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 mediaeval 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. Trinita 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 Monarchia," 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 citta, 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:

[161] See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 12.

[162] See Vol. II., Revival of Learning, pp. 122-129.

[163] His real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, of the family of Scheggia. Masaccio means in Tuscan, "Great hulking Tom," just as Masolino, his supposed master and fellow-worker, means "Pretty little Tom." Masolino was Tommaso di Cristofero Fini, born in 1384 in S. Croce. It is now thought that we have but little of his authentic work except the frescoes at Castiglione di Olona, near Milan. Masaccio was born at San Giovanni, in the upper valley of the Arno, in 1402. He died at Borne in 1429.

[164] His family name was Doni. He was born about 1396, and died at the age of about 73. He got his name Uccello from his partiality for painting birds, it is said.

[165] See above, Chapter III, Andrea Verocchio, for what has been said about Verocchio's "David."

[166] A drawing made in red chalk for this "Dream of Constantine" has been published in facsimile by Ottley, in his Italian School of Design. He wrongly attributes it, however, to Giorgione, and calls it a "Subject Unknown."

[167] The one in S. Francesco at Rimini, the other in the Uffizzi.

[168] Two angels have recently been published by the Arundel Society who have also copied Melozzo's wall-painting of Sixtus IV. in the Vatican. It is probable that the picture in the Royal Collection at Windsor, of Duke Frederick of Urbino listening to the lecture of a Humanist, is also a work of Melozzo's, much spoiled by re-painting. See Vol. II., Revival of Learning, p. 220.

[169] Muratori, vol. xxiv. 1181.

[170] For Ciriac of Ancona, see Vol. II., Revival of Learning, p. 113.

[171] The services rendered by Squarcione to art have been thoroughly discussed by Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Painting in North Italy, vol. i. chap. 2. I cannot but think that they underrate the importance of his school.

[172] He was born between 1360 and 1370, and he settled at Florence about 1422, where he opened a bottega in S. Trinita. In 1423 he painted his masterpiece, the "Adoration of the Magi," now exhibited in the Florentine Academy of Arts.

[173] See, for instance, the valuable portraits of the Medicean family with Picino and Poliziano, in the fresco of the "Tower of Babel" at Pisa.

[174] L'Art Chretien, vol. ii. p. 397.

[175] The same remark might be made about the Venetian Bonifazio. It is remarkable that the "Adoration of the Magi" was always a favourite subject with painters of this calibre.

[176] I may refer to the picture of the hunters in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford, the "Vintage of Noah" at Pisa, the attendants of the Magi in the Riccardi Palace, and the Carola in the "Marriage of Jacob and Rachel" at Pisa.

[177] "Stories of Isaac and Ishmael and of Jacob and Esau" at Pisa, and "Story of S. Augustine" at San Gemignano. Nothing can be prettier than the school children in the latter series. The group of the little boy, horsed upon a bigger boy's back for a whipping, is one of the most natural episodes in painting.

[178] Riccardi Chapel.

[179] For an example, the picture of Madonna worshipping the infant Christ upheld by two little angels in the Uffizzi.

[180] In the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence.

[181] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. chap. 19. Nothing was more common in the practice of Italian arts than for pupils to take their names from their masters, in the same way as they took them from their fathers, by the prefix di or otherwise.

[182] The most simply beautiful of Filippino's pictures is the oil-painting in the Badia at Florence, which represents Madonna attended by angels dictating the story of her life to S. Bernard. In this most lovely religious picture Filippino comes into direct competition with Perugino (see the same subject at Munich), without suffering by the contrast. The type of Our lady, striven after by Botticelli and other masters of his way of feeling, seems to me more thoroughly attained by Filippino than by any of his fellow-workers. She is a woman acquainted with grief and nowise distinguished by the radiance of her beauty among the daughters of earth. It is measureless love for the mother of his Lord that makes S. Bernard bow before her with eyes of wistful adoration and hushed reverence.

[183] The study of the fine arts offers few subjects of more curious interest than the vicissitudes through which painters of the type of Botticelli, not absolutely and confessedly in the first rank, but attractive by reason of their relation to the spirit of their age, and of the seal of intimite set upon their work have passed. In the last century and the beginning of this, our present preoccupation with Botticelli would have passed for a mild lunacy, because he has none of the qualities then most in vogue and most enthusiastically studied, and because the moment in the history of culture he so faithfully represents, was then but little understood. The prophecy of Mr. Ruskin, the tendencies of our best contemporary art in Mr. Burne Jones's painting, the specific note of our recent fashionable poetry, and, more than all, our delight in the delicately poised psychological problems of the middle Renaissance, have evoked a kind of hero-worship for this excellent artist and true poet.

[184] A friend, writing to me from Italy, speaks thus of Botticelli, and of the painters associated with him: "When I ask myself what it is I find fascinating in him—for instance, which of his pictures, or what element in them—I am forced to admit that it is the touch of paganism in him, the fairy-story element, the echo of a beautiful lapsed mythology which he has found the means of transmitting." The words I have printed in italics seem to me very true. At the same time we must bear in mind that the scientific investigation of nature had not in the fifteenth century begun to stand between the sympathetic intellect and the outer world. There was still the possibility of that "lapsed mythology," the dream of poets and the delight of artists, seeming positively the best form of expression for sentiments aroused by nature.

[185] De Rerum Natura, lib. v. 737.

[186] The rose-tree background in a Madonna belonging to Lord Elcho is a charming instance of the value given to flowers by careful treatment.

[187] I cannot bring myself to accept Mr. Pater's reading of the Madonna's expression. It seems to me that Botticelli meant to portray the mingled awe and tranquillity of a mortal mother chosen for the Son of God. He appears to have sometimes aimed at conveying more than painting can compass; and, since he had not Lionardo's genius, he gives sadness, mournfulness, or discontent, for some more subtle mood. Next to the Madonna of the Uffizzi, Botticelli's loveliest religious picture to my mind is the "Nativity" belonging to Mr. Fuller Maitland. Poetic imagination in a painter has produced nothing more graceful and more tender than the dance of angels in the air above, and the embracement of the angels and the shepherds on the lawns below.

[188] In the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice. I do not mention this picture as a complete pendant to Botticelli's famous tondo. The faces of S. Catherine and Madonna, however, have something of the rarity that is so striking in that work.

[189] I might mention stanzas 122-124 of Poliziano's Giostra, describing Venus in the lap of Mars; or stanzas 99-107, describing the birth of Venus; and from Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, I might quote the episode of Rinaldo's punishment by Love (lib. ii. canto xv. 43), or the tale of Silvanella and Narcissus (lib. ii. canto xvii. 49).

[190] I hope to make use of this passage in a future section of my work on the Italian Poetry of the Renaissance. Therefore I pass by this portion of Piero's art-work now.

[191] Uffizzi Gallery.

[192] See the bas-relief upon the pedestal of his "Perseus" in the Loggia de' Lanzi.

[193] In the National Gallery.

[194] His family name was Domenico di Currado di Doffo Bigordi. He probably worked during his youth and early manhood as a goldsmith and got his artist's name from the trade of making golden chaplets for the Florentine women. See Vasari, vol. v. p. 66.

[195] What, after all, remains the grandest quality of Ghirlandajo is his powerful drawing of characteristic heads. They are as various as they are vigorous. What a nation of strong men must the Florentines have been, we feel while gazing at his frescoes.

[196] In many houses he painted roundels with his own hand, and of naked women plenty.



CHAPTER VI

PAINTING

Two Periods in the True Renaissance—Andrea Mantegna—His Statuesque Design—His Naturalism—Roman Inspiration—Triumph of Julius Caesar—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 Caesar'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 Maenads. 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 Caesar."

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. Mediaeval 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 "Danae" 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 "Pieta" 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 facade 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 AEneas 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 naivete 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 terribilita. 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.