Another friend whom Michael Angelo found in this last stage of life, and whom he loved with only less warmth than Vittoria, was a young Roman of perfect beauty and of winning manners. Tommaso Cavalieri must be mentioned next to the Marchioness of Pescara as the being who bound this greatest soul a captive.[344] Both Cavalieri and Vittoria are said to have been painted by him, and these are the only two portraits he is reported to have executed. It may here be remarked that nothing is more characteristic of his genius than the determination to see through nature, to pass beyond the actual to the abstract, and to use reality only as a stepping-stone to the ideal. This artistic Platonism was the source both of his greatness and his mannerism. As men choose to follow Blake or Ruskin, they may praise or blame him; yet, blame and praise pronounced on such a matter with regard to such a man are equally impertinent and insignificant. It is enough for the critic to note with reverence that thus and thus the spirit that was in him worked and moved.

When we read the sonnets addressed to Vittoria Colonna and Cavalieri, we find something inexpressibly pathetic in this pure and fervent worship of beauty, when the artist with a soul still young had reached the limit of the years of man. Here and there we trace in them an echo of his youth. The Platonic dialogues he heard while yet a young man at the suppers of Lorenzo, reappear converted to the very substance of his thought and style. At the same time Savonarola resumes ascendency over his mind; and when he turns to Florence, it is of Dante that he speaks.

At last the moment came when this strong solitary spirit, much suffering and much loving, had to render its account. It appears from a letter written to Lionardo Buonarroti on February 15, 1564, that his old servant Antonio del Francese, the successor of Urbino in his household, together with Tommaso Cavalieri and Daniello Ricciarelli of Volterra, attended him in his last illness. On the 18th of that month, having bequeathed his soul to God, his body to the earth, and his worldly goods to his kinsfolk, praying them on their death-bed to think upon Christ's passion, he breathed his last. His corpse was transported to Florence, and buried in the church of S. Croce, with great pomp and honour, by the Duke, the city, and the Florentine Academy.

FOOTNOTES:

[289] See Vasari, vol. xii. p. 333, and Gotti's Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, vol. i. p. 4, for a discussion of this claim, and for a letter written by Alessandro Count of Canossa, in 1520, to the artist.

[290] That Michael Angelo was contemptuous to brother artists, is proved by what Torrigiani said to Cellini: "Aveva per usanza di uccellare tutti quelli che dissegnavano." He called Perugino goffo, told Francia's son that his father made handsomer men by night than by day, and cast in Lionardo's teeth that he could not finish the equestrian statue of the Duke of Milan. It is therefore not improbable that when, according to the legend, he corrected a drawing of Ghirlandajo's, he may have said things unendurable to the elder painter.

[291] Engraved in outline in Harford's Illustrations of the Genius of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, Colnaghi, 1857.

[292] This group, placed in S. Peter's, was made for the French Cardinal de Saint Denys. It should be said that the first work of Michael Angelo in Rome was the "Bacchus" now in the Florentine Bargello, executed for Jacopo Gallo, a Roman gentleman.

[293] Pitti approved of the form of government represented by Soderini. Machiavelli despised the want of decision that made him quit Florence, and the euetheia of the man. Hence their curiously conflicting phrases.

[294] See the chapter entitled "Della Malitia e pessime Conditioni del Tyranno," in Savonarola's "Tractato circa el reggimento e governo della Citta di Firenze composto ad instantia delli excelsi Signori al tempo di Giuliano Salviati, Gonfaloniere di Justitia." A more terrible picture has never been drawn by any analyst of human vice and cruelty and weakness.

[295] Guasti's edition of the Rime, p. 26.

[296] He defends himself thus in a letter to Lodovico Buonarroti: "Del caso dei Medici io non o mai parlato contra di loro cosa nessuna, se non in quel modo che s' e parlato generalmente per ogn' uomo, come fu del caso di Prato; che se le pietre avessin saputo parlare, n' avrebbono parlato."

[297] It seems clear from the correspondence in the Archivio Buonarroti, recently published, that when Michael Angelo fled from Florence to Venice in 1529, he did so under the pressure of no ignoble panic, but because his life was threatened by a traitor, acting possibly at the secret instance of Malatesta Baglioni. See Heath Wilson, pp. 326-330.

[298] See Guasti, p. 4.

[299] Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 251.

[300] To these years we must also assign the two unfinished medallions of "Madonna and the infant Christ," the circular oil picture of the "Holy Family," painted for Angelo Doni, and the beautiful unfinished picture of "Madonna with the boy Jesus and S. John" in the National Gallery. The last of these works is one of the loveliest of Michael Angelo's productions, whether we regard the symmetry of its composition or the refinement of its types. The two groups of two boys standing behind the central group on either hand of the Virgin, have incomparable beauty of form. The supreme style of the Sistine is here revealed to us in embryo. Whether the "Entombment," also unfinished, and also in the National Gallery, belongs to this time, and whether it be Michael Angelo's at all, is a matter for the experts to decide. To my perception, it is quite unworthy of the painter of the Doni "Holy family;" nor can I think that his want of practice in oil-painting will explain its want of charm and vigour.

[301] It has long been believed that Baccio Bandinelli destroyed Michael Angelo's; but Grimm, in his Life of the sculptor (vol. i. p. 376, Eng. Tr.), adduces solid arguments against this legend. A few studies, together with the engravings of portions by Marc Antonio and Agostino Veneziano, enable us to form a notion of the composition. At Holkham there is an old copy of the larger portion of the cartoon, which has been engraved by Schiavonetti, and reproduced in Harford's Illustrations, plate x.

[302] Vita, p. 23. Cellini, the impassioned admirer of Michael Angelo, esteemed this cartoon so highly, that he writes: "Sebbene il divino Michelagnolo fece la gran cappella di Papa Julio da poi, non arrivo mai a questo segno alla meta: la sua virtu non aggiunse mai da poi alla forza di quei primi studj."

[303] The cartoon was probably exhibited in 1505. See Gotti, vol. i. p. 35.

[304] Gotti, pp. 277-282.

[305] Springer, in his essay, Michael Agnolo in Rome, p. 21, makes out that this large design was not conceived till after the death of Julius. It is difficult to form a clear notion of the many changes in the plan of the tomb, between 1505 and 1542, when Michael Angelo signed the last contract with the heirs of Julius.

[306] In the Uffizzi at Florence. See Heath Wilson, plate vi.

[307] Boboli Gardens, Bargello, Louvre. These captives are unfinished. The "Rachel" and "Leah" at S. Pietro in Vincoli were committed to pupils by Michael Angelo.

[308] "Che mi fosso messo a fare zolfanelli.... Son ogni di lapidato, come se havessi crucifisso Cristo.... io mi truovo avere perduta tutta la mia giovinezza legato a questa sepoltura."

[309] Gotti, p. 42. Grimm makes two visits to Carrara in 1505 and 1506, vol. i. pp. 239, 243.

[310] See his letter. Gotti, p. 44.

[311] Our authorities for this episode in Michael Angelo's biography are mainly Vasari and Condivi. Though there may be exaggeration in the legend, it is certain that a correspondence took place between the Pope and the Gonfalonier of Florence, to bring about his return. See Heath Wilson, pp. 79-87, and the letter to Giuliano di San Gallo in Milanesi's Archivio Buonarroti, p. 377. Michael Angelo appears to have had some reason to fear assassination in Rome.

[312] See Michael Angelo's letters to Giovan Francesco Fattucci, and his family. Gotti, pp. 55-65.

[313] See the sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoja:—

La mia pittura morta Difendi orma', Giovanni, e 'l mio onore, Non sendo in loco bon, ne io pittore.

[314] According to the first plan, Michael Angelo bargained with the Pope for twelve Apostles in the lunettes, and another part to be filled with ornament in the usual manner—"dodici Apostoli nelle lunette, e 'l resto un certo partimento ripieno d' adornamenti come si usa." Michael Angelo, after making designs for this commission, told the Pope he thought the roof would look poor, because the Apostles were poor folk—"perche furon poveri anche loro." He then began his cartoons for the vault as it now exists. See the letter to Ser Giovan Francesco Fattucci, in the Archivio Buonarroti, Milanesi, pp. 426-427. This seems to be the foundation for an old story of the Pope's complaining that the Sistine roof looked poor without gilding, and Michael Angelo's reply that the Biblical personages depicted there were but poor people.

[315] Bramante, the Pope's architect, did in truth fail to construct the proper scaffolding, whether through inability or jealousy. Michael Angelo designed a superior system of his own, which became a model for future architects in similar constructions.

[316] See chapters vi. vii. and viii. of Mr. Charles Heath Wilson's admirable Life of Michel Angelo. Aurelio Gotti's Vita di Michel Agnolo, and Anton Springer's Michael Agnolo in Rome, deserve to be consulted on this passage in the painter's biography.

