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 most mysterious of human things, the most manifold in form and hue, snakelike in its subtlety for the entanglement of souls, had naturally supreme attractiveness for the magician of the arts.

With like energy Lionardo bent himself to divine the import of ugliness. Whole pages of his sketch-book are filled with squalid heads of shrivelled crones and ghastly old men—with idiots, goitred cretins, criminals, and clowns. It was not that he loved the horrible for its own sake; but he was determined to seize character, to command the gamut of human physiognomy from ideal beauty down to forms bestialised by vice and disease. The story related by Giraldi concerning the head of Judas in the "Cenacolo" at Milan, sufficiently illustrates the method of Lionardo in creating types and the utility of such caricatures as his notebooks contain.[240]

It is told that he brought into his room one day a collection of reptiles—lizards, newts, toads, vipers, efts—all creatures that are loathsome to the common eye. These, by the magic of imagination, he combined into a shape so terrible that those who saw it shuddered. Medusa's snake-enwoven head exhaling poisonous vapour from the livid lips; Leda, swanlike beside her swan lover; Chimaera, in whom many natures mingled and made one; the conflict of a dragon and a lion; S. John conceived not as a prophet but as a vine-crowned Faun, the harbinger of joy:—over pictorial motives of this kind, attractive by reason of their complexity or mystery, he loved to brood; and to this fascination of a sphinx-like charm we owe some of his most exquisite drawings. Lionardo more than any other artist who has ever lived (except perhaps his great predecessor Leo Battista Alberti) felt the primal sympathies that bind men to the earth, their mother, and to living things, their brethren.[241] Therefore the borderland between humanity and nature allured him with a spell half aesthetic and half scientific. In the dawn of Hellas this sympathetic apprehension of the world around him would have made him a supreme mythopoet. In the dawn of the modern world curiosity claimed the lion's share of his genius: nor can it be denied that his art suffered by this division of interests. The time was not yet come for accurate physiological investigation, or for the true birth of the scientific spirit; and in any age it would have been difficult for one man to establish on a sound basis discoveries made in so many realms as those explored by Lionardo. We cannot, therefore, but regret that he was not more exclusively a painter. If, however, he had confined his activity to the production of works equal to the "Cenacolo," we should have missed the most complete embodiment in one personality of the twofold impulses of the Renaissance and of its boundless passion for discovery.

Lionardo's turn for physical science led him to study the technicalities of art with fervent industry. Whatever his predecessors had acquired in the knowledge of materials, the chemistry of colours, the mathematics of composition, the laws of perspective, and the illusions of chiaroscuro, he developed to the utmost. To find a darker darkness and a brighter brightness than had yet been shown upon the painter's canvas; to solve problems of foreshortening; to deceive the eye by finely graduated tones and subtle touches; to submit the freest play of form to simple figures of geometry in grouping, were among the objects he most earnestly pursued. At the same time his deep feeling for all things that have life, gave him new power in the delineation of external nature. The branching of flower-stems, the outlines of fig-leaves, the attitudes of beasts and birds in motion, the arching of the fan-palm, were rendered by him with the same consummate skill as the dimple on a cheek or the fine curves of a young man's lips.[242] Wherever he perceived a difficulty, he approached and conquered it. Love, which is the soul of art—Love, the bondslave of Beauty and the son of Poverty by Craft—led him to these triumphs. He used to buy caged birds in the marketplace that he might let them loose. He was attached to horses, and kept a sumptuous stable; and these he would draw in eccentric attitudes, studying their anatomy in detail for his statue of Francesco Sforza.[243] In the "Battle of the Standard," known to us only by a sketch of Rubens,[244] he gave passions to the horse—not human passion, nor yet merely equine—but such as horses might feel when placed upon a par with men. In like manner the warriors are fiery with bestial impulses—leonine fury, wolfish ferocity, fox-like cunning. Their very armour takes the shape of monstrous reptiles. To such an extent did the interchange of human and animal properties haunt Lionardo's fancy.

From what has been already said we shall be better able to understand Lionardo's love of the bizarre and grotesque. One day a vine-dresser brought him a very curious lizard. The master fitted it with wings injected with quicksilver to give them motion as the creature crawled. Eyes, horns, and a beard, a marvellous dragon's mask, were placed upon its head. This strange beast lived in a cage, where Lionardo tamed it; but no one, says Vasari, dared so much as to look at it.[245] On quaint puzzles and perplexing schemes he mused a good part of his life away. At one time he was for making wings to fly with; at another he invented ropes that should uncoil, strand by strand; again, he devised a system of flat corks, by means of which to walk on water.[246] One day, after having scraped the intestines of a sheep so thin that he could hold them in the hollow of his hand, he filled them with wind from a bellows, and blew and blew until the room was choked, and his visitors had to run into corners. Lionardo told them that this was a proper symbol of genius.

Such stories form what may be called the legend of Lionardo's life; and some of them seem simple, others almost childish.[247] They illustrate what is meant when we call him the wizard of the Renaissance. Art, nature, life, the mysteries of existence, the infinite capacity of human thought, the riddle of the world, all that the Greeks called Pan, so swayed and allured him that, while he dreamed and wrought and never ceased from toil, he seemed to have achieved but little. The fancies of his brain were, perhaps, too subtle and too fragile to be made apparent to the eyes of men. He was wont, after years of labour, to leave his work still incomplete, feeling that he could not perfect it as he desired: yet even his most fragmentary sketches have a finish beyond the scope of lesser men. "Extraordinary power," says Vasari, "was in his case conjoined with remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness and magnanimous daring." Yet he was constantly accused of indolence and inability to execute.[248] Often and often he made vast preparations and accomplished nothing. It is well known how the Prior of S. Maria delle Grazie complained that Lionardo stood for days looking at his fresco, and for weeks never came near it; how the monks of the Annunziata at Florence were cheated out of their painting, for which elaborate designs had yet been made; how Leo X., seeing him mix oils with varnish to make a new medium, exclaimed, "Alas! this man will do nothing; he thinks of the end before he makes a beginning." A good answer to account for the delay was always ready on the painter's lips, as that the man of genius works most when his hands are idlest; Judas, sought in vain through all the thieves' resorts in Milan, is not found; I cannot hope to see the face of Christ except in Paradise. Again, when an equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza had been modelled in all its parts, another model was begun because Da Vinci would fain show the warrior triumphing over a fallen foe.[249] The first motive seemed to him tame; the second was unrealisable in bronze. "I can do anything possible to man," he wrote to Lodovico Sforza, "and as well as any living artist either in sculpture or painting." But he would do nothing as taskwork, and his creative brain loved better to invent than to execute.[250] "Of a truth," continues his biographer, "there is good reason to believe that the very greatness of his most exalted mind, aiming at more than could be effected, was itself an impediment; perpetually seeking to add excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection. This was without doubt the true hindrance, so that, as our Petrarch has it, the work was retarded by desire." At the close of that cynical and positive century, the spirit whereof was so well expressed by Cosimo de' Medici,[251] Lionardo set before himself aims infinite instead of finite. His designs of wings to fly with symbolise his whole endeavour. He believed in solving the insoluble; and nature had so richly dowered him in the very dawntime of discovery, that he was almost justified in this delusion. Having caught the Proteus of the world, he tried to grasp him; but the god changed shape beneath his touch. Having surprised Silenus asleep, he begged from him a song; but the song Silenus sang was so marvellous in its variety, so subtle in its modulations, that Lionardo could do no more than recall scattered phrases. His Proteus was the spirit of the Renaissance. The Silenus from whom he forced the song was the double nature of man and of the world.

By ill chance it happened that Lionardo's greatest works soon perished. His cartoon at Florence disappeared. His model for Sforza's statue was used as a target by French bowmen. His "Last Supper" remains a mere wreck in the Convent delle Grazie. Such as it is, blurred by ill-usage and neglect, more blurred by impious re-painting, that fresco must be seen by those who wish to understand Da Vinci. It has well been called the compendium of all his studies and of all his writings; and, chronologically, it is the first masterpiece of the perfected Renaissance.[252] Other painters had represented the Last Supper as a solemn prologue to the Passion, or as the mystical inauguration of the greatest Christian sacrament.[253] But none had dared to break the calm of the event by a dramatic action. The school of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Ghirlandajo, Perugino, even Signorelli, remained within the sphere of symbolical suggestion; and their work gained in dignity what it lost in intensity. Lionardo combined both. He undertook to paint a moment, to delineate the effect of a single word upon twelve men seated at a table, and to do this without sacrificing the tranquillity demanded by ideal art, and without impairing the divine majesty of Him from whose lips that word has fallen. The time has long gone by for detailed criticism or description of a painting known to everybody. It is enough to observe that the ideal representation of a dramatic moment, the life breathed into each part of the composition, the variety of the types chosen to express varieties of character, and the scientific distribution of the twelve Apostles in four groups of three around the central Christ, mark the appearance of a new spirit of power and freedom in the arts. What had hitherto been treated with religious timidity, with conventional stiffness, or with realistic want of grandeur, was now humanised and at the same time transported into a higher intellectual region; and though Lionardo discrowned the Apostles of their aureoles, he for the first time in the history of painting created a Christ not unworthy to be worshipped as the praesens Deus. We know not whether to admire most the perfection of the painter's art or his insight into spiritual things.[254]

If we are forced to feel that, with Da Vinci, accomplishment fell short of power and promise, the case is very different with Raphael. In him there was no perplexity, no division of interests. He was fascinated by no insoluble mystery and absorbed by no seductive problems. His faculty and his artistic purpose were exactly balanced, adequate, and mutually supporting. He saw by intuition what to do, and he did it without let or hindrance, exercising from his boyhood till his early death an unimpeded energy of pure productiveness. Like Mozart, to whom he bears in many respects a remarkable resemblance, Raphael was gifted with inexhaustible fertility and with unwearied industry. Like Mozart, again, he had a nature which converted everything to beauty. Thought, passion, emotion, became in his art living melody. We almost forget his strength in admiration of his grace; the travail of his intellect is hidden by the serenity of his style. There is nothing over-much in any portion of his work, no sense of effort, no straining of a situation, not even that element of terror needful to the true sublime. It is as though the spirit of young Greece had lived in him again, purifying his taste to perfection and restraining him from the delineation of things stern or horrible.

Raphael found in this world nothing but its joy, and communicated to his ideal the beauty of untouched virginity. Brescia might be sacked with sword and flame. The Baglioni might hew themselves to pieces in Perugia. The plains of Ravenna might flow with blood. Urbino might change masters and obey the viperous Duke Valentino. Raphael, meanwhile, working through his short May-life of less than twenty [Handwritten: 40] years, received from nature and from man a message that was harmony unspoiled by one discordant note. His very person was a symbol of his genius. Lionardo was beautiful but stately, with firm lips and penetrating glance; he conquered by the magnetism of an incalculable personality. The loveliness of Raphael was fair and flexible, fascinating not by power or mystery, but by the winning charm of open-hearted sweetness. To this physical beauty, rather delicate than strong, he united spiritual graces of the most amiable nature. He was gentle, docile, modest, ready to oblige, free from jealousy, binding all men to him by his cheerful courtesy.[255] In morals he was pure. Indeed, judged by the lax standard of those times, he might be called almost immaculate. His intellectual capacity, in all that concerned the art of painting, was unbounded; but we cannot place him among the many-sided heroes of the Renaissance. What he attempted in sculpture, though elegant, is comparatively insignificant; and the same may be said about his buildings. As a painter he was capable of comprehending and expressing all things without excess or sense of labour. Of no other artist do we feel that he was so instinctively, unerringly right in what he thought and did.

Among his mental faculties the power of assimilation seems to have been developed to an extraordinary degree. He learned the rudiments of his art in the house of his father Santi at Urbino, where a Madonna is still shown—the portrait of his mother, with a child, perhaps the infant Raphael, upon her lap. Starting, soon after his father's death, as a pupil of Perugino, he speedily acquired that master's manner so perfectly that his earliest works are only to be distinguished from Perugino's by their greater delicacy, spontaneity, and inventiveness. Though he absorbed all that was excellent in the Peruginesque style, he avoided its affectations, and seemed to take departure for a higher flight from the most exquisite among his teacher's early paintings. Later on, while still a lad, he escaped from Umbrian conventionality by learning all that was valuable in the art of Masaccio and Fra Bartolommeo. To the latter master, himself educated by the influence of Lionardo, Raphael owed more, perhaps, than to any other of his teachers. The method of combining figures in masses, needful to the general composition, while they preserve a subordinate completeness of their own, had been applied with almost mathematical precision by the Frate in his fresco at S. Maria Nuova.[256] It reappears in all Raphael's work subsequent to his first visit to Florence[257] (1504-1506). So great, indeed, is the resemblance of treatment between the two painters that we know not well which owed the other most. Many groups of women and children in the Stanze, for example—especially in the "Miracle of Bolsena" and the "Heliodorus"—seem almost identical with Fra Bartolommeo's "Madonna della Misericordia" at Lucca. Finally, when Raphael settled in Rome, he laid himself open to the influence of Michael Angelo, and drank in the classic spirit from the newly discovered antiques. Here at last it seemed as though his native genius might suffer from contact with the potent style of his great rival; and there are many students of art who feel that Raphael's later manner was a declension from the divine purity of his early pictures. There is, in fact, a something savouring of overbloom in the Farnesina frescoes, as though the painter's faculty had been strained beyond its natural force. Muscles are exaggerated to give the appearance of strength, and open mouths are multiplied to indicate astonishment and action. These faults may be found even in the Cartoons. Yet who shall say that Raphael's power was on the decline, or that his noble style was passing into mannerism, after studying both the picture of the "Transfiguration" and the careful drawings from the nude prepared for this last work?

So delicate was the assimilative tendency in Raphael, that what he learned from all his teachers, from Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Masaccio, Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and the antique, was mingled with his own style without sacrifice of individuality. Inferior masters imitated him, and passed their pictures off upon posterity as Raphael's; but to mistake a genuine piece of his painting for the performance of another is almost impossible. Each successive step he made was but a liberation of his genius, a stride toward the full expression of the beautiful he saw and served. He was never an eclectic. The masterpieces of other artists taught him how to comprehend his own ideal.

Raphael is not merely a man, but a school. Just as in his genius he absorbed and comprehended many diverse styles, so are many worthy craftsmen included in his single name. Fresco-painters, masters of the easel, workmen in mosaic and marquetrie, sculptors, builders, arras-weavers, engravers, decorators of ceilings and of floors, all laboured under his eye, receiving designs from, his hand, and executing what was called thereafter by his name.[258] It was thus partly by his facility and energy, partly by the use he made of other men, that Raphael was able to achieve so much. In the Vatican he covered the walls and ceilings of the Stanze with historical and symbolical frescoes that embrace the whole of human knowledge. The cramping limits of ecclesiastical tradition are transcended. The synod of the antique sages finds a place beside the synod of the Fathers and the company of Saints. Parnassus and the allegory of the virtues front each other. The legend of Marsyas and the mythus of the Fall are companion pictures. A new catholicity, a new orthodoxy of the beautiful, appears. The Renaissance in all its breadth and liberality of judgment takes ideal form. Nor is there any sense of discord; for the genius of Raphael views both revelations, Christian and pagan, from a point of view of art above them. To his pure and unimpeded faculty the task of translating motives so diverse into mutually concordant shapes was easy. On the domed ceilings of the Loggie he painted sacred history in a series of exquisitely simple compositions, known as Raphael's Bible. The walls and pilasters were adorned with arabesques that anticipated the discovery of Pompeii, and surpassed the best of Roman frescoes in variety and freedom. With his own hands he coloured the incomparable "Triumph of Galatea" in Agostino Chigi's villa on the Tiber, while his pupils traced the legend of Cupid and Psyche from his drawings on the roof of the great banquet hall. Remaining within the circuit of Rome, we may turn from the sibyls of S. Maria della Pace to the genii of the planets in S. Maria del Popolo, from the "Violin-player" of the Sciarra palace to the "Transfiguration" in the Vatican: wherever we go, we find the masterpieces of this youth, so various in conception, so equal in performance. And then, to think that the palaces and picture-galleries of Europe are crowded with his easel-pictures, that his original drawings display a boundless store of prodigal inventive creativeness, that the Cartoons, of which England is proud, are alone enough to found a mighty master's fame!

The vast mass of Raphael's works is by itself astounding. The accuracy of their design and the perfection of their execution are literally overwhelming to the imagination, that attempts to realise the conditions of his short life. There is nothing, or but very little, of rhetoric in all this world of pictures. The brain has guided the hand throughout, and the result is sterling poetry. The knowledge, again, expressed in many of his frescoes is so thorough that we wonder whether in his body lived again the soul of some accomplished sage. How, for example, did he appropriate the history of philosophy, set forth so luminously in the "School of Athens," that each head, each gesture, is the epitome of some system? Fabio Calvi may, indeed, have supplied him with serviceable notes on Greek philosophy. But to Raphael alone belongs the triumph of having personified the dry elements of learning in appropriate living forms. The same is true of the "Parnassus," and, in a less degree, of the "Disputa." To the physiognomist these frescoes will always be invaluable. The "Heliodorus," the "Miracle of Bolsena," and the Cartoons, display a like faculty applied with more dramatic purpose. Passion and action take the place of representative ideas; but the capacity for translating into perfect human form what has first been intellectually apprehended by the artist, is the same.

If, after estimating the range of thought revealed in this portion of Raphael's work, we next consider the labour of the mind involved in the distribution of so many multitudes of beautiful and august human figures, in the modelling of their drapery, the study of their expression, and their grouping into balanced compositions, we may form some notion of the magnitude of Raphael's performance. It is, indeed, probable that all attempts at reflective analysis of this kind do injustice to the spontaneity of the painter's method. Yet, even supposing that the "Miraculous Draught of Fishes" or the "School of Athens" were seen by him as in a vision, this presumption will increase our wonder at the imagination which could hold so rich a store of details ready for immediate use. That Raphael paid the most minute attention to the details of his work, is shown by the studies made for these two subjects, and by the drawings for the "Transfiguration." A young man bent on putting forth his power the first time in a single picture that should prove his mastery, could not have laboured with more diligence than Raphael at the height of his fame and in full possession of his matured faculty.

When, furthermore, we take into account the variety of Raphael's work, we arrive at a new point of wonder. The drawing of "Alexander's Marriage with Roxana," the "Temptation of Adam by Eve," and the "Massacre of the Innocents," engraved by Marc Antonio, are unsurpassed not only as compositions, but also as studies of the nude in chosen attitudes, powerfully felt and nobly executed. In these designs, which he never used for painting, the same high style is successively applied to a pageant, an idyll, and a drama.[259] The rapture of Greek art in its most youthful moment has never been recaptured by a modern painter with more force and fire of fancy than in the "Galatea." The tenderness of Christian feeling has found no more exalted expression than in the multitudes of the Madonnas, one more lovely than another, like roses on a tree in June, from the maidenly "Madonna del Gran' Duca" to the celestial vision of the San Sisto, that sublimest lyric of the art of Catholicity.[260] It is only by hurrying through a list like this that we can appreciate the many-sided perfection of Raphael's accomplishment. How, lastly, was it possible that this young painter should have found the time to superintend the building of S. Peter's, and to form a plan for excavating Rome in its twelve ancient regions?[261]

When Lomazzo assigned emblems to the chief painters of the Renaissance, he gave to Michael Angelo the dragon of contemplation, and to Mantegna the serpent of sagacity. For Raphael, by a happier instinct, he reserved man, the microcosm, the symbol of powerful grace, incarnate intellect. This quaint fancy of the Milanese critic touches the truth. What distinguishes the whole work of Raphael, is its humanity in the double sense of the humane and human. Phoebus, as imagined by the Greeks, was not more radiant, more victorious by the marvel of his smile, more intolerant of things obscene or ugly. Like Apollo chasing the Eumenides from his Delphian shrine, Raphael will not suffer his eyes to fall on what is loathsome or horrific. Even sadness and sorrow, tragedy and death, take loveliness from him. And here it must be mentioned that he shunned stern and painful subjects. He painted no martyrdom, no "Last Judgment," and no "Crucifixion," if we except the little early picture belonging to Lord Dudley.[262] His men and women are either glorious with youth or dignified in hale old age. Touched by his innocent and earnest genius, mankind is once more gifted with the harmony of intellect and flesh and feeling, that belonged to Hellas. Instead of asceticism, Hellenic temperance is the virtue prized by Raphael. Over his niche in the Temple of Fame might be written: "I have said ye are gods;"—for the children of men in his ideal world are divinized. The godlike spirit of man is all in all. Happy indeed was the art that by its limitations and selections could thus early express the good news of the Renaissance; while in the spheres of politics and ethics, science and religion, we are still far from having learned its lesson.

Correggio is the Faun or Ariel of Renaissance painting. Turning to him from Raphael, we are naturally first struck by the affinities and differences between them. Both drew from their study of the world the elements of joy which it contains; but the gladness of Correggio was more sensuous than that of Raphael; his intellectual faculties were less developed; his rapture was more tumultuous and Bacchantic. Like Raphael, Correggio died young; but his brief life was spent in comparative obscurity and solitude. Far from the society of scholars and artists, ignorant of courts, unpatronised by princes, he wrought for himself alone the miracle of brightness and of movement that delights us in his frescoes and his easel-pictures.

Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden,

was this lyrist of luxurious ecstasy. In his work there was nothing worldly; that divides him from the Venetians, whose sensuousness he shared: nothing scientific; that distinguishes him from Da Vinci, the magic of whose chiaroscuro he comprehended: nothing contemplative; that separates him from Michael Angelo, the audacity of whose design in dealing with forced attitudes he rivalled, without apparently having enjoyed the opportunity of studying his works. The cheerfulness of Raphael, the wizardry of Lionardo, and the boldness of Michael Angelo, met in him to form a new style, the originality of which is indisputable, and which takes us captive—not by intellectual power, but by the impulse of emotion. Of his artistic education we know nothing; and when we call him the Ariel of painting, this means that we are compelled to think of him as an elemental spirit, whose bidding the air and the light and the hues of the morning obey.

Correggio created a world of beautiful human beings, the whole condition of whose existence is an innocent and radiant wantonness.[263] Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway; nor could he deal with subjects demanding pregnancy of intellectual meaning. He paints the three Fates for instance like young and joyous Bacchantes; if we placed rose-garlands and thyrsi in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of human destinies, they might figure upon the panels of a banquet-chamber in Pompeii. Nor, again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of composition which seeks the highest beauty of design in architectural harmony supreme above the melodies of gracefulness in detail. He was essentially a lyrical as distinguished from an epical or dramatic poet. The unity of his work is derived from the effect of light and atmosphere, the inbreathed soul of tremulous and throbbing life, which bathes and liquefies the whole. It was enough for him to produce a gleeful symphony by the play of light and colour, by the animation of his figures, and by the intoxicating beauty of his forms. His angels are genii disimprisoned from the chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic Paradise, elemental sprites of nature wantoning in Eden in her prime. They belong to the generation of the fauns. Like fauns, they combine a certain wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy, a delight in rapid motion as they revel amid clouds and flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the painter's style. Correggio's sensibility to light and colour—that quality which makes him unique among painters—was on a par with his feeling for form. Brightness and darkness are woven together on his figures like an impalpable veil, aerial and transparent, enhancing the palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved. His colouring does not glow or burn; blithesome and delicate, it seems exactly such a beauty-bloom as sense requires for its satiety. That cord of jocund colour which may fitly be combined with the smiles of daylight, the clear blues found in laughing eyes, the pinks that tinge the cheeks of early youth, and the warm yet silvery tones of healthy flesh, mingle, as in a pearl-shell, on his pictures. Within his own magic circle Correggio reigns supreme; no other artist having blent the witcheries of colouring, chiaroscuro, and wanton loveliness of form, into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous charm. To feel his influence, and at the same moment to be the subject of strong passion, or intense desire, or heroic resolve, or profound contemplation, or pensive melancholy, is impossible. The Northern traveller, standing beneath his master-works in Parma, may hear from each of those radiant and laughing faces what the young Italian said to Goethe: Perche pensa? pensando s' invecchia.

Michael Angelo is the prophet or seer of the Renaissance. It would be impossible to imagine a stronger contrast than that which distinguishes his art from Correggio's, or lives more different in all their details, than those which he and Raphael or Lionardo lived respectively. During the eighty-nine years of his earthly pilgrimage he saw Italy enslaved and Florence extinguished; it was his exceeding bitter fate to watch the rapid decay of the arts and to witness the triumph of sacerdotal despotism over liberal thought. To none of these things was he indifferent; and the sorrow they wrought in his soul, found expression in his painting.[264] Michael Angelo was not framed by nature to fascinate like Lionardo or to charm like Raphael. His manners were severe and simple. When he spoke, his words were brief and pungent. When he wrote, whether in poetry or prose, he used the fewest phrases to express the most condensed meaning. When asked why he had not married, he replied that the wife he had—his art—cost him already too much trouble. He entertained few friends, and shunned society. Brooding over the sermons of Savonarola, the text of the Bible, the discourses of Plato, and the poems of Dante, he made his spirit strong in solitude by the companionship with everlasting thoughts. Therefore, when he was called to paint the Sistine Chapel, he uttered through painting the weightiest prophecy the world has ever seen expressed in plastic form. His theme is nothing less than the burden of the prophets and the Sibyls who preached the coming of a light upon the world, and the condemnation of the world which had rejected it, by an inexorable judge. Michelet says, not without truth, that the spirit of Savonarola lives again in these frescoes. The procession of the four-and-twenty elders, arraigned before the people of Brescia to accuse Italy of sin—the voice that cried to Florence, "Behold the sword of the Lord, and that swiftly! Behold I, even I, do bring a deluge on the earth!" are both seen and heard here very plainly. But there is more than Savonarola in this prophecy of Michael Angelo's. It contains the stern spirit of Dante, aflame with patriotism, passionate for justice. It embodies the philosophy of Plato. The creative God, who divides light from darkness, who draws Adam from the clay and calls forth new-born Eve in awful beauty, is the Demiurgus of the Greek. Again, it carries the indignation of Isaiah, the wild denunciations of Ezekiel, the monotonous refrain of Jeremiah—"Ah, Lord, Lord!" The classic Sibyls intone their mystic hymns; the Delphic on her tripod of inspiration, the Erythraean bending over her scrolls, the withered witch of Cumae, the parched prophetess of Libya—all seem to cry, "Repent, repent! for the kingdom of the spirit is at hand! Repent and awake, for the judgment of the world approaches!" And above these voices we hear a most tremendous wail: "The nations have come to the birth; but there is not strength to bring forth." That is the utterance of the Renaissance, as it had appeared in Italy. She who was first among the nations was now last; bound and bleeding, she lay prostrate at the temple-gate she had unlocked. To Michael Angelo was given for his portion—not the alluring mysteries of the new age, not the joy of the renascent world, not the petulant and pulsing rapture of youth: these had been divided between Lionardo, Raphael, and Correggio—but the bitter burden of the sense that the awakening to life is in itself a pain, that the revelation of the liberated soul is itself judgment, that a light is shining, and that the world will not comprehend it. Pregnant as are the paintings of Michael Angelo with religious import, they are no longer Catholic in the sense in which the frescoes of the Lorenzetti and Orcagna and Giotto are Catholic. He went beyond the ecclesiastical standing ground and reached one where philosophy includes the Christian faith. Thus the true spirit of the Renaissance was embodied in his work of art.

Among the multitudes of figures covering the wall above the altar in the Sistine Chapel there is one that might well stand for a symbol of the Renaissance. It is a woman of gigantic stature in the act of toiling upwards from the tomb. Grave clothes impede the motion of her body: they shroud her eyes and gather round her chest. Part only of her face and throat is visible, where may be read a look of blank bewilderment and stupefaction, a struggle with death's slumber in obedience to some inner impulse. Yet she is rising slowly, half awake, and scarcely conscious, to await a doom still undetermined. Thus Michael Angelo interpreted the meaning of his age.

FOOTNOTES:

[197] "La man che ubbedisce all' intelletto" is a phrase pregnant with meaning, used by Michael Angelo in one of his sonnets. See Guasti, Le Rime di Michael Angelo, p. 173. Michael Angelo's blunt criticism of Perugino, that he was goffo, a fool in art, and his rude speech to Francia's handsome son, that his father made better forms by night than day, sufficiently indicate the different aims pursued by the painters of the two periods distinguished above.

[198] Though Mantegna seems to have owed all his training to Padua, it is impossible to regard him as what is called a Squarcionesque—one among the artistic hacks formed and employed by the Paduan impresario of third-rate painting. No other eagle like to him was reared in that nest. His greatness belonged to his own genius, assimilating from the meagre means of study within his reach those elements which enabled him to divine the spirit of the antique and to attempt its reproduction. In order to facilitate the explanation of the problem offered by his early command of style, it has been suggested with great show of reason that he received a strong impression from the work executed in bas-relief by Donatello for the church of S. Antonio at Padua. Thus Florentine influences helped to form even the original genius of this greatest of the Lombard masters.

[199] Vasari, vol. v. p. 163, may be consulted with regard to Mantegna's preference for the ideal of statuary when compared with natural beauty, as the model for a painter.

[200] See Crowe and Cavalcaselle's History of Painting in North Italy, vol. i. p. 334, for an account of his antiquarian researches in company with Felice Feliciano. His museum was so famous that in 1483 Lorenzo de' Medici, passing through Mantua from Venice, thought it worthy of a visit. In his old age Mantegna fell into pecuniary difficulties, and had to part with his collection. The forced sale of its chief ornament, a bust of Faustina, is said to have broken his heart. Ib. p. 415.

[201] Painted on canvas in tempera for the Marquis of Mantua, before 1488, looted by the Germans in 1630, sold to Charles I., resold by the Commonwealth, bought back by Charles II., and now exposed, much spoiled by time and change, but more by villainous re-painting, on the walls of Hampton Court.

[202] An oil painting in the National Gallery.

[203] The so-called "Triumph of Scipio" in the National Gallery seems to me in every respect feebler than the Hampton Court Cartoons.

[204] The "Madonna della Vittoria," now in the Louvre Gallery, was painted to commemorate the achievements of Francesco Gonzaga in the battle of Fornovo. That Francesco, General of the Venetian troops, should have claimed that action, the eternal disgrace of Italian soldiery, for a victory, is one of the strongest signs of the depth to which the sense of military honour had sunk in Italy. But though the occasion of its painting was so mean, the impression made by this picture is too powerful to be described. It is in every detail grandiose: masculine energy being combined with incomparable grace, religious feeling with athletic dignity, and luxuriance of ornamentation with severe gravity of composition. It is worth comparing this portrait of Francesco Gonzaga with his bronze medal, just as Piero della Francesco's picture of Sigismondo Malatesta should be compared with Pisanello's medallion.

[205] Vol. II., Revival of Learning, p. 212.

[206] Nothing is known about Mantegna's stay in Florence. He went to meet the Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga at Bologna. This Cardinal, a great amateur of music and connoisseur in relics of antiquity, came to Mantua in August, 1472, where the "Orfeo" of Messer Angelo Poliziano was produced for his amusement.

[207] That he could conceive a stern and tragic subject, with all the passion it required, is, however, proved not only by the frescoes at Orvieto, but also by the powerful oil-painting of the "Crucifixion" at Borgo San Sepolcro.

[208] This story has been used for verse in a way to heighten its romantic colouring. Such as the lines are, I subjoin them for the sake of their attempt to emphasize and illustrate Renaissance feeling:—

"Vasari tells that Luca Signorelli, The morning star of Michael Angelo, Had but one son, a youth of seventeen summers, Who died. That day the master at his easel Wielded the liberal brush wherewith he painted At Orvieto, on the Duomo's walls, Stern forms of Death and Heaven and Hell and Judgment. Then came they to him, cried: 'Thy son is dead, Slain in a duel: but the bloom of life Yet lingers round red lips and downy cheek.' Luca spoke not, but listened. Next they bore His dead son to the silent painting-room, And left on tip toe son and sire alone. Still Luca spoke and groaned not; but he raised The wonderful dead youth, and smoothed his hair, Washed his red wounds, and laid him on a bed, Naked and beautiful, where rosy curtains Shed a soft glimmer of uncertain splendour Life-like upon the marble limbs below. Then Luca seized his palette: hour by hour Silence was in the room; none durst approach: Morn wore to noon, and noon to eve, when shyly A little maid peeped in and saw the painter Painting his dead son with unerring hand-stroke, Firm and dry-eyed before the lordly canvas."

[209] See the article on Orvieto in my Sketches in Italy and Greece.

[210] The earlier frescoes of Fra Angelico, on the roof, depict Christ as Judge. But there is nothing in common with these works and Signorelli's.

[211] This is the conjecture of Signor Luzi (Il Duomo di Orvieto, p. 168). He bases it upon the Dantesque subjects illustrated, and quotes from the "Inferno":—

"Omero poeta sovrano; L' altro e Orazio satiro che viene, Ovidio e il terzo, e l' ultimo Lucano."

Nothing is more marked or more deeply interesting than the influence exercised by Dante over Signorelli, an influence he shared with Giotto, Orcagna, Botticelli, Michael Angelo, the greatest imaginative painters of Central Italy.

[212] The background to the circular "Madonna" in the Uffizzi, the "Flagellation of Christ" in the Academy at Florence and in the Brera at Milan, and the "Adam" at Cortona, belong to this grade.

[213] We may add the pages in a predella representing the "Adoration of the Magi" in the Uffizzi.

[214] Vasari mentions the portraits of Nicolo, Paolo, and Vitellozzo Vitelli, Gian Paolo, and Orazio Baglioni, among others, in the frescoes at Orvieto.

[215] Painted for Lorenzo de' Medici. It is now in the Berlin Museum through the neglect of the National Gallery authorities to purchase it for England.

[216] I must not omit to qualify Vasari's praise of Luca Signorelli, by reference to a letter recently published from the Archivio Buonarroti, Lettere a Diversi, p. 391. Michael Angelo there addresses the Captain of Cortona, and complains that in the first year of Leo's pontificate Luca came to him and by various representations obtained from him the sum of eighty Giulios, which he never repaid, although he made profession to have done so. Michael Angelo was ill at the time, and working with much difficulty on a statue of a bound captive for the tomb of Julius. Luca gave a specimen of his renowned courtesy by comforting the sculptor in these rather sanctimonious phrases: "Doubt not that angels will come from heaven, to support your arms and help you."

[217] Pietro, known as Perugino from the city of his adoption, was the son of Cristoforo Vannucci, of Citta della Pieve. He was born in 1446, and died at Fontignano in 1522.

[218] The triptych in the National Gallery.

[219] They have been published by the Arundel Society.

[220] These frescoes were begun in 1499. It may be mentioned that in this year, on the refusal of Perugino to decorate the Cappella di S. Brizio, the Orvietans entrusted that work to Signorelli.

[221] Uffizzi and Sala del Cambio.

[222] "Fu Pietro persona di assai poca religione, e non se gli pote mai far credere l'immortalita dell' anima: anzi, con parole, accomodate al suo cervello di porfido, ostinatissimamente ricuso ogni buona vita. Aveva ogni sua speranza ne' beni della fortuna, e per danari arebbe fatto ogni male contratto." Vasari, vol. vi. p. 50. The local tradition alluded to above relates to the difficulties raised by the Church against the Christian burial of Perugino: but if he died of plague, as it is believed (see C. and C., vol. iii. p. 244), these difficulties were probably caused by panic rather than belief in his impiety. For Gasparo Celio's note on Perugino's refusal to confess upon his death-bed, saying that he preferred to see how an impenitent soul would fare in the other world, the reader may consult Rio's L'Art Chretien, vol. ii. p. 269. The record of Perugino's arming himself in Dec. 1486, together with a notorious assassin, Aulista di Angelo of Perugia, in order to waylay and beat a private enemy of his near S. Pietro Maggiore at Florence is quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. iii. p. 183.

[223] "Guadagno molte ricchezze; e in Fiorenza muro e compro case; ed in Perugia ed a Castello della Pieve acquisto molti beni stahili." Vasari, vol. vi. p. 50.

[224] "Goffo nell arte." See Vasari, vol. vi. p. 46. See too above, p. 196.

[225] I select these for comment rather than the frescoes at Spello, beautiful as these are, because they have more interest in relation to the style of the Renaissance.

[226] The "Assumption" in S. Frediano at Lucca should also be mentioned as one of Francia's masterpieces.

[227] His father was a muleteer of Suffignano, who settled at Florence, in a house and garden near the gate of S. Piero Gattolino. He was born in 1475, and he died in 1517.

[228] In S. Domenico at Prato in 1500. He afterwards resided in S. Marco at Florence.

[229] May 23, 1498.

[230] In addition to the pictures mentioned above, I may call attention to the adoring figure of S. Catherine of Siena, in three large paintings—now severally in the Pitti, at Lucca, and in the Louvre.

[231] In the Uffizzi. As a composition, it is the Frate's masterpiece.

[232] See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 487, for this consequence of the sack of Prato.

[233] L'Art Chretien, vol. ii. p. 515.

[234] Two of our best portraits of Savonarola, the earlier inscribed "Hieronymi Ferrariensis a Deo Missi Prophetae Effigies," the later treated to represent S. Peter Martyr, are from the hand of Fra Bartolommeo. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. iii. p. 433.

[235] See below, chapter vii.

[236] This sonnet I have translated into English with such closeness to the original words as I found possible:—

He who can do not what he wills, should try To will what he can do; for since 'tis vain To will what can't be compassed, to abstain From idle wishing is philosophy. Lo, all our happiness and grief imply Knowledge or not of will's ability: They therefore can, who will what ought to be. Nor wrest true reason from her seat awry. Nor what a man can, should he always will: Oft seemeth sweet what after is not so; And what I wished, when had, hath cost a tear. Then, reader of these lines, if thou wouldst still Be helpful to thyself, to others dear, Will to can alway what thou ought to do.

[237] See the letter addressed by Lionardo to Lodovico Sforza enumerating his claims as a mechanician, military and civil engineer, architect, &c. It need scarcely be mentioned that he served Cesare Borgia and the Florentine Republic as an engineer, and that much of his time at Milan was spent in hydraulic works upon the Adda. It should be added here that Lionardo committed the results of his discoveries to writing; but he published very little, and that by no means the most precious portion of his thoughts. He founded at Milan an Academy of Arts and Sciences, if this name may be given to a reunion of artists, scholars, and men of the world, to whom it is probable that he communicated his researches in anatomy. The Treatise on Painting, which bears his name, is a compilation from notes and MSS. first printed in 1651.

[238] The folio volume of sketches in the Ambrosian Library at Milan contains designs for all these works. The collection in the Royal Library at Windsor is no less rich. Among Lionardo's scientific drawings in the latter place may be mentioned a series of maps illustrating the river system of Central Italy, with plans for improved drainage.

[239] Shelley says of the poet:—

He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy bloom; Nor heed nor see what things they be, But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality.

[240] See De Stendhal, Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, p. 143, for this story.

[241] In the Treatise on Painting, da Vinci argues strongly against isolating man. He regarded the human being as in truth a microcosm to be only understood in relation to the world around him, expressing, as a painter, the same thought as Pico. (See Vol. II., Revival of Learning, p. 35.) Therefore he urges the claims of landscape on the attention of artists.

[242] I might refer in detail to four studies of bramble branches, leaves, and flowers and fruit, in the royal collection at Windsor, most wonderful for patient accuracy and delicate execution: also to drawings of oak leaves, wild guelder-rose, broom, columbine, asphodel, bull-rush, and wood-spurge in the same collection. These careful studies are as valuable for the botanist as for the artist. To render the specific character of each plant with greater precision would be impossible.

[243] See the series of anatomical studies of the horse in the Royal Collection.

[244] Engraved by Edelinck. The drawing has obvious Lionardesque qualities; but how far it may be from the character of the original we can guess by Rubens' transcript from Mantegna. (See above, Chapter VI, Mantegna's Biography.) De Stendhal says wittily of this work, "C'est Virgile traduit par Madame de Stael," op. cit. p. 162.

[245] In the Royal Collection at Windsor there are anatomical drawings for the construction of an imaginary quadruped with gigantic claws. The bony, muscular, and venous structure of its legs and feet is accurately indicated.

[246] See the drawings engraved and published by Gerli in his Disegni di Lionardo da Vinci, Milan, 1784.

[247] Vasari is the chief source of these legends. Giraldi Lomazzo, the Milanese historian of painting, and Bandello, the novelist, supply further details. It appears from all accounts that Lionardo impressed his contemporaries as a singular and most commanding personality. There is a touch of reverence in even the strangest stories, which is wanting in the legend of Piero di Cosimo.

[248] Even Michael Angelo, meeting him in Florence, flung in his teeth that "he had made the model of a horse to cast in bronze, and could not cast it, and through shame left it as it was unfinished." See Arch. St. It., serie terza, xvi. 226.

[249] In the Royal Collection at Windsor there is a whole series of studies for these two statues, together with drawings for the mould in which Lionardo intended to cast them. The second of the two is sketched with great variety of motive. The horse is rearing; the fallen enemy is vainly striving to defend himself; the victor in one drawing is reining in his steed, in another is waving a truncheon, in a third is brandishing his sword, in a fourth is holding the sword in act to thrust. The designs for the pedestals, sometimes treated as a tomb and sometimes as a fountain, are equally varied.

[250] "Concevoir," said Balzac, "c'est jouir, c'est fumer des cigarettes enchantees; mais sans l'execution tout s'en va en reve et en fumee." Quoted by Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vol. ii. p. 353.

[251] See Vol. II., Revival of Learning, p. 128, 129.

[252] It was finished, according to Fra Paciolo, in 1498.

[253] Signorelli, with his usual originality, chose the moment when Christ broke bread and gave it to His disciples. In that rare picture at Cortona, we see not the betrayed chief but the founder of a new religion.

[254] The Cenacolo alone will not enable the student to understand Lionardo. He must give his attention to the master's sketch books, those studies in chalk, in tempera, on thin canvas and paper, prepared for the stylus or the pen, which Vasari calls the final triumphs of designing, and of which, in spite of the loss of many of his books, the surviving specimens are very numerous. Some are easily accessible in Gerli, Chamberlaine, and the autotype reproductions. It is possible that a sympathetic student may get closer to the all-embracing and all-daring genius of the magician through these drawings than if he had before him an elaborate work in fresco or in oils. They express the many-sided, mobile, curious, and subtle genius of the man in its entirety.

[255] "Raffaello, che era la gentilezza stessa ... restavano vinti dalla cortesia e dall' arte sua, ma piu dal genio della sua buona natura; la quale era si piena di gentilezza e si colma di carita, che egli si vedeva che fino agli animali l'onoravano, non che gli uomini."—Vasari, vol. viii. pp. 6, 60.

[256] See above, Chapter VI, Fra Bartolommeo.

[257] The "Holy Family" at Munich, and the "Madonna del Baldacchino" in the Pitti, might be mentioned as experiments on Raphael's part to perfect the Frate's scheme of composition.

[258] See Vasari, vol. viii. p. 60, for a description of the concord that reigned in this vast workshop. The genius and the gentle nature of Raphael penetrated the whole group of artists, and seemed to give them a single soul.

[259] The fresco of "Alexander" in the Palazzo Borghese is by an imitator.

[260] The "Madonna di San Sisto" was painted for a banner to be borne in processions. It is a subtle observation of Rio that the banner, an invention of the Umbrian school, corresponds in painting to the hymn in poetry.

[261] See Vol. II., Revival of Learning, p. 316, for Raphael's letter on this subject to Leo X.

[262] "La Spasimo di Sicilia" is the single Passion picture of Raphael's maturity. The predella of "Christ carrying the Cross" at Leigh Court, and the "Christ showing His Wounds" in the Tosi Gallery at Brescia, are both early works painted under Umbrian influence. The Borghese "Entombment," painted for Atalanta Baglioni, a pen-and-ink drawing of the "Pieta" in the Louvre collection, Marc Antonio's engraving of the "Massacre of the Innocents," and an early picture of the "Agony in the Garden," are all the other painful subjects I can now remember.

[263] For a fuller working out of this analysis I must refer to my Sketches in Italy, article "Parma." Much that follows is a quotation from that essay.

[264] Much of the controversy about Michael Angelo, which is continually being waged between his admirers and his detractors, might be set at rest if it were acknowledged that there are two distinct ways of judging works of art. We may regard them simply as appealing to our sense of beauty, and affording harmonious intellectual pleasure. Or we may regard them as expressing the thought and spirit of their age, and as utterances made by men whose hearts burned within them. Critics trained in the study of good Greek sculpture, or inclined by temperament to admire the earlier products of Italian painting, are apt to pursue the former path exclusively. They demand serenity and simplicity. Perturbation and violence they denounce as blemishes. It does not occur to them that, though the phenomenon is certainly rare, it does occasionally happen that a man arises whose art is for him the language of his soul, and who lives in sympathetic relation to the sternest interests of his age. If such an artist be born when tranquil thought and serene emotions are impossible for one who feels the meaning of his times with depth, he must either paint and carve lies, or he must abandon the serenity that was both natural and easy to the Greek and the earlier Italian. Michael Angelo was one of these select artistic natures. He used his chisel and his pencil to express, not merely beautiful artistic motives, but what he felt and thought about the world in which he had to live: and this world was full of the ruin of republics, the corruption and humiliation of society, the subjection of Italy to strangers. In Michael Angelo the student of both art and history finds an inestimably precious and rare point of contact between the inner spirit of an age, and its external expression in sculpture and painting.



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.

It was a fact of the greatest importance for the development of the fine arts in Italy that painting in Venice reached maturity later than in Florence. Owing to this circumstance one chief aspect of the Renaissance, its material magnificence and freedom, received consummate treatment at the hands of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. To idealise the sensualities of the external universe, to achieve for colour what the Florentines had done for form, to invest the worldly grandeur of human life at one of its most gorgeous epochs with the dignity of the highest art, was what these great artists were called on to accomplish. Their task could not have been so worthily performed in the fifteenth century as in the sixteenth, if the development of the aesthetic sense had been more premature among the Venetians.

Venice was precisely fitted for the part her painters had to play. Free, isolated, wealthy, powerful; famous throughout Europe for the pomp of her state equipage, and for the immorality of her private manners; ruled by a prudent aristocracy, who spent vast wealth on public shows and on the maintenance of a more than imperial civic majesty: Venice, with her pavement of liquid chrysoprase, with her palaces of porphyry and marble, her frescoed facades, her quays and squares aglow with the costumes of the Levant, her lagoons afloat with the galleys of all nations, her churches floored with mosaics, her silvery domes and ceilings glittering with sculpture bathed in molten gold: Venice luxurious in the light and colour of a vaporous atmosphere, where sea-mists rose into the mounded summer clouds; arched over by the broad expanse of sky, bounded only by the horizon of waves and plain and distant mountain ranges, and reflected in all its many hues of sunrise and sunset upon the glassy surface of smooth waters: Venice asleep like a miracle of opal or of pearl upon the bosom of an undulating lake:—here and here only on the face of the whole globe was the unique city wherein the pride of life might combine with the lustre of the physical universe to create and stimulate in the artist a sense of all that was most sumptuous in the pageant of the world of sense.

There is colour in flowers. Gardens of tulips are radiant, and mountain valleys touch the soul with the beauty of their pure and gemlike hues. Therefore the painters of Flanders and of Umbria, John van Eyck and Gentile da Fabriano, penetrated some of the secrets of the world of colour. But what are the purples and scarlets and blues of iris, anemone, or columbine, dispersed among deep meadow grasses or trained in quiet cloister garden-beds, when compared with that melodrama of flame and gold and rose and orange and azure, which the skies and lagoons of Venice yield almost daily to the eyes? The Venetians had no green fields and trees, no garden borders, no blossoming orchards, to teach them the tender suggestiveness, the quaint poetry of isolated or contrasted tints. Their meadows were the fruitless furrows of the Adriatic, hued like a peacock's neck; they called the pearl-shells of their Lido flowers, fior di mare. Nothing distracted their attention from the glories of morning and of evening presented to them by their sea and sky. It was in consequence of this that the Venetians conceived colour heroically, not as a matter of missal-margins or of subordinate decoration, but as a motive worthy in itself of sublime treatment. In like manner, hedged in by no limitary hills, contracted by no city walls, stifled by no narrow streets, but open to the liberal airs of heaven and ocean, the Venetians understood space and imagined pictures almost boundless in their immensity. Light, colour, air, space: those are the elemental conditions of Venetian art; of those the painters weaved their ideal world for beautiful and proud humanity.

Shelley's description of a Venetian sunset strikes the keynote to Venetian painting:[265]—

As those who pause on some delightful way, Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood Looking upon the evening and the flood, Which lay between the city and the shore, Paved with the image of the sky: the hoar And airy Alps, towards the north appeared, Through mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared Between the east and west; and half the sky Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry, Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep west into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent Among the many-folded hills—they were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, As seen from Lido through the harbour piles, The likeness of a clump of peaked isles— And then, as if the earth and sea had been Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame, Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade," Said my companion, "I will show you soon A better station." So, o'er the lagune We glided: and from that funereal bark I leaned, and saw the city; and could mark How from their many isles, in evening's gleam, Its temples and its palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

With this we may compare the following extract from a letter, addressed in May 1544 to Titian, by one of the most unprincipled of literary bandits who have ever disgraced humanity, but who nevertheless was solemnised to the spirit of true poetry by the grandiose aspect of nature as it appeared to him in Venice. That Pietro Aretino should have so deeply felt the charm of natural beauty in an age when even the greatest artists and poets sought inspiration in human life rather than the outer world, is a significant fact. It seems to illustrate the necessity whereby Venice became the cradle of the art of nature.[266] "Having, dear Sir, and my best gossip, supped alone to the injury of my custom, or, to speak more truly, supped in the company of all the boredoms of a cursed quartan fever, which will not let me taste the flavour of any food, I rose from table sated with the same disgust with which I had sat down to it. In this mood I went and leaned my arms upon the sill outside my window, and throwing my chest and nearly all my body on the marble, abandoned myself to the contemplation of the spectacle presented by the innumerable boats, filled with foreigners as well as people of the city, which gave delight not merely to the gazers, but also to the Grand Canal itself, that perpetual delight of all who plough its waters. From this animated scene, all of a sudden, like one who from mere ennui knows not how to occupy his mind, I turned my eyes to heaven, which, from the moment when God made it, was never adorned with such painted loveliness of lights and shadows. The whole region of the air was what those who envy you, because they are unable to be you, would fain express. To begin with, the buildings of Venice, though of solid stone, seemed made of some ethereal substance. Then the sky was full of variety—here clear and ardent, there dulled and overclouded. What marvellous clouds there were! Masses of them in the centre of the scene hung above the house-roofs, while the immediate part was formed of a grey tint inclining to dark. I gazed astonished at the varied colours they displayed. The nearer masses burned with flames of sunset; the more remote blushed with a blaze of crimson less afire. Oh, how splendidly did Nature's pencil treat and dispose that airy landscape, keeping the sky apart from the palaces, just as Titian does! On one side the heavens showed a greenish-blue, on another a bluish-green, invented verily by the caprice of Nature, who is mistress of the greatest masters. With her lights and her darks, there she was harmonising, toning, and bringing out into relief, just as she wished. Seeing which, I who know that your pencil is the spirit of her inmost soul, cried aloud thrice or four tines, 'Oh, Titian! where are you now?'"

In order to understand the destiny of Venice in art, it is not enough to concentrate attention on the peculiarities of her physical environment. Potent as these were in the creation of her style, the political and social conditions of the Republic require also to be taken into account. Among Italian cities Venice was unique. She alone was tranquil in her empire, unimpeded in her constitutional development, independent of Church interference, undisturbed by the cross purposes and intrigues of the Despots, inhabited by merchants who were princes, and by a free-born people who had never seen war at their gates. The serenity of undisturbed security, the luxury of wealth amassed abroad and liberally spent at home, gave a physiognomy of ease and proud self-confidence to all her edifices. The grim and anxious struggles of the Middle Ages left no mark on Venice. How different was this town from Florence, every inch of whose domain could tell of civic warfare, whose passionate aspirations after independence ended in the despotism of the bourgeois Medici, whose repeated revolutions had slavery for their climax, whose grey palaces bore on their fronts the stamp of mediaeval vigilance, whose spirit was incarnated in Dante the exile, whose enslavement forced from Michael Angelo those groans of a chained Titan expressed in the marbles of S. Lorenzo! It is not an insignificant, though a slight, detail, that the predominant colour of Florence is brown, while the predominant colour of Venice is that of mother-of-pearl, concealing within its general whiteness every tint that can be placed upon the palette of a painter. The conditions of Florence stimulated mental energy and turned the forces of the soul inwards. Those of Venice inclined the individual to accept life as he found it. Instead of exciting him to think, they disposed him to enjoy, or to acquire by industry the means of manifold enjoyment. To represent in art the intellectual strivings of the Renaissance was the task of Florence and her sons; to create a monument of Renaissance magnificence was the task of Venice. Without Venice the modern world could not have produced that flower of sensuous and unreflective loveliness in painting, which is worthy to stand beside the highest product of the Greek genius in sculpture. For Athena from her Parthenon stretches the hand to Venezia enthroned in the ducal palace. The broad brows and earnest eyes of the Hellenic goddess are of one divine birth and lineage with the golden hair and superb carriage of the sea-queen.

It is in the heart of Venice, in the House of the Republic, that the Venetian painters, considered as the interpreters of worldly splendour, fulfilled their function with the most complete success. Centuries contributed to make the Ducal Palace what it is. The massive colonnades and Gothic loggias of the external basement date from the thirteenth century; their sculpture belongs to the age when Niccola Pisano's genius was in the ascendant. The square fabric of the palace, so beautiful in the irregularity of its pointed windows, so singular in its mosaic diaper of pink and white, was designed at the same early period. The inner court and the facade that overhangs the lateral canal, display the handiwork of Sansovino. The halls of the palace—spacious chambers where the Senate assembled, where ambassadors approached the Doge, where the Savi deliberated, where the Council of Ten conducted their inquisition—are walled and roofed with pictures of inestimable value, encased in framework of carved oak; overlaid with burnished gold. Supreme art—the art of the imagination perfected with delicate and skilful care in detail—is made in these proud halls the minister of mundane pomp. In order that the gold brocade of the ducal robes, that the scarlet and crimson of the Venetian senator, might, be duly harmonised by the richness of their surroundings, it was necessary that canvases measured by the square yard, and rendered priceless by the authentic handiwork of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese, should glow upon the walls and ceilings. A more insolent display of public wealth—a more lavish outpouring of human genius in the service of State pageantry, cannot be imagined.

Sublime over all allegories and histories depicted in those multitudes of paintings, sits Venezia herself enthroned and crowned, the personification of haughtiness and power. Figured as a regal lady, with yellow hair tightly knotted round a small head poised upon her upright throat and ample shoulders, Venice takes her chair of sovereignty—as mistress of the ocean to whom Neptune and the Tritons offer pearls, as empress of the globe at whose footstool wait Justice with the sword and Peace with the olive branch, as a queen of heaven exalted to the clouds. They have made her a goddess, those great painters; they have produced a mythus, and personified in native loveliness that bride of the sea, their love, their lady. The beauty of Venetian women and the glory of Venetian empire find their meeting point in her, and live as the spirit of Athens lived in Pallas Promachos. On every side, above, around, wherever the eye falls in those vast rooms, are seen the deeds of Venice—painted histories of her triumphs over emperors and popes and infidels, or allegories of her greatness—scenes wherein the Doges perform acts of faith, with S. Mark for their protector, and with Venezia for their patroness. The saints in Paradise, massed together by Tintoretto and by Palma, mingle with mythologies of Greece and Rome, and episodes of pure idyllic painting.

Religion in these pictures was a matter of parade, an adjunct to the costly public life of the Republic. We need not, therefore, conclude that it was unreal. Such as it was, the religion of the Venetian masters is indeed as genuine as that of Fra Angelico or Albert Duerer. But it was the faith, not of humble men or of mystics, not of profound thinkers or ecstatic visionaries, so much as of courtiers and statesmen, of senators and merchants, for whom religion was a function among other functions, not a thing apart, not a source of separate and supreme vitality. Even as Christians, the Venetians lived a life separate from the rest of Italy. Their Church claimed independence of the see of Rome, and the enthusiasm of S. Francis was but faintly felt in the lagoons. Siena in her hour of need dedicated herself to Madonna; Florence in the hour of her regeneration gave herself to Christ; Venice remained under the ensign of the leonine S. Mark. While the cities of Lombardy and Central Italy ran wild with revivalism and religious panics, the Venetians maintained their calm, and never suffered piety to exceed the limits of political prudence. There is, therefore, no mystical exaltation in the faith depicted by her artists. That Tintoretto could have painted the saints in glory—a countless multitude of congregated forms, a sea whereof the waves are souls—as a background for State ceremony, shows the positive and realistic attitude of mind from which the most imaginative of Venetian masters started, when he undertook the most exalted of religious themes. Paradise is a fact, we may fancy Tintoretto reasoned; and it is easier to fill a quarter of an acre of canvas with a picture of Paradise than with any other subject, because the figures can be arranged in concentric tiers round Christ and Madonna in glory.

There is a little sketch by Guardi representing a masked ball in the Council Chamber where the "Paradise" of Tintoretto fills a wall. The men are in periwigs and long waistcoats; the ladies wear hoops, patches, fans, high heels, and powder. Bowing, promenading, intriguing, exchanging compliments or repartees, they move from point to point; while from the billowy surge of saints, Moses with the table of the law and the Magdalen with her adoring eyes of penitence look down upon them. Tintoretto could not but have foreseen that the world of living pettiness and passion would perpetually jostle with his world of painted sublimities and sanctities in that vast hall. Yet he did not on that account shrink from the task or fail in its accomplishment. Paradise existed: therefore it could be painted; and he was called upon to paint it here. If the fine gentlemen and ladies below felt out of harmony with the celestial host, so much the worse for them. In this practical spirit the Venetian masters approached religious art, and such was the sphere appointed for it in the pageantry of the Republic. When Paolo Veronese was examined by the Holy Office respecting some supposed irreverence in a sacred picture, his answers clearly proved that in planning it he had thought less of its spiritual significance than of its aesthetic effect.[267]

In the Ducal Palace the Venetian art of the Renaissance culminates; and here we might pause a moment to consider the difference between these paintings and the mediaeval frescoes of the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena.[268] The Sienese painters consecrated all their abilities to the expression of thoughts, theories of political self-government in a free State, and devotional ideas. The citizen who read the lesson of the Sala della Pace was instructed in his duties to God and to the State. The Venetian painters, as we have seen, exalted Venice and set forth her acts of power. Their work is a glorification of the Republic; but no doctrine is inculcated, and no system of thought is conveyed to the mind through the eye. Daily pacing the saloons of the palace, Doge and noble were reminded of the greatness of the State they represented. They were not invited to reflect upon the duties of the governor and governed. Their imaginations were dilated and their pride roused by the spectacle of Venice seated like a goddess in her home. Of all the secular States of Italy the Republic of S. Mark's alone produced this mythical ideal of the body politic, self-sustained and independent of the citizens, compelling their allegiance, and sustaining them through generations with the life of its organic unity.[269] The artists had no reason to paint thoughts and theories. It was enough to set forth Venice and to illustrate her acts.

Long before Venetian painting reached a climax in the decorative triumphs of the Ducal Palace, the masters of the school had formed a style expressive of the spirit of the Renaissance, considered as the spirit of free enjoyment and living energy. To trace the history of Venetian painting is to follow through its several stages the growth of that mastery over colour and sensuous beauty which was perfected in the works of Titian and his contemporaries.[270] Under the Vivarini of Murano the Venetian school in its infancy began with a selection from the natural world of all that struck them as most brilliant. No other painters of their age in Italy employed such glowing colours, or showed a more marked predilection for the imitation of fruits, rich stuffs, architectural canopies, jewels, and landscape backgrounds. Their piety, unlike the mysticism of the Sienese and the deep thought of the Florentine masters, is somewhat superficial and conventional. The merit of their devotional pictures consists of simplicity, vivacity, and joyousness. Our Lady and her court of saints seem living and breathing upon earth. There is no atmosphere of tranced solemnity surrounding them, like that which gives peculiar meaning to similar works of the Van Eycks and Memling—artists, by the way, who in many important respects are more nearly allied than any others to the spirit of the first age of Venetian painting.[271]

What the Vivarini began, the three Bellini,[272] with Crivelli, Carpaccio, Mansueti, Basaiti, Catena, Cima da Conegliano, Bissolo, Cordegliaghi, continued. Bright costumes, distinct and sunny landscapes, broad backgrounds of architecture, large skies, polished armour, gilded cornices, young faces of fisherboys and country girls,[273] grave faces of old men brown with sea-wind and sunlight, withered faces of women hearty in a hale old age, the strong manhood of Venetian senators, the dignity of patrician ladies, the gracefulness of children, the rosy whiteness and amber-coloured tresses of the daughters of the Adriatic and lagoons—these are the source of inspiration to the Venetians of the second period. Mantegna, a few miles distant, at Padua, was working out his ideal of severely classical design. Yet he scarcely touched the manner of the Venetians with his influence, though Gian Bellini was his brother-in-law and pupil, and though his genius, in grasp of matter and in management of composition, soared above his neighbours. Lionardo da Vinci at Milan was perfecting his problems of psychology in painting, offering to the world solutions of the greatest difficulties in the delineation of the spirit by expression. Yet not a trace of Lionardo's subtle play of light and shadow upon thoughtful features can be discerned in the work of the Bellini. For them the mysteries of the inner and the outer world had no attraction. The externals of a full and vivid existence fascinated their imagination. Their poetry and their piety were alike simple and objective. How to depict the world as it is seen—a miracle of varying lights and melting hues, a pageant substantial to the touch and concrete to the eyes, a combination of forms defined by colours more than outlines—was their task. They did not reach their end by anatomy, analysis, and reconstruction. They undertook to paint just what they felt and saw.

Very instructive are the wall-pictures of this period, painted not in fresco but on canvas by Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, for the decoration of the Scuole of S. Ursula and S. Croce.[274] Not only do these bring before us the life of Venice in its manifold reality, but they illustrate the tendency of the Venetian masters to express the actual world, rather than to formulate an ideal of the fancy or to search the secrets of the soul. This realism, if the name can be applied to pictures so poetical as those of Carpaccio, is not, like the Florentine realism, hard and scientific. A natural feeling for grace and a sense of romance inspire the artist, and breathe from every figure that he paints. The type of beauty produced is charming by its negligence and naivete; it is not thought out with pains or toilsomely elaborated.[275]

Among the loveliest motives used in the altar-pieces of this period might be mentioned the boy-angels playing flutes and mandolines beneath Madonna on the steps of her throne. There are usually three of them, seated, or sometimes standing. They hold their instruments of music as though they had just ceased from singing, and were ready to recommence at the pleasure of their mistress. Meanwhile there is a silence in the celestial company, through which the still voice of the praying heart is heard, a silence corresponding to the hushed mood of the worshipper.[276] The children are accustomed to the holy place; therefore their attitudes are both reverent and natural. They are more earthly than Fra Angelico's melodists, and yet they are not precisely of human lineage. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that they strike the keynote of Venetian devotion, at once real and devoid of pietistic rapture.