would not condescend to model a Venus and then place a book and skull upon a rock beside her; nor did he imagine that the bloom and beauty of a laughing Faun were fitting attributes for the preacher of repentance. It remained for later artists, intoxicated with antique loveliness and corroded with worldly scepticism, to reproduce the outward semblance of Greek deities under the pretence of setting forth the myths of Christianity. Such compromise had not occurred to Donatello. The motive of his art was clearly apprehended, his method was sincere; certain phases of profound emotion had to be represented with the physical characteristics proper to them. The result, ugly and painful as it may sometimes be, was really more concordant with the spirit of Greek method than Lionardo's "John" or Correggio's "Magdalen." That is to say, it was straightforward and truthful; whereas the strange caprices of the later Renaissance too often betrayed a double mind, disloyal alike to paganism and to Christianity, in their effort to combine divergent forces. It may still be argued that such conceptions as sorrow for sin and mortification of the flesh, unflinchingly portrayed by haggard gauntness in the saints of Donatello, are unfit for sculpturesque expression.

A more felicitous embodiment of modern feeling was achieved by Donatello in "S. George" and "David." The former is a marble statue placed upon the north wall of Orsammichele; the latter is a bronze, cast for Cosimo de' Medici, and now exhibited in the Bargello.^[89] Without striving to idealise his models, the sculptor has expressed in both the Christian conception of heroism, fearless in the face of danger, and sustained by faith. The naked beauty of the boy David and the mailed manhood of S. George are raised to a spiritual region by the type of feature and the pose of body selected to interpret their animating impulse. These are no mere portraits of wrestlers, such, as peopled the groves of Altis at Olympia, no ideals of physical strength translated into brass and marble, like the "Hercules" of Naples or the Vatican. The one is a Christian soldier ready to engage Apollyon in battle to the death; the other the boy-hero of a marvellous romance. The body in both is but the shrine of an indwelling soul, the instrument and agent of a faith-directed will; and the crown of their conflict is no wreath of laurel or of parsley. In other words, the value of S. George and David to the sculptor lay not in their strength and youthful beauty—though he has endowed them with these excellent gifts—so much as in their significance for the eternal struggle of the soul with evil. The same power of expressing Christian sentiment in a form of perfect beauty, transcending the Greek type by profounder suggestion of feeling, is illustrated in the well-known low-relief of an angel's head in profile, technically one of Donatello's most masterly productions.^[90]

It is no part of my present purpose to enumerate the many works of Donatello in marble and bronze; yet some allusion to their number and variety is necessary in order to show how widely his influence was diffused through Italy. In the monuments of Pope John XXIII., of Cardinal Brancacci, and of Bartolommeo Aragazzi, he subordinated his genius to the treatment of sepulchral and biographical subjects according to time-honoured Tuscan usage. They were severally placed in Florence, Naples, and Montepulciano. For the cathedral of Prato he executed bas-reliefs of dancing boys; a similar series, intended for the balustrades of the organ in S. Maria del Fiore, is now preserved in the Bargello museum. The exultation of movement has never been expressed in stone with more fidelity to the strict rules of plastic art. For his friend and patron, Cosimo de' Medici, he cast in bronze the group of "Judith and Holofernes"—a work that illustrates the clumsiness of realistic treatment, and deserves to be remembered chiefly for its strange fortunes. When the Medici fled from Florence in 1494, their palace was sacked; the new republic took possession of Donatello's "Judith," and placed it on a pedestal before the gate of the Palazzo Vecchio, with this inscription, ominous to would-be despots: Exemplum salutis publicæ cives posuere. MCCCCXCV. It now stands near Cellini's "Perseus" under the Loggia de' Lanzi. For the pulpits of S. Lorenzo, Donatello made designs of intricate bronze bas-reliefs, which were afterwards completed by his pupil Bertoldo. These, though better known to travellers, are less excellent than the reliefs in bronze wrought by Donatello's own hand for the church of S. Anthony at Padua.^[91] To that city he was called in 1451, in order that he might model the equestrian statue of Gattamelata. It still stands on the Piazza, a masterpiece of scientific bronze-founding, the first great portrait of a general on horseback since the days of Rome.^[92] At Padua, in the hall of the Palazzo della Ragione, is also preserved the wooden horse, which is said to have been constructed by the sculptor for the noble house of Capodilista. These two examples of equestrian modelling marked an epoch in Italian statuary.

When Donato di Nicolo di Betto Bardi, called Donatello because men loved his sweet and cheerful temper, died in 1466 at the age of eighty, the brightest light of Italian sculpture in its most promising period was extinguished. Donatello's influence, felt far and wide through Italy, was of inestimable value in correcting the false direction toward pictorial sculpture which Ghiberti, had he flourished alone at Florence, might have given to the art. His style was always eminently masculine. However tastes may differ about the positive merits of his several works, there can be no doubt that the principles of sincerity, truth to nature, and technical accuracy they illustrate, were all-important in an age that lent itself too readily to the caprices of the fancy and the puerilities of florid taste. To regret that Donatello lacked Ghiberti's exquisite sense of beauty, is tantamount to wishing that two of the greatest artists of the world had made one man between them.

Donatello did not, in the strict sense of the term, found a school.^[93] Andrea Verocchio, goldsmith, painter, and worker in bronze, was the most distinguished of his pupils. To all the arts he practised, Verocchio applied limited powers, a meagre manner, and a prosaic mind. Yet few men have exercised at a very critical moment a more decided influence. The mere fact that he numbered Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and Pietro Perugino among his scholars, proves the esteem of his contemporaries; and when we have observed that the type of face selected by Lionardo and transmitted to his followers, appears also in the pictures of Lorenzo di Credi and is first found in the "David" of Verocchio, we have a right to affirm that the master of these men was an artist of creative genius as well as a careful workman. Florence still points with pride to the "Incredulity of Thomas" on the eastern wall of Orsammichele, to the "Boy and Dolphin" in the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, and to the "David" of this sculptor: but the first is spoiled by heaviness and angularity of drapery; the second, though fanciful and marked by fluttering movement, is but a caprice; the third outdoes the hardest work of Donatello by its realism. Verocchio's "David," a lad of some seventeen years, has the lean, veined arms of a stone-hewer or gold-beater. As a faithful portrait of the first Florentine prentice who came to hand, this statue might have merit but for the awkward cuirass and kilt that partly drape the figure.

The name of Verocchio is best known to the world through the equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni. When this great Condottiere, the last surviving general trained by Braccio da Montone, died in 1475, he bequeathed a large portion of his wealth to Venice, on condition that his statue on horseback should be erected in the Piazza di S. Marco. Colleoni, having long held the bâton of the Republic, desired that after death his portrait, in his habit as he lived, should continue to look down on the scene of his old splendour. By an ingenious quibble the Senators adhered to the letter of his will without infringing a law that forbade them to charge the square of S. Mark with monuments. They ruled that the piazza in front of the Scuola di S. Marco, better known as the Campo di S. Zanipolo, might be chosen as the site of Colleoni's statue, and to Andrea Verocchio was given the commission for its erection.

Andrea died in 1488 before the model for the horse was finished. The work was completed, and the pedestal was supplied by Alessandro Leopardi. To Verocchio, profiting by the example of Donatello's "Gattamelata," must be assigned the general conception of this statue; but the breath of life that animates both horse and rider, the richness of detail that enhances the massive grandeur of the group, and the fiery spirit of its style of execution were due to the Venetian genius of Leopardi. Verocchio alone produced nothing so truly magnificent. This joint creation of Florentine science and Venetian fervour is one of the most precious monuments of the Renaissance. From it we learn what the men who fought the bloodless battles of the commonwealths, and who aspired to principality, were like. "He was tall," writes a biographer of Colleoni,^[94] "of erect and well-knit figure, and of well-proportioned limbs. His complexion tended rather to brown, marked withal by bright and sanguine flesh-tints. He had black eyes; their brilliancy was vivid, their gaze terrible and penetrating. In the outline of his nose and in all his features he displayed a manly nobleness combined with goodness and prudence." Better phrases cannot be chosen to describe his statue.

While admiring this masterpiece and dwelling on its royal style, we are led to deplore most bitterly the loss of the third equestrian statue of the Renaissance. Nothing now remains but a few technical studies made by Lionardo da Vinci for his portrait of Francesco Sforza. The two elaborate models he constructed and the majority of his minute designs have been destroyed. He intended, we are told, to represent the first Duke of the Sforza dynasty on his charger, trampling the body of a prostrate and just conquered enemy. Rubens' transcript from the "Battle of the Standard," enables us to comprehend to some extent how Lionardo might have treated this motive. The severe and cautious style of Donatello, after gaining freedom and fervour from Leopardi, was adapted to the ideal presentation of dramatic passion by Lionardo. Thus Gattamelata, Colleoni, and Francesco Sforza would, through their statues, have marked three distinct phases in the growth of art. The final effort of Italian sculpture to express human activity in the person of a mounted warrior has perished. In this sphere we possess nothing which, like the tombs of S. Lorenzo in relation to sepulchral statuary, completes a series of development.

If Donatello founded no school, this was far more the case with Ghiberti. His supposed pupil, Antonio del Pollajuolo, showed no sign of Ghiberti's influence, but struck out for himself a style distinguished by almost brutal energy and bizarre realism—characteristics the very opposite to those of his master. If the bronze relief of the "Crucifixion" in the Bargello be really Pollajuolo's, we may even trace a leaning to Verocchio in his manner. The emphatic passion of the women recalls the group of mourners round the death-bed of Selvaggia Tornabuoni in Verocchio's celebrated bas-relief. Pollajuolo, like so many Florentine artists, was a goldsmith, a painter, and a worker in niello, before he took to sculpture. As a goldsmith he is said to have surpassed all his contemporaries, and his mastery over this art influenced his style in general. What we chiefly notice, however, in his choice of subjects is a frenzy of murderous enthusiasm, a grimness of imagination, rare among Italian artists. The picture in the Uffizzi of "Hercules and Antæus" and the well-known engraving of naked men fighting a series of savage duels in a wood, might be chosen as emphatic illustrations of his favourite motives. The fiercest emotions of the Renaissance find expression in the clenched teeth, strained muscles, knotted brows, and tense nerves, depicted by Pollajuolo with eccentric energy. We seem to be assisting at some of those combats a steccato chiuso wherein Sixtus IV. delighted, or to have before our eyes a fray between Crocensi and Vallensi in the streets of Rome.^[95] The same remarks apply to the terra-cotta relief by Pollajuolo in the South Kensington Museum. This piece displays the struggles of twelve naked men, divided into six pairs of combatants. Two of the couples hold short chains with the left hand, and seek to stab each other with the right. In the case of another two couples the fight is over, and the victor is insulting his fallen foe. In each of the remaining pairs one gladiator is on the point of yielding to his adversary. There are thus three several moments of duel to the death, each illustrated by two couples. The mathematical distribution of these dreadful groups gives an effect of frozen passion; while the vigorous workmanship displays not only an enthusiasm for muscular anatomy, but a real sympathy with blood-fury in the artist.

There was, therefore, a certain propriety in the choice of Pollajuolo to cast the sepulchre of Sixtus IV. in bronze at Rome. The best judges complain, not without reason, that the allegories surrounding this tomb are exaggerated and affected in style; yet the dead Pope, stretched in pomp upon his bier, commands more than merely historical interest; while the figures, seated as guardians round the old man, terrible in death, communicate an impression of monumental majesty. Criticised in detail, each separate figure may be faulty. The composition, as a whole, is picturesque and grandiose. The same can scarcely be said about the tomb of Innocent VIII., erected by Antonio and his brother Piero del Pollajuolo. While it perpetuates the memory of an uninteresting Pontiff, it has but little, as a work of art, to recommend it. The Pollajuoli were not great sculptors. In the history of Italian art they deserve a place, because of the vivid personality impressed upon some portions of their work. Few draughtsmen carried the study of muscular anatomy so far as Antonio.^[96]

Luca della Robbia, whose life embraced the first eighty years of the fifteenth century, offers in many important respects a contrast to his contemporaries Ghiberti and Donatello, and still more to their immediate followers. He made his art as true to life as it is possible to be, without the rugged realism of Donatello or the somewhat effeminate graces of Ghiberti. The charm of his work is never impaired by scientific mannerism—that stumbling-block to critics like De Stendhal in the art of Florence; nor does it suffer from the picturesqueness of a sentimental style. How to render the beauty of nature in her most delightful moments—taking us with him into the holiest of holies, and handling the sacred vessels with a child's confiding boldness—was a secret known to Luca della Robbia alone. We may well find food for meditation in the innocent and cheerful inspiration of this man, whose lifetime coincided with a period of sordid passions and debased ambition in the Church and States of Italy.

Luca was apprenticed in his youth to a goldsmith; but of what he wrought before the age of forty-five, we know but little.^[97] At that time his faculty had attained full maturity, and he produced the groups of dancing children and choristers intended for the organ gallery of the Duomo. Wholly free from affectation, and depending for effect upon no merely decorative detail, these bas-reliefs deserve the praise bestowed by Dante on the sculpture seen in Purgatory:^[98]—

Movement has never been suggested in stone with less exaggeration, nor have marble lips been made to utter sweeter and more varied music. Luca's true perception of the limits to be observed in sculpture, appears most eminently in the glazed terra-cotta work by which he is best known. An ordinary artist might have found the temptation to aim at showy and pictorial effects in this material overwhelming. Luca restrained himself to pure white on pale blue, and preserved an exquisite simplicity of line in all his compositions. There is an almost unearthly beauty in the profiles of his Madonnas, a tempered sweetness in the modulation of their drapery and attitude, that prove complete mastery in the art of rendering evanescent moments of expression, the most fragile subtleties of the emotions that can stir a tranquil spirit. Andrea della Robbia, the nephew of Luca, with his four sons, Giovanni, Luca, Ambrogio, and Girolamo, continued to manufacture the glazed earthenware of Luca's invention. These men, though excellent artificers, lacked the fine taste of their teacher. Coarser colours were introduced; the eye was dazzled with variety; but the power of speaking to the soul as Luca spoke was lost.^[99]

After the Della Robbias, this is the place to mention Agostino di Gucci or di Duccio,^[100] a sculptor who handled terra-cotta somewhat in the manner of Donatello's flat-relief, introducing more richness of detail and aiming at more passion than Luca's taste permitted. For the oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia he designed the façade partly in stone and partly in baked clay—crowded with figures, flying, singing, playing upon instruments of music, with waving draperies and windy hair and the ecstasy of movement in their delicately modelled limbs. If nothing else remained of Agostino's workmanship, this façade alone would place him in the first rank of contemporary artists. He owed something, perhaps, to his material; for terra-cotta has the charm of improvisation. The hand, obedient to the brain, has made it in one moment what it is, and no slow hours of labour at the stone have dulled the first caprice of the creative fancy. Work, therefore, which, if translated into marble, might have left our sympathy unstirred, affects us with keen pleasure in the mould of plastic clay. What prodigality of thought and invention has been lavished on the terra-cotta models of unknown Italian artists! What forms and faces, beautiful as shapes of dreams, and, like dreams, so airy that we think they will take flight and vanish, lean to greet us from cloisters and palace fronts in Lombardy! To catalogue their multitude would be impossible. It is enough to select one instance out of many; this shall be taken from the chapel of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio at Milan. High up around the cupola runs a frieze of angels, singing together and dancing with joined hands, while bells composed of fruits and flowers hang down between them. Each angel is an individual shape of joy; the soul in each moves to its own deep melody, but the music made of all is one. Their raiment flutters, the bells chime; the chorus of their gladness falls like voices through a star-lit heaven, half-heard in dreams and everlastingly remembered.

Four sculptors, the younger contemporaries of Luca della Robbia, and marked by certain common qualities, demand attention next. All the work of Antonio Rossellino, Matteo Civitali, Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da Majano, is distinguished by sweetness, grace, tranquillity, and self-restraint—as though these artists had voluntarily imposed limits on their genius, refusing to trespass beyond a traced circle of religious subjects, or to aim at effects unrealisable by purity of outline, suavity of expression, delicacy of feeling, and urbanity of style. The charm of manner they possess in common, can scarcely he defined except by similes. The innocence of childhood, the melody of a lute or song-bird as distinguished from the music of an orchestra, the rathe tints of early dawn, cheerful light on shallow streams, the serenity of a simple and untainted nature that has never known the world—many such images occur to the mind while thinking of the sculpture of these men. To charge them with insipidity, immaturity, and monotony, would be to mistake the force of genius and skill displayed by them. We should rather assume that they confined themselves to certain types of tranquil beauty, without caring to realise more obviously striking effects, and that this was their way of meeting the requirements of sculpture considered as a Christian art. The melody of their design, meanwhile, is like the purest song-music of Pergolese or Salvator Rosa, unapproachably perfect in simple outline, and inexhaustibly refreshing.

Though it is possible to characterise the style of these sculptors by some common qualities observable in their work, it should rather be the aim of criticism to point out their differences. Antonio Rossellino, for example, might be distinguished by his leaning toward the manner of Ghiberti, whose landscape backgrounds he has adopted in the circular medallions of his monumental sculpture. A fine perception of the poetic capabilities of Christian art is displayed in Rossellino's idyllic treatment of the Nativity—the adoration of the shepherds, the hush of reverential stillness in the worship Mary pays her infant son.^[101] To the qualities of sweetness and tranquillity rare dignity is added in the monument of the young Cardinal di Portogallo.^[102] The sublimity of the slumber that is death has never been more nobly and feelingly portrayed than in the supine figure and sleeping features of this most beautiful young man, who lies watched by angels beneath a heavy-curtained canopy. The genii of eternal repose modelled by Greek sculptors are twin-brothers of Love, on whom perpetual slumber has descended amid poppy-fields by Lethe's stream. The turmoil of the world is over for them; they will never wake again; they do not even dream. Sleep is the only power that still has life in them. But the Christian cannot thus conceive the mystery of the soul "fallen on sleep." His art must suggest a time of waiting and a time of waking; and this it does partly through the ministration of attendant angels, who would not be standing there on guard if the clay-cold corpse had no futurity, partly by breathing upon the limbs and visage of the dead a spirit as of life suspended for a while. Thus the soul herself is imaged in the marble "most sweetly slumbering in the gates of dreams."

What Vespasiano tells us of this cardinal, born of the royal house of Portugal, adds the virtue of sincerity to Rossellino's work, proving there is no flattery of the dead man in his sculpture.^[103] "Among his other admirable virtues," says the biographer, "Messer Jacopo di Portogallo determined to preserve his virginity, though he was beautiful above all others of his age. Consequently he avoided all things that might prove impediments to his vow, such as free discourse, the society of women, balls, and songs. In this mortal flesh he lived as though he had been free from it—the life, we may say, rather of an angel than a man. And if his biography were written from his childhood to his death, it would be not only an ensample, but confusion to the world. Upon his monument the hand was modelled from his own, and the face is very like him, for he was most lovely in his person, but still more in his soul."

While contemplating this monument of the young cardinal, we feel that the Italians of that age understood sepulchral sculpture far better than their immediate successors. They knew how to carve the very soul, according to the lines which our Webster, a keen observer of all things relating to the grave and death, has put into Jolenta's lips:—

The same Webster condemns that evil custom of aping life and movement on the monuments of dead men, which began to obtain when the motives of pure repose had been exhausted. "Why," asks the Duchess of Malfi, "do we grow fantastical in our death-bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?" "Most ambitiously," answers Bosola; "princes' images on their tombs do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks (as if they died of the toothache): they are not carved with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but, as their minds were wholly bent upon the world, the self-same way they seem to turn their faces." A more trenchant criticism than this could hardly have been pronounced upon Andrea Contucci di Monte Sansavino's tombs of Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo della Rovere, if Bosola had been standing before them in the church of S. Maria del Popolo when he spoke. Were it the function of monumental sculpture to satirise the dead, or to point out their characteristic faults for the warning of posterity, then the sepulchres of these worldly cardinals of Sixtus IV.'s creation would be artistically justified. But the object of art is not this. The idea of death, as conceived by Christians, has to be portrayed. The repose of the just, the resurrection of the body, and the coming judgment, afford sufficient scope for treatment of good men and bad alike. Or if the sculptor have sublime imagination, he may, like Michael Angelo, suggest the alternations of the day and night, slumber and waking, whereby "our little life is rounded with a sleep."

This digression will hardly be thought superfluous when we reflect how large a part of the sculptor's energy was spent on tombs in Italy. Matteo Civitali of Lucca was at least Rossellino's equal in the sculpturesque delineation of spiritual qualities; but the motives he chose for treatment were more varied. All his work is penetrated with deep, prayerful, intense feeling; as though the artist's soul, poured forth in ecstasy and adoration, had been given to the marble. This is especially true of two angels kneeling upon the altar of the Chapel of the Sacrament in Lucca Cathedral. Civitali, by singular good fortune, was chosen in the best years of his life to adorn the cathedral of his native city; and it is here, rather than at Genoa, where much of his sculpture may also be seen, that he deserves to be studied. For the people of Lucca he designed the Chapel of the Santo Volto—a gem of the purest Renaissance architecture—and a pulpit in the same style. His most remarkable sculpture is to be found in three monuments: the tombs of Domenico Bertini and Pietro da Noceto, and the altar of S. Regulus. The last might be chosen as an epitome of all that is most characteristic in Tuscan sculpture of the earlier Renaissance. It is built against the wall, and architecturally designed so as to comprehend a full-length figure of the bishop stretched upon his bier and watched by angels, a group of Madonna and her child seated above him, a row of standing saints below, and a predella composed of four delicately finished bas-reliefs. Every part of this complex work is conceived with spirit and executed with care; and the various elements are so combined as to make one composition, the body of the saint on his sarcophagus forming the central object of the whole.

To do more than briefly mention the minor sculptors of this group would be impossible. Mino di Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterised by grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The tombs in the Abbey of Florence have an almost infantine sweetness of style, which might be extremely piquant, were it not that Mino pushed this quality in other works to the verge of mannerism.^[104] Their architectural features are the same as those of similar monuments in Tuscany:—a shallow recess, flanked by Renaissance pilasters, and roofed with a semicircular arch; within the recess, the full-length figure of the dead man on a marble coffin of antique design; in the lunette above, a Madonna carved in low relief.^[105] Mino's bust of Bishop Salutati in the cathedral church of Fiesole is a powerful portrait, no less distinguished for vigorous individuality than consummate workmanship. The waxlike finish of the finely chiselled marble alone betrays that delicacy which with Mino verged on insipidity. The same faculty of character delineation is seen in three profiles, now in the Bargello Museum, attributed to Mino. They represent Frederick Duke of Urbino, Battista Sforza, and Galeazzo Sforza. The relief is very low, rising at no point more than half an inch above the surface of the ground, but so carefully modulated as to present a wonderful variety of light and shade, and to render the facial expression with great vividness.

Desiderio da Settignano, one of Donatello's few scholars, was endowed with the same gift of exquisite taste as his friend Mino da Fiesole;^[106] but his inventive faculty was bolder, and his genius more robust, in spite of the profuse ornamentation and elaborate finish of his masterpiece, the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce. The bust he made of Marietta di Palla degli Strozzi enables us to compare his style in portraiture with that of Mino.^[107] It would be hard to find elsewhere a more captivating combination of womanly sweetness and dignity. We feel, in looking at these products of the best age of Italian sculpture, that the artists who conceived them were, in the truest sense of the word, gentle. None but men courteous and unaffected could have carved a face like that of Marietta Strozzi, breathing the very spirit of urbanity. To express the most amiable qualities of a living person in a work of art that should suggest emotional tranquillity by harmonious treatment, and indicate the temperance of a disciplined nature by self-restraint and moderation of style, and to do this with the highest technical perfection, was the triumph of fifteenth-century sculpture.

An artist who claims a third place beside Mino and his friend, "il bravo Desider si dolce e bello,"^[108] is Benedetto da Majano. In Benedetto's bas-reliefs at San Gemignano, carved for the altars of those unlovely Tuscan worthies, S. Fina and S. Bartolo, we find a pictorial treatment of legendary subjects, proving that he had studied Ghirlandajo's frescoes. The same is true about his pulpit in S. Croce at Florence, his treatment of the story of S. Savino at Faenza, and his "Annunciation" in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples. Benedetto, indeed, may be said to illustrate the working of Ghiberti's influence by his liberal use of landscape and architectural backgrounds; but the style is rather Ghirlandajo's than Ghiberti's. If it was a mistake in the sculptors of that period to subordinate their art to painting, the error, we feel, was aggravated by the imitation of a manner so prosaic as that of Ghirlandajo. That Benedetto began life as a tarsiatore may perhaps help to account for his pictorial style in bas-relief.^[109] In estimating his total claim as an artist, we must not forget that he designed the formidable and splendid Strozzi Palace.

It will be observed that all the sculptors hitherto mentioned have been Tuscans; and this is due to no mere accident—nor yet to caprice on the part of their historian. Though the other districts of Italy produced admirable workmen, the direction given to this art proceeded from Tuscany. Florence, the metropolis of modern culture, determined the course of the æsthetical Renaissance. Even at Rimini we cannot account for the carvings in low relief, so fanciful, so delicately wrought, and so profusely scattered over the side chapels of S. Francesco, without the intervention of two Florentines, Bernardo Ciuffagni and Donatello's pupil Simone; while in the palace of Urbino we trace some hand not unlike that of Mino da Fiesole at work upon the mouldings of door and architrave, cornice and high-built chimney.^[110] Not only do we thus find Tuscan craftsmen or their scholars employed on all the great public buildings throughout Italy; but it also happens that, except in Tuscany, the decoration of churches and palaces is not unfrequently anonymous.

This does not, however, interfere with the truth that sculpture, like all the arts, assumed a somewhat different character in each Italian city. The Venetian stone-carvers leaned from the first to a richer and more passionate style than the Florentine, reproducing the types of Cima's and Bellini's paintings.^[111] Whole families, like the Bregni—classes, like the Lombardi—schools, like that of Alessandro Leopardi, worked together on the monumental sculpture of S. Zanipolo. In the tombs of the Doges the old Pisan motive of the curtains (first used by Arnolfo di Cambio at Orvieto, and afterwards with grand effect by Giovanni Pisano at Perugia) is expanded into a sumptuous tent-canopy. Pages and genii and mailed heroes take the place of angels, and the marine details of Roman reliefs are copied in the subordinate decoration. At Verona the mediæval tombs of the Scaligers, with their vast chest-like sarcophagi and mounted warriors, exhibit features markedly different from the monuments of Tuscany; while the mixture of fresco with sculpture, in monuments like that of the Cavalli in S. Anastasia, and in many altar-pieces, is at variance with Florentine usage. On the terra-cotta mouldings, so frequent in Lombard cities, I have already had occasion to touch briefly. They almost invariably display a feeling for beauty more sensuous, with less of scientific purpose in their naturalism, than is common in the Tuscan style. Guido Mazzoni of Modena, called Il Modanino, may be mentioned as the sculptor who freed terra-cotta from its dependence upon architecture, and who modelled groups of overpowering dramatic realism. His "Pietà," in the Church of Monte Oliveto at Naples, is valuable, less for its passionate intensity of expression than for the portraits of Pontano, Sannazzaro, and Alfonso of Aragon.^[112] This sub-species of sculpture was freely employed in North Italy to stimulate devotion, and to impress the people with lively pictures of the Passion. The Sacro Monte at Varallo, for example, is covered with a multitude of chapels, each one of which presents some chapter of Bible history dramatically rendered by life-size groups of terra-cotta figures. Some of these were designed by eminent painters, and executed by clever modellers in clay. Even now they are scarcely less stirring to the mind of a devout spectator than the scenes of a mediæval Mystery may have been.

The Certosa of Pavia, lastly, is the centre of a school of sculpture that has little in common with the Florentine tradition. Antonio Amadeo^[113] and Andrea Fusina, acting in concert with Ambrogio Borgognone the painter, gave it in the fifteenth century that character of rich and complex decorative beauty which many generations of artists were destined to continue and complete. Among the countless sculptors employed upon its marvellous façade Amadeo asserts an individuality above the rest, which is further manifested in his work in the Cappella Colleoni at Bergamo. We there learn to know him, not only as an enthusiastic cultivator of the mingled Christian and pagan manner of the quattrocento, but as an artist in the truest sense of the word sympathetic. The sepulchral portrait of Medea, daughter of the great Condottiere, has a grace almost beyond that of Della Quercia's "Ilaria."^[114] Much, no doubt, is due to the peculiarly fragile beauty of the girl herself, who lies asleep with little crisp curls clustering upon her forehead, and with a string of pearls around her slender throat. But the sensibility to loveliness so delicate, and the power to render it in marble with so ethereal a touch upon the rigid stone, belong to the sculptor, and win for him our worship.

The list of fifteenth-century sculptors is almost ended; and already, on the threshold of the sixteenth, stands the mighty form of Michael Angelo. Andrea Contucci da Sansavino and his pupil Jacopo Tatti, called also Sansovino, after his master, must, however, next be mentioned as continuing the Florentine tradition without subservience to the style of Buonarroti. Andrea da Sansavino was a sculptor in whom for the first time the faults of the mid-Renaissance period are glaringly apparent. He persistently sacrificed simplicity of composition to decorative ostentation, and tranquillity of feeling to theatrical effect. The truth of this will be acknowledged by all who have studied the tombs of the cardinals in S. Maria del Popolo already mentioned,^[115] and the bas-reliefs upon the Santa Casa at Loreto. In technical workmanship Andrea proved himself an able craftsman, modelling marble with the plasticity of wax, and lavishing patterns of the most refined invention. Yet the decorative prodigality of this master corresponded to the frigid and stylistic graces of the neo-Latin poets. It was so much mannerism—adopted without real passion from the antique, and applied with a rhetorical intention. Those acanthus scrolls and honeysuckle borders, in spite of their consummate finish, fail to arrest attention, leaving the soul as unstirred as the Ovidian cadences of Bembo.

Jacopo Tatti was a genius of more distinction. Together with San Gallo and Bramante he studied the science of architecture in Rome, where he also worked at the restoration of newly discovered antiques, and cast in bronze a copy of the "Laocoon." Thus equipped with the artistic learning of his age, he was called in 1523 by the Doge, Andrea Gritti, to Venice. The material pomp of Venice at this epoch, and the pride of her unrivalled luxury, affected his imagination so powerfully that his genius, tutored by Florentine and Umbrian masters among the ruins of old Rome, became at once Venetian. In the history of the Renaissance the names of Titian and Aretino, themselves acclimatised aliens, are inseparably connected with that of their friend Sansovino. At Venice he lived until his death in 1570, building the Zecca, the Library, the Scala d'Oro in the Ducal Palace, and the Loggietta beneath the bell-tower of S. Mark. In all his work he subordinated sculpture to architecture, and his statuary is conceived in the bravura, manner of Renaissance paganism. Whatever may be the faults of Sansovino in both arts, it cannot be denied that he expressed, in a style peculiar to himself, the large voluptuous external life of Venice at a moment when this city was the Paris or the Corinth of Renaissance Europe. At the same time, the shallowness of Sansovino's inspiration as a sculptor is patent in his masterpieces of parade—the "Neptune" and the "Mars," guarding the Scala d'Oro. Separated from the architecture of the court and staircase, they are insignificant in spite of their colossal scale. In their place they add a haughty grandeur, by the contrast which their flowing forms and arrogant attitudes present to the severer lines of the construction. But they are devoid of artistic sincerity, and occupy the same relation to true sculpture as flourishes of rhetoric, however brilliant, to poetry embodying deep thought or passion. At first sight they impose: on further acquaintance we find them chiefly interesting as illustrations of a potent civic life upon the wane, gorgeous in its decay.

Sansovino was a first-rate craftsman. The most finished specimen of his skill is the bronze door of the Sacristy of S. Marco, upon which he is said to have worked through twenty years. Portraits of the sculptor, Titian, and Pietro Aretino are introduced into the decorative border. These heads start from the surface of the gate with astonishing vivacity. That Aretino should thus daily assist in effigy at the procession of priests bearing the sacred emblems from the sacristy to the high altar of S. Mark, is one of the most characteristic proofs of sixteenth-century indifference to things holy and things profane.

Jacopo Sansovino marks the final intrusion of paganism into modern art. The classical revival had worked but partially and indirectly upon Ghiberti and Donatello—not because they did not feel it most intensely, but because they clung to nature far more closely than to antique precedent. This enthusiasm inspired Sansovino with the best and strongest qualities that he can boast; and if his genius had been powerful enough to resist the fascination of merely rhetorical effects, he might have produced a perfect restoration of the classic style. His was no lifeless or pedantic imitation of antique fragments, but a real expression of the fervour with which the modern world hailed the discoveries revealed to it by scholarship. This is said advisedly. The most beautiful and spirited pagan statue of the Renaissance period, justifying the estimate here made of Sansovino's genius, is the "Bacchus" exhibited in the Bargello Museum. Both the Bacchus and the Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism, irradiated and idealised by the sculptor's vivid sense of natural gladness. Considered as a restitution of the antique manner, this statue is decidedly superior to the "Bacchus" of Michael Angelo. While the mundane splendour of Venice gave body and fulness to Sansovino's paganism, he missed the self-restraint and purity of taste peculiar to the studious shades of Florence. In his style, both architectural and sculptural, the neo-pagan sensuality of Italy expanded all its bloom.

For the artist at this period a Greek myth and a Christian legend were all one. Both afforded the occasion for displaying technical skill in fluent forms, devoid of any but voluptuous feeling; while both might be subordinated to rich effects of decoration.^[116] To this point the intellectual culture of the fifteenth century had brought the plastic arts of Italy, by a process similar to that which ended in the "Partus Virginis" of Sannazzaro. They were still indisputably vigorous, and working in accordance with the movement of the modern spirit. Yet the synthesis they attempted to effect between heathenism and Christianity, by a sheer effort of style, and by indifferentism, strikes us from the point of view of art alone, not reckoning religion or morality, as unsuccessful. Still, if it be childish on the one hand to deplore that the Christian earnestness of the earlier masters had failed, it would be even more ridiculous to complain that paganism had not been more entirely recovered. The double-mind of the Renaissance, the source of its weakness in art as in thought, could not be avoided, because humanity at this moment had to lose the mediæval sincerity of faith, and to assimilate the spirit of a bygone civilisation. This, for better or for worse, was the phase through which the intellect of modern Europe was obliged to pass; and those who have confidence in the destinies of the human race, will not spend their strength in moaning over such shortcomings as the periods of transition bring inevitably with them. The student of Italian history may indeed more reasonably be allowed to question whether the arts, if left to follow their own development unchecked, might not have recovered from the confusion of the Renaissance and have entered on a stage of nobler activity through earnest and unaffected study of nature. But the enslavement of the country, together with the counter-Reformation, suspended the Renaissance in mid-career; and what remains of Italian art is incomplete. Besides, it must be borne in mind that the confusion of opinions consequent upon the clash of the modern with the ancient world, left no body of generally accepted beliefs to express; nor has the time even yet arrived for a settlement and synthesis that shall be favourable to the activity of the figurative arts.

Sansovino himself was neither original nor powerful enough, to elevate the mixed motives of Renaissance sculpture by any lofty idealisation. To do that remained for Michael Angelo. The greatness of Michael Angelo consists in this—that while literature was sinking into the frivolity of Academies and the filth of the Bernesque "Capitoli," while the barefaced villanies of Aretino won him credit, while sensual magnificence formed the ideal of artists who were neither Greeks nor Christians, while Ariosto found no subject fitter for his genius than a glittering romance, he and he alone maintained the Dantesque dignity of the Italian intellect in his sculpture. Michael Angelo stands so far apart from other men, and is so gigantic a force for good and evil in the history of art, that to estimate his life and labour in relation to the Renaissance must form the subject of a separate chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that his immediate scholars, Raffaello da Montelupo, and Gian Angelo Montorsoli, caught little from their master but the mannerism of contorted form and agitated action. This mannerism, a blemish even in the strong work of Buonarroti, became ridiculous when adopted by men of feeble powers and passionless imagination. By straining the art of sculpture to its utmost limits, Michael Angelo expressed vehement emotions in marble; and the forced attitudes affected in his work had their value as significant of spiritual struggle. His imitators showed none of their master's sublime force, none of that terribilità which made him unapproachable in social intercourse and inimitable in art. They merely fancied that dignity and beauty were to be achieved by placing figures in difficult postures, exaggerated muscular anatomy, and twisting the limbs of their models upon sections of ellipses in uncomfortable attitudes, till the whole of their work was writhen into uncouth lines. Buonarroti himself was not responsible for these results. He wrought out his own ideal with the firmness of a genius that obeys the law of its own nature, doing always what it must. That the decadence of sculpture into truculent bravado was independent of his direct influence, is further proved by the inefficiency of his contemporaries.

Baccio Bandinelli and Bartolommeo Ammanati filled the squares of the Italian cities with statues of Hercules and Satyrs, Neptune and River-gods. We know not whether to select the vulgarity, the feebleness, or the pretentiousness of these pseudo-classical colossi for condemnation. They have nothing Greek about them but their names, their nakedness, and their association with myths, the significance whereof was never really felt by the sculptors. Some of Bandinelli's designs, it is true, are vigorous; but they are mere drawings from undraped peasants, life studies depicting the human animal. His "Hercules and Cacus," while it deserves all the sarcasm hurled at it by Cellini, proves that Bandinelli could not rise above the wrestling bout of a porter and a coal-heaver. Nor would it be possible to invent a motive less in accordance with Greek taste than the conceit of Ammanati's fountain at Castello, where Hercules by squeezing the body of Antæus makes the drinking water of a city spout from a giant's mouth. Such pitiful misapplications of an art which is designed to elevate the commonplace of human form, and to render permanent the nobler qualities of physical existence, show how superficially and wrongly the antique spirit had been apprehended.

Some years before his death Ammanati expressed in public his regret that he had made so many giants and satyrs, feeling that, by exhibiting forms of lust, brutality, and animalism to the gaze of his fellow-countrymen, he had sinned against the higher law revealed by Christianity. For a Greek artist to have spoken thus would have been impossible. The Faun, the Titan, and the Satyr had a meaning for him, which he sought to set forth in accordance with the semi-religious, semi-poetical traditions of his race; and when he was at work upon a myth of nature-forces, he well knew that at the other end of the scale, separated by no spiritual barrier, but removed to an almost infinite distance of refinement, Zeus, Phoebus, and Pallas claimed his loftier artistic inspiration. Ammanati's confession, on the contrary, betrays that schism between the conscience of Christianity and the lusts let loose by ill-assimilated sympathy with antique heathenism, which was a marked characteristic of the Renaissance. The coarser passions, held in check by ecclesiastical discipline, dared to emerge into the light of day under the supposed sanction of classical examples. What the Visconti and the Borgias practised in their secret chambers, the sculptors exposed in marble and the poets in verse. All alike, however, were mistaken in supposing that antique precedent sanctioned this efflorescence of immorality. No amount of Greek epigrams by Strato and Meleager, nor all the Hermaphrodites and Priapi of Rome, had power to annul the law of conduct established by the founders of Christianity, and ratified by the higher instincts of the Middle Ages. Nor again were artists justified before the bar of conscience in selecting the baser elements of Paganism for imitation, instead of aiming at Greek self-restraint and Roman strength of character. All this the men of the Renaissance felt when they listened to the voice within them. Their work, therefore, in so far as it pretended to be a reconstruction of the antique was false. The sensuality it shared in common with many Greek and Roman masterpieces, had ceased to be frank and in the true sense pagan. To shake off Christianity, and to revert with an untroubled conscience to the manners of a bygone age, was what they could not do.

The errors I have attempted to characterise did not, however, prevent the better and more careful works of sculpture, executed in illustration of classical mythology, from having a true value. The "Perseus" of Cellini and some of Gian Bologna's statues belong to a class of æsthetic productions which show how much that is both original and excellent may be raised in the hotbed of culture.^[117] They express a genuine moment of the Renaissance with vigour, and deserve to be ranked with the Latin poetry of Poliziano, Bembo, and Pontano. The worst that can be said of them is that their inspiration was factitious, and that their motives had been handled better in the age of Greek sincerity.

Gian Bologna, born at Douai, but a Florentine by education, devoted himself almost exclusively to mythological sculpture. That he was a greater sculptor than his immediate predecessors will be affirmed by all who have studied his bronze "Mercury," the "Venus of Petraja," and the "Neptune" on the fountain of Bologna. Something of the genuine classic feeling had passed into his nature. The "Mercury" is not a reminiscence of any antique statue. It gives in bronze a faithful and spirited reading of Virgil's lines, and is conceived with artistic purity not unworthy of a good Greek period. The "Neptune" is something more than a muscular old man; and, in its place, it forms one of the most striking ornaments of Italy. It is worthy of remark that sculpture, in this stage, continued to be decorative. Fountains are among the most successful monuments of the late Renaissance. Even Montorsoli's fountain at Messina is in a high sense picturesquely beautiful.

Casting a glance backward over the foregoing sketch of Italian sculpture, it will be seen that three distinct stages were traversed in the evolution of this art. The first may be called architectural, the second pictorial, the third neo-pagan. Defined by their artistic purposes, the first idealises Christian motives; the second is naturalistic; the third attempts an idealisation inspired by revived paganism. As far as the Renaissance is concerned, all three are moments in its history; though it was only during the third that the influences of the classical revival made themselves overwhelmingly felt. Niccola Pisano in the first stage marked a fresh point of departure for his art by a return to Græco-Roman standards of the purest type then attainable, in combination with the study of nature. Giovanni Pisano effected a fusion between his father's manner and the Gothic style. The Pisan sculpture was wholly Christian; nor did it attempt to free itself from the service of architecture. Giotto opened the second stage by introducing new motives, employed by him with paramount mastery in painting. Under his influence the sculptors inclined to picturesque effects, and the direction thus given to sculpture lasted through the fifteenth century. For the rest, the style of these masters was distinguished by a fresh and charming naturalism and by rapid growth in technical processes. While assimilating much of the classical spirit, they remained on the whole Christian; and herein they were confirmed by the subjects they were chiefly called upon to treat, in the decoration of altars, pulpits, church façades, and tombs. The revived interest in antique literature widened their sympathies and supplied their fancy with new material; but there is no imitative formalism in their work. Its beauty consists in a certain immature blending of motives chosen almost indiscriminately from Christian and pagan mythology, vitalised by the imagination of the artist, and presented with the originality of true creative instinct. During the third stage the results of prolonged and almost exclusive attention to the classics, on the part of the Italians as a people, make themselves manifest. Collections of antiquities and libraries had been formed in the fifteenth century; the literary energies of the nation were devoted to the interpretation of Greek and Latin texts, and the manners of society affected paganism. At the same time a worldly Church and a corrupt hierarchy had done their utmost to enfeeble the spirit of Christianity. That art should prove itself sensitive to this phase of intellectual and social life was natural. Religious subjects were now treated by the sculptors with superficial formalism and cynical indifference, while all their ingenuity was bestowed upon providing pagan myths with new forms. How far they succeeded has been already made the matter of inquiry. The most serious condemnation of art in this third period is that it halted between two opinions, that it could not be sincere. But this double-mindedness, as I have tried to show, was necessary; and therefore to lament over it is weak. What the Renaissance achieved for the modern world was the liberation of the reason, the power of starting on a new career of progress. The false direction given to the art of sculpture at one moment of this intellectual revival may be deplored; and still more deplorable is the corresponding sensual debasement of the race who won for us the possibility of freedom. But the life of humanity is long and vigorous, and the philosopher of history knows well that the sum total of accomplishment at any time must be diminished by an unavoidable discount. The Renaissance, like a man of genius, had the defects of its qualities.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IV--PAINTING

Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy—Florence and Venice —Classification by Schools—Stages in the Evolution of Painting—Cimabue —The Rucellai Madonna—Giotto—His widespread Activity—The Scope of his Art—Vitality—Composition—Colour—Naturalism—Healthiness—Frescoes at Assisi and Padua—Legend of S. Francis—The Giotteschi—Pictures of the Last Judgment—Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel—Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Pisa—Dogmatic Theology—Cappella degli Spagnuoli—Traini's "Triumph, of S. Thomas Aquinas"—Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco—Sala della Pace at Siena—Religious Art in Siena and Perugia—The Relation of the Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance.

It is the duty of the historian of painting to trace the beginnings of art in each of the Italian communities, to differentiate their local styles, and to explain their mutual connections. For the present generation this work is being done with all-sufficient thoroughness and accuracy.^[118] The historian of culture, on the other hand, for whom the arts form one important branch of intellectual activity, may dispense with these detailed inquiries, and may endeavour to seize the more general outlines of the subject. He need not weigh in balances the claims of rival cities to priority, nor hamper his review of national progress by discussing the special merits of the several schools. Still there are certain broad facts about the distribution of artistic gifts in Italy which it is necessary to bear in mind. However much we may desire to treat of painting as a phase of national and not of merely local life, the fundamental difficulty of Italian history, its complexity and variety, owing to the subdivisions of the nation into divers states, must here as elsewhere be acknowledged. To deny that each of the Italian centres had its own strong personality in art—that painting, as practised in Genoa or Naples, differed from the painting of Ferrara or Urbino—would be to contradict a law that has been over and over again insisted upon already in these volumes.

The broad outlines of the subject can be briefly stated. Surveying the map of Italy, we find that we may eliminate from our consideration the north-western and the southern provinces. Not from Piedmont nor from Liguria, not from Rome nor from the extensive kingdom of Naples, does Italian painting take its origin, or at any period derive important contributions.^[119] Lombardy, with the exception of Venice, is comparatively barren of originative elements.^[120] To Tuscany, to Umbria, and to Venice, roughly speaking, are due the really creative forces of Italian painting; and these three districts were marked by strong peculiarities. In art, as in politics, Florence and Venice exhibit distinct types of character.^[121] The Florentines developed fresco, and devoted their genius to the expression of thought by scientific design. The Venetians perfected oil-painting, and set forth the glory of the world as it appeals to the imagination and the senses. The art of Florence may seem to some judges to savour over-much of intellectual dryness; the art of Venice, in the apprehension of another class of critics, offers something over-much of material richness. More allied to the Tuscan than to the Venetian spirit, the Umbrian masters produced a style of genuine originality. The cities of the Central Apennines owed their specific quality of religious fervour to the influences emanating from Assisi, the head-quarters of the cultus of S. Francis. This pietism, nowhere else so paramount, except for a short period in Siena, constitutes the individuality of Umbria.

With regard to the rest of Italy, the old custom of speaking about schools and places, instead of signalising great masters, has led to misconception, by making it appear that local circumstances were more important than the facts justify. We do not find elsewhere what we find in Tuscany, in Umbria, and in Venice—a definite quality, native to the district, shared through many generations by all its painters, and culminating in a few men of commanding genius. When, for instance, we speak of the School of Milan, what we mean is the continuation through Lionardo da Vinci and his pupils of the Florentine tradition, as modified by him and introduced into the Lombard capital. That a special style was developed by Luini, Ferrari, and other artists of the Milanese duchy, so that their manner differs essentially from that of Parma and Cremona, does not invalidate the importance of this fact about its origin. The name of Roman School, again, has been given to Raphael and Michael Angelo together with their pupils. The truth is that Rome, for one brief period, during the pontificates of Julius and Leo, was the focus of Italian intellect. Allured by the patronage of the Papal Curia, not only artists, but scholars and men of letters, flocked from all the cities of Italy to Rome, where they found a nobler sphere for the exercise of their faculties than elsewhere. But Rome, while she lent her imperial quality of grandeur to the genius of her aliens, was in no sense originative. Rome produced no first-rate master from her own children, if we except Giulio Romano. The title of originality is due rather to Padua, the birthplace of Mantegna, or to Parma, the city of Correggio, whose works display independence of either Florentine or Venetian traditions. Yet these great masters were isolated, neither expressing in any definite form the character of their districts, nor founding a succession of local artists. Their influence was incontestably great, but widely diffused. Bologna and Ferrara, Brescia and Bergamo, Cremona and Verona, have excellent painters; and it is not difficult to show that in each of these cities art assumed specific characters. Yet the interest of the schools in these towns is due mainly to the varied influences brought to bear upon them from Venice, Umbria, and Milan. In other words they are affiliated, each according to its geographical position, to the chief originative centres.

What I have advanced in the foregoing paragraphs is not meant for a polemic against the time-honoured division of Italian painters into local schools, but for a justification of my own proposed method of treatment. Having undertaken to deal with painting as the paramount art-product of the Renaissance, it will be my object to point out the leading characteristics of æsthetic culture in Italy, rather than to dwell upon its specific differences. The Venetian painters I intend to reserve for a separate chapter, devoting this and the two next to the general history of the art as developed in Tuscany and propagated by Tuscan influences.^[122] In pursuing this plan I shall endeavour to show how the successive stages in the evolution of Italian painting corresponded to similar stages in the history of the Renaissance. Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and stimulated by the enthusiasm of the two great popular monastic orders, painting was at first devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediæval Christianity. In proportion as the painters fortified themselves by study of the natural world, their art became more secular. Mysticism gave way to realism. It was felt that much beside religious sentiment was worthy of expression. At the same time, about the year 1440, this process of secularisation was hastened by the influences of the classical revival, renewing an interest in the past life of humanity, and stirring a zeal for science. The painters, on the one hand, now aimed at accurate delineation of actual things: good perspective, correct drawing, sound portraiture, occupied their attention, to the exclusion of more purely spiritual motives. On the other hand they conceived an admiration for the fragments of the newly discovered antiques, and felt the plastic beauty of Hellenic legends. It is futile to attempt, as M. Rio has done, to prove that this abandonment of the religious sphere of earlier art was for painting a plain decline from good to bad, or to make the more or less of spiritual feeling in a painter's style the test of his degree of excellence; nor can we by any sophistries be brought to believe that the Popes of the fifteenth century were pastoral protectors of solely Christian arts. The truth is, that in the Church, in politics, and in society, the fifteenth century witnessed a sensible decrease of religious fervour, and a very considerable corruption of morality. Painting felt this change; and the secularisation, which was inevitable, passed onward into paganism. Yet the art itself cannot be said to have suffered, when on the threshold of the sixteenth century stand the greatest painters whom the world has known—neither Catholics nor Heathens, but, in their strength of full accomplished art and science, human. After Italy, in the course of that century, had been finally enslaved, then, and not till then, painting suffered from the general depression of the national genius. The great luminaries were extinguished one by one, till none were left but Michael Angelo in Rome, and Tintoret in Venice. The subsequent history of Italian painting is occupied with its revival under the influences of the counter-Reformation, when a new religious sentiment, emasculated and ecstatic, was expressed in company with crude naturalism and cruel sensualism by Bolognese and Neapolitan painters.

I need scarcely repeat the tale of Cimabue's picture, visited by Charles of Anjou, and borne in triumph through the streets with trumpeters, beneath a shower of garlands, to S. Maria Novella.^[123] Yet this was the birthday festival of nothing less than what the world now values as Italian painting. In this public act of joy the people of Florence recognised and paid enthusiastic honour to the art arisen among them from the dead. If we rightly consider the matter, it is not a little wonderful that a whole community should thus have hailed the presence in their midst of a new spirit of power and beauty. It proves the widespread sensibility of the Florentines to things of beauty, and shows the sympathy which, emanating from the people, was destined to inspire and brace the artist for his work.^[124]

In a dark transept of S. Maria Novella, raised by steps above the level of the church, still hangs this famous "Madonna" of the Rucellai—not far, perhaps, from the spot where Boccaccio's youths and maidens met that Tuesday morning in the year of the great plague; nor far, again, from where the solitary woman, beautiful beyond belief, conversed with Machiavelli on the morning of the first of May in 1527.^[125] We who can call to mind the scenes that picture has looked down upon—we who have studied the rise and decadence of painting throughout Italy from this beginning even to the last work of the latest Bolognese—may do well to visit it with reverence, and to ponder on the race of mighty masters whose lineage here takes its origin.

Cimabue did not free his style from what are called Byzantine or Romanesque mannerisms. To unpractised eyes his saints and angels, with their stiff draperies and angular attitudes, though they exhibit stateliness and majesty, belong to the same tribe as the grim mosaics and gaunt frescoes of his predecessors. It is only after careful comparison that we discover, in this picture of the Rucellai for example, a distinctly fresh endeavour to express emotion and to depict life. The outstretched arms of the infant Christ have been copied from nature, not merely borrowed from tradition. The six kneeling angels display variety of attitude suited to several shades of devout affection and adoring service. The head of the Madonna, heavy as it is and conventional in type, still strives to represent maternal affection mingled with an almost melancholy reverence. Prolonging our study, we are led to ask whether the painter might not have painted more freely had he chosen—whether, in fact, he was not bound down to the antique mode of presentation consecrated by devout tradition. This question occurs with even greater force before the wall-paintings ascribed to Cimabue in the church of S. Francis at Assisi.

It remained for Giotto Bondone, born at Vespignano in 1276, just at the date of Niccola Pisano's death, to carry painting in his lifetime even further than the Pisan sculptor had advanced the sister art. Cimabue, so runs a legend luckily not yet discredited, found the child Giotto among the sheep-folds on the solemn Tuscan hill-side, drawing with boyish art the outline of a sheep upon a stone.^[126] The master recognised his talent, and took him from his father's cottage to the Florentine bottega, much as young Haydn was taken by Renter to S. Stephen's at Vienna. Gifted with a large and comprehensive intellect, capable of sustained labour, and devoted with the unaffected zeal of a good craftsman to his art, Giotto in the course of his long career filled Italy with work that taught succeeding centuries of painters. As we travel from Padua in the north, where his Arena Chapel sets forth the legend of Mary and the life of Christ in a series of incomparable frescoes, southward to Naples, where he adorned the convent of S. Chiara, we meet with Giotto in almost every city. The "Passion of our Lord" and the "Allegories of S. Francis" were painted by him at Assisi. S. Peter's at Borne still shows his mosaic of the "Ship of the Church." Florence raises his wonderful bell-tower, that lily among campanili, to the sky; and preserves two chapels of S. Croce, illuminated by him with paintings from the stories of S. Francis and S. John. In the chapel of the Podestà he drew the portraits of Dante, Brunetto Latini, and Charles of Valois. And these are but a tithe of his productions. Nothing, indeed, in the history of art is more remarkable than the fertility of this originative genius, no less industrious in labour than fruitful of results for men who followed him. The sound common sense, the genial temper, and the humour of the man, as we learn to know him in tales made current by Vasari and the novelists, help to explain how he achieved so much, with energy so untiring and with excellence so even.

It is no exaggeration to say that Giotto and his scholars, within the space of little more than half a century, painted out upon the walls of the churches and public palaces of Italy every great conception of the Middle Ages. And this they achieved without ascetic formalism, energetically, but always reverently, aiming at expressing life and dramatising Scripture history. The tale told about Giotto's first essay in drawing might be chosen as a parable: he was not found beneath a church roof tracing a mosaic, but on the open mountain, trying to draw the portrait of the living thing committed to his care.

What, therefore, Giotto gave to art was, before all things else, vitality. His Madonnas are no longer symbols of a certain phase of pious awe, but pictures of maternal love. The Bride of God suckles her divine infant with a smile, watches him playing with a bird, or stretches out her arms to take him when he turns crying from the hands of the circumcising priest. By choosing incidents like these from real home-life, Giotto, through his painting, humanised the mysteries of faith, and brought them close to common feeling. Nor was the change less in his method than his motives. Before his day painting had been without composition, without charm of colour, without suggestion of movement or the play of living energy. He first knew how to distribute figures in the given space with perfect balance, and how to mass them together in animated groups agreeable to the eye. He caught varied and transient shades of emotion, and expressed them by the posture of the body and the play of feature. The hues of morning and of evening served him. Of all painters he was most successful in preserving the clearness and the light of pure, well-tempered colours. His power of telling a story by gesture and action is unique in its peculiar simplicity. There are no ornaments or accessories in his pictures. The whole force of the artist has been concentrated on rendering the image of the life conceived by him. Relying on his knowledge of human nature, and seeking only to make his subject intelligible, no painter is more unaffectedly pathetic, more unconsciously majestic. While under the influence of his genius, we are sincerely glad that the requisite science for clever imitation of landscape and architectural backgrounds was not forthcoming in his age. Art had to go through a toilsome period of geometrical and anatomical pedantry, before it could venture, in the frescoes of Michael Angelo and Raphael, to return with greater wealth of knowledge on a higher level to the divine simplicity of its childhood in Giotto.

In the drawing of the figure Giotto was surpassed by many meaner artists of the fifteenth century. Nor had he that quality of genius which selects a high type of beauty, and is scrupulous to shun the commonplace. The faces of even his most sacred personages are often almost vulgar. In his choice of models for saints and apostles we already trace the Florentine instinct for contemporary portraiture. Yet, though his knowledge of anatomy was defective, and his taste was realistic, Giotto solved the great problem of figurative art far better than more learned and fastidious painters. He never failed to make it manifest that what he meant to represent was living. Even to the non-existent he gave the semblance of reality. We cannot help believing in his angels leaning waist-deep from the blue sky, wringing their hands in agony above the Cross, pacing like deacons behind Christ when He washes the feet of His disciples, or sitting watchful and serene upon the empty sepulchre. He was, moreover, essentially a fresco-painter, working with rapid decision on a large scale, aiming at broad effects, and willing to sacrifice subtlety to clearness of expression. The health of his whole nature and his robust good sense are everywhere apparent in his solid, concrete, human work of art. There is no trace of mysticism, no ecstatic piety, nothing morbid or hysterical, in his imagination. Imbuing whatever he handled with the force and freshness of actual existence, Giotto approached the deep things of the Christian faith and the legend of S. Francis in the spirit of a man bent simply on realising the objects of his belief as facts. His allegories of "Poverty," "Chastity," and "Obedience," at Assisi, are as beautiful and powerfully felt as they are carefully constructed. Yet they conceal no abstruse spiritual meaning, but are plainly painted "for the poor laity of love to read." The artist poet who coloured the virginal form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved by his well-known canzone that he was free from monastic Quixotism, and took a practical view of the value of worldly wealth.^[127] His homely humour saved him from the exaltation and the childishness that formed the weakness of the Franciscan revival. By the same firm grasp upon reality he created more than mere abstractions in his chiaroscuro figures of the virtues and vices at Padua. Fortitude and Justice, Faith and Envy, are gifted by him with a real corporeal existence. They seem fit to play their parts with other concrete personalities upon the stage of this world's history. Giotto in truth possessed a share of that power which belonged to the Greek sculptors. He embodies myths in physical forms, adequate to their intellectual meaning. This was in part the secret of the influence he exercised over the sculptors of the second period;^[128] and had the conditions of the age been favourable to such development, some of the allegorical types created by him might have passed into the Pantheon of popular worship as deities incarnate.

The birth of Italian painting is closely connected with the religious life of the Italians. The building of the church of S. Francis at Assisi gave it the first great impulse; and to the piety aroused by S. Francis throughout Italy, but mostly in the valleys of the Apennines, it owed its animating spirit in the fourteenth century. The church of Assisi is double. One structure of nave, and choir, and transept, is imposed upon another; and the walls of both, from floor to coping-stone, are covered with fresco-painted pictures taking here the place occupied by mosaic in such churches as the cathedral of Monreale, or by coloured glass in the northern cathedrals of the pointed style. Many of these frescoes date from years before the birth of Giotto. Giunta the Pisan, Gaddo Gaddi, and Cimabue, are supposed to have worked there, painfully continuing or feebly struggling to throw off the decadent traditions of a dying art. In their school Giotto laboured, and modern painting arose with the movement of new life beneath his brush. Here, pondering in his youth upon the story of Christ's suffering, and in his later manhood on the virtues of S. Francis and his vow, he learned the secret of giving the semblance of flesh and blood reality to Christian thought. His achievement was nothing less than this. The Creation, the Fall, the Redemption of the World, the moral discipline of man, the Judgment, and the final state of bliss or misery—all these he quickened into beautiful and breathing forms. Those were noble days, when the painter had literally acres of walls given him to cover; when the whole belief of Christendom, grasped by his own faith, and firmly rooted in the faith of the people round him, as yet unimpaired by alien emanations from the world of classic culture, had to be set forth for the first time in art. His work was then a Bible, a compendium of grave divinity and human history, a book embracing all things needful for the spiritual and the civil life of man. He spoke to men who could not read, for whom there were no printed pages, but whose heart received his teaching through the eye. Thus painting was not then what it is now, a decoration of existence, but a potent and efficient agent in the education of the race. Such opportunities do not occur twice in the same age. Once in Greece for the pagan world; once in Italy for the modern world;—that must suffice for the education of the human race.

Like Niccola Pisano, Giotto not only founded a school in his native city, but spread his manner far and wide over Italy, so that the first period of the history of painting is the Giottesque. The Gaddi of Florence, Giottino, Puccio Capanna, the Lorenzetti of Siena, Spinello of Arezzo, Andrea Orcagna, Domenico Veneziano, and the lesser artists of the Pisan Campo Santo, were either formed or influenced by him. To give an account of the frescoes of these painters would be to describe how the religious, social, and philosophical conceptions of the fourteenth century found complete expression in form and colour. By means of allegory and pictured scene they drew the portrait of the Middle Age in Italy, performing jointly and in combination with the followers of Niccola Pisano what Dante had done singly by his poetry.

It has often been remarked that the drama of the life beyond this world—its prologue in the courts of death, the tragedy of judgment, and the final state of bliss or misery prepared for souls—preoccupied the mind of the Italians at the close of the Middle Ages. Every city had its pictorial representation of the "Dies Iræ;" and within this framework the artist was free to set forth his philosophy of human nature, adding such touches of satire or admonition as suited his own temper or the circumstances of the place for which he worked. Dante's poem has immortalised this moment of Italian consciousness, when the belief in another world was used to intensify the emotions of this life—when the inscrutable darkness toward which men travel became for them a black and polished mirror reflecting with terrible luminousness the events of the present and the past. So familiar had the Italians become with the theme of death artistically treated, that they did not shrink from acted pageants of the tragedy of Hell. Giovanni Villani tells us that in 1304 the companies and clubs of pleasure, formed for making festival throughout the town of Florence on the 1st of May, contended with each other for the prize of novelty and rarity in sports provided for the people. "Among the rest, the Borgo S. Friano had it cried about the streets, that whoso wished for news from the other world, should find himself on Mayday on the bridge Carraja or the neighbouring banks of Arno. And in Arno they contrived stages upon boats and various small craft, and made the semblance and figure of Hell there with flames and other pains and torments, with men dressed as demons horrible to see; and others had the shape of naked souls; and these they gave unto those divers tortures with exceeding great crying and groaning and confusion, the which seemed hateful and appalling unto eyes and ears. The novelty of the sport drew many citizens, and the bridge Carraja, then of wood, was so crowded that it brake in several places and fell with the folk upon it, whereby were many killed and drowned, and many were disabled; and as the crier had proclaimed, so now in death went much folk to learn news of the other world."

Such being the temper of the people, we find that some of the greatest works of art in this age were paintings of Death and Hell, Heaven and Judgment. Orcagna, in the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella, set forth these scenes with a wonderful blending of beauty and grotesque invention. In the treatment of the Inferno he strove to delineate the whole geography of Dante's first cantica, tracing the successive circles and introducing the various episodes commemorated by the poet. Interesting as this work may be for the illustration of the "Divine Comedy" as understood by Dante's immediate successors, we turn from it with a sense of relief to admire the saints and angels ranged in goodly row, "each burning upward to his point of bliss" whereby the painter has depicted Paradise. Early Italian art has nothing more truly beautiful to offer than the white-robed Madonna kneeling at the judgment seat of Christ.^[129]

It will be felt by every genuine student of art that if Orcagna painted these frescoes in S. Maria Novella, whereof there is no doubt, he could not have executed the wall-paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa attributed to him by Vasari. To what artists or artist we owe those three grave and awful panels, may still be regarded an open question.^[130] At the end of the southern wall of the cemetery, exposed to a cold and equal north light from the cloister windows, these great compositions, after the lapse of five centuries, bring us face to face with the most earnest thoughts of mediæval Christianity. Their main purpose seems to be to illustrate the advantage of the ascetic over the secular mode of life, and to school men into living with the fear of death before their eyes. The first displays the solitary vigils, self-imposed penances, cruel temptations, firm endurance, and beatific visions of the anchorites in the Thebaid. The second is devoted to the triumph of Death over the pomp, strength, wealth, and beauty of the world. The third reveals a grimly realistic and yet awfully imaginative vision of judgment, such as it has rarely been granted to a painter to conceive. Thus to the awakening soul of the Italians, on the threshold of the modern era, with the sonnets of Petrarch and the stories of Boccaccio sounding in their memories, this terrible master presented the three saddest phantoms of the Middle Ages—the spectre of death omnipotent, the solitude of the desert as the only refuge from a sinful and doomed world, the dread of Divine justice inexorable and inevitable. In those piles of the promiscuous and abandoned dead, those fiends and angels poised in mid-air struggling for souls, those blind and mutilated beggars vainly besieging Death with prayers and imprecations for deliverance, while she descends in her robe of woven wire to mow down with her scythe the knights and ladies in their garden of delight; again in those horses snuffing at the open graves, those countesses and princes face to face with skeletons, those serpents coiling round the flesh of what was once fair youth or maid, those multitudes of guilty men and women trembling beneath the trump of the archangel—tearing their cheeks, their hair, their breasts in agony, because they see Hell through the prison-bars, and hear the raging of its fiends, and feel the clasp upon their wrists and ankles of clawed hairy demon hands; in all this terrific amalgamation of sinister and tragic ideas, vividly presented, full of coarse dramatic power, and intensified by faith in their material reality, the Lorenzetti brethren, if theirs be indeed the hands that painted here, summed up the nightmares of the Middle Age and bequeathed an ever memorable picture of its desolate preoccupations to the rising world. They have called to their aid poetry, and history, and legend. Boccaccio supplies them with the garden scene of youths and damsels dancing among roses, while the plague is at their gates, and death is in the air above. From Petrarch they have borrowed the form and mystic robe of Death herself^[131]. Uguccione della Faggiuola has sat for the portrait of the Captain who must quail before the terrors of the tomb, and Castruccio Castracane is the strong man cut off in the blossom of his age. The prisons of the Visconti have disgorged their victims, cast adrift with maiming that makes life unendurable but does not hasten death.^[132] The lazar houses and the charnels have been ransacked for forms of grisly decay. Thus the whole work is not merely "an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson" of ascetic philosophy; it is also a realisation of mediæval life in its cruellest intensity and most uncompromising truth. For mere beauty these painters had but little regard.^[133] Their distribution of the subjects chosen for treatment on each panel shows, indeed, a keen sense for the value of dramatic contrast and a masterly power of varying while combining the composition. Their chief aim, however, is to produce the utmost realism of effect, to translate the poignancy of passion, the dread certainty of doom, into forms of unmistakable fidelity. Therefore they do not shrink from prosaic and revolting details. The knight who has to hold his nose above the open grave, the lady who presses her cheek against her hand with a spasm of distress, the horse who pricks his ears and snorts with open nostrils, the grooms who start aside like savage creatures, all suggest the loathsomeness of death, its physical repulsiveness. In the "Last Judgment" the same kind of dramatic force is used to heighten a sublime conception. The crouching attitude and the shrouded face of the Archangel Raphael, whose eyes alone are visible above the hand that he has thrust forth from his cloak to hide the grief he feels, prove more emphatically than any less realistic motive could have done, how terrible, even for the cherubic beings to whose guardianship the human race has been assigned, will be the trumpet of the wrath of God.^[134] Studying these frescoes, we cannot but reflect what nerves, what brains, what hearts encased in triple brass the men who thought and felt thus must have possessed. They make us comprehend not merely the stern and savage temper of the Middle Ages, but the intense and fiery ebullition of the Renaissance, into which, as by a sudden liberation, so much imprisoned pent-up force was driven.

A different but scarcely less important phase of mediæval thought is imaged in the frescoes of the Cappella degli Spagnuoli in S. Maria Novella.^[135] Dogmatic theology is here in the ascendant. While S. Francis bequeathed a legend of singular suavity and beauty, overflowing with the milk of charity and mildness, to the Church, S. Dominic assumed the attitude of the saint militant and orthodox. Dante's words about him—

omit nothing that is needed to characterise the impression produced upon the Christian world by this remorseless foe of heresy, this champion of the faith who dealt in butcheries and burnings. S. Francis taught love; S. Dominic taught wrath: and both, perhaps, were needed for the safety of the mediæval Church—the one by resuscitating the spirit of the Gospels, the other by resisting the intrusion of alien ideals ere the time for their triumph had arrived. What the painters of these frescoes undertook to delineate for the Dominicans of Florence, was the fabric of society sustained and held together by the action of inquisitors and doctors issued from their order. The Pope with his Cardinals, the Emperor with his Council, represent the two chief forces of Christendom, as conceived by the mediæval jurists and the school of Dante. Seated on thrones, they are ready to rise in defence of Holy Church, symbolised by a picture of S. Maria del Fiore. At their feet the black and white hounds of the Dominican order—Domini canes, according to the monkish pun—are hunting heretical wolves. Opposite this painting is the apotheosis of S. Thomas Aquinas. Beneath the footstool of this "dumb ox of Sicily," as he was called, grovel the heresiarchs—Arius, Sabellius, Averroes. At again a lower level, as though supporting the saint on either hand, are ranged seven sacred and seven profane sciences, each with its chief representative. Thus Rhetoric and Cicero, Civil Law and Justinian, Speculative Theology and the Areopagite, Practical Theology and Peter Lombard, Geometry and Euclid, Arithmetic and Abraham, are grouped together. It will be seen that the whole learning of the Middle Age—its philosophy as well as its divinity—is here combined as in a figured abstract, for the wise to comment on and for the simple to peruse. None can avoid drawing the lesson that knowledge exists for the service of the Church, and that the Church, while she instructs society, will claim complete obedience to her decrees. The ipse dixit of the Dominican author of the "Summa" is law.

Such frescoes, by no means uncommon in Dominican cloisters, still retain great interest for the student of scholastic thought. In the church of S. Maria Sopra Minerva at Rome, where Galileo was afterwards compelled to sign his famous retractation, Filippino Lippi painted another triumph of S. Thomas, conceived in the spirit of Taddeo Gaddi's, but expressed with the freedom of the middle Renaissance. Nor should we neglect to notice the remarkable picture by Traini in S. Caterina at Pisa. Here the doctor of Aquino is represented in an aureole surrounded by a golden sphere or disc, on the edge of which are placed the four evangelists, together with Moses and S. Paul.^[137] At his side, within the burnished sphere, Plato and Aristotle stand upright, holding the "Timæus" and the "Ethics" in their hands. Christ in glory is above the group, emitting from His mouth three rays upon the head of S. Thomas. Single rays descend in like manner upon the evangelists and Moses and S. Paul. They, like Plato and Aristotle, hold open books; and rays from these eight volumes converge upon the head of the angelical doctor, who becomes the focus, as it were, of all the beams sent forth from Christ and from the classic teachers, whether directly effused or transmitted through the writers of the Bible. S. Thomas lastly holds a book open in his hand, and carries others on his lap; while lines of light are shed from these upon two bands of the faithful, chiefly Dominican monks, arranged on each side of his footstool. Averroes lies prostrate beneath his feet with his book face downwards, lightning-smitten by a shaft from the leaves of the volume in the saint's hand, whereon is written: veritatem meditabitur guttur meum et labia mea detestabuntur impium.^[138]

This picture, afterwards repeated by Benozzo Gozzoli with some change in the persons,^[139] has been minutely described, because it is important to bear in mind the measure of inspiration conceded by the mediæval Church to the fathers of Greek philosophy, and her utter detestation of the peripatetic traditions transmitted through the Arabic by Averroes. Averroes, though Dante placed him with the great souls of pagan civilisation in the first circle of Inferno,^[140] was regarded as the protagonist of infidelity. The myth of incredulity that gathered round his memory and made him hated in the Middle Ages, has been traced with exquisite delicacy by Renan,^[141] who shows that his name became a rallying point for freethinkers. Scholars like Petrarch were eager to confute his sect, and artists used him as a symbol of materialistic disbelief. Thus we meet with Averroes among the lost souls in the Pisan Campo Santo, distinguished as usual by his turban and long beard. On the other hand, the frank acceptance of pagan philosophy, insofar as it could be accommodated to the doctrine of the Church, finds full expression in the art of this early period. On the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena were painted the figures of Curius Dentatus and Cato,^[142] while the pavement of the Duomo showed Hermes Trismegistus instructing both a pagan and a Christian, and Socrates ascending the steep hill of virtue. Perugino, some years later, decorated the Sala del Cambio at Perugia with the heroes, philosophers, and worthies of the ancient world. We are thus led by a gradual progress up to the final achievement of Raphael in the Vatican. Separating the antique from the Christian tradition, but placing them upon an equality in his art, Raphael made the "School of Athens" an epitome of Greek and Roman wisdom, while in the "Dispute of the Sacrament" he symbolised the Church in heaven and Church on earth.

Another class of ideas, no less illustrative of mediævalism, can be studied in the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena. There, on the walls of the Sala della Pace or de' Nove, may be seen the frescoes whereby Ambrogio Lorenzetti expressed theories of society and government peculiar to his age.^[143] The panels are three in number. In the first the painter has delineated the Commune of Siena by an imperial male figure in the prime of life, throned on a judgment-seat, holding a sceptre in his right hand and a medallion of Justice in his left.^[144] He wears no coronet, but a burgher's cap; and beneath his footstool are the Roman twins, suckled by the she-wolf.^[145] Above his head in the air float Faith, Charity, and Hope—the Christian virtues; while Justice, Temperance, Magnanimity, Prudence, Fortitude, and Peace, six women, crowned, and with appropriate emblems, are enthroned beside him. The majestic giant of the Commune towers above them all in bulk and stature, as though to indicate the people's sovereignty. The virtues are his assessors and inspirers—he is King. Beneath the daïs occupied by these supreme personages, are ranged on either hand mailed and visored cavaliers, mounted on chargers, the guardians of the State. All the citizens in their degrees advance toward the throne, carrying between them, pair by pair, a rope received from the hands of Concord; while some who have transgressed her laws, are being brought with bound hands to the judgment-seat. Concord herself, being less the virtue of the government than of the governed, is seated on a line with the burghers in a place apart beneath the throne of Civil Justice, who is allegorised as the dispenser of rewards and punishments, as well as controller of the armed force and the purse of the community. The whole of this elaborate allegory suffers by the language of description. Those who have seen it, and who are familiar with Sienese chronicles, feel that, artistically laboured as the painter's work may be, every figure had a passionate and intense meaning for him^[146]. His picture is the epitome of government conducted by a sovereign people. Nor can we fail to be struck with the beauty of some details. The pale earnest faces of the horsemen are eminently chivalrous, with knightly honour written on their calm and fearless features. Peace, reclining at ease upon her pillow, is a lovely woman in loose raiment, her hair wreathed with blossoms, in her hand an olive branch, her feet reposing upon casque and shield. She is like a painted statue, making us wonder whether the artist had not copied her from the "Aphrodite" of Lysippus, ere the Sienese destroyed this statue in their dread of paganism^[147].

In the other two panels of this hall Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted the contrast of good and bad government, harmony and discord. A city full of brawls and bloodshed is set in opposition to one where the dance and viol do not cease. Merchants are plundered as they issue from the gates on one side; on the other, trains of sumpter mules are securely winding along mountain paths. Tyranny, with all the vices for his council and with Terror for prime minister, presides over the ill-governed town. The burghers of the happy commune follow trade or pleasure, as they list; a beautiful winged genius, inscribed "Securitas," floats above their citadel. It should be added that in both these pictures the architecture is the same; for the painter has designed to teach how different may be the state of one and the same city according to its form of government. Such then were the vivid images whereby Ambrogio Lorenzetti expressed the mediæval curse of discord, and the ideal of a righteous rule. It is only necessary to read the "Diario Sanese" of Allegretto Allegretti in order to see that he drew no fancy picture. The torchlight procession of burghers swearing amity by couples in the cathedral there described, receives exact pictorial illustration in the fresco of the Sala della Pace^[148]. Siena, by her bloody factions and her passionate peacemakings, expressed in daily action what the painter had depicted on her palace walls.

The method of treatment adopted for these chapters has obliged me to give priority to Florence, and to speak of the two Lorenzetti, Pietro in the Pisan Campo Santo and Ambrogio in the Sala della Pace at Siena, as though they were followers of Giotto; so true is it that the main currents of Tuscan art were governed by Florentine influences, and that Giotto's genius made itself felt in all the work of his immediate successors. It must, however, be observed that painting had an independent origin among the Sienese, and that Guido da Siena may claim to rank even earlier than Cimabue.^[149] In the year 1260, just before engaging in their duel with Florence, the Sienese dedicated their city to the Virgin; and the victory of Montaperti, following immediately upon this vow, gave a marked impulse to their piety.^[150] The early masters of Siena devoted themselves to religious paintings, especially to pictures of Madonna suited for chapels and oratories. We find upon these mystic panels an ecstasy of adoration and a depth of fervour which are alien to the more sober spirit of Florence, combined with an almost infantine delight in pure bright colours, and in the decorative details of the miniaturist.

The first great painter among the Sienese was Duccio di Buoninsegna.^[151] The completion of his masterpiece—a picture of the Majesty of the Virgin, executed for the high altar of the Duomo—marked an epoch in the history of Siena. Nearly two years had been spent upon it; the painter receiving sixteen soldi a day from the Commune, together with his materials, in exchange for his whole time and skill and labour. At last, on June 9, 1310, it was carried from Duccio's workshop to its place in the cathedral. A procession was formed by the clergy, with the archbishop at their head, followed by the magistrates of the Commune, and the chief men of the Monte de' Nove. These great folk crowded round their Lady; after came a multitude of burghers bearing tapers; while the rear was brought up by women and children. The bells rang and trumpets blew as this new image of the Sovereign Mistress of Siena was borne along the summer-smiling streets of her metropolis to take its throne in her high temple. Duccio's altar-piece presented on one face to the spectator a Virgin seated with the infant Christ upon her lap, and receiving the homage of the patron saints of Siena. On the other, he depicted the principal scenes of the Gospel story and the Passion of our Lord in twenty-eight compartments. What gives peculiar value to this elaborate work of Sienese art is, that in it Duccio managed to combine the tradition of an early hieratic style of painting with all the charm of brilliant colouring and with dramatic force of presentation only rivalled at that time by Giotto. Independently of Giotto, he performed at a stroke what Cimabue and his pupil had achieved for the Florentines, and bequeathed to the succeeding painters of Siena a tradition of art beyond which they rarely passed.

Far more than their neighbours at Florence, the Sienese remained fettered by the technical methods and the pietistic formulæ of the earliest religious painting. To make their conventional representations of Madonna's love and woe and glory burn with all the passion of a fervent spirit, and to testify their worship by the oblation of rich gifts in colouring and gilding massed around her, was their earnest aim. It followed that, when they attempted subjects on a really large scale, the faults of the miniaturist clung about them. I need hardly say that Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti form notable exceptions to this general statement. It may be applied, however, with some truth to Simone Martini, the painter, who during his lifetime enjoyed a celebrity only second to that of Giotto.^[152] Like Giotto, Simone exercised his art in many parts of Italy. Siena, Pisa, Assisi, Orvieto, Naples, and Avignon can still boast of wall and easel pictures from his hand; and though it has been suggested that he took no part in the decoration of the Cappella degli Spagnuoli, the impress of his manner remains at Florence in those noble frescoes of the "Church Militant" and the "Consecration of S. Dominic."^[153] Simone's first undisputed works are to be seen at Siena and at Assisi, where we learn what he could do as a frescante in competition with the ablest Florentines. In the Palazzo Pubblico of his native city he painted a vast picture of the Virgin enthroned beneath a canopy and surrounded by saints;^[154] while at Assisi he put forth his whole power in portraying the legend of S. Martin. In all his paintings we trace the skill of an exquisite and patient craftsman, elaborately careful to finish his work with the utmost refinement, sensitive to feminine beauty, full of delicate inventiveness, and gifted with a rare feeling for grace. These excellent qualities tend, however, towards affectation and over-softness; nor are they fortified by such vigour of conception or such majesty in composition as belong to the greatest trecentisti. The Lorenzetti alone soared high above the Sienese mannerism into a region of masculine imaginative art. We feel Simone's charm mostly in single heads and detached figures, some of which at Assisi have incomparable sweetness. "Molles Senæ," the delicate and femininely variable, fond of all things brilliant, and unstable through defect of sternness, was the fit mother of this ingenious and delightful master.

After the days of Duccio and Simone Martini, of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, were over, there remained but little for the Sienese to do in painting. Taddeo di Bartolo continued the tradition of Duccio as the later Giottesques continued that of Giotto. His most remarkable wall-painting is a fresco of the Apostles visiting the Virgin, the motive of which is marked by great originality.^[155] Our Lady is seated in an open loggia with a company of holy men and women round her. Descending from the sky and floating through the arches are three of the Apostles, while one who has just alighted from his aërial transit kneels and folds his hands in adoration. Seldom have the longing and the peace of loving worship been more poetically expressed than here. The seated, kneeling, standing, and flying figures are admirably grouped together; their draperies are dignified and massive; and the architectural accessories help the composition by dividing it into three balanced sections.

Such power of depicting movement was rare in the fourteenth century. To find its analogue, we must betake ourselves to the frescoes of Spinello Aretino, a master more decidedly Giottesque than his contemporary Taddeo di Bartolo.^[156] A Gabriel, rushing down from heaven to salute Madonna, with all the whirr of arch-angelic pinions and the glory of Paradise around him, is a fine specimen of Spinello's vehemence. The same quality, more tempered, is noticeable in his frescoes of the legend of S. Ephesus at Pisa.^[157] Few faces in the paintings of any period are more fascinating than the profiles under steel-blue battle-caps of that godlike pair—the knightly saint and the Archangel Michael—breaking by the irresistible force of their onset and their calm youthful beauty through the mailed ranks of the Sardinian pagans. Spinello was essentially a warlike painter; among the best of his compositions may be named the series of pictures from the history of the Venetian campaign against Frederick Barbarossa.^[158] It is a pity that the war of liberation carried on by the Lombard communes with the Empire should have left but little trace on Italian art; and therefore these paintings of Spinello, in addition to their intrinsic merit, have rare historical interest. Delighting in the gleam of armour and the shock of speared warriors, Spinello communicated something of this fiery spirit even to his saints. The monks of Samminiato near Florence employed him in 1388 to paint their newly-finished sacristy with the legend of S. Benedict. In the execution of this task Spinello displayed his usual grandeur and vigour, treating the grey-robed brethren of Monte Cassino like veritable champions of a militant Church. When he died in 1410, it might have been truly said that the flame of the torch kindled by Giotto was at last extinguished.

The student of history cannot but notice with surprise that a city famed like Siena for its vanity, its factious quarrels, and its delicate living, should have produced an almost passionately ardent art of piety.^[159] The same reflections are suggested at Perugia, torn by the savage feuds of the Oddi and Baglioni, at warfare with Assisi, reduced to exhaustion by the discords of jealous parties, yet memorable in the history of painting as the head-quarters of the pietistic Umbrian school. The contradiction is, however, in both cases more apparent than real. The people both of Siena and Perugia were highly impressible and emotional, quick to obey the promptings of their passion, whether it took the form of hatred or of love, of spiritual fervour or of carnal violence. Yielding at one moment to the preachings of S. Bernardino, at another to the persuasions of Grifonetto degli Baglioni, the Perugians won the character of being fiends or angels according to the temper of their leaders; while Siena might boast with equal right of having given birth to S. Catherine and nurtured Beccadelli. The religious feeling was a passion with them on a par with all the other movements of their quick and mobile temperament: it needed ecstatic art for its interpretation. What was cold and sober would not satisfy the men of these two cities. The Florentines, more justly balanced, less abandoned to the frenzies of impassioned impulse, less capable of feeling the rapt exaltation of the devotee, expressed themselves in art distinguished for its intellectual power, its sanity, its scientific industry, its adequacy to average human needs. Therefore, Florentine influences determined the course of painting in Central Italy. Therefore Giotto, who represented the Florentine genius in the fourteenth century, set his stamp upon the Lorenzetti. The mystic painters of Umbria and Siena have their high and honoured place in the history of Italian art. They supply an element which, except in the work of Fra Angelico, was defective at Florence; but to the Florentines was committed the great charge of interpreting the spirit of Italian civilisation in all its branches, not for the cloister only, or the oratory, but for humanity at large, through painting.

Giotto and his followers, then, in the fourteenth century painted, as we have seen, the religious, philosophical, and social conceptions of their age. As artists, their great discovery was the secret of depicting life. The ideas they expressed belonged to the Middle Ages. But by their method and their spirit they anticipated the Renaissance. In executing their work upon the walls of palaces and churches, they employed a kind of fresco. Fresco was essentially the Florentine vehicle of expression. Among the peoples of Central Italy it took the place of mosaic in Sicily, Ravenna, and Venice, as the means of communicating ideas by forms to the unlettered laity, and as affording to the artist the widest and the freest sphere for the expression of his thoughts.^[160]

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER V--PAINTING

Mediæval Motives exhausted—New Impulse toward Technical Perfection—Naturalists in Painting—Intermediate Achievement needed for the Great Age of Art—Positive Spirit of the Fifteenth Century—Masaccio—The Modern Manner—Paolo Uccello—Perspective—Realistic Painters—The Model—Piero della Francesca—His Study of Form—Resurrection at Borgo San Sepolcro—Melozzo da Forli—Squarcione at Padua—Gentile da Fabriano—Fra Angelico—Benozzo Gozzoli—His Decorative Style—Lippo Lippi—Frescoes at Prato and Spoleto—Filippino Lippi—Sandro Botticelli—His Value for the Student of Renaissance Fancy—His Feeling for Mythology—Piero di Cosimo—Domenico Ghirlandajo—In what sense he sums up the Age—Prosaic Spirit—Florence hitherto supreme in Painting—Extension of Art Activity throughout Italy—Medicean Patronage.

After the splendid outburst of painting in the first half of the fourteenth century, there came a lull. The thoughts and sentiments of mediæval Italy had been now set forth in art. The sincere and simple style of Giotto was worked out. But the new culture of the Revival had not as yet sufficiently penetrated the Italians for the painters to express it; nor had they mastered the technicalities of their craft in such a manner as to render the delineation of more complex forms of beauty possible. The years between 1400 and 1470 may be roughly marked out as the second period of great, activity in painting. At this time sculpture, under the hands of Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia, had reached a higher point than the sister art. The debt the sculptors owed to Giotto, they now repaid in full measure to his successors, in obedience to the law whereby sculpture, though subordinated, as in Italy, to painting, is more precocious in its evolution. One of the most marked features of this period was the progress in the art of design, due to bronze modelling and bas-relief; for the painters, labouring in the workshops of the goldsmiths and the stone-carvers, learned how to study the articulation of the human body, to imitate the nude, and to aim by means of graduated light and dark at rendering the effect of roundness in their drawing. The laws of perspective and foreshortening were worked out by Paolo Uccello and Brunelleschi. New methods of colouring were attempted by the Peselli and the Pollajuoli. Abandoning the conventional treatment of religious themes, the artists began to take delight in motives drawn from everyday experience. It became the fashion to introduce contemporary costumes, striking portraits, and familiar incidents into sacred subjects, so that many pictures of this period, though worthless to the student of religious art, are interesting for their illustration of Florentine custom and character. At the same time the painters began to imitate landscape and architecture, loading the background of their frescoes with pompous vistas of palaces and city towers, or subordinating their figures to fantastic scenery of wood and rock and seashore. Many were naturalists, delighting, like Gentile da Fabriano, in the delineation of field flowers and living creatures, or, like Piero di Cosimo, in the portrayal of things rare and curious. Gardens please their eyes, and birds and beasts and insects. Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance, were painted by Paolo Uccello. Others, again, abandoned the old ground of Christian story for the tales of Greece and Rome; and not the least charming products of the time are antique motives treated with the freshness of romantic feeling. We look in vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters: that stage of thought has been traversed, and a new cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful, idyllic, corresponding to Boiardo's episodes rather than to Dante's vision, opens for the artist. Instead of seeking to set forth vast subjects with the equality of mediocrity, like the Gaddi, or to invent architectonic compositions embracing the whole culture of their age, like the Lorenzetti, the painters were now bent upon realising some special quality of beauty, expressing some fantastic motive, or solving some technical problem of peculiar difficulty. They had, in fact, outgrown the childhood of their art; and while they had not yet attained to mastery, had abandoned the impossible task of making it the medium of universal expression. In this way the manifold efforts of the workers in the first half of the fifteenth century prepared the ground for the great painters of the Golden Age. It remained for Raphael and his contemporaries to achieve the final synthesis of art in masterpieces of consummate beauty. But this they could not have done without the aid of those innumerable intermediate labourers, whose productions occupy in art the place of Bacon's media axiomata in science. Remembering this, we ought not to complain that the purpose of painting at this epoch was divided, or that its achievements were imperfect. The whole intellectual conditions of the country were those of growth, experiment, preparation, and acquisition, rather than of full accomplishment. What happened in the field of painting, was happening also in the field of scholarship; and we have good reason to be thankful that by the very nature of the arts, these tentative endeavours have a more enduring charm than the dull tomes of contemporary students. Nor, again, is it rational to regret that painting, having started with the sincere desire of expressing the hopes and fears that agitate the soul of man, and raise him to a spiritual region, should now be occupied with lessons in perspective and anatomy. In the twofold process of discovering the world and man, this dry ground had inevitably to be explored, and its exploration could not fail to cost the sacrifice of much that was impassioned and imaginative in the earlier and less scientific age of art.^[161] The spirit of Cosimo de' Medici, almost cynical in its positivism, the spirit of Sixtus IV., almost godless in its egotism, were abroad in Italy at this period;^[162] indeed, the fifteenth century presents at large a spectacle of prosaic worldliness and unideal aims. Yet the work done by the artists was the best work of the epoch, far more fruitful of results and far more permanently valuable than that of Filelfo inveighing in filthy satires against his personal foes, or of Beccadelli endeavouring to inoculate modern literature with the virus of pagan vices. Petrarch in the fourteenth century had preached the evangel of humanism; Giotto in the fourteenth century had given life to painting. The students of the fifteenth, though their spirit was so much baser and less large than Petrarch's, were following in the path marked out for them and leading forward to Erasmus. The painters of the fifteenth, though they lacked the unity of aim and freshness of their master, were learning what was needful for the crowning and fulfilment of his labours on a loftier stage.

Foremost among the pioneers of Renaissance-painting, towering above them all by head and shoulders, like Saul among the tribes of Israel, stands Masaccio.^[163] The Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, painted in fresco almost entirely by his hand, was the school where all succeeding artists studied, and whence Raphael deigned to borrow the composition and the figures of a portion of his Cartoons. The "Legend of S. Catherine," painted by Masaccio in 8. Clemente at Rome, though an earlier work, is scarcely less remarkable as evidence that a new age had begun for art. In his frescoes the qualities essential to the style of the Renaissance—what Vasari calls the modern manner—appear precociously full-formed. Besides life and nature they have dignity and breadth, the grand and heightened manner of emancipated art. Masaccio is not inferior to Giotto in his power of telling a story with simplicity; but he understands the value of perspective for realising the circumstances of the scene depicted. His august groups of the Apostles are surrounded by landscape tranquillising to the sense and pleasant to the eye. Mountain-lines and distant horizons lend space and largeness to his compositions, and the figures of his men and women move freely in a world prepared for them. In Masaccio's management of drapery we discern the influence of plastic art; without concealing the limbs, which are always modelled with a freedom that suggests the power of movement even in stationary attitudes, the voluminous folds and broad masses of powerfully coloured raiment invest his forms with a nobility unknown before in painting. His power of representing the nude is not less remarkable. But what above all else renders his style attractive is the sense of aërial space. For the first time in art the forms of living persons are shown moving in a transparent medium of light, graduated according to degrees of distance, and harmonised by tones that indicate an atmospheric unity. In comparing Masaccio with Giotto we must admit that, with so much gained, something has been sacrificed. Giotto succeeded in presenting the idea, the feeling, the pith of the event, and pierced at once to the very ground-root of imagination. Masaccio thinks over-much, perhaps, of external form, and is intent on air-effects and colouring. He realises the phenomenal truth with a largeness and a dignity peculiar to himself. But we ask whether he was capable of bringing close to our hearts the secret and the soul of spiritual things. Has not art beneath his touch become more scenic, losing thereby somewhat of dramatic poignancy?

Born in 1402, Masaccio left Florence in 1429 for Rome, and was not heard of by his family again. Thus perished, at the early age of twenty-seven, a painter whose work reveals not only the originality of real creative genius, but a maturity that moves our wonder. What might he not have done if he had lived? Between his style in the Brancacci chapel and that of Raphael in the Vatican there seems to be but a narrow gap, which might perchance have been passed over by this man, if death had spared him.

Masaccio can by no means be taken as a fair instance of the painters of his age. Gifted with exceptional powers, he overleaped the difficulties of his art, and arrived intuitively at results whereof as yet no scientific certainty had been secured. His contemporaries applied humbler talents to severe study, and wrought out by patient industry those principles which Masaccio had divined. Their work is therefore at the same time more archaic and more pedantic, judged by modern standards. It is difficult to imagine a style of painting less attractive than that of Paolo Uccello.^[164] Yet his fresco of the "Deluge" in the cloisters of S. Maria Novella, and his battlepieces—one of which may be seen in the National Gallery—taught nearly all that painters needed of perspective. The lesson was conveyed in hard, dry, uncouth diagrams, ill-coloured and deficient in the quality of animation. At this period the painters, like the sculptors, were trained as goldsmiths, and Paolo had been a craftsman of that guild before he gave his whole mind to the study of linear perspective and the drawing of animals. The precision required in this trade forced artists to study the modelling of the human form, and promoted that crude naturalism which has been charged against their pictures. Carefully to observe, minutely to imitate some actual person—the Sandro of your workshop or the Cecco from the marketplace—became the pride of painters. No longer fascinated by the dreams of mediæval mysticism, and unable for the moment to invest ideals of the fancy with reality, they meanwhile made the great discovery that the body of a man is a miracle of beauty, each limb a divine wonder, each muscle a joy as great as sight of stars or flowers. Much that is repulsive in the pictures of the Pollajuoli and Andrea del Castagno, the leaders in this branch of realism, is due to admiration for the newly studied mechanism of the human form. They seem to have cared but little to select their types or to accentuate expression, so long as they were able to portray the man before them with fidelity.^[165] The comeliness of average humanity was enough for them; the difficulties of reproducing what they saw, exhausted their force. Thus the master-works on which they staked their reputation show them emulous of fame as craftsmen, while only here and there, in minor paintings for the most part, the poet that was in them sees the light. Brunelleschi told Donatello the truth when he said that his Christ was a crucified contadino. Intent on mastering the art of modelling, and determined above all things to be accurate, the sculptor had forgotten that something more was wanted in a crucifix than the careful study of a robust peasant-boy.

A story of a somewhat later date still further illustrates the dependence of the work of art upon the model in Renaissance Florence. Jacopo Sansovino made the statue of a youthful "Bacchus" in close imitation of a lad called Pippo Fabro. Posing for hours together naked in a cold studio, Pippo fell into ill health, and finally went mad. In his madness he frequently assumed the attitude of the "Bacchus" to which his life had been sacrificed, and which is now his portrait. The legend of the painter who kept his model on a cross in order that he might the more minutely represent the agonies of death by crucifixion, is but a mythus of the realistic method carried to its logical extremity.

Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San Sepolcro, and a pupil of Domenico Veneziano, must be placed among the painters of this period who advanced their art by scientific study. He carried the principles of correct drawing and solid modelling as far as it is possible for the genius of man to do, and composed a treatise on perspective in the vulgar tongue. But these are not his only titles to fame. By dignity of portraiture, by loftiness of style, and by a certain poetical solemnity of imagination, he raised himself above the level of the mass of his contemporaries. Those who have once seen his fresco of the "Resurrection" in the hall of the Compagnia della Misericordia at Borgo San Sepolcro, will never forget the deep impression of solitude and aloofness from all earthly things produced by it. It is not so much the admirable grouping and masterly drawing of the four sleeping soldiers, or even the majestic type of the Christ emergent without effort from the grave, as the communication of a mood felt by the painter and instilled into our souls, that makes this by far the grandest, most poetic, and most awe-inspiring picture of the Resurrection. The landscape is simple and severe, with the cold light upon it of the dawn before the sun is risen. The drapery of the ascending Christ is tinged with auroral colours like the earliest clouds of morning; and His level eyes, with the mystery of the slumber of the grave still upon them, seem gazing, far beyond our scope of vision, into the region of the eternal and illimitable. Thus, with Piero for mystagogue, we enter an inner shrine of deep religious revelation. The same high imaginative faculty marks the fresco of the "Dream of Constantine" in S. Francesco at Arezzo, where, it may be said in passing, the student of art must learn to estimate what Piero could do in the way of accurate foreshortening, powerful delineation of solid bodies, and noble treatment of drapery.^[166] To Piero, again, we owe most precious portraits of two Italian princes, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and Federigo of Urbino, masterpieces^[167] of fidelity to nature and sound workmanship.

In addition to the many great paintings that command our admiration, Piero claims honour as the teacher of Melozzo da Forli and of Luca Signorelli. Little is left to show the greatness of Melozzo; but the frescoes preserved in the Quirinal are enough to prove that he continued the grave and lofty manner of his master.^[168] Signorelli bears a name illustrious in the first rank of Italian painters; and to speak of him will be soon my duty. It was the special merit of these artists to elevate the ideal of form and to seek after sublimity, without departing from the path of conscientious labour, in an age preoccupied on the one hand with technicality and naturalism, on the other with decorative prettiness and pietism.

While the Florentine and Umbro-Tuscan masters were perfecting the arts of accurate design, a similar direction toward scientific studies was given to the painters of Northern Italy at Padua. Michael Savonarola, writing his panegyric of Padua about 1440, expressly mentions Perspective as a branch of philosophy taught in the high school;^[169] and the influence of Francesco Squarcione, though exaggerated by Vasari, was not inconsiderable. This man, who began life as a tailor or embroiderer, was early interested in the fine arts. Like Ciriac of Ancona, he had a taste for travel and collection,^[170] visiting the sacred soil of Greece and sojourning in divers towns of Italy, everywhere making drawings, copying pictures, taking casts from statues, and amassing memoranda on the relics of antiquity as well as on the methods practised by contemporary painters. Equipped with these aids to study, Squarcione returned to Padua, his native place, where he opened a kind of school for painters. It is clear that he was himself less an artist than an amateur of painting, with a turn for teaching, and a conviction, based upon the humanistic instincts of his age, that the right way of learning was by imitation of the antique. During the course of his career he is said to have taught no less than 137 pupils, training his apprentices by the exhibition of casts and drawings, and giving them instruction in the science of perspective.^[171] From his studio issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna, whose life-work, one of the most weighty moments in the history of modern art, will be noticed at length in the next chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that through Squarcione the scientific and humanistic movement of the fifteenth century was communicated to the art of Northern Italy. There, as at Florence, painting was separated from ecclesiastical tradition, and a new starting-point was sought in the study of mathematical principles, and the striving after form for its own sake.

Without attempting the detailed history of painting in this period of divided energy and diverse effort, it is needful here to turn aside and notice those masters of the fifteenth century who remained comparatively uninfluenced by the scholastic studies of their contemporaries. Of these, the earliest and most notable was Gentile da Fabriano, the last great painter of the Gubbian school.^[172] In the predella of his masterpiece at Florence there is a little panel, which attracts attention as one of the earliest attempts to represent a sunrise. The sun has just appeared above one of those bare sweeping hill-sides so characteristic of Central Italian landscape. Part of the country lies untouched by morning, cold and grey: the rest is silvered with the level light, falling sideways on the burnished leaves and red fruit of the orange trees, and casting shadows from olive branches on the furrows of a new-ploughed field. Along the road journey Joseph and Mary and the infant Christ, so that you may call this little landscape a "Flight into Egypt," if you choose. Gentile, with all his Umbrian pietism, was a painter for whom the fair sights of the earth had exquisite value. The rich costumes of the Eastern kings, their train of servants, their hawks and horses, hounds and monkeys, are painted by him with scrupulous fidelity; and nothing can be more true to nature than the wild flowers he has copied in the framework of this picture. Yet we perceive that, though he felt in his own way the naturalistic impulse of the age, he had scarcely anything in common with masters like Uccello or Verocchio.

Still less had Fra Angelico. Of all the painters of this period he most successfully resisted the persuasions of the Renaissance, and perfected an art that owed little to sympathy with the external world. He thought it a sin to study or to imitate the naked form, and his most beautiful faces seem copied from angels seen in visions, not from any sons of men. While the artists around him were absorbed in mastering the laws of geometry and anatomy, Fra Angelico sought to express the inner life of the adoring soul. Only just so much of realism, whether in the drawing of the body and its drapery, or in the landscape background, as seemed necessary for suggesting the emotion or for setting forth the story, found its way into his pictures. The message they convey might have been told almost as perfectly upon the lute or viol. His world is a strange one—a world not of hills and fields and flowers and men of flesh and blood, but one where the people are embodied ecstasies, the colours tints from evening clouds or apocalyptic jewels, the scenery a flood of light or a background of illuminated gold. His mystic gardens, where the ransomed souls embrace, and dance with angels on the lawns outside the City of the Lamb, are such as were never trodden by the foot of man in any paradise of earth.

Criticism has a hard task in attempting to discern the merit of the several painters of this time. It is clear that we must look not to Fra Angelico but to Masaccio for the progressive forces that were carrying art forward to complete accomplishment. Yet the charm of Masaccio is as nothing in comparison with that which holds us spell-bound before the sacred and impassioned reveries of the Fiesolan monk. Masaccio had inestimable value for his contemporaries. Fra Angelico, now that we know all Masaccio can teach, has a quality so unique that we return again and again to the contemplation of his visions. Thus it often happens that we are tempted to exaggerate the historical importance of one painter because he touches us by some peculiar quality, and to over-estimate the intrinsic value of another because he was a motive power in his own age. Both these temptations should be resolutely resisted by the student who is capable of discerning different kinds of excellence and diverse titles to affectionate remembrance. Tracing the history of Italian painting is like pursuing a journey down an ever-broadening river, whose affluents are Giotto and Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, and Mantegna. We have to turn aside and land upon the shore, in order to visit the heaven-reflecting lakelet, self-encompassed and secluded, called Angelico.

Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico, but in no sense the continuator of his tradition, exhibits the blending of several styles by a genius of less creative than assimilative force. That he was keenly interested in the problems of perspective and foreshortening, and that none of the knowledge collected by his fellow-workers had escaped him, is sufficiently proved by his frescoes at Pisa. His compositions are rich in architectural details, not always chosen with pure taste, but painted with an almost infantine delight in the magnificence of buildings. Quaint birds and beasts and reptiles crowd his landscapes; while his imagination runs riot in rocks and rivers, trees of all variety, and rustic incidents adopted from real life. At the same time he felt an enjoyment like that of Gentile da Fabriano in depicting the pomp and circumstance of pageantry, and no Florentine of the fifteenth century was more fond of assembling the personages of contemporary history in groups.^[173] Thus he showed himself sensitive to the chief influences of the earlier Renaissance, and combined the scientific and naturalistic tendencies of his age in a manner not devoid of native poetry. What he lacked was depth of feeling, the sense of noble form, the originative force of a great mind. His poetry of invention, though copious and varied, owed its charm to the unstudied grace of improvisation, and he often undertook subjects where his idyllic rather than dramatic genius failed to sustain him. It is difficult, for instance, to comprehend how M. Rio could devote two pages to Gozzoli's "Destruction of Sodom," so comparatively unimpressive in spite of its aggregated incidents, when he passes by the "Fulminati" of Signorelli, so tragic in its terrible simplicity, with a word.^[174]

This painter's marvellous rapidity of execution enabled him to produce an almost countless series of decorative works. The best of these are the frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, of the Riccardi Palace of Florence, of San Gemignano, and of Montefalco. It has been well said of Gozzoli that, though he attempted grand subjects on a large scale, he could not rise above the limitations of a style better adapted to the decoration of cassoni than to fresco.^[175] Yet within the range of his own powers there are few more fascinating painters. His feeling for fresh nature—for hunters in the woods at night or dawn, for vintage-gatherers among their grapes, for festival troops of cavaliers and pages, and for the marriage-dances of young men and maidens—yields a delightful gladness to compositions lacking the simplicity of Giotto and the dignity of Masaccio.^[176] No one knew better how to sketch the quarrels of little boys in their nursery, or the laughter of serving-women, or children carrying their books to school;^[177] and when the idyllic genius of the man was applied to graver themes, his fancy supplied him with multitudes of angels waving rainbow-coloured wings above fair mortal faces. Bevies of them nestle like pigeons on the penthouse of the hut of Bethlehem, or crowd together round the infant Christ.^[178]

From these observations on the style of Benozzo Gozzoli it will be seen that in the evolution of Renaissance culture he may be compared with the romantic poets for whom the cheerfulness of nature and the joy that comes to men from living in a many-coloured world of inexhaustible delight were sufficient sources of inspiration. It should be mentioned lastly that he enjoyed the patronage and friendship of the Medicean princes.

Another painter favoured by the Medici was Fra Filippo Lippi, whose life and art-work were alike the deviation of a pleasure-loving temperament from its natural sphere into the service of the Church. Left an orphan at the age of two years, he was brought up by an aunt, who placed him, as a boy of eight, in the convent of the Carmine at Florence. For monastic duties he had no vocation, and the irregularities of his behaviour caused scandal even in that age of cynical indulgence. It can scarcely be doubted that the schism between his practice and profession served to debase and vulgarise a genius of fine imaginative quality, while the uncongenial work of decorating choirs and painting altar-pieces limed the wings of his swift spirit with the dulness of routine that savoured of hypocrisy. Bound down to sacred subjects, he was too apt to make angels out of street-urchins, and to paint the portraits of his peasant-loves for Virgins.^[179] His delicate sense of natural beauty gave peculiar charm to this false treatment of religious themes. Nothing, for example, can be more attractive than the rows of angels bearing lilies in his "Coronation of the Virgin;"^[180] and yet, when we regard them closely, we find that they have no celestial quality of form or feature. Their grace is earthly, and the spirit breathed upon the picture is the loveliness of colour, quiet and yet glowing—blending delicate blues and greens with whiteness purged of glare. The beauties as well as the defects of such compositions make us regret that Fra Filippo never found a more congenial sphere for his imagination. As a painter of subjects half-humorous and half-pathetic, or as the illustrator of romantic stories, we fancy that he might have won fame rivalled only by the greatest colourists. One such picture it was granted him to paint, and this is his masterpiece. In the prime of life he was commissioned to decorate the choir of the cathedral at Prato with the legends of S. John Baptist and S. Stephen. All of these frescoes are noteworthy for their firm grasp upon reality in the portraits of Florentine worthies, and for the harmonious disposition of the groups; but the scene of Salome dancing before Herod is the best for its poetic feeling. Her movement across the floor before the tyrant and his guests at table, the quaint fluttering of her drapery, the well-bred admiration of the spectators, their horror when she brings the Baptist's head to Herodias, and the weak face of the half-remorseful Herod are expressed with a dramatic power that shows the genius of a poet painter. And even more lovely than Salome are a pair of girls locked in each other's arms close by Herodias on the daïs. A natural and spontaneous melody, not only in the suggested movements of this scene, but also in the colouring, choice of form, and treatment of drapery, makes it one of the most musical of pictures ever painted.

Fra Filippo was not so successful in the choir of the cathedral at Spoleto, where he undertook; to paint scenes from the life of the Virgin. Yet those who have not examined these frescoes, ruinous in their decay and spoiled by stupid restoration, can form no just notion of the latent capacity of this great master. The whole of the half-dome above the tribune is filled with, a "Coronation of Madonna." A circular rainbow surrounds both her and Christ. She is kneeling with fiery rays around her, glorified by her assumption into heaven. Christ is enthroned, and at His side stands a seat prepared for His mother, as soon as the crown that He is placing on her head shall have made her Queen. From the outer courts of heaven, thronged with multitudes of celestial beings, angels are crowding in, breaking the lines of the prismatic aureole, as though the ardour of their joy could scarcely be repressed; while the everlasting light of God sheds radiance from above, and far below, lies earth with diminished sun and moon. The boldness of conception in this singular fresco reveals a genius capable of grappling with such problems as Tintoretto solved. Fra Filippo died at Spoleto, and left his work unfinished, to the care of his assistant, the Fra Diamante. Over his tomb Lorenzo de' Medici caused a monument to be erected, and Poliziano wrote Latin couplets to commemorate the fame of a painter highly prized by his patrons.

The space devoted in these pages to Fra Lippo Lippi is justified not only by the excellence of his own work, but also by the influence he exercised over two of the best Florentine painters of the fifteenth century. Whether Filippino Lippi was in truth his son by Lucrezia Buti, a novice he is said to have carried from her cloister in Prato, has been called in question by recent critics; but they adduce no positive arguments for discrediting the story of Vasari.^[181] There can, however, be no doubt that to the Frate, whether he was his father or only his teacher, Filippino owed his style. His greatest works were painted in continuation of Masaccio's frescoes in the Carmine at Florence. It is the best warrant of their excellence that we feel them worthy to hold the place they do, and that Raphael transferred one of their motives, the figure of S. Paul addressing S. Peter in prison, to his cartoon of "Mars' Hill." That he was not so accomplished as Masaccio in the art of composition, that his scale of colour is less pleasing, and that his style in general lacks the elevation of his mighty predecessor, is not sufficient to place him in any position of humiliating inferiority.^[182] What above all things interests the student of the Renaissance in Filippino's work, is the powerful action of revived classicism on his manner. This can be traced better in the Caraffa Chapel of S. Maria sopra Minerva at Rome and in the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella at Florence than in the Carmine. The "Triumph of S. Thomas Aquinas" and the "Miracle of S. John" are remarkable for an almost insolent display of Roman antiquities—not studied, it need scarcely be observed, with the scientific accuracy of Alma Tadema—for such science was non-existent in the fifteenth century—but paraded with a kind of passion. To this delight in antique details Filippino added violent gestures, strange attitudes, and affected draperies, producing a general result impressive through the artist's energy, but quaint and unattractive.

Sandro Botticelli, the other disciple of Fra Lippo, bears a name of greater mark. He is one of those artists, much respected in their own days, who suffered eclipse from the superior splendour of immediate successors, and to whom, through sympathy stimulated by prolonged study of the fifteenth century, we have of late paid tardy and perhaps exaggerated honours.^[183] His fellow-workers seem to have admired him as an able draughtsman gifted with a rare if whimsical imagination; but no one recognised in him a leader of his age. For us he has an almost unique value as representing the interminglement of antique and modern fancy at a moment of transition, as embodying in some of his pictures the subtlest thought and feeling of men for whom the classic myths were beginning to live once more, while new guesses were timidly hazarded in the sphere of orthodoxy.^[184] Self-confident sensuality had not as yet encouraged painters to substitute a florid rhetoric for the travail of their brain; nor was enough known about antiquity to make the servile imitation of Greek or Roman fragments possible. Yet scholarship had already introduced a novel element into the culture of the nation. It was no doubt with a kind of wonder that the artists heard of Fauns and Sylvans, and the birth of Aphrodite from the waves. Such fables took deep hold upon their fancy, stirring them to strange and delicate creations, the offspring of their own thought, and no mere copies of marbles seen in statue galleries. The very imperfection of these pictures lends a value to them in the eyes of the student, by helping him to comprehend exactly how the revelations of the humanists affected the artistic sense of Italy.

In the mythological work of Botticelli there is always an element of allegory, recalling the Middle Ages and rendering it far truer to the feelings of the fifteenth century than to the myths it illustrates. His painting of the "Spring," suggested by a passage from Lucretius,^[185] is exquisitely poetic; and yet the true spirit of the Latin verse has not been seized—to have done that would have taxed the energies of Titian—but something special to the artist and significant for Medicean scholarship has been added. There is none of the Roman largeness and freedom in its style; Venus and her Graces are even melancholy, and their movements savour of affectation. This combination or confusion of artistic impulses in Botticelli, this treatment of pagan themes in the spirit of mediæval mysticism, sometimes ended in grotesqueness. It might suffice to cite the pregnant "Aphrodite" in the National Gallery, if the "Mars and Venus" in the same collection were not even a more striking instance. Mars is a young Florentine, whose throat and chest are beautifully studied from the life, but whose legs and belly, belonging no doubt to the same model, fall far short of heroic form. He lies fast asleep with the corners of his mouth drawn down, as though he were about to snore. Opposite there sits a woman, weary and wan, draped from neck to foot in the thin raiment Botticelli loved. Four little goat-footed Cupids playing with the armour of the sleeping lad complete the composition. These wanton loves are admirably conceived and exquisitely drawn; nor indeed can any drawing exceed in beauty the line that leads from the flank along the ribs and arm of Mars up to his lifted elbow. The whole design, like one of Piero di Cosimo's pictures in another key, leaves a strong impression on the mind, due partly to the oddity of treatment, partly to the careful work displayed, and partly to the individuality of the artist. It gives us keen pleasure to feel exactly how a painter like Botticelli applied the dry naturalism of the early Florentine Renaissance, as well as his own original imagination, to a subject he imperfectly realised. Yet are we right in assuming that he meant the female figure in this group for Aphrodite, the sleeping man for Ares? A Greek or a Roman would have rejected this picture as false to the mythus of Mars and Venus; and whether Botticelli wished to be less descriptive than emblematic, might be fairly questioned. The face and attitude of that unseductive Venus, wide awake and melancholy, opposite her snoring lover, seems to symbolise the indignities which women may have to endure from insolent and sottish boys with only youth to recommend them. This interpretation, however, sounds like satire. We are left to conjecture whether Botticelli designed his composition for an allegory of intemperance, the so-called Venus typifying some moral quality.

Botticelli's "Birth of Aphrodite" expresses this transient moment in the history of the Renaissance with more felicity. It would be impossible for any painter to design a more exquisitely outlined figure than that of his Venus, who, with no covering but her golden hair, is wafted to the shore by zephyrs. Roses fall upon the ruffled waves, and the young gods of the air twine hands and feet together as they float. In the picture of "Spring" there is the same choice of form, the same purity of line, the same rare interlacement in the limbs. It would seem as though Botticelli intended every articulation of the body to express some meaning, and this, though it enhances the value of his work for sympathetic students, often leads him to the verge of affectation. Nothing but a touch of affectation in the twined fingers of Raphael and Tobias impairs the beauty of one of Botticelli's best pictures at Turin. We feel the same discord looking at them as we do while reading the occasional concetti in Petrarch; and all the more in each case does the discord pain us because we know that it results from their specific quality carried to excess.

Botticelli's sensibility to the refinements of drawing gave peculiar character to all his work. Attention has frequently been called to the beauty of his roses.^[186] Every curl in their frail petals is rendered with as much care as though they were the hands or feet of Graces. Nor is it, perhaps, a mere fancy to imagine that the corolla of an open rose suggested to Botticelli's mind the composition of his best-known picture, the circular "Coronation of the Virgin" in the Uffizzi. That masterpiece combines all Botticelli's best qualities. For rare distinction of beauty in the faces it is unique, while the mystic calm and resignation, so misplaced in his Aphrodites, find a meaning here^[187]. There is only one other picture in Italy, a "Madonna and Child with S. Catherine" in a landscape by Boccaccino da Cremona, that in any degree rivals the peculiar beauty of its types^[188].

Sandro Botticelli was not a great painter in the same sense as Andrea Mantegna. But he was a true poet within the limits of a certain sphere. We have to seek his parallel among the verse-writers rather than the artists of his day. Some of the stanzas of Poliziano and Boiardo, in particular, might have been written to explain his pictures, or his pictures might have been painted to illustrate their verses^[189]. In both Poliziano and Boiardo we find the same touch upon antique things as in Botticelli; and this makes him serviceable almost above all painters to the readers of Renaissance poetry.

The name of Piero di Cosimo has been mentioned incidentally in connection with that of Botticelli; and though his life exceeds the limits assigned for this chapter, so many links unite him to the class of painters I have been discussing, that I can find no better place to speak of him than this. His biography forms one of the most amusing chapters in Vasari, who has taken great delight in noting Piero's quaint humours and eccentric habits, and whose description of a Carnival triumph devised by him is one of our most precious documents in illustration of Renaissance pageantry.^[190] The point that connects him with Botticelli is the romantic treatment of classical mythology, best exemplified in his pictures of the tale of Perseus and Andromeda.^[191] Piero was by nature and employment a decorative painter; the construction of cars for pageants, and the adornment of dwelling rooms and marriage chests, affected his whole style, rendering it less independent and more quaint than that of Botticelli. Landscape occupies the main part of his compositions, made up by a strange amalgam of the most eccentric details—rocks toppling over blue bays, sea-caverns, and fantastic mountain ranges. Groups of little figures disposed upon these spaces tell the story, and the best invention of the artist is lavished on the form of monstrous creatures like the dragon slain by Perseus. There is no attempt to treat the classic subject in a classic spirit: to do that, and to fail in doing it, remained for Cellini.^[192] We have, on the contrary, before us an image of the orc, as it appeared to Ariosto's fancy—a creature borrowed from romance and made to play its part in a Greek myth. The same criticism applies to Piero's picture of the murdered Procris watched by a Satyr of the woodland.^[193] In creating his Satyr the painter has not had recourse to any antique bas-relief, but has imagined for himself a being half human, half bestial, and yet wholly real; nor has he portrayed in Procris a nymph of Greek form, but a girl of Florence. The strange animals and gaudy flowers introduced into the landscape background further remove the subject from the sphere of classic treatment. Florentine realism and quaint fancy being thus curiously blended, the artistic result may be profitably studied for the light it throws upon the so-called Paganism of the earlier Renaissance. Fancy at that moment was more free than when superior knowledge of antiquity had created a demand for reproductive art, and when the painters thought less of the meaning of the fable for themselves than of its capability of being used as a machine for the display of erudition.

It remains to speak of the painter who closes and at the same time gathers up the whole tradition of this period. Domenico Ghirlandajo deserves this place of honour not because he had the keenest intuitions, the deepest thought, the strongest passion, the subtlest fancy, the loftiest imagination—for in all these points he was excelled by some one or other of his contemporaries or predecessors—but because his intellect was the most comprehensive and his mastery of art the most complete. His life lasted from 1449 to 1498, and he did not distinguish himself as a painter till he was past thirty.^[194] Therefore he does not properly fall within the limit of 1470, assigned roughly to this age of transition in painting. But in style and spirit he belonged to it, resuming in his own work the qualities we find scattered through the minor artists of the fifteenth century, and giving them the unity of fusion in a large and lucid manner. Like the painters hitherto discussed, he was working toward the full Renaissance; yet he reached it neither in ideality nor in freedom. His art is the art of the understanding only; and to this the masters of the golden age added radiance, sublimity, grace, passion—qualities of the imagination beyond the scope of men like Ghirlandajo.

It is almost with reluctance that a critic feels obliged to name this powerful but prosaic painter as the Giotto of the fifteenth century in Florence, the tutelary angel of an age inaugurated by Masaccio. He was a consummate master of the science collected by his predecessors. No one surpassed him in the use of fresco. His orderly composition, in the distribution of figures and the use of architectural accessories, is worthy of all praise; his portraiture is dignified and powerful;^[195] his choice of form and treatment of drapery, noble. Yet we cannot help noting his deficiency in the finer sense of beauty, the absence of poetic inspiration or feeling in his work, the commonplaceness of his colour, and his wearisome reiteration of calculated effects. He never arrests attention by sallies of originality, or charms us by the delicacies of suggestive fancy. He is always at the level of his own achievement, so that in the end we are as tired with able Ghirlandajo as the men of Athens with just Aristides. Who, however, but Ghirlandajo could have composed the frescoes of "S. Fina" at S. Gemignano, the fresco of the "Death of S. Francis" in S. Trinità at Florence, or that again of the "Birth of the Virgin" in S. Maria Novella? There is something irritating in pure common sense imported into art, and Ghirlandajo's masterpieces are the apotheosis of that quality. How correct, how judicious, how sagacious, how mathematically ordered! we exclaim; but we gaze without emotion, and we turn away without regret. It does not vex us to read how Ghirlandajo used to scold his prentices for neglecting trivial orders that would fill his purse with money. Similar traits of character pain us with a sense of impropriety in Perugino. They harmonise with all we feel about the work of Ghirlandajo. It is bitter mortification to know that Michael Angelo never found space or time sufficient for his vast designs in sculpture. It is a positive relief to think that Ghirlandajo sighed in vain to have the circuit of the walls of Florence given him to paint. How he would have covered them with compositions, stately, flowing, easy, sober, and incapable of stirring any feeling in the soul!

Though Ghirlandajo lacked almost every true poetic quality, he combined the art of distributing figures in a given space, with perspective, fair knowledge of the nude, and truth to nature, in greater perfection than any other single painter of the age he represents; and since these were precisely the gifts of that age to the great Renaissance masters, we accord to him the place of historical honour. It should be added that, like almost all the artists of this epoch, he handled sacred and profane, ancient and modern, subjects in the same style, introducing contemporary customs and costumes. His pictures are therefore valuable for their portraits and their illustration of Florentine life. Fresco was his favourite vehicle; and in this preference he showed himself a true master of the school of Florence: but he is said to have maintained that mosaic, as more durable, was superior to wall-painting. This saying, if it be authentic, justifies our criticism of his cold achievement as a painter.

Reviewing the ground traversed in this and the last chapter, we find that the painting of Tuscany, and in particular the Florentine section of it, has absorbed attention. It is characteristic of the next age that other districts of Italy began to contribute their important quota to the general culture of the nation. The force generated in Tuscany expanded and dilated till every section of the country took part in the movement which Florence had been first to propagate. What was happening in scholarship began to manifest itself in art, for the same law of growth and distribution affected both alike; and thus the local differences of the Italians were to some extent abolished. The nation, never destined to acquire political union in the Renaissance, possessed at last an intellectual unity in its painters and its students, which justifies our speaking of the great men of the golden period as Italians and not as citizens of such or such a burgh. In the Middle Ages United Italy was an Idea to theorists like Dante, who dreamed for her an actual supremacy beneath her Emperor's sway in Rome. The reasoning to which they trusted proved fallacious, and their hopes were quenched. Instead of the political empire of the "De Monarchiâ," a spiritual empire had been created, and the Italians were never more powerful in Europe than when their sacred city was being plundered by the imperial bandits in 1527. It is necessary, at the risk of some repetition, to keep this point before the reader, if only as an apology for the method of treatment to be followed in the next chapter, where the painters of the mid-Renaissance period will be reviewed less in relation to their schools and cities than as representatives of the Italian spirit.

Since the intellectual unity gained by the Italians in the age of the Renaissance was chiefly due to the Florentines, it is a matter of some moment to reconsider the direct influences brought to bear upon the arts in Florence during the fifteenth century. I have chosen Ghirlandajo as the representative of painting in that period. I have also expressed the opinion that his style is singularly cold and prosaic, and have hinted that this prosaic and cold quality was caused by a defect of emotional enthusiasm, by preoccupation with finite aims. Herein Ghirlandajo did but reflect the temper of his age—that temper which Cosimo de' Medici, the greatest patron of both art and scholarship in Florence before 1470, represented in his life and in his public policy. It concerns us, therefore, to take into account the nature of the patronage extended by the Medici to art. Excessive praise and blame have been showered upon these burgher princes in almost equal quantities; so that, if we were to place Roscoe and Rio, as the representatives of conflicting views, in the scales together, they would balance each other, and leave the index quivering. This bare statement warns the critic to be cautious, and inclines him to accept the intermediate conclusion that neither the Medici nor the artists could escape the conditions of their century. It is specially argued on the one hand against the Medici that they encouraged a sensual and worldly style of art, employing the painters to decorate their palaces with nude figures, and luring them away from sacred to profane subjects. Yet Cosimo gave orders to Donatello for his "David" and his "Judith," employed Michellozzo and Brunelleschi to build him convents and churches, and filled the library of S. Marco, where Fra Angelico was painting, with a priceless collection of MSS. His own private chapel was decorated by Benozza Gozzoli. Fra Lippo Lippi and Michael Angelo Buonarroti were the house-friends of Lorenzo de' Medici. Leo Battista Alberti was a member of his philosophical society. The only great Florentine artist who did not stand in cordial relations to the Medicean circle, was Lionardo da Vinci. This sufficiently shows that the Medicean patronage was commensurate with the best products of Florentine genius; nor would it be easy to demonstrate that encouragement, so largely exhibited and so intelligently used, could have been in the main injurious to the arts.

There is, however, a truth in the old grudge against the Medicean princes. They enslaved Florence; and even painting was not slow to suffer from the stifling atmosphere of tyranny. Lorenzo deliberately set himself to enfeeble the people by luxury, partly because he liked voluptuous living, partly because he aimed at popularity, and partly because it was his interest to enervate republican virtues. The arts used for the purposes of decoration in triumphs and carnival shows became the instruments of careless pleasure; and there is no doubt that even earnest painters lent their powers with no ill-will and no bad conscience to the service of lascivious patrons. "Per la città, in diverse case, fece tondi di sua mano e femmine ignude assai," says Vasari about Sandro Botticelli, who afterwards became a Piagnone and refused to touch a pencil.^[196] We may, therefore, reasonably concede that if the Medici had never taken hold on Florence, or if the spirit of the times had made them other than they were in loftiness of aim and nobleness of heart, the arts of Italy in the Renaissance might have shown less of worldliness and materialism. It was against the demoralisation of society by paganism, as against the enslavement of Florence by her tyrants, that Savonarola strove; and since the Medici were the leaders of the classical revival, as well as the despots of the dying commonwealth, they justly bear the lion's share of that blame which fell in general upon the vices of their age denounced by the prophet of S. Marco. We may regard it either as a singular misfortune for Italy or as the strongest sign of deep-seated Italian corruption, that the most brilliant leaders of culture both at Florence and at Rome—Cosimo, Lorenzo, and Giovanni de' Medici—promoted rather than checked the debasing influences of the Renaissance, and added the weight of their authority to the popular craving for sensuous amusement.

Meanwhile, what was truly great and noble in Renaissance Italy, found its proper home in Florence; where the spirit of freedom, if only as an idea, still ruled; where the populace was still capable of being stirred to super-sensual enthusiasm; and where the flame of the modern intellect burned with its purest, whitest lustre.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER VI--PAINTING

Two Periods in the True Renaissance—Andrea Mantegna—His Statuesque Design—His Naturalism—Roman Inspiration—Triumph of Julius Cæsar—Bas-reliefs—Luca Signorelli—The Precursor of Michael Angelo—Anatomical Studies—Sense of Beauty—The Chapel of S. Brizio at Orvieto—Its Arabesques and Medallions—Degrees in his Ideal—Enthusiasm for Organic Life—Mode of treating Classical Subjects—Perugino—His Pietistic Style—His Formalism—The Psychological Problem of his Life—Perugino's Pupils—Pinturicchio—At Spello and Siena—Francia—Fra Bartolommeo—Transition to the Golden Age—Lionardo da Vinci—The Magician of the Renaissance—Raphael—The Melodist—Correggio—The Faun—Michael Angelo—The Prophet.

The Renaissance, so far as Painting is concerned, may be said to have culminated between the years 1470 and 1550. These dates, it must be frankly admitted, are arbitrary; nor is there anything more unprofitable than the attempt to define by strict chronology the moments of an intellectual growth so complex, so unequally progressive, and so varied as that of Italian art. All that the historian can hope to do, is to strike a mean between his reckoning of years and his more subtle calculations based on the emergence of decisive genius in special men. An instance of such compromise is afforded by Lionardo da Vinci, who belongs, as far as dates go, to the last half of the fifteenth century, but who must, on any estimate of his achievement, be classed with Michael Angelo among the final and supreme masters of the full Renaissance. To violate the order of time, with a view to what may here be called the morphology of Italian art, is, in his case, a plain duty.

Bearing this in mind, it is still possible to regard the eighty years above mentioned as a period no longer of promise and preparation but of fulfilment and accomplishment. Furthermore, the thirty years at the close of the fifteenth century may be taken as one epoch in this climax of the art, while the first half of the sixteenth forms a second. Within the former falls the best work of Mantegna, Perugino, Francia, the Bellini, Signorelli, Fra Bartolommeo. To the latter we may reckon Michael Angelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Correggio, Titian, and Andrea del Sarto. Lionardo da Vinci, though belonging chronologically to the former epoch, ranks first among the masters of the latter; and to this also may be given Tintoretto, though his life extended far beyond it to the last years of the century. We thus obtain, within the period of eighty years from 1470 to 1550, two subordinate divisions of time, the one including the last part of the fifteenth century, the other extending over the best years of the sixteenth.

The subdivisions I have just suggested correspond to two distinct stages in the evolution of art. The painters of the earlier group win our admiration quite as much by their aim as by their achievement. Their achievement, indeed, is not so perfect but that they still make some demand upon interpretative sympathy in the student. There is, besides, a sense of reserved strength in their work. We feel that their motives have not been developed to the utmost, that their inspiration is not exhausted; that it will be possible for their successors to advance beyond them on the same path, not realising more consummate excellence in special points, but combining divers qualities, and reaching absolute freedom.

The painters of the second group display mastery more perfect, range of faculty more all-embracing. What they design they do; nature and art obey them equally; the resources placed at their command are employed with facile and unfettered exercise of power. The hand obedient to the brain is now so expert that nothing further is left to be desired in the expression of the artist's thought.^[197] The student can only hope to penetrate the master's meaning. To imagine a step further in the same direction is impossible. The full flower of the Italian genius has been unfolded. Its message to the world in art has been delivered.

Chronology alone would not justify us in drawing these distinctions. What really separates the two groups is the different degree in which they severally absorbed the spirit and uttered the message of their age. In the former the Renaissance was still immature, in the latter it was perfected. Yet all these painters deserve in a true sense to be called its children. Their common object is art regarded as an independent function, and relieved from the bondage of technical impediments. In their work the liberty of the modern mind finds its first and noblest expression. They deal with familiar and time-honoured Christian motives reverently; but they use them at the same time for the exhibition of pure human beauty. Pagan influences yield them spirit-stirring inspiration; yet the antique models of style, which proved no less embarrassing to their successors than Saul's armour was to David, weigh lightly, like a magician's breast-plate, upon their heroic strength.

Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua in 1431. Vasari says that in his boyhood he herded cattle, and it is probable that he was the son of a small Lombard farmer. What led him to the study of the arts we do not know; but that his talents were precociously developed, is proved by his registration in 1441 upon the books of the painter's guild at Padua. He is there described as the adopted son of Squarcione. At the age of seventeen he signed a picture with his name. Studying the casts and drawings collected by Squarcione for his Paduan school, the young Mantegna found congenial exercise for his peculiar gifts.^[198] His early frescoes in the Eremitani at Padua look as though they had been painted from statues or clay models, carefully selected for the grandeur of their forms, the nobility of their attitudes, and the complicated beauty of their drapery. The figures, arranged on different planes, are perfect in their perspective; the action is indicated by appropriate gestures, and the colouring, though faint and cold, is scientifically calculated. Yet not a man or woman in these wondrous compositions seems to live. Well provided with bone and muscle, they have neither blood nor anything suggestive of the breath of life within them. It is as though Mantegna had been called to paint a people turned to stone, arrested suddenly amid their various occupations, and preserved for centuries from injury in some Egyptian solitude of dewless sand.

In spite of this unearthly immobility, the Paduan frescoes exercise a strange and potent spell. We feel ourselves beneath the sway of a gigantic genius, intent on solving the severest problems of his art in preparation for the portraiture of some high intellectual abstraction. It should also be observed that notwithstanding their frigidity and statuesque composure, the pictures of "S. Andrew" and "S. Christopher" in the chapel of the Eremitani reveal minute study of real objects. Transitory movements of the body are noted and transcribed with merciless precision; an Italian hill-side, with its olive trees and winding ways and crown of turrets, forms the background of one scene; in another the drama is localised amid Renaissance architecture of the costliest style. Rustic types have been selected for the soldiers, and commonplace details, down to a patched jerkin or a broken shoe, bear witness to the patience and the observation of the master. But over all these things the glamour of Medusa's head has fallen, turning them to stone. We are clearly in the presence of a painter for whom the attractions of nature were subordinated to the fascinations of science—a man the very opposite, for instance, to Benozzo Gozzoli. If Mantegna had passed away in early manhood, like Masaccio, his fame would have been that of a cold and calculating genius labouring after an ideal unrealised except in its dry formal elements.

The truth is that Mantegna's inspiration was derived from the antique.^[199] The beauty of classical bas-relief entered deep into his soul and ruled his imagination. In later life he spent his acquired wealth in forming a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities.^[200] He was, moreover, the friend of students, eagerly absorbing the knowledge brought to light by Ciriac of Ancona, Flavio Biondo, and other antiquaries; and so completely did he assimilate the materials of scholarship, that the spirit of a Roman seemed to be re-incarnated in him. Thus, independently of his high value as a painter, he embodies for us in art that sincere passion for the ancient world which was the dominating intellectual impulse of his age.

The minute learning accumulated in the fifteenth century upon the subject of Roman military life found noble illustration in his frieze of "Julius Cæsar's Triumph."^[201] Nor is this masterpiece a cold display of pedantry. The life we vainly look for in the frescoes of the Eremitani chapel may be found here—statuesque, indeed, in style, and stately in movement, but glowing with the spirit of revived antiquity. The processional pomp of legionaries bowed beneath their trophied arms, the monumental majesty of robed citizens, the gravity of stoled and veiled priests, the beauty of young slaves, and all the paraphernalia of spoils and wreaths and elephants and ensigns are massed together with the self-restraint of noble art subordinating pageantry to rules of lofty composition. What must the genius of the man have been who could move thus majestically beneath the weight of painfully accumulated erudition, converting an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of line composed in the grave Dorian mood?

By no process can the classic purity of this bas-relief be better understood than by comparing the original with a transcript made by Rubens from a portion of the "Triumph."^[202] The Flemish painter strives to add richness to the scene by Bacchanalian riot and the sensuality of imperial Rome. His elephants twist their trunks, and trumpet to the din of cymbals; negroes feed the flaming candelabra with scattered frankincense; the white oxen of Clitumnus are loaded with gaudy flowers, and the dancing maidens are dishevelled Mænads. But the rhythmic procession of Mantegna, modulated to the sound of flutes and soft recorders, carries our imagination back to the best days and strength of Rome. His priests and generals, captives and choric women, are as little Greek as they are modern. In them awakes to a new life the spirit-quelling energy of the republic. The painter's severe taste keeps out of sight the insolence and orgies of the empire; he conceives Rome as Shakspeare did in "Coriolanus."^[203]

In compositions of this type, studied after bas-reliefs and friezes, Mantegna displayed a power that was unique. Those who have once seen his drawings for Judith with the head of Holofernes, and for Solomon judging between the two mothers, will never forget their sculpture. The lines are graven on our memory. When this marble master chose to be tragic, his intensity was terrible. The designs for a dead Christ carried to the tomb among the weeping Maries, concentrate within the briefest space the utmost agony; it is as though the very ecstasy of grief had been congealed and fixed for ever. What, again, he could produce of purely beautiful within the region of religious art, is shown by his "Madonna of the Victory."^[204] No other painter has given to the soldier saints forms at once so heroic and so chivalrously tender.

With regard to the circumstances of Mantegna's biography, it may be said briefly that, though of humble birth, he spent the greater portion of his life at Court and in the service of princes. It was in 1456, after he had distinguished himself by the Paduan frescoes, that he first received an invitation from the Marquis Lodovico Gonzaga. Of this sovereign I have already had occasion to speak.^[205] Reared by Vittorino da Feltre, to whom his father had committed almost unlimited authority, Lodovico had early learned to estimate the real advantages of culture. It was now his object to render his capital no less illustrious by art than by the residence of learned men. With this view he offered Mantegna a salary of fifteen ducats a month, together with lodging, corn, and fuel—provided the painter would place his talents at his service. Mantegna accepted the invitation; but numerous engagements prevented him from transferring his household from Padua to Mantua until the year 1460. From that date onwards to 1506, when he died, Mantegna remained attached to the Gonzaga family serving three Marquises in succession, and adorning their palaces, chapels, and country-seats with frescoes now, alas! almost entirely ruined. The grants of land and presents he received in addition to his salary, enabled him to build a villa at Buscoldo, where he resided during the summer, as well as to erect a sumptuous mansion in the capital.

Between Mantua, Goito, and Buscoldo, Mantegna spent the last forty-six years of his life in continual employment, broken only by a short visit to Florence in 1466, and another to Bologna in 1472,^[206] and by a longer residence in Rome between the years 1488 and 1490. During the latter period Innocent VIII. was Pope. He had built a chapel in the Belvedere of the Vatican, and wished the greatest painter of the day to decorate it. Therefore he wrote to Francesco, Marquis of Mantua, requesting that he might avail himself of Mantegna's skill. Francesco, though unwilling to part with his painter in ordinary, thought it unadvisable to disappoint the Pope. Accordingly he dubbed Mantegna knight, and sent him to Rome. The chapel painted in fresco for Innocent was ruthlessly destroyed by Pius VI.; and thus the world has lost one of Mantegna's masterpieces, executed while his genius was at its zenith. On his return to Mantua he finished the decorations of the Castello of the Gonzaghi, and completed his greatest surviving work, the "Triumph of Julius Cæsar."

By his wife, Nicolosia, the sister of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Mantegna had several children, one of whom, Francesco, adopted painting as a trade. The great artist was by temper arrogant and haughty; nor could he succeed in living peaceably with any of his neighbours. It appears that he spent habitually more money than he could well afford, freely indulging his taste for magnificence, and disbursing large sums in the purchase of curiosities. Long before his death his estate had been involved in debt; and after his decease, his sons were forced to sell the pictures in his studio for the payment of pressing creditors. He was buried in Alberti's church of S. Andrea at Mantua, in a chapel decorated at his own expense. Over the grave was placed a bronze bust, most noble in modelling and perfect in execution. The broad forehead with its deeply cloven furrows, the stern and piercing eyes, the large lips compressed with nervous energy, the massive nose, the strength of jaw and chin, and the superb clusters of the hair escaping from a laurel-wreath upon the royal head, are such as realise for us our notion of a Roman in the days of the Republic. Mantegna's own genius has inspired this masterpiece, which tradition assigns to the medallist Sperando Maglioli. Whoever wrought it, must have felt the incubation of the mighty painter's spirit, and have striven to express in bronze the character of his uncompromising art.

Of a different temperament, yet not wholly unlike Mantegna in a certain iron strength of artistic character, was Luca Signorelli, born about 1441 at Cortona. The supreme quality of Mantegna was studied purity of outline, severe and heightened style. As Landor is distinguished by concentration above all the English poets who have made trial of the classic Muse, so Mantegna holds a place apart among Italian painters because of his stern Roman self-control. Signorelli, on the contrary, made his mark by boldness, pushing experiment almost beyond the verge of truth, and approaching Michael Angelo in the hardihood of his endeavour to outdo nature. Vasari says of him, that "even Michael Angelo imitated the manner of Luca, as every one can see;" and indeed Signorelli anticipated the greatest master of the sixteenth century, not only in his profound study of human anatomy, but also in his resolution to express high thought and tragic passion by pure form, discarding all the minor charms of painting. Trained in the severe school of Piero della Francesca, he early learned to draw from the nude with boldness and accuracy; and to this point, too much neglected by his predecessors, he devoted the full powers of his maturity. Anatomy he practised, according to the custom of those days, in the graveyard or beneath the gibbet. There is a drawing by him in the Louvre of a stalwart man carrying upon his back the corpse of a youth. Both are naked. The motive seems to have been taken from some lazar-house. Life-long study of perspective in its application to the drawing of the figure, made the difficulties of foreshortening and the delineation of brusque attitude mere child's play to this audacious genius. The most rapid movement, the most perilous contortion of bodies falling through the air or flying, he depicted with hard, firmly-traced, unerring outline. If we dare to criticise the productions of a master so original and so accomplished, all we can say is that Signorelli revelled almost too wantonly in the display of hazardous posture, and that he sacrificed the passion of his theme to the display of science.^[207] Yet his genius comprehended great and tragic subjects, and to him belongs the credit in an age of ornament and pedantry of having made the human body a language for the utterance of all that is most weighty in the thought of man.

A story is told by Vasari which brings Signorelli very close to our sympathy, and enables us to understand the fascination of pure form he felt so deeply. "It is related of Luca that he had a son killed at Cortona, a youth of singular beauty in face and person, whom he had tenderly loved. In his grief the father caused the boy to be stripped naked, and with extraordinary constancy of soul, uttering no complaint and shedding no tear, he painted the portrait of his dead son, to the end that he might still be able, through the work of his own hand, to contemplate that which nature had given him, but which an adverse fortune had taken away." So passionate and ardent, so convinced of the indissoluble bond between the soul he loved in life and its dead tenement of clay, and withal so iron-nerved and stout of will, it behoved that man to be, who undertook in the plenitude of his power, at the age of sixty, to paint upon the walls of the chapel of S. Brizio at Orvieto the images of Doomsday, Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell.^[208]

It is a gloomy chapel in the Gothic cathedral of that forlorn Papal city—gloomy by reason of bad lighting, but more so because of the terrible shapes with which Signorelli has filled it^[209]. In no other work of the Italian Renaissance, except in the Sistine Chapel, has so much thought, engaged upon the most momentous subjects, been expressed with greater force by means more simple and with effect more overwhelming. Architecture, landscape, and decorative accessories of every kind, the usual padding of quattrocento pictures, have been discarded from the main compositions. The painter has relied solely upon his power of imagining and delineating the human form in every attitude, and under the most various conditions. Darting like hawks or swallows through the air, huddling together to shun the outpoured vials of the wrath of God, writhing with demons on the floor of Hell, struggling into new life from the clinging clay, standing beneath the footstool of the Judge, floating with lute and viol on the winds of Paradise, kneeling in prayer, or clasping "inseparable hands with joy and bliss in overmeasure for ever"—these multitudes of living beings, angelic, diabolic, bestial, human, crowd the huge spaces of the chapel walls. What makes the impression of controlling doom the more appalling, is that we comprehend the drama in its several scenes, while the chief actor, the divine Judge, at whose bidding the cherubs sound their clarions, and the dead arise, and weal and woe are portioned to the saved and damned, is Himself unrepresented.^[210] We breathe in the presence of embodied consciences, submitting, like our own, to an unseen inevitable will.

It would be doing Signorelli injustice at Orvieto to study only these great panels. The details with which he has filled all the vacant spaces above the chapel stalls and round the doorway, throw new light upon his power. The ostensible motive for this elaborate ornamentation is contained in the portraits of six poets, who are probably Homer, Virgil, Lucan, Horace, Ovid, and Dante, il sesto tra cotanto senno.^[211] But the portraits themselves, though vigorously conceived and remarkable for bold foreshortening, are the least part of the whole design. Its originality consists in the arabesques, medallions, and chiaroscuro bas-reliefs, where the human form, treated as absolutely plastic, supplies the sole decorative element. The pilasters by the doorway, for example, are composed, after the usual type of Italian grotteschi, in imitation of antique candelabra, with numerous stages for the exhibition of the artist's fancies. Unlike the work of Raphael in the Loggie, these pilasters of Signorelli show no birds or beasts, no flowers or foliage, fruits or fauns, no masks or sphinxes. They are crowded with naked men—drinking, dancing, leaning forward, twisting themselves into strange attitudes, and adapting their bodies to the several degrees of the framework. The same may be said of the arabesques around the portraits of the poets, where men, women, and children, some complete, some ending in foliage or in fish-tails, are lavished with a wild and terrible profusion. Hippogriffs and centaurs, sirens and dolphins, are here used as adjuncts to humanity. Amid this fantastic labyrinth of twisted forms we find medallions painted in chiaroscuro with subjects taken chiefly from Ovidian and Dantesque mythology. Here every attitude of men in combat and in motion has been studied from the nude, and multitudes of figures draped and undraped are compressed into the briefest compass. All but the human form is sternly eliminated; and the body itself is treated with a mastery and a boldness that prove Signorelli to have held its varied capabilities firmly in his brain. He could not have worked out all those postures from the living model. He played freely with his immense stores of knowledge; but his play was the pastime of a Prometheus. Each pose, however hazardous, carries conviction with it of sincerity and truth; the life and liberty of nature reign throughout. From the whole maze of interlaced and wrestling figures the terrible nature of the artist's genius shines forth. They are almost all strong men in the prime or past the prime of life, chosen for their salient display of vital structure. Signorelli was the first, and, with the exception of Michael Angelo, the last painter thus to use the body, without sentiment, without voluptuousness, without any second intention whatsoever, as the supreme decorative principle. In his absolute sincerity he made, as it were, a parade of hard and rugged types, scorning to introduce an element of beauty, whether sensuous or ideal, that should distract him from the study of the body in and for itself. This distinguishes him in the arabesques at Orvieto alike from Mantegna and Michael Angelo, from Correggio and Raphael, from Titian and Paolo Veronese.

This point is so important for its bearing on Renaissance art that I may be permitted to dilate at greater length on Signorelli's choice of types and treatment of form in general. Having a special predilection for the human body, he by no means confined himself to monotony in its presentation. On the contrary, we can trace many distinct grades of corporeal expression. First comes the abstract nude, illustrated by the "Resurrection" and the arabesques at Orvieto^[212]. Contemporary life, with all its pomp of costume and insolence of ruffling youth, is depicted in the "Fulminati" at Orvieto and in the "Soldiers of Totila" at Monte Oliveto^[213]. These transcripts from the courts of princes and camps of condottieri are invaluable as portraits of the lawless young men who filled Italy with the noise of their feuds and the violence of their adventures. They illustrate Matarazzo's Perugian chronicle better than any other Renaissance pictures; for in frescoes like those of Pinturicchio at Siena the same qualities are softened to suit the painter's predetermined harmony, whereas Signorelli rejoices in their pure untempered character^[214]. These, then, form a second stage. Third in degree we find the type of highly idealised adolescence reserved by Signorelli for his angels. All his science and his sympathy with real life are here subordinated to poetic feeling. It is a mistake to say that these angels are the young men of Umbria whom he loved to paint in their striped jackets, with the addition of wings to their shoulders. The radiant beings who tune their citherns on the clouds of Paradise, or scatter roses for elect souls, could not live and breathe in the fiery atmosphere of sensuous passions to which the Baglioni were habituated. A grave and solemn sense of beauty animates these fair male beings, clothed in voluminous drapery, with youthful faces and still earnest eyes. Their melody, like that of Milton, is severe. Nor are Signorelli's angelic beings of one uniform type like the angels of Fra Angelico. The athletic cherubs of the "Resurrection," breathing their whole strength into the trumpets that awake the dead; the mailed and winged warriors, keeping guard above the pit of "Hell," that none may break their prison-bars among the damned; the lute-players of "Paradise," with their almost feminine sobriety of movement; the flame-breathing seraphs of the day of doom; the "Gabriel" of Volterra, in whom strength is translated into swiftness:—these are the heralds, sentinels, musicians, executioners, and messengers of the celestial court; and each class is distinguished by appropriate physical characteristics. At the other end of the scale, forming a fourth grade, we may mention the depraved types of humanity chosen for his demons—those greenish, reddish, ochreish fiends of the "Inferno," whom Signorelli created by exaggerating the more grotesque qualities of the nude developed in his arabesques. We thus obtain four several degrees of form: the demoniac, the abstract nude, the adolescent beauty of young men copied from choice models, and the angelic.

Except in his angels, Signorelli was comparatively indifferent to what is commonly considered beauty. He was not careful to select his models, or to idealise their type. The naked human body, apart from facial distinction or refinement of form, contented him. Violent contrasts of light and shadow, accentuating the anatomical structure with rough and angular decision, give the effect of illustrative diagrams to his studies. Harmony of proportion and the magic of expression are sacrificed to energy emergent in a powerful physique. Redundant life, in sinewy limbs, in the proud carriage of the head upon the neck, in the sway of the trunk backward from the reins, the firmly planted calves and brawny thighs, the thick hair, broad shoulders, spare flanks, and massive gluteal muscles of a man of twenty-two or upwards, whose growth has been confined to the development of animal force, was what delighted him. Yet there is no coarseness or animalism properly so called in his style. He was attracted by the marvellous mechanism of the human frame—its goodliness regarded as the most highly organised of animate existences.

Owing, perhaps, to this exclusive predilection for organic life, Signorelli was not great as a colourist. His patches of blues and reds in the frescoes of Monte Oliveto are oppressively distinct; his use of dull brown for the shading of flesh imparts a disagreeable heaviness to his best modelled forms; nor did he often attain in his oil pictures to that grave harmony we admire in his "Last Supper" at Cortona. The world of light and colour was to him a comparatively untravelled land. It remained for other artists to raise these elements of pictorial expression to the height reached by Signorelli in his treatment of the nude.

Before quitting the frescoes at Orvieto, some attention should be paid to the medallions spoken of above, in special relation to the classicism of the earlier Renaissance. Scenes from Dante's "Purgatorio" and subjects from the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid are treated here in the same key; but the latter, since they engaged Signorelli's fancy upon Greek mythology, are the more important for our purpose. Two from the legend of "Orpheus" and two from that of "Proserpine" might be chosen as typical of the whole series. Mediæval intensity, curiously at variance with antique feeling, is discernible throughout. The satellites of Hades are gaunt and sinewy devils, eager to do violence to Eurydice. Pluto himself drives his jarring car-wheels up through the lava-blocks and flames of Etna with a fury and a vehemence we seek in vain upon antique sarcophagi. Ceres, wandering through Sicily in search of her lost daughter, is a gaunt witch with dishevelled hair, raising frantic hands to tear her cheeks; while the snakes that draw her chariot are no grave symbols of the germinating corn, but greedy serpents ready to spit fire against the ravishers of Proserpine. Thus the tranquillity and self-restraint of Greek art yield to a passionate and trenchant realisation of the actual romance. The most thrilling moments in the legend are selected for dramatic treatment, grace and beauty being exchanged for vivid presentation. A whole cycle of human experience separates these medallions from the antique bas-relief at Naples, where Hermes hands the veiled Eurydice to Orpheus, and all three are calm. That Signorelli, if he chose to do so, could represent a classic myth with more of classic feeling, is shown by his picture of "Pan Listening to Olympus"^[215]. The nymph, the vineleaf-girdled Faun, and the two shepherds, all undraped and drawn with subtle feeling for the melodies of line, render this work one of his most successful compositions.

It would be interesting to compare Signorelli's treatment of the antique with Mantegna's or Botticelli's. The visions of the pagan world, floating before the mind of all men in the fifteenth century, found very different interpreters in these three painters—Botticelli adding the quaint alloy of his own fancy, Signorelli imparting the semi-savagery of a terrible imagination, Mantegna, with the truest instinct and the firmest touch, confining himself to the processional pageantry of bas-relief. Yet, were this comparison to be instituted, we could hardly refrain from carrying it much further. Each great master of the Renaissance had his own relation to classical mythology. The mystic sympathies of "Leda and the Swan," as imaged severally by Lionardo and Michael Angelo; Correggio's romantic handling of the myths of "Danaë" and "Io;" Titian's and Tintoretto's rival pictures of "Bacchus and Ariadne;" Raphael's "Galatea;" Pollajuolo's "Hercules;" the "Europa" of Veronese; the "Circe" of Dosso Dossi; Palma's "Venus;" Sodoma's "Marriage of Alexander"—all these, to mention none but pictures familiar to every traveller in Italy, raise for the student of the classical Revival absorbing questions relative to the influences of pagan myths upon the modern imagination.

Signorelli was chiefly occupied, during the course of his long career, upon religious pictures; and the high place he occupies in the history of Renaissance culture is due partly to his free abandonment of conventional methods in treating sacred subjects. The Uffizzi Gallery contains a circular "Madonna" by his hand, with a row of naked men for background—the forerunner of Michael Angelo's famous "Holy Family." So far had art for art's sake already encroached upon the ecclesiastical domain. To discuss Signorelli's merits as a painter of altar-pieces would be to extend the space allotted to him far beyond its proper limits. It is not as a religious artist that he takes his rank, but as having powerfully promoted the rehabilitation of the body achieved for art by the Renaissance.

Unlike Mantegna, Signorelli never entered the service of a prince, though we have seen that he executed commissions for Lorenzo de' Medici and Pandolfo Petrucci. He bore a name which, if not noble, had been more than once distinguished in the annals of Tuscany. Residing at his native place, Cortona, he there enjoyed the highest reputation, and was frequently elected to municipal office. Concerning his domestic life very little is known, but what we do know is derived from an excellent source^[216]. His mother was the sister of Lazzaro, great-grandfather of Giorgio Vasari. In his biography of Signorelli, Vasari relates how, when he was himself a boy of eight, his illustrious cousin visited the house of the Vasari family at Arezzo; and hearing from little Giorgio's grammar-master that he spent his time in drawing figures, Luca turned to the child's father and said, "Antonio, since Giorgio takes after his family, you must by all means have him taught; for even though he should pay attention to literature as well, drawing cannot fail to be a source of utility, honour, and recreation to him, as it is to every man of worth." Luca's kindness deeply impressed the boy, who afterwards wrote the following description of his personal qualities: "He was a man of the most excellent habits, sincere and affectionate with his friends, sweet of conversation and amusing in society, above all things courteous to those who had need of his work, and easy in giving instruction to his pupils. He lived splendidly, and took delight in dressing handsomely. This excellent disposition caused him to be always held in highest veneration both in his own city and abroad."

To turn from Signorelli to Perugino is to plunge at once into a very different atmosphere^[217]. It is like quitting the rugged gorges of high mountains for a valley of the Southern Alps—still, pensive, beautiful, and coloured with reflections from an evening sky. Perugino knew exactly how to represent a certain mood of religious sentiment, blending meek acquiescence with a prayerful yearning of the impassioned soul. His Madonnas worshipping the infant Jesus in a tranquil Umbrian landscape, his angels ministrant, his pathetic martyrs with upturned holy faces, his sexless S. Sebastians and immaculate S. Michaels, display the perfection of art able by colour and by form to achieve within a narrow range what it desires. What this artist seems to have aimed at, was to create for the soul amid the pomps and passions of this world a resting-place of contemplation tenanted by saintly and seraphic beings. No pain comes near the folk of his celestial city; no longing poisons their repose; they are not weary, and the wicked trouble them no more. Their cheerfulness is no less perfect than their serenity; like the shades of Hellas, they have drunk Lethean waters from the river of content, and all remembrance of things sad or harsh has vanished from their minds. The quietude of holiness expressed in this ideal region was a legacy to Perugino from earlier Umbrian masters; but his technical supremacy in fresco-painting and in oils, his correct drawing within certain limits, and his refined sense of colour enabled him to realise it more completely than his less accomplished predecessors. In his best work the Renaissance set the seal of absolute perfection upon pietistic art.

We English are fortunate in possessing one of Perugino's sincerest devotional oil pictures^[218]. His frescoes of "S. Sebastian" at Panicale, and of the "Crucifixion" at Florence, are tolerably well known through reproductions^[219]; while the "Vision of S. Bernard" at Munich and the "Pietà" in the Pitti Gallery are familiar to all travelled students of Italian painting. These masterpieces belong to Perugino's best period, when his inspiration was fresh, and his enthusiasm for artistic excellence was still unimpaired; and when, as M. Rio thinks, the failure of his faith had not yet happened. It is only at Perugia, however, in the Sala del Cambio, that we are able to gauge the extent of his power and to estimate the value of his achievement beyond the pale of strictly religious themes.

Early in the course of his career Perugino seems to have become contented with a formal repetition of successful motives, and to have checked the growth of his genius by adhering closely to a prescribed cycle of effects. The praises of his patrons and the prosperity of his trade proved to his keen commercial sense that the raised ecstatic eyes, the upturned oval faces, the pale olive skin, the head inclined upon the shoulder, the thin fluttering hair, the ribands and the dainty dresses of his holy persons found great favour in Umbrian palaces and convents. Thenceforward he painted but little else; and when, in the Sala del Cambio, he was obliged to treat the representative heroes of Greek and Roman story, he adopted the same manner^[220]. Leonidas, the lionhearted Spartan, and Cato, the austere Roman, who preferred liberty to life, bend their mild heads like flowers in Perugino's frescoes, and gather up their drapery in studied folds with celestial delicacy. Jove is a reproduction of the Eterno Padre, conceived as a benevolent old man for a conventional painting of the "Trinity;" and Ganymede is a page-boy with the sweet submissive features of Tobias. Already Perugino had opened a manufactory of pietistic pictures, and was employing many pupils on his works. He coined money by fixing artificially beautiful faces upon artificially elegant figures, placing a row of these puppets in a landscape with calm sky behind them, and calling the composition by the name of some familiar scene. His inspiration was dead, his invention exhausted; his chief object seemed to be to make his trade thrive.

Perugino will always remain a problem to the psychologist who believes in physiognomy, as well as to the student of the passionate times in which he lived. His hard unsympathetic features in the portraits at Perugia and Florence do not belie, but rather win credence for Vasari's tales about his sordid soul.^[221] Local traditions and contemporary rumours, again, give colour to what Vasari relates about his infidelity; while the criminal records of Florence prove that he was not over-scrupulous to keep his hands from violence.^[222] How could such a man, we ask ourselves, have endured to pass a long life in the fabrication of devotional pictures? Whence did he derive the sentiment of masterpieces, for piety only equalled by those of Fra Angelico, either in his own nature or in the society of a city torn to pieces by the factions of the Baglioni? How, again, was it possible for an artist who at times touched beauty so ideal, to be contented with the stencilling by his pupils of conventional figures on canvases to which he gave his name? Taking these questions separately, we might reply that "there is no art to find the mind's construction in the face;" that painting in the sixteenth century was a trade regulated by the demand for particular wares; that men can live among ruffians without sharing their mood; that the artist and the moral being are separate, and may not be used to interpret each other. Yet, after giving due weight to such answers, Perugino, being what he was, living at the time he did, not as a recluse, but as a prosperous impresario of painting, and systematically devoting his powers to pietistic art, must be for us a puzzle. That the quietism of his highly artificial style should have been fashionable in Perugia, while the Baglioni were tearing each other to pieces, and the troops of the Vitelli and the Borgia were trampling upon Umbria, is one of the most striking paradoxes of an age rich in dramatic contradictions.

It is much to be regretted, with a view to solving the question of Perugino's personality in relation to his art, that his character does not emerge with any salience from the meagre notices we have received concerning him, and that we know but little of his private life. Vasari tells us that he married a very beautiful girl, and that one of his chief pleasures was to see this wife handsomely dressed at home and abroad. He often decked her out in clothes and jewels with his own hand. For the rest, we find in Perugino, far more than in either Mantegna or Signorelli, an instance of the simple Italian craftsman, employing numerous assistants, undertaking contract work on a large scale, and striking keen bargains with his employers. Both at Florence and at Perugia he opened a bottega; and by the exercise of his trade as a master-painter, he realised enough money to buy substantial estates in those cities, as well as in his birthplace.^[223] In all the greatest artworks of the age he took his part. Thus we find him painting in the Sistine Chapel between 1484 and 1486, treating with the commune of Orvieto for the completion of the chapel of S. Brizio in 1489, joining in the debate upon the façade of S. Maria del Fiore in 1491, giving his opinion upon the erection of Michael Angelo's "David" at Florence in 1504, and competing with Signorelli, Pinturicchio, and Bazzi for the decoration of the Stanze of the Vatican in 1508. The rising of brighter stars above the horizon during his lifetime somewhat dimmed his fame, and caused him much disquietude; yet neither Raphael nor Michael Angelo interfered with the demand for his pictures, which continued to be lively till the very year of his death. That he was jealous of these younger rivals, appears from the fact that he brought an action against Michael Angelo for having called his style stupid and antiquated. In the celebrated phrase cast at him by the blunt and scornful master of a new art-mystery^[224], we discern the abrupt line of division between time-honoured tradition and the maniera moderna of the full Renaissance. The old Titans had to yield their place before the new Olympian deities of Italian painting. There is something pathetic in the retirement of the grey-haired Perugino from Rome, to make way for the victorious Phoebean beauty of the boy Raphael.

The influence of Perugino upon Italian art was powerful though transitory. He formed a band of able pupils, among whom was the great Raphael; and though Raphael speedily abandoned his master's narrow footpath through the fields of painting, he owed to Perugino the invaluable benefit of training in solid technical methods and traditions of pure taste. From none of his elder contemporaries, with the exception of Fra Bartolommeo, could the young Raphael have learnt so much that was congenial to his early instincts. What, for example, might have befallen him if he had worked with Signorelli, it is difficult to imagine; for while nothing is more obvious on the one hand than Raphael's originality, his strong assimilative bias is scarcely less remarkable. The time has not yet come to speak of Raphael; nor will space suffice for detailed observations on his fellow-students in the workshop at Perugia. The place occupied by Perugino in the evolution of Italian painting is peculiar. In the middle of a positive and worldly age, declining fast to frigid scepticism and political corruption, he set the final touch of technical art upon the devotion transmitted from earlier and more enthusiastic centuries. The flower of Umbrian piety blossomed in the masterpieces of his youth, and faded into dryness in the affectations of his manhood. Nothing was left on the same line for his successors.

Among these, Bernardo Pinturicchio can here alone be mentioned. A thorough naturalist, though saturated with the mannerism of the Umbrian school, Pinturicchio was not distracted either by scientific or ideal aims from the clear and fluent presentation of contemporary manners and costumes. He is a kind of Umbrian Gozzoli, who brings us here and there in close relation to the men of his own time, and has in consequence a special value for the student of Renaissance life. His wall-paintings in the library of the cathedral of Siena are so well preserved that we need not seek elsewhere for better specimens of the decorative art most highly prized in the first years of the sixteenth century^[225]. These frescoes have a richness of effect and a vivacity of natural action, which, in spite of their superficiality, render them highly charming. The life of Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pius II., is here treated like a legend. There is no attempt at representing the dress of half a century anterior to the painter's date, or at rendering accurate historic portraiture. Both Pope and Emperor are romantically conceived, and each portion of the tale is told as though it were a fit in some popular ballad. So much remains of Perugian affectation as gives a kind of childlike grace to the studied attitudes and many-coloured groups of elegant young men.

We must always be careful to distinguish the importance of an artist considered as the exponent of his age from that which he may claim by virtue of some special skill or some peculiar quality of feeling. The art of Perugino, for example, throws but little light upon the Renaissance taken as a whole. Intrinsically valuable because of its technical perfection and its purity of sentiment, it was already in the painter's lifetime superseded by a larger and a grander manner. The progressive forces of the modern style found their channels outside him. This again is true of Francesco Raibolini, surnamed Francia from his master in the goldsmith's craft. Francia is known to Englishmen as one of the most sincerely pious of Christian painters by his incomparable picture of the "Dead Christ" in our National Gallery. The spirituality that renders Fra Angelico unintelligible to minds less ecstatically tempered than his own, is not found in such excess in Francia, nor does his work suffer from the insipidity of Perugino's affectation. Deep religious feeling is combined with physical beauty of the purest type in a masterpiece of tranquil grace. A greater degree of naïveté and naturalness compensates for the inferiority of Francia's to Perugino's supremely perfect handling. This is true of Francia's numerous pictures at Bologna; where indeed, in order to be rightly known, he should be studied by all lovers of the quattrocento style in its most delightful moments^[226]. For mastery over oil painting and for charm of colour Francia challenges comparison with what is best in Perugino, though he did not quite attain the same technical excellence.

One more painter must delay us yet awhile within the limits of the fifteenth century. Bartolommeo di Paolo del Fattorino, better known as Baccio della Porta or Fra Bartolommeo, forms at Florence the connecting link between the artists of the earlier Renaissance and the golden age^[227]. By chronological reckoning he is nearly a quarter of a century later than Lionardo da Vinci, and is the exact contemporary of Michael Angelo. As an artist, he has thoroughly outgrown the quattrocento style, and falls short only by a little of the greatest. In assigning him a place among the predecessors and precursors of the full Renaissance, I am therefore influenced rather by the range of subjects he selected, and by the character of his genius, than by calculations of time or estimate of ability.

Fra Bartolommeo was sent, when nine years old, into the workshop of Cosimo Rosselli, where he began his artist's life by colour-grinding, sweeping out the shop, and errand-running. It was in Cosimo's bottega that he made acquaintance with Mariotto Albertinelli, who became his intimate friend and fellow-worker. In spite of marked differences of character, disagreements upon the fundamental matters of politics and religion, and not unfrequent quarrels, these men continued to be comrades through the better part of their joint lives. Baccio was gentle, timid, yielding, and industrious. Mariotto was wilful, obstinate, inconsequent, and flighty, Baccio fell under the influence of Savonarola, professed himself a piagnone, and took the cowl of the Dominicans^[228]. Mariotto was a partisan of the Medici, an uproarious pallesco, and a loose liver, who eventually deserted the art of painting for the calling of an innkeeper. Yet so sweet was the temper of the Frate, and so firm was the bond of friendship established in boyhood between this ill-assorted couple, that they did not part company until 1512, three years before Mariotto's death and five before that of Bartolommeo. During their long association the task of designing fell upon the Frate, while Albertinelli took his orders and helped to work out his conceptions. Both were excellent craftsmen and consummate colourists, as is proved by the pictures executed by each unassisted. Albertinelli's "Salutation" in the Uffizzi yields no point of grace and vigour to any of his more distinguished coadjutor's paintings.

The great contributions made by Fra Bartolommeo to the art of Italy were in the double region of composition and colouring. In his justly celebrated fresco of S. Maria Nuova at Florence—a "Last Judgment" with a Christ enthroned amid a choir of Saints—he exhibited for the first time a thoroughly scientific scheme of grouping based on geometrical principles. Each part is perfectly balanced in itself, and yet is necessary to the structure of the whole. The complex framework may be subdivided into numerous sections no less harmoniously ordered than is the total scheme to which they are subordinated. Simple figures—the pyramid and the triangle, upright, inverted, and interwoven like the rhymes in a sonnet—form the basis of the composition. This system was adhered to by the Frate in all his subsequent works. To what extent it influenced the style of Raphael, will be afterwards discussed. As a colourist, Fra Bartolommeo was equal to the best of his contemporaries, and superior to any of his rivals in the school of Florence. Few painters of any age have combined harmony of tone so perfectly with brilliance and richness. It is a real joy to contemplate the pure and splendid folds of the white drapery he loved to place in the foreground of his altar-pieces. Solidity and sincerity distinguish his work in every detail, while his feeling is remarkable for elevation and sobriety. All that he lacks, is the boldness of imagination, the depth of passion, and the power of thought, that are indispensable to genius of the highest order. Gifted with a sympathetic and a pliant, rather than a creative and self-sustained nature, he was sensitive to every influence. Therefore we find him learning much in his youth from Lionardo, deriving a fresh impulse from Raphael, and endeavouring in his later life, after a visit to Rome in 1514, to "heighten his style," as the phrase went, by emulating Michael Angelo. The attempt to tread the path of Buonarroti was a failure. What Fra Bartolommeo sought to gain in majesty, he lost in charm. His was essentially a pure and gracious manner, upon which sublimity could not be grafted. The gentle soul, who dropped his weapon when the convent of S. Marco was besieged by the Compagnacci^[229], and who vowed, if heaven preserved him in the tumult, to become a monk, had none of Michael Angelo's terribilità. Without possessing some share of that spirit, it was vain to aggrandise the forms and mass the raiment of his prophets in imitation of the Sistine.

Nature made Fra Bartolommeo the painter of adoration^[230]. His masterpiece at Lucca—the "Madonna della Misericordia"—is a poem of glad worship, a hymn of prayerful praise. Our Lady stands elate, between earth and heaven, appealing to her Son for mercy. At her footstool are her suppliants, the men and women and little children of the city she has saved. The peril is past. Salvation has been won; and the song of thanksgiving ascends from all those massed and mingled forms in unison. Not less truly is the great unfinished picture of "Madonna surrounded by the Patron Saints of Florence" a poem of adoration^[231]. This painting was ordered by the Gonfalonier Piero Soderini, the man who dedicated Florence to Christ as King. He intended it to take its place in the hall of the Consiglio Grande, where Michael Angelo and Lionardo gained their earliest laurels. Before it could be finished, the Republic perished.^[232] "That," says Rio, "is the reason why he left but an imperfect work—for those at least who are only struck by what is wanting in it. Others will at first regard it with the interest attaching to unfinished poems, interrupted by the jailer's call or by the stern voice of the executioner. Then they will study it in all its details, in order to appreciate its beauties; and that appreciation will be the more perfect in proportion as a man is the more fully penetrated with its dominant idea, and with the attendant circumstances that bring this home to him. It is not against an abstract enemy that the intercession of the celestial powers is here invoked: it is not by a caprice of the painter or his patron that, in the group of central figures, S. Anne attracts attention before the Holy Virgin, not only by reason of her pre-eminence, but also through the intensity of her heavenward prayer, and again through her beauty, which far surpasses that of nearly all "Madonnas" painted by Fra Bartolommeo."^[233] But artist and patron had indeed good reason, in this crisis of the Commonwealth, to select as the most eminent advocate for Florence at the bar of Heaven that saint, on whose day, July 26, 1343, had been celebrated the emancipation of the city from its servitude to Walter of Brienne.

The great event of Fra Bartolommeo's life was the impression produced on him by Savonarola.^[234] Having listened to the Dominican's terrific denunciations of worldliness and immorality, he carried his life studies to the pyre of vanities, resolved to assume the cowl, and renounced his art. Between 1499, when he was engaged in painting the "Last Judgment" of S. Maria Nuova, and 1506, he is supposed never to have touched the pencil. When he resumed it Savonarola had been burned for heresy, and Fra Bartolommeo was a brother in his convent of S. Marco. Savonarola has sometimes been described as an iconoclast, obstinately hostile to the fine arts. This is by no means a true account of the crusade he carried on against the pagan sensuality of his contemporaries. He desired that art should remain the submissive handmaid of the Church and the willing servant of pure morality. While he denounced the heathenism of the style in vogue at Florence, and forbade the study of the nude, he strove to encourage religious painting, and established a school for its exercise in the cloister of S. Marco. It was in this monastic bottega that Fra Bartolommeo, in concert with his friend Albertinelli, worked for the benefit of the convent after the year 1506. The reforms Savonarola attempted in the fine arts as in manners, by running counter to the tendencies of the Renaissance at a moment when society was too corrupt to be regenerated, and the passion for antiquity was too powerful to be restrained, proved of necessity ineffective. It may further be said that the limitations he imposed would have been fatal to the free development of art if they had been observed.

Several painters, besides Fra Baccio, submitted to Savonarola's influence. Among these the most distinguished were the pure and gentle Lorenzo di Credi and Sandro Botticelli, who, after the great preacher's death, is said to have abandoned painting. Neither Lorenzo di Credi nor Fra Baccio possessed a portion of the prophet's fiery spirit. Had that but found expression in their cloistral pictures, one of the most peculiar and characteristic flowers of art the world has ever known, would then have bloomed in Florence. The mantle of Savonarola, however, if it fell upon any painter, fell on Michael Angelo, and we must seek an echo of the friar's thunders in the Sistine Chapel. Fra Bartolommeo was too tender and too timid. The sublimities of tragic passion lay beyond his scope. Though I have ventured to call him the painter of adoration, he did not feel even this movement of the soul with the intensity of Fra Angelico. In the person of S. Dominic kneeling beneath the cross Fra Angelico painted worship as an ecstasy, wherein the soul goes forth with love and pain and yearning beyond any power of words or tears or music to express what it would utter. To these heights of the ascetic ideal Fra Bartolommeo never soared. His sobriety bordered upon the prosaic.

We have now reached the great age of the Italian Renaissance, the age in which, not counting for the moment Venice, four arch-angelic natures gathered up all that had been hitherto achieved in art since the days of Pisano and Giotto, adding such celestial illumination from the sunlight of their inborn genius that in them the world for ever sees what art can do. Lionardo da Vinci was born in Valdarno in 1452, and died in France in 1519. Michael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Caprese, in the Casentino, in 1475, and died at Borne in 1564, having outlived the lives of his great peers by nearly half a century. Raphael Santi was born at Urbino in 1483, and died in Rome in 1520. Antonio Allegri was born at Correggio in 1494, and died there in 1534. To these four men, each in his own degree and according to his own peculiar quality of mind, the fulness of the Renaissance, in its power and freedom, was revealed. They entered the inner shrine, where dwelt the spirit of their age, and bore to the world without the message each of them had heard. In their work posterity still may read the meaning of that epoch, differently rendered according to the difference of gifts in each consummate artist, but comprehended in its unity by study of the four together. Lionardo is the wizard or diviner; to him the Renaissance offers her mystery and lends her magic. Raphael is the Phoebean singer; to him the Renaissance reveals her joy and dowers him with her gift of melody. Correggio is the Ariel or Faun; he has surprised laughter upon the face of the universe, and he paints this laughter in ever-varying movement. Michael Angelo is the prophet and Sibylline seer; to him the Renaissance discloses the travail of her spirit; him she endues with power; he wrests her secret, voyaging, like an ideal Columbus, the vast abyss of thought alone. In order that this revelation of the Renaissance in painting should be complete, it is necessary to add a fifth power to these four—that of the Venetian masters, who are the poets of carnal beauty, the rhetoricians of mundane pomp, the impassioned interpreters of all things great and splendid in the pageant of the outer world. As Venice herself, by type of constitution and historical development, remained sequestered from the rest of Italy, so her painters demand separate treatment.^[235] It is enough, therefore, for the present to remember that without the note they utter the chord of the Renaissance lacks its harmony.

Lionardo, the natural son of Messer Pietro, notary of Florence and landed proprietor at Vinci, was so beautiful of person that no one, says Vasari, has sufficiently extolled his charm; so strong of limb that he could bend an iron ring or horse-shoe between his fingers; so eloquent of speech that those who listened to his words were fain to answer "Yes" or "No" as he thought fit. This child of grace and persuasion was a wonderful musician. The Duke of Milan sent for him to play upon his lute and improvise Italian canzoni. The lute he carried was of silver, fashioned like a horse's head, and tuned according to acoustic laws discovered by himself. Of the songs he sang to its accompaniment none have been preserved. Only one sonnet remains to show of what sort was the poetry of Lionardo, prized so highly by the men of his own generation. This, too, is less remarkable for poetic beauty than for sober philosophy expressed with singular brevity of phrase.^[236]

This story of Da Vinci's lute might be chosen as a parable of his achievement. Art and science were never separated in his work; and both were not unfrequently subservient to some fanciful caprice, some bizarre freak of originality. Curiosity and love of the uncommon ruled his nature. By intuition and by persistent interrogation of nature he penetrated many secrets of science; but he was contented with the acquisition of knowledge. Once found, he had but little care to distribute the results of his investigations; at most he sought to use them for purposes of practical utility.^[237] Even in childhood he is said to have perplexed his teachers by propounding arithmetical problems. In his maturity he carried anatomy further than Delia Torre; he invented machinery for water-mills and aqueducts; he devised engines of war, discovered the secret of conical rifle-bullets, adapted paddle-wheels to boats, projected new systems of siege artillery, investigated the principles of optics, designed buildings, made plans for piercing mountains, raising churches, connecting rivers, draining marshes, clearing harbours.^[238] There was no branch of study whereby nature through the effort of the inquisitive intellect might be subordinated to the use of man, of which he was not master. Nor, richly gifted as was Lionardo, did he trust his natural facility. His patience was no less marvellous than the quickness of his insight. He lived to illustrate the definition of genius as the capacity for taking infinite pains.

While he was a boy, says Vasari, Lionardo modelled in terra-cotta certain heads of women smiling. This was in the workshop of Verocchio, who had already fixed a smile on David's face in bronze. When an old man, he left "Mona Lisa" on the easel not quite finished, the portrait of a subtle, shadowy, uncertain smile. This smile, this enigmatic revelation of a movement in the soul, this seductive ripple on the surface of the human personality, was to Lionardo a symbol of the secret of the world, an image of the universal mystery. It haunted him all through his life, and innumerable were the attempts he made to render by external form the magic of this fugitive and evanescent charm.

Through long days he would follow up and down the streets of Florence or of Milan beautiful unknown faces, learning them by heart, interpreting their changes of expression, reading the thoughts through the features. These he afterwards committed to paper. We possess many such sketches—a series of ideal portraits, containing each an unsolved riddle that the master read; a procession of shadows, cast by reality, that, entering the camera lucida of the artist's brain, gained new and spiritual quality.^[239] In some of them his fancy seems to be imprisoned in the labyrinths of hair; in others the eyes deep with feeling or hard with gemlike brilliancy have caught it, or the lips that tell and hide so much, or the nostrils quivering with momentary emotion. Beauty, inexpressive of inner meaning, must, we conceive, have had but slight attraction for him. We do not find that he drew "a fair naked body" for the sake of its carnal charm; his hasty studies of the nude are often faulty, mere memoranda of attitude and gesture. The human form was interesting to him either scientifically or else as an index to the soul. Yet he felt the influence of personal loveliness His favourite pupil Salaino was a youth "of singular grace, with curled and waving hair, a feature of personal beauty by which Lionardo was always greatly pleased." Hair, the