[317] The conditions under which Michael Angelo worked, without a trained band of pupils, must have struck contemporaries, accustomed to Raphael's crowds of assistants, with a wonder that justified Vasari's emphatic language of exaggeration as to his single-handed labour.

[318] In speaking of the Sistine I have treated Michael Angelo as a sculptor, and it was a sculptor who designed those frescoes. Ne io pittore is his own phrase. Compare an autotype of "Adam" in the Sistine with one of "Twilight" in S. Lorenzo: it is clear that in the former Michael Angelo painted what he would have been well pleased to carve. A sculptor's genius was needed for the modelling of those many figures; it was, moreover, not a painter's part to deal thus drily with colour.

[319] The Laurentian Library, however, was built in 1524.

[320] See Gotti, pp. 150, 155, 158, 159, for the correspondence which passed upon the subject, and the various alterations in the plan. As in the case of all Michael Angelo's works, except the Sistine, only a small portion of the original project was executed.

[321] Cosimo de' Medici found it impossible to induce him to return to Florence. See B. Cellini's Life, p. 436, for his way of receiving the Duke's overtures.

[322] See above, Chapter II, Michael Angelo.

[323] Vasari names the gloomy statue, called by the Italians Il Penseroso, "Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino," the sprightly one, "Giuliano, Duke of Nemours;" and this contemporary tradition has been recently confirmed by an inspection of the Penseroso's tomb (see a letter to the Academy, March 13, 1875, by Mr. Charles Heath Wilson). Grimm, in his Life of Michael Angelo, gave plausible aesthetic reasons why we should reverse the nomenclature; but the discovery of two bodies beneath the Penseroso, almost certainly those of Lorenzo and his supposed son Alessandro, justifies Vasari. Neither of these statues can be accepted as a portrait.

[324] The "Bacchus" of the Bargello, the "David," the "Christ," of the Minerva, the "Duke of Nemours," and the almost finished "Night," might also be mentioned. His chalk drawings of the "Bersaglieri," the "Infant Bacchanals," the "Fall of Phaethon," and the "Punishment of Tityos," now in the Royal Collection at Windsor, prove that even in old age Michael Angelo carried delicacy of execution as a draughtsman to a point not surpassed even by Lionardo. Few frescoes, again, were ever finished with more conscientious elaboration than those of the Sistine vault.

[325] See Varchi, at the end of the Storia Fiorentina, for episodes in the life of Pier Luigi Farnese, and Cellini for a popular estimate of the Cardinal, his father.

[326] This extract from Cesare Balbo's Pensieri sulla Storia d' Italia, Le Monnier, 1858, p. 57, may help to explain the situation: "E se lasciando gli uomini e i nomi grandi de' governanti, noi venissimo a quella storia, troppo sovente negletta, dei piccoli, dei piu, dei governati che sono in somma scopo d' ogni sorta di governo; se, coll' aiuto delle tante memorie rimaste di quell' secolo, noi ci addestrassimo a conoscere la condizione comune e privata degli Italiani di quell' eta, noi troveremmo trasmesse dai governanti a' governati, e ritornate da questi a quelli, tali universali scostumatezze ed immoralita, tali fiacchezze e perfidie, tali mollezze e libidini, tali ozi e tali vizi, tali avvilimenti insomma e corruzioni, che sembrano appena credibili in una eta d' incivilmento cristiano."

[327] Vasari's description moves our laughter with its jargon about "attitudini bellissime e scorti molto mirabili," when the man, in spite of his honest and enthusiastic admiration, is so little capable of penetrating the painter's thought. Mr. Ruskin leaves the same impression as Vasari: he too makes much talk about attitudes and muscles in Michael Angelo, and seems to be on Vasari's level as to comprehending him. The difference is that Vasari praises, Ruskin blames; both miss the mark.

[328] "E possibile che voi, che per essere divino non degnate il consortio degli huomini, haviate cio fatto nel maggior tempio di Dio?.... In un bagno delitioso, non in un choro supremo si conveniva il far vostro." Those who are curious may consult Aretino's correspondence with Michael Angelo in his published letters (Parigi, 1609), lib. i. p. 153; lib. ii. p. 9; lib. iii. pp. 45, 122; lib. iv. p. 37.

[329] Braun's autotypes of the vault frescoes show what ravage the lapse of time has wrought in them, by the cracking of the plaster, the peeling off in places of the upper surface, and the deposit of dirt and cobwebs. Mr. Heath Wilson, after careful examination, pronounces that not only time, but the wilful hand of man, re-painting and washing the delicate tint-coats with corrosive acids, has contributed to their ruin.

[330] Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, p. 332.

[331] That is not counting the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina in the Vatican, painted about 1544, which are now in a far worse state even than the "Last Judgment," and which can never have done more than show his style in decadence.

[332] See above, Chapter II, S. Peter's.

[333] See Gotti, p. 307, or Archivio Buonarroti, p. 535.

[334] I have reserved my translation of the sonnets that cast most light upon Michael Angelo's thought and feeling for an Appendix, No. II.

[335] The majority of Michael Angelo's letters are written on domestic matters—about the affairs of his brothers and his father. When they vexed him, he would break out into expressions like the following: "Io son ito, da dodici anni in qua, tapinando per tutta Italia; sopportato ogni vergognia; patito ogni stento; lacerato il corpo mio in ogni fatica; messa la vita propria a mille pericoli, solo per aiutar la casa mia." They are generally full of good counsel and sound love. How he loved his father may be seen in the terza rima poem on his death in 1534.

[336] Notice this expression in a letter to his father, written from Rome, about 1512, "Bastivi avere del pane, e vivete ben con Cristo e poveramente; come fo io qua, che vivo meschinamente." It does not seem that he ever altered this poor way of living. For his hiring at Bologna, in 1507, a single room with one bed in it, for himself and his three workmen, see Gotti, p. 58. His father in 1500 rebuked him for the meanness of his establishment; ibid. p. 23. It appears that he was always sending money home.

[337] "Io sto qua in grande afanno, e con grandissima fatica di corpo, e non o amici di nessuna sorte, e none voglio: e non o tanto tempo che io possa mangiare el bisognio mio." Letter to Gismondo, published by Grimm. See, too, Sebastian del Piombo's letter to him of November 9, 1520: "Ma fate paura a ognuno, insino a' papi." Compare, too, the letter of Sebastian, Oct. 15, 1512, in which Julius is reported to have said, "E terribile, come tu vedi, non se pol praticar con lui." Again, Michael Angelo writes: "Sto sempesolo, vo poco attorno e non parlo a persona e massino di fiorentini." Gotti, p. 255.

[338] When anything went wrong with him, he became moody and vehement: "Non vi maravigliate che io vi abbi scritto alle volte cosi stizosamente, che io o alle volte di gran passione, per molte cagioni che avengono a chi e fuor di casa." So he writes to his father in 1498. A letter to Luigi del Riccio of 1545, is signed "Michelagnolo Buonarroti non pittore, ne scultore, ne architettore, ma quel che voi volete, ma none briaco, come vi dissi, in casa."

[339] See the letters of Cosimo de' Medici, Gotti, pp. 301-313, the letter of Count Alessandro da Canossa, ibid. p. 4, and Pier Vettori's letter to Borghini, about the visit of some German gentlemen, ibid. p. 315.

[340] See the story as told by Torrigiani himself in Cellini, ed. Le Monnier, p. 23.

[341] After saying that he talked of love like Plato, Condivi continues: "Non senti mai uscir di quella bocca se non parole onestissime, e che avevan forza d' estinguere nella gioventu ogni incomposto e sfrenato desiderio che in lei potesse cadere." Compare Scipione Ammirato, quoted by Guasti, "Le Rime," p. xi.

[342] Her intense affection for the Marquis of Pescara, to whom she had been betrothed by her father at the age of five, is sufficiently proved by those many sonnets and canzoni in which she speaks of him as her Sun.

[343] See Grimm, vol. ii.

[344] See the Sonnets translated in my Appendix and in my Sonnets of Michael Angelo and Campanella, London, Smith & Elder, 1878. See also the letters to Cavalieri, quoted by Gotti, pp. 231, 232, 234. It is surely strained criticism to conjecture, as Gotti has done, that these epistles were meant for Vittoria, though written to Cavalieri. Taken together with the sonnets and the letter of Bartolommeo Angiolini (Gotti, p. 233), they seem to me to prove only Michael Angelo's warm love for this young man.



CHAPTER IX

LIFE OF BENVENUTO CELLINI

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

Few names in the history of Italian art are more renowned than that of Benvenuto Cellini. This can hardly be attributed to the value of his extant works; for though, while he lived, he was the greatest goldsmith of his time, a skilled medallist and an admirable statuary, few of his many masterpieces now survive. The plate and armour that bear his name, are only in some rare instances genuine; and the bronze "Perseus" in the Loggia de' Lanzi at Florence remains almost alone to show how high he ranked among the later Tuscan sculptors. If, therefore, Cellini had been judged merely by the authentic productions of his art, he would not have acquired a celebrity unique among his fellow-workers of the sixteenth century. That fame he owes to the circumstance that he left behind him at his death a full and graphic narrative of his stormy life. The vivid style of this autobiography dictated by Cellini while still engaged in the labour of his craft, its animated picture of a powerful character, the variety of its incidents, and the amount of information it contains, place it high both as a life-romance and also as a record of contemporary history. After studying the laboured periods of Varchi, we turn to these memoirs, and view the same events from the standpoint of an artisan conveying his impressions with plebeian raciness of phrase. The sack of Rome, the plague and siege of Florence, the humiliation of Clement VII., the pomp of Charles V. at Rome, the behaviour of the Florentine exiles at Ferrara, the intimacy between Alessandro de' Medici and his murderer, Lorenzino, the policy of Paul III., and the method pursued by Cosimo at Florence, are briefly but significantly touched upon—no longer by the historian seeking causes and setting forth the sequence of events, but by a shrewd observer interested in depicting his own part in the great game of life. Cellini haunted the private rooms of popes and princes; he knew the chief actors of his day, just as the valet knows the hero; and the picturesque glimpses into their life we gain from him, add the charm of colour and reality to history.

At the same time this book presents an admirable picture of an artist's life at Rome, Paris, and Florence. Cellini was essentially an Italian of the Cinque-cento. His passions were the passions of his countrymen; his vices were the vices of his time; his eccentricity and energy and vital force were what the age idealised as virtu. Combining rare artistic gifts with a most violent temper and a most obstinate will, he paints himself at one time as a conscientious craftsman, at another as a desperate bravo. He obeys his instincts and indulges his appetites with the irreflective simplicity of an animal. In the pursuit of vengeance and the commission of murder he is self-reliant, coolly calculating, fierce and fatal as a tiger. Yet his religious fervour is sincere; his impulses are generous; and his heart on the whole is good. His vanity is inordinate; and his unmistakable courage is impaired, to Northern apprehension, by swaggering bravado.

The mixture of these qualities in a personality so natural and so clearly limned renders Cellini a most precious subject for the student of Renaissance life and character. Even supposing him to have been exceptionally passionate, he was made of the same stuff as his contemporaries. We are justified in concluding this not only from collateral evidence and from what he tells us, but also from the meed of honour he received. In Europe of the present day he could hardly fail to be regarded as a ruffian, a dangerous disturber of morality and order. In his own age he was held in high esteem and buried by his fellow-citizens with public ceremonies. A funeral oration was pronounced over his grave "in praise both of his life and works, and also of his excellent disposition of mind and body."[345] He dictated the memoirs that paint him as bloodthirsty, sensual, and revengeful, in the leisure of his old age, and left them with complacency to serve as witness of his manly virtues to posterity. Even Vasari, whom he hated, and who reciprocated his ill-will, records that "he always showed himself a man of great spirit and veracity, bold, active, enterprising, and formidable to his enemies; a man, in short, who knew as well how to speak to princes as to exert himself in his art."

Enough has been said to prove that Cellini was not inferior to the average morality of the Renaissance, and that we are justified in accepting his life as a valuable historical document.[346] To give a detailed account of a book pronounced by Horace Walpole "more amusing than any novel," received by Parini and Tiraboschi as the most delightful masterpiece of Italian prose, translated into German by Goethe, and placed upon his index of select works by Auguste Comte, may seem superfluous. Yet I cannot afford to omit from my plan the most singular and characteristic episode in the private history of the Italian Renaissance. I need it for the concrete illustration of much that has been said in this and the preceding volumes of my work.

Cellini was born of respectable parents at Florence on the night of All Saints' Day in 1500, and was called Benvenuto to record his father's joy at having a son.[347] It was the wish of Giovanni Cellini's heart that his son should be a musician. Benvenuto in consequence practised the flute for many years attentively, though much against his will. At the age of fifteen so great was his desire to learn the arts of design that his father placed him under the care of the goldsmith Marcone. At the same time he tells us in his memoirs: "I continued to play sometimes through complaisance to my father either upon the flute or the horn; and I constantly drew tears and deep sighs from him every time he heard me." While engaged in the workshop of Marcone, Benvenuto came to blows with some young men who had attacked his brother, and was obliged to leave Florence for a time. At this period he visited Siena, Bologna, and Pisa, gaming his livelihood by working in the shops of goldsmiths, and steadily advancing in his art.

It must not be thought that this education was a mean one for so great an artist. Painting and sculpture in Italy were regarded as trades, and the artist had his bottega just as much as the cobbler or the blacksmith.[348] I have already had occasion to point out that an apprenticeship to goldsmith's work was considered at Florence an almost indispensable commencement of advanced art-study.[349] Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Orcagna, Verocchio, Ghiberti, Pollajuolo, Ghirlandajo, Luca della Robbia, all underwent this training before they applied themselves to architecture, painting, and sculpture. As the goldsmith's craft was understood in Florence, it exacted the most exquisite nicety in performance as well as design. It forced the student to familiarise himself with the materials, instruments, and technical processes of art; so that, later on in life, he was not tempted to leave the execution of his work to journeymen and hirelings.[350] No labour seemed too minute, no metal was too mean, for the exercise of the master-workman's skill; nor did he run the risk of becoming one of those half-amateurs in whom accomplishment falls short of first conception. Art ennobled for him all that he was called to do. Whether cardinals required him to fashion silver vases for their banquet-tables; or ladies wished the setting of their jewels altered; or a pope wanted the enamelled binding of a book of prayers; or men-at-arms sent swordblades to be damascened with acanthus foliage; or kings desired fountains and statues for their palace courts; or poets begged to have their portraits cast in bronze; or generals needed medals to commemorate their victories, or dukes new coins for their mint; or bishops ordered reliquaries for the altars of their patron saints; or merchants sought for seals and signet rings engraved with their device; or men of fashion asked for medallions of Leda and Adonis to fasten in their caps—all these commissions could be undertaken by a workman like Cellini. He was prepared for all alike by his apprenticeship to orfevria; and to all he gave the same amount of conscientious toil. The consequence was that, at the time of the Renaissance, furniture, plate, jewels, and articles of personal adornment were objects of true art. The mind of the craftsman was exercised afresh in every piece of work. Pretty things were not bought, machine-made, by the gross in a warehouse; nor was it customary, as now it is, to see the same design repeated with mechanical regularity in every house.

In 1518 Benvenuto returned to Florence and began to study the cartoons of Michael Angelo. He must have already acquired considerable reputation as a workman, for about this time Torrigiani invited him to go to England in his company and enter the service of Henry VIII. The Renaissance was now beginning to penetrate the nations of the North, and Henry and Francis vied with each other in trying to attract foreign artists to their capitals. It does not, however, appear that the English king secured the services of men so distinguished as Lionardo da Vinci, II Rosso, Primaticcio, Del Sarto, and Cellini, who shed an artificial lustre on the Court of France. Going to London then was worse than going to Russia now, and to take up a lengthy residence among questi diavoli ... quelle bestie di quegli Inglesi, as Cellini politely calls the English, did not suit a Southern taste. He had, moreover, private reasons for disliking Torrigiani, who boasted of having broken Michael Angelo's nose in a quarrel. "His words," says Cellini, "raised in me such a hatred of the fellow that, far from wishing to accompany him to England, I could not bear to look at him." It may be mentioned that one of Cellini's best points was hero-worship for Michael Angelo. He never speaks of him except as quel divino Michel Agnolo, il mio maestro, and extols la bella maniera of the mighty sculptor to the skies. Torrigiani, as far as we can gather from Cellini's description of him, must have been a man of his own kidney and complexion: "he was handsome, of consummate assurance, having rather the airs of a bravo than a sculptor; above all, his fierce gestures and his sonorous voice, with a peculiar manner of knitting his brows, were enough to frighten everyone that saw him; and he was continually talking of his valiant feats among those bears of Englishmen." The story of Torrigiani's death in Spain is worth repeating. A grandee employed him to model a Madonna, which he did with more than usual care, expecting a great reward. His pay, however, falling short of is expectation, in a fit of fury he knocked his statue to pieces. For this act of sacrilege, as it was deemed, to the work of his own brain and hand, Torrigiani was thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition. There he starved himself to death in 1522 in order to escape the fate of being burned. This story helps to explain why the fine arts were never well developed in Spain, and why they languished after the introduction of the Holy Office into Italy.[351]

Instead of emigrating to England, Benvenuto, after a quarrel with his father about the obnoxious flute-playing, sauntered out one morning toward the gate of S. Piero Gattolini. There he met a friend called Tasso, who had also quarrelled with his parents; and the two youths agreed, upon the moment, to set off for Rome. Both were nineteen years of age. Singing and laughing, carrying their bundle by turns, and wondering "what the old folks would say," they trudged on foot to Siena, there hired a return horse between them, and so came to Rome. This residence in Rome only lasted two years, which were spent by Cellini in the employment of various masters. At the expiration of that time he returned to Florence, and distinguished himself by the making of a marriage girdle for a certain Raffaello Lapaccini.[352] The fame of this and other pieces of jewellery roused against him the envy and malice of the elder goldsmiths, and led to a serious fray, in the course of which he assaulted a young man of the Guasconti family, and was obliged to fly disguised like a monk to Rome.

As this is the first of Cellini's homicidal quarrels, it is worth while to transcribe what he says about it. "One day as I was leaning against the shop of these Guasconti, and talking with them, they contrived that a load of bricks should pass by at the moment, and Gherardo Guasconti pushed it against me in such wise that it hurt me. Turning suddenly and seeing that he was laughing, I struck him so hard upon the temple that he fell down stunned. Then turning to his cousins, I said, That is how I treat cowardly thieves like you; and when they began to show fight, being many together, I, finding myself on flame, set hand to a little knife I had, and cried, If one of you leaves the shop, let another run for the confessor, for a surgeon won't find anything to do here." Nor was he contented with this truculent behaviour; for when Gherardo recovered from his blow, and the matter had come before the magistrates, Cellini went to seek him in his own house. There he stabbed him in the midst of all his family, raging meanwhile, to use his own phrase, "like an infuriated bull."[353] It appears that on this occasion no one was seriously hurt; but the affair proved perilous to Cellini, since it was a mere accident that he had not killed more than one of the Guasconti. These affrays recur continually among the adventures recorded by Cellini in his Life. He says with comical reservation of phrase that he was "naturally somewhat choleric;" and then, describes the access of his fury as a sort of fever, lasting for days, preventing him from taking food or sleep, making his blood boil in his veins, inflaming his eyes, and never suffering him to rest till he revenged himself by murder or at least by blows. To enumerate all the people he killed or wounded, or pounded to a jelly in public brawls or private quarrels, in the pursuit of deliberate vendetta or under a sudden impulse of ungovernable rage, would take too long. We are forced by an effort to recall to mind the state of society at that time in Italy, in order to understand how it is that he can talk with unconcern and even self-complacency about his homicides. He makes himself accuser, judge, and executioner, and is quite satisfied with the goodness of his cause, the justice of his sentence, and the equity of his administration. In a sonnet written to Bandinelli, he compares his own victims with the mangled statues of that sculptor, much to his own satisfaction.[354]

There is the same callousness of conscience in his record of spiteful acts that we should blush to think of—stabs in the dark, and such a piece of revenge as cutting the beds to bits in the house of an innkeeper who had offended him.[355] Nor does he speak with any shame of the savage cruelty with which he punished a woman who was sitting to him as a model, and whom he hauled up and down his room by the hair of her head, kicking and beating her till he was tired.[356] It is true that on this occasion he regrets having spoiled, in a moment of blind passion, the best arms and legs that he could find to draw from. Such episodes, to which it is impossible to allude otherwise than very briefly, illustrate with extraordinary vividness what I have already had occasion to say about the Italian sense of honour at this period.[357]

The consciousness of physical courage and the belief in his own moral superiority sustained Cellini in all his dangers and in all his crimes. Armed with his sword and dagger, and protected by his coat of mail, he was ready to stand against the world and fight his way towards any object he desired. When a man opposed his schemes or entered into competition with him as an artist, he swaggered up with hand on hilt and threatened to run him through the body if he did not mind his business. At the same time he attributes the success of his own violence in quelling and maltreating his opponents to the providence of God. "I do not write this narrative," he says, "from a motive of vanity, but merely to return thanks to God, who has extricated me out of so many trials and difficulties; who likewise delivers me from those that daily impend over me. Upon all occasions I pay my devotions to Him, call upon Him as my defender, and recommend myself to His care. I always exert my utmost efforts to extricate myself, but when I am quite at a loss, and all my powers fail me, then the force of the Deity displays itself—that formidable force which, unexpectedly, strikes those who wrong and oppress others, and neglect the great and honourable duty which God has enjoined on them." I shall have occasion later on to discuss Cellini's religious opinions; but here it may be remarked that the feeling of this passage is thoroughly sincere and consistent with the spirit of the times. The separation between religion and morality was complete in Italy.[358] Men made their own God and worshipped him; and the God of Cellini was one who always helped those who began to help themselves by taking justice into their own hands.

From the date of his second visit to Rome in 1523, Cellini's life divides itself into three periods, the first spent in the service of Popes Clement VII. and Paul III., the second in Paris at the Court of Francis, and the third at Florence under Cosimo de' Medici.

On arriving in Rome, his extraordinary abilities soon brought him into notice at the Court. The Chigi family, the Bishop of Salamanca, and the Pope himself employed him to make various jewels, ornaments, and services of plate. In consequence of a dream in which his father appeared and warned him not to neglect music, under pain of the paternal malediction, he accepted a post in the Papal band. The old bugbear of flute-playing followed him until his father's death, and then we hear no more of it. The history of this portion of his life is among the most entertaining passages of his biography. Drawing the Roman ruins, shooting pigeons, scouring the Campagna on a pony like a shaggy bear, fighting duels, prosecuting love-affairs, defending his shop against robbers, skirmishing with Moorish pirates on the shore by Cerveterra, stabbing, falling ill of the plague and the French sickness—these adventures diversify the account he gives of masterpieces in gold and silver ware. The literary and artistic society of Rome at this period was very brilliant. Painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths mixed with scholars and poets, passing their time alternately in the palaces of dukes and cardinals and in the lodgings of gay women. Bohemianism of the wildest type was combined with the manners of the great world. A little incident described at some length by Cellini brings this varied life before us. There was a club of artists, including Giulio Romano and other pupils of Raphael, who met twice a week to sup together and to spend the evening in conversation, with music and the recitation of sonnets. Each member of this company brought with him a lady. Cellini, on one occasion, not being provided for the moment with an innamorata, dressed up a beautiful Spanish youth called Diego as a woman, and took him to the supper. The ensuing scene is described in the most vivid manner. We see before us the band of painters and poets, the women in their bright costumes, the table adorned with flowers and fruit, and, as a background to the whole picture, a trellis of jasmines with dark foliage and starry blossoms. Diego, called Pomona, with regard doubtless to his dark and ruddy beauty, is unanimously proclaimed the fairest of the fair. Then a discovery of his sex is made; and the adventure leads, as usual in the doings of Cellini, to daggers, midnight ambushes, and vendettas that only end with bloodshed.

An episode of this sort may serve as the occasion for observing that the artists of the late Renaissance had become absorbed in the admiration of merely carnal beauty. With the exception of Michael Angelo and Tintoretto, there was no great master left who still pursued an intellectual ideal. The Romans and the Venetians simply sought and painted what was splendid and luxurious in the world around them. Their taste was contented with well-developed muscles, gorgeous colour, youthful bloom, activity of limb, and grace of outline. The habits of the day, voluptuous yet hardy, fostered this one-sided development of the arts; while the asceticism of the Middle Ages had yielded to a pagan cult of sensuality. To draw un bel corpo ignudo with freedom was now the ne plus ultra of achievement. How to express thought or to indicate the subtleties of emotion, had ceased to be the artist's aim. We have already noticed the passionate love of beauty which animated the great masters of the golden age. This, in the less elevated natures of the craftsmen who succeeded them, and under the conditions of advancing national corruption, was no longer refined or restrained by delicacy of feeling or by loftiness of aim. It degenerated into soulless animalism. The capacity for perceiving and for reproducing what is nobly beautiful was lost. Vulgarity and coarseness stamped themselves upon the finest work of men like Giulio Romano. At this crisis it was proved how inferior was the neo-paganism of the sixteenth century to the paganism of antiquity it aped. Mythology preserved Greek art from degradation, and connected a similar enthusiasm for corporeal beauty with the thoughts and aspirations of the Hellenic race. The Italians lacked this safeguard of a natural religion. To throw the Christian ideal aside, and to strive to grasp the classical ideal in exchange, was easy. But paganism alone could give them nothing but its vices; it was incapable of communicating its real source of life—its poetry, its faith, its cult of nature. Art, therefore, as soon as the artists pronounced themselves for sensuality, merged in a skilful selection and reproduction of elegant forms, and nothing more. A handsome youth upon a pedestal was called a god. A duke's mistress on Titian's canvas passed for Aphrodite. Andrea del Sarto's faithless wife figured as Madonna. Cellini himself, though sensitive to every kind of physical beauty—as we gather from what he tells us of Cencio, Diego, Faustina, Paolino, Angelica, Ascanio—has not attempted to animate his "Perseus," or his "Ganymede," or his "Diana of Fontainebleau," with a vestige of intellectual or moral loveliness. The vacancy of their expression proves the degradation of an art that had ceased to idealise anything beyond a faultless body. Not thus did the Greeks imagine even their most sensual divinities. There is at least a thought in Faun and Satyr. Cellini's statues have no thought; their blank animalism corresponds to the condition of their maker's soul.[359]

When Rome was carried by assault in 1527, and the Papal Court was besieged in the castle of S. Angelo, Cellini played the part of bombardier. It is well known that he claims to have shot the Constable of Bourbon dead with his own hand, and to have wounded the Prince of Orange; nor does there seem to be any adequate reason for discrediting his narrative. It is certain that he was an expert marksman, and that he did Clement good service by directing the artillery of S. Angelo. If we believed all his assertions, however, we should have to suppose that nothing memorable happened without his intervention. In his own eyes his whole life was a miracle. The very hailstones that fell upon his head could not be grasped in both hands. His guns and powder brought down birds no other marksman had a chance of hitting. When he was a child, he grasped a scorpion without injury, and saw a salamander "living and enjoying himself in the hottest flames." After his fever at Rome in 1535, he threw off from his stomach a hideous worm—hairy, speckled with green, black, and red—the like whereof the doctors never saw.[360] When he finally escaped from the dungeons of S. Angelo in 1539, a luminous appearance like an aureole settled on his head, and stayed there for the rest of his life.[361] These facts are related in the true spirit of Jerome Cardan, Paracelsus, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Sir Thomas Browne. Cellini doubtless believed in them; but they warn us to be cautious in accepting what he says about his exploits, since imagination and self-conceit could so far distort his judgment.

It may be regretted that Cellini has not given a fuller account of the memorable sack of Borne. Yet, confining himself almost wholly to his own adventures, he presents a very vivid picture of the sad life led by the Pope and cardinals, vainly hoping for succour from Urbino, wrangling together about the causes of the tragedy, sewing the crown jewels into their doublets, and running the perils of the siege with common soldiers on the ramparts. When peace at last was signed, Cellini paid a visit to Florence, and found that his father and some other relatives had died of plague.[362] His brother Cecchino, however, who was a soldier in the Bande Nere of Giovanni de' Medici, and his sister Liperata survived. With them he spent a pleasant evening; for Liperata having "for a while lamented her father, her sister, her husband, and a little son that she had been deprived of, went to prepare supper, and during the rest of the evening there was not a word more spoken of the dead, but much about weddings. Thus we supped together with the greatest cheerfulness and satisfaction imaginable." In these sentences there is no avowal of hard-heartedness; only the careless familiarity with loss and danger, engendered by war, famine, plague, and personal adventures in those riotous times.[363] Cellini gladly risked his life in a quarrel for his friends; but he would not sadden the present by reflecting on inevitable accidents. This elastic temper permeates his character. His affections were strong, but transient. The one serious love-affair he describes, among a multitude of mere debaucheries, made him miserable for a few days. His mistress, Angelica, ran away, and left him "on the point of losing his senses or dying of grief." Yet, when he found her again, a short time sufficed to satisfy his longing, and he turned his back with jibes upon her when she bargained about money.

It is worthy of notice that, at the same time, he was an excellent son and brother. His sister was left a widow with two children; whereupon he took them all into his house, without bragging about what appears to have been the best action of his life. In the same spirit he conscientiously performed what he conceived to be his duty to Cecchino, murdered by a musketeer in Rome. After nursing his revenge till he was nearly mad, he stole out one evening and stabbed the murderer in the back.[364] So violent was the blow that he could not extricate his dagger from the man's spine, but had to leave it sticking in his nape. Next to his own egotism the strongest feelings in Cellini were domestic; and he showed them at one moment by charity to his sister's family, at another by a savage assassination.

After killing the musketeer, Cellini retired for refuge to the house of Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Civita di Penna, who had been his brother's patron. The matter reached the Pope's ears, for whom Benvenuto was at work upon crown jewels. Clement sent for him, and simply said: "Now you have recovered your health, Benvenuto, take care of yourself." This shows how little they thought of homicide in Rome. After killing a man, some powerful protector had to be sought, who was usually a cardinal, since the cardinals had right of sanctuary in their palaces. There the assassin lay in hiding, in order to avoid his victim's friends and relatives, until such time as a pardon and safe-conduct and absolution had been obtained from his Holiness. When Cellini, soon after this occurrence, stabbed a private enemy, by name Pompeo, two cardinals were anxious to screen him from pursuit, and disputed the privilege of harbouring so talented a criminal.[365] The Pope, with marvellous good-humour, observed: "I have never heard of the death of Pompeo, but often of Benvenuto's provocation; so let a safe-conduct be instantly made out, and that will secure him from all manner of danger." A friend of Pompeo's who was present, ventured to insinuate that this was dangerous policy. The Pope put him down at once by saying, "You do not understand these matters; I would have you know that men who are unique in their profession, like Benvenuto, are not subject to the laws." Whether Paul really said these words, may be doubted; but it is clear that much was conceded to a clever workman, and that the laws were a mere brutum fulmen. No man of spirit appealed to them. Cellini, for example, was poisoned by a parish priest near Florence:[366] yet he never brought the man to justice; and in the case of his own murders, he only dreaded the retaliation of his victims' kinsmen. On one occasion, indeed, the civil arm came down upon him; when the city guard attempted to arrest him for Pompeo's assassination. He beat them off with swords and sticks; and, after all, it appeared that they were only acting at the instigation of Pier Luigi Farnese, whom Benvenuto had offended.

During his residence at Rome, Cellini witnessed an incantation conducted in the Colosseum by a Sicilian priest and necromancer. The conjurer and the artist, accompanied by two friends, and by a boy, who was to act as medium, went by night to the amphitheatre. The magic circle was drawn; fires were lighted, and perfumes scattered on the flames. Then the spirit-seer began his charms, calling in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, or what passed for such, upon the leaders of the hosts of hell. The whole hollow space now filled with phantoms, surging up by legions, rushing down from the galleries, issuing from subterranean caverns, and wheeling to and fro with signs of fury. All the party, says Cellini, were thrown into consternation, except himself, who, though terribly afraid, kept up the fainting spirits of the rest. At last the conjurer summoned courage to inquire when Cellini might hope to be restored to his lost love, Angelica;—for this was the trivial object of the incantation. The demons answered (how we are not told) that he would meet her ere a month had passed away. This prophecy, as it happened, was fulfilled. Then they redoubled their attacks; the necromancer kept crying out that the peril was most imminent, until the matin bells of Rome swung through the darkness, freeing them at last from fear. As they walked home, the boy, holding the Sicilian by his robe and Benvenuto by his mantle, told them that he still saw giants leaping with fantastic gestures on their path, now running along the house roofs, and now dancing on the earth. Each one of them that night dreamed in his bed of devils.[367]

The interest of this incident is almost wholly picturesque. It throws but little light upon the superstitions of the age.[368] The magnitude of the Colosseum, the popular legends concerning its magical origin, and the terrible uses of blood to which it had been put, invested this building with peculiar mystery. Robbers haunted the huge caves. Rubbish and weeds choked the passages. Sickly trees soared up from darkness into light among the porches, and the moon peered through the empty vomitories. If we call imagination to our aid, and place the necromancers and their brazier in the centre of this space;—if we fancy the priest's chaunted spells, the sacred names invoked in his unholy rites, the shuddering terror of the conscience-stricken accomplices, and Cellini with defiant mien but quailing heart, we can well believe that he saw more than the amphitheatre contained. Whether the spectres were projected by the conjurer from a magic lantern on the smoke that issued from his heaps of blazing wood, so that the volumes of vapour, agitated by the wind and rolling in thick spirals, showed them retreating and advancing, and varying in shape and number, is a matter for conjecture. Cellini firmly believed that he had been environed by living squadrons of the spirits of the damned.

The next four years were spent by Cellini chiefly in Rome, in peril of his life at several seasons, owing to the animosity of Pier Luigi Farnese. One journey he took at this period to Venice, passing through Ferrara, where he came to blows with the Florentine exiles. It is interesting to find the respectable historian Jacopo Nardi involved, if only as a peacemaker, in this affray.[369] He also visited Florence and cast dies for Alessandro's silver coinage. It was here that he found opportunities of observing the perilous intimacy between the Duke of Civita di Penna and his cousin—quel pazzo malinconico filosofo di Lorenzino.[370] In April 1537, having quarrelled with the Pope, who seems to have adopted Pier Luigi's prejudice against him, Cellini set out for France with two of his workmen. They passed through Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Padua, staying in the last place to model a medallion portrait of Pietro Bembo;[371] then they crossed the Grisons by the Bernina and Albula passes. We hear nothing about this part of the journey, except that the snow was heavy, and that they ran great danger of their lives. Cellini must have traversed some of the most romantic scenery of Switzerland at the best season of the year; yet not a word escapes him about the beauty of the Alps or the wonder of the glaciers, which he saw for the first time. The pleasure we derive from contemplating savage scenery was unknown to the Italians of the sixteenth century; the height and cold, the gloom and solitude of mountains struck them with a sense of terror or of dreariness. On the Lake of Wallenstadt Cellini met with a party of Germans, whom he hated as cordially as an Athenian of the age of Pericles might have loathed the Scythians for their barbarism.[372] The Italians embarked in one boat, the Germans in another; Cellini being under the impression that the Northern lakes would not be so likely to drown him as those of his own country. However, when a storm swept down the hills, he took a terrible fright, and compelled the boatmen at the point of the poniard to put him and his company ashore. The description of their struggles to drag their heavily laden horses over the uneven ground near Wesen, is extremely graphic, and gives a good notion of the dangers of the road in those days.[373] That night they "heard the watch sing at all hours very agreeably; and as the houses of that town were all of wood, he kept bidding them to take care of their fires." Next day they arrived, not without other accidents, at Zurich, "a marvellous city, as clear and polished as a jewel." Thence by Solothurn, Lausanne, Geneva, and Lyons, they made their way to Paris.

This long and troublesome journey led to nothing, for Cellini grew weary of following the French Court about from place to place; his health too failed him, and he decided that he would rather die in Italy than France.[374] Accordingly he returned to Rome, and there, not long after his arrival, he was arrested by the order of Pope Paul III.[375] The charge against him, preferred by one of his own prentices, was this. During the siege of Rome, he had been employed by Clement to melt down the tiaras and papal ornaments, in order that the precious stones might be conveyed away in secrecy. He did so; and afterwards confessed to having kept a portion of the gold filings found in the cinders of his brazier during the operation. For this crime Clement gave him absolution.[376] Now, however, he was accused of having stolen gold and jewels to the amount of nearly eighty thousand ducats. "The avarice of the Pope, but more that of his bastard, then called Duke of Castro," inclined Paul to believe this charge; and Pier Luigi was allowed to farm the case. Cellini was examined by the Governor of Rome and two assessors; in spite of his vehement protestations of innocence, the absence of any evidence against him, and the sound arguments adduced in his defence, he was committed to the castle of S. Angelo. When he received his sentence, he called heaven and earth to witness, thanking God that he had "the happiness not to be confined for some error of his sinful nature, as generally happens to young men." Whereupon "the brute of a Governor replied, Yet you have killed enough men in your time." This remark was pertinent; but it provoked a torrent of abuse and a long enumeration of his services from the virtuous Cellini.

The account of this imprisonment, and especially of the hypochondriacal Governor who thought he was a bat and used to flap his arms and squeak when night was coming on, is highly entertaining.[377] Not less interesting is the description of Cellini's daring escape from the castle. In climbing over the last wall, he fell and broke his leg, and was carried by a waterman to the palace of the Cardinal Cornaro. There he lay in hiding, visited by all the rank and fashion of Rome, who were not a little curious to see the hero of so perilous an escapade. Cornaro promised to secure his pardon, but eventually exchanged him for a bishopric. This remarkable proceeding illustrates the manners of the Papal Court. The cardinal wanted a benefice for one of his followers, and the Pope wished to get his son's enemy once more into his power. So the two ecclesiastics bargained together, and by mutual kind offices attained their several ends.

Cellini with his broken leg went back to languish in his prison. He found the flighty Governor furious because he had "flown away," eluding his bat's eyes and wings. The rigour used towards him made him dread the worst extremities. Cast into a condemned cell, he first expected to be flayed alive; and when this terror was removed, he perceived the crystals of a pounded jewel in his food. According to his own account of this mysterious circumstance, Messer Durante Duranti of Brescia, one of Cellini's numerous enemies, had given a diamond of small value to be broken up and mixed with a salad served to him at dinner. The jeweller to whom this charge was entrusted, kept the diamond and substituted a beryl, thinking that the inferior stone would have the same murderous properties. To the avarice of this man Cellini attributed his escape from a lingering death by inflammation of the mucous membrane.[378]

During his first imprisonment he had occupied a fair chamber in the upper turret of the castle. He was now removed to a dungeon below ground where Fra Fojano, the reformer, had been starved to death. The floor was wet and infested with crawling creatures. A few reflected sunbeams slanting from a narrow window for two hours of the afternoon, was all the light that reached him. Here he lay, alone, unable to move because of his broken leg, with his hair and teeth falling away, and with nothing to occupy him but a Bible and a volume of Villani's "Chronicles." His spirit, however, was indomitable; and the passionate energy of the man, hitherto manifested in ungoverned acts of fury, took the form of ecstasy. He began the study of the Bible from the first chapter of Genesis, and trusting firmly to the righteousness of his own cause, compared himself to all the saints and martyrs of Scripture, men of whom the world was not worthy. He sang psalms, prayed continually, and composed a poem in praise of his prison. With a piece of charcoal he made a great drawing of angels surrounding God the Father on the wall. Once only his courage gave way: he determined on suicide, and so placed a beam that it should fall on him like a trap. When all was ready, an unseen hand took violent hold of him, and dashed him on the ground at a considerable distance. From this moment his dungeon was visited by angels, who healed his broken leg, and reasoned with him of religion.

The mention of these visions reminds us that Cellini had become acquainted with Savonarola's writings during his first imprisonment.[379] Impressed with the grandeur of the prophet's dreams, and exalted by the reading of the Bible, he no doubt mistook his delirious fancies for angelic visitors, and in the fervour of his enthusiasm laid claim to inspiration. One of these hallucinations is particularly striking. He had prayed that he might see the sun at least in trance, if it were impossible that he should look on it again with waking eyes. But, while awake and in possession of his senses, he was hurried suddenly away and carried to a room, where the invisible power sustaining him appeared in human shape, "like a youth whose beard is but just growing, with a face most marvellous, fair, but of austere and far from wanton beauty." In that room were all the men who had ever lived and died on earth; and thence they two went together, and came into a narrow street, one side whereof was bright with sunlight. Then Cellini asked the angel how he might behold the sun; and the angel pointed to certain steps upon the side of a house. Up these Cellini climbed, and came into the full blaze of the sun, and, though dazzled by its brightness, he gazed steadfastly and took his fill. While he looked, the rays fell away upon the left side and the disk shone like a bath of molten gold. This surface swelled, and from the glory came the figure of a Christ upon the cross, which moved and stood beside the rays. Again the surface swelled, and from the glory came the figure of Madonna and her Child; and at the right hand of the sun there knelt S. Peter in his sacerdotal robes, pleading Cellini's cause; and "full of shame that such foul wrong should be done to Christians in his house." This vision marvellously strengthened Cellini's soul, and he began to hope with confidence for liberty. When free again, he modelled the figures he had seen in gold.

The religious phase in Cellini's history requires some special comment, since it is precisely at this point that he most faithfully personifies the spirit of his age and nation. That he was a devout Catholic there is no question. He made two pilgrimages to Loreto, and another to S. Francis of Vernia. To S. Lucy he dedicated a golden eye after his recovery from an illness. He was, moreover, always anxious to get absolution from the Pope. More than this; he continually sustained himself at the great crises of his life, when in peril of imprisonment, while defending himself against assassins, and again on the eve of casting his "Perseus," by direct and passionate appeals to God. Yet his religion had but little effect upon his life; and he often used it as a source of moral strength in doing deeds repugnant to real piety. Like love, he put it off and on quite easily, reverting to it when he found himself in danger or bad spirits, and forgetting it again when he was prosperous. Thus in the dungeon of S. Angelo he vowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre if God would grant him to behold the sun. This vow he forgot until he met with disappointment at the Court of Francis, and then he suddenly determined to travel to Jerusalem. The offer of a salary of seven hundred crowns restored his spirits, and he thought no more about his vow.

While he loved his life so dearly and indulged so freely in the pleasures of this earth, he made a virtue of necessity as soon as death approached, crying, "The sooner I am delivered from the prison of this world, the better; especially as I am sure of salvation, being unjustly put to death." His good opinion of himself extended to the certainty he felt of heaven. Forgetting his murders and debaucheries, he sustained his courage with devotion when all other sources failed. As to the divine government of the world, he halted between two opinions. Whether the stars or Providence had the upper hand, he could not clearly say; but by the stars he understood a power antagonistic to his will, by Providence a force that helped him to do what he liked. There is a similar confusion in his mind about the Pope. He goes to Clement submissively for absolution from homicide and theft, saying, "I am at the feet of your Holiness, who have the full power of absolving, and I request you to give me permission to confess and communicate, that I may with your favour be restored to the divine grace." He also tells Paul that the sight of Christ's vicar, in whom there is an awful representation of the divine Majesty, makes him tremble. Yet at another time he speaks of Clement being "transformed to a savage beast," and talks of him as "that poor man Pope Clement."[380] Of Paul he says that he "believed neither in God nor in any other article of religion;" he sincerely regrets not having killed him by accident during the siege of Rome, abuses him for his avarice, casts his bastards in his teeth, and relates with relish the crime of forgery for which in his youth he was imprisoned in the castle of S. Angelo.[381] Indeed, the Italians treated the Pope as negroes treat their fetishes. If they had cause to dislike him, they beat and heaped insults on him—like the Florentines who described Sixtus IV. as "leno matris suae, adulterorum minister, diaboli vicarius," and his spiritual offspring as "simonia, luxus, homicidium, proditio, haeresis." On the other hand, they really thought that he could open heaven and shut the gates of hell.

At the end of the year 1539, the Cardinal Ippolito d'Este appeared in Rome with solicitations from Francis I. that the Pope would release Cellini and allow him to enter his service.[382] Upon this the prison door was opened. Cellini returned to his old restless life of violence and pleasure. We find him renewing his favourite pastimes—killing, wantoning, disputing with his employers, and working diligently at his trade. The temporary saint and visionary becomes once more the bravo and the artist. A more complete parallel to the consequences of revivalism in Italy could not be found.[383] Meanwhile the first period of his history is closed and the second begins.

Cellini's account of his residence in France has much historical interest besides the charm of its romance. When he first joined the Court, he found Francis travelling from city to city with a retinue of eighteen thousand persons and twelve thousand horses. Frequently they came to places where no accommodation could be had, and the suite were lodged in wretched tents. It is not wonderful that Cellini should complain of the French being less civilised than the Italians of his time. Francis among his ladies and courtiers, pretending to a knowledge of the arts, sauntering with his splendid train into the goldsmith's workshop, encouraging Cellini's violence with a boyish love of mischief, vain and flattered, peevish, petulant, and fond of show, appears upon these pages with a life-like vividness.[384] When the time came for settling in Paris, the King presented his goldsmith with a castle called Le Petit Nesle, and made him lord thereof by letters of naturalisation. This house stood where the Institute has since been built; of its extent we may judge from the number of occupations carried on within its precincts when Cellini entered into possession. He found there a tennis-court, a distillery, a printing press, and a factory of saltpetre, besides residents engaged in other trades. Cellini's claims were resisted. Probably the occupiers did not relish the intrusion of a foreigner. So he stormed the place and installed himself by force of arms. Similar violence was needed in order to maintain himself in possession; but this Cellini loved, and had he been let alone, it is probable he would have died of ennui.

Difficulties of all kinds, due in part to his ungovernable temper, in part to his ill-regulated life, in part to his ignorance of French habits, gathered round him. He fell into disfavour with Madame d'Estampes, the mistress of the King; and here it may be mentioned that many of his troubles arose from his inability to please noble women.[385] Proud, self-confident, overbearing, and unable to command his words or actions, Cellini was unfitted to pay court to princes. Then again he quarrelled with his brother artists, and made the Bolognese painter, Primaticcio, his enemy. After being attacked by assassins and robbers on more than one occasion, he was involved in two lawsuits. He draws a graphic picture of the French courts of justice, with their judge as grave as Plato, their advocates all chattering at once, their perjured Norman witnesses, and the ushers at the doors vociferating Paix, paix, Satan, allez, paix. In this cry Cellini recognised the gibberish at the beginning of the seventh canto of Dante's "Inferno." But the most picturesque group in the whole scene presented to us is that made by Cellini himself, armed and mailed, and attended by his prentices in armour, as they walked into the court to browbeat justice with the clamour of their voice. If we are to trust his narrative, he fought his way out of one most dangerous trial by simple vociferation. Afterwards he took the law, as usual, into his own hands. One pair of litigants were beaten; Caterina was nearly kicked to death; and the attorneys were threatened with the sword.

In the midst of these disturbances, Cellini began some important works for Francis. At Paris the King employed him to make huge silver candelabra, and at Fontainebleau to restore the castle gate. For the chateau of Fontainebleau Cellini executed the nymph in bronze, reclining among trophies of the chase, which may still be seen in the Louvre. It is a long-limbed, lifeless figure, without meaning—a snuff-box ornament enlarged to a gigantic size. Francis, who cannot have had good taste in art, if what Cellini makes him say be genuine, admired these designs above the bronze copies of the Vatican marbles he had recently received. He seems to have felt some personal regard for Benvenuto, and to have done all he could to retain him in his service. The animosity of Madame d'Estampes, and a grudge against his old patron, Ippolito d'Este, however, determined the restless craftsman to quit Paris. Leaving his castle, his unfinished works, and other property behind him in the care of Ascanio, his friend and pupil, he returned alone to Italy. This step, taken in a moment of restless pique, was ever after regretted by Cellini, who looked back with yearning from Florence to the generosity of Francis.

Cosimo de' Medici was indeed a very different patron from Francis. Cautious, little-minded, meddling, with a true Florentine's love of bargaining and playing cunning tricks, he pretended to protect the arts, but did not understand the part he had assumed. He was always short of money, and surrounded by old avaricious servants, through whose hands his meagre presents passed. As a connoisseur, he did not trust his own judgment, thus laying himself open to the intrigues of inferior artists. Henceforward a large part of Cellini's time was wasted in wrangling with the Duke's steward, squabbling with Bandinelli and Ammanati, and endeavouring to overcome the coldness or to meet the vacillations of his patron. Those who wish to gain insight into the life of an artist at Court in the sixteenth century, will do well to study attentively the chapters devoted by Cellini to his difficulties with the Duchess, and his wordy warfares with Bandinelli.[386] This atmosphere of intrigue and animosity was not uncongenial to Benvenuto; and as far as words and blows went, he almost always got the best of it. Nothing, for example, could be keener and more cutting than the very just criticism he made in Bandinelli's presence of his "Hercules and Cacus." "Quel bestial buaccio Bandinello," as he delights to name him, could do nothing but retort with vulgar terms of insult.[387]

The great achievement of this third period was the modelling and casting of the "Perseus." No episode in Cellini's biography is narrated with more force than the climax to his long-protracted labours, when at last, amid the chaos and confusion of innumerable accidents, the metal in his furnace liquefied and filled the mould. After the statue was uncovered in the Loggia de' Lanzi, where it now stands, Cellini achieved a triumph adequate to his own highest expectations. Odes and sonnets in Italian, Greek, and Latin, were written in its praise. Pontormo and Bronzino, the painters, loaded it with compliments. Cellini, ruffling with hand on hilt in silks and satins through the square, was pointed out to foreigners as the great sculptor who had cast the admirable bronze. It was, in truth, no slight distinction for a Florentine artist to erect a statue beneath the Loggia de' Lanzi in the square of the Signory. Every great event in Florentine history had taken place on that piazza. Every name of distinction among the citizens of Florence was connected with its monuments. To this day we may read the course of Florentine art by studying its architecture and sculpture; and not the least of its many ornaments, in spite of all that may be said against it, is the "Perseus" of Cellini.

Cellini completed the "Perseus" in 1554. His autobiography is carried down to the year 1562, when it abruptly terminates. It appears that in 1558 he received the tonsure and the first ecclesiastical orders; but two years later on he married a wife, and died at the age of sixty-nine, leaving three legitimate children. He was buried honourably, and a funeral oration was pronounced above his bier in the Chapter House of the Annunziata.

As a man, Cellini excites more interest than as an artist; and for this reason I have refrained from entering into minute criticism of his few remaining masterpieces. It has been well said that the two extremes of society, the statesman and the craftsman, find their point of meeting in Machiavelli and Cellini, inasmuch as both recognise no moral authority but the individual will.[388] The virtu, extolled by Machiavelli is exemplified by Cellini. Machiavelli bids his prince ignore the laws; Cellini respects no tribunal and takes justice into his own hands. The word conscience does not occur in Machiavelli's phraseology of ethics; conscience never makes a coward of Cellini, and in the dungeons of S. Angelo he is visited by no remorse. If we seek a literary parallel for the statesman and the artist in their idealisation of force and personal character, we find it in Pietro Aretino. In him, too, conscience is extinct; for him, also, there is no respect of King or Pope; he has placed himself above law, and substituted his own will for justice. With his pen, as Cellini with his dagger, he assassinates; his cynicism serves him for a coat of armour. And so abject is society, so natural has tyranny become, that he extorts blackmail from monarchs, makes princes tremble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from Buonarroti. These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, and Aretino, each in his own line, and with the proper differences that pertain to philosophic genius, artistic skill, and ribald ruffianism, sufficiently indicate the dissolution of the social bond in Italy. They mark their age as the age of adventurers, bandits, bullies, Ishmaelites, and tyrants.

FOOTNOTES:

[345] "In lode e onor della vita sua e opere d'esso, e buona disposizione della anima e del corpo." La Vita di Benvenuto Cellini, Firenze, Le Monnier, 1852; Documenti, p. 578.

[346] I do not by this mean to commit myself to the opinion that Cellini is accurate in details or truthful. On the contrary, it is impossible to read his life without feeling that his vanity and self-esteem led him to exaggeration and mis-statement. The value of the biography consists in its picturesqueness, its brilliant and faithful colouring, and its unconscious self-revelation of an energetic character.

[347] With regard to his pedigree Cellini tells a ridiculous story about a certain Fiorino da Cellino, one of Julius Caesar's captains, who gave his name to Florence. For the arms of the Cellini family, see lib. i. cap. 50.

[348] To enlarge upon this point is hardly necessary; or it would be easy to prove from documentary evidence that artists so eminent as Simone Martini, Gentile da Fabriano, Perugino, and Ghirlandajo kept open shops, where customers could buy the products of their craft from a highly-finished altar-piece down to a painted buckler or a sign to hang above the street-door. The commercial status of fine art in Italy was highly beneficial to its advancement, inasmuch as it implied a thorough technical apprenticeship for learners. The defective side of the system was apparent in great workshops like that of Raphael, who undertook painting-commissions quite beyond his powers of conscientious execution.

[349] See above, Chapter III, Orcagna's Tabernacle.

[350] See lib. ii. cap. 5, for the description of Francis I. visiting Cellini in his work-room. He finds him hammering away at the metal, and suggests that he might leave that labour to his prentices. Cellini replies that the excellence of his work would suffer if he did not do it himself.

[351] See Yriarte, Vie d'un Gentilhomme de Venise, p. 439, for a process instituted by the Inquisition against Paolo Veronese.

[352] He calls it "un chiavaquore di argento, il quale era in quei tempi chiamato cosi. Questo si era una cintura di tre dita larga, che alle spose novelle s' usava di fare."

[353] "Si come un toro invelenito."

[354] "Living men have felt my blows: those many maimed and mutilated stones one sees, attest to your disgrace: the earth hides my bad work." See the lines quoted by Perkins, Tuscan Sculptors, vol. ii. p. 140.

[355] Lib. i. cap. 79.

[356] Lib. ii. cap. 34. The whole history of this woman Caterina, and of the revenge he took upon her and his prentice Paolo, is one of the most extraordinary passages in the life.

[357] See Vol. 1., Age of the Despots, pp. 377-380.

[358] See Vol. 1., Age of the Despots, pp. 362-363.

[359] This might be further illustrated by analysing Cellini's mode of loving. He never rises above animal appetite.

[360] Lib. i. cap. 85. "Nel qual vomito mi usci dello stomaco un verme piloso, grande un quarto di braccio: e' peli erano grandi ed il verme era bruttissimo, macchiato di diversi colori, verdi, neri e rossi."

[361] Lib. i. cap. 128.

[362] Notice lib. i. cap. 40, p. 90, the dialogue between Cellini and the old woman, on his return to the paternal house: "Oh dimmi, gobba perversa," &c.

[363] "Per essere il mondo intenebrato di peste e di guerra," is a phrase of Cellini's, i. 40.

[364] Lib. i. cap. 51.

[365] Lib. i. cap. 74. Clement was dead, and Paul III. had just been elected, 1534. Paul sent Cellini a safe-conduct and pardon for Pompeo's murder to Florence in 1535. Lib. i. cap. 81.

[366] Lib. ii. cap. 104.

[367] Lib. i. cap. 64.

[368] See, however, what is said about the mountain villages of Norcia being good for incantations. That district in Roman times was famous for such superstitions. Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, pp. 427-428, gives curious information on this topic.

[369] Lib. i. cap. 76.

[370] Lib. i. cap. 88. "That mad melancholy philosopher Lorenzino." Cf. i. 80 and 81. "Molte volte lo trovavo a dormicchiare dopo desinare con quel suo Lorenzino, che poi l'ammazzo, e non altri; ed io molto mi maravigliavo che un duca di quella sorte cosi si fidava ... il duca' che lo teneva quando per pazzericcio, e quando per poltrone." Cf. again, cap. 89.

[371] This glimpse of Bembo in his Paduan villa is very pleasing. Lib. i. cap. 94.

[372] "Quei diavoli di quei gentiluomini tedeschi." This is, however, the language he uses about nearly all foreigners—Spaniards, French, and English.

[373] Lib. i. cap. 96. "Io ero tutto armato di maglia con istivali grossi e con uno scoppietto in mano, e pioveva quanto Iddio ne sapeva mandare," &c.

[374] Lib. i. cap. 98.

[375] Ib. cap. 101.

[376] See lib. i. cap. 38, 43.

[377] The Governor, perplexed by Cellini's vaunt that if he only tried he was sure he could fly, put him under strict guard, saying, "Benvenuto e un pipistrello contrafatto, ed io sono un pipistrello da dovero."

[378] Lib. i. cap. 125.

[379] Lib. i. cap. 105.

[380] "Il Papa diventato cosi pessima bestia," lib. i. 58; "Il Papa entrato in un bestial furore," ib. 60; "Quel povero uomo di Papa Clemente," ib. 103.

[381] Ib. 36, 101, 111.

[382] The scene is well described, lib. i. 127. The Pope was wont to have a weekly debauch, and the cardinal chose this favourable moment for his appeal: "Gli usava una volta la settimana di fare una crapula assai gagliarda, perche da poi la gomitava.... Allora il papa, sentendosi appressare all' ora del suo vomito, e perche la troppa abbundanzia del vino ancora faceva l' ufizio suo, disse," &c.

[383] See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 485.

[384] See especially the visit to the Paris workshop, lib. ii. cap. 15, and the scene in the Gallery at Fontainebleau, ib. 41.

[385] His quarrels, for example, with the Duchess of Florence.

[386] Lib. ii. cap. 83, 84, 87, 70, 71.

[387] "That beastly big ox, Bandinelli." Cf. cap. 70 for the critique. It may be said here, in passing, that the insult of Bandinelli, "Oh sta cheto, soddomitaccio," seems to have been justified by Benvenuto's conduct, though of course he carefully conceals it in his memoirs. After the charge brought against him by Cencio, for instance, he thought it better to leave Florence.—Ib. cap. 61, 62.

[388] Edgar Quinet, Les Revolutions d'Italie, p. 358.



CHAPTER X

THE EPIGONI

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

In the foregoing chapters I have not sought to write again the history of art, so much as to keep in view the relation between Italian art and the leading intellectual impulses of the Renaissance. In the masters of the sixteenth century—Lionardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and the Venetians—the force inherent in the Italian genius for painting reached full development. What remained was but an after-bloom rapidly tending to decadence. To surpass those men in their own line seemed impossible. What they had achieved was so transcendent that imitation satisfied their successors; and if they refused imitation, originality had to be sought by deviating into extravagances. Meanwhile no new stock of thoughts had been acquired; and students of history are now well aware that for really great art ideas common to the nation are essential. The motives suggested by mediaeval Christianity, after passing through successive stages of treatment in the quattrocento, had received the grand and humane handling of the golden age. The motives of revived paganism in like manner were exhausted, and at this time the feeling for antiquity had lost its primal freshness. It might seem superfluous to carry this inquiry further, when we have thus confessedly attained the culminating point of painting. Yet the sketch attempted in this volume would be incomplete and liable to misinterpretation, if no account were taken of the legacy bequeathed to the next generation by the great masters.

Lionardo da Vinci formed, as we have seen, a school at Milan. It was the special good fortune of his pupils that what he actually accomplished, bore no proportion to the suggestiveness of his teaching and the fertility of his invention. Of finished work he left but little to the world; while his sketches and designs, the teeming thoughts of his creative brain, were an inestimable heritage. The whole of this rich legacy of masterpieces, projected, but not executed, was characterised by a feeling for beauty which has fallen to no other painter. When we examine the sketches in the Royal Collection at Windsor, we perceive that the exceeding sense of loveliness possessed by Lionardo could not have failed to animate his pupils with a high spirit of art. At the same time the extraordinary variety of his drawing—sometimes reminding us of German method, sometimes modern in the manner of French and English draughtsmen—by turns bold and delicate, broad and minute in detail—afforded to his school examples of perfect treatment in a multiplicity of different styles. There was no formality of fixed unalterable precedent in Lionardo, nothing for his scholars to repeat with the monotony of mannerism.

It remained for his disciples, each in his own sphere, with inferior powers and feebler intellect, to perpetuate the genius of their master. Thus the spirit of Lionardo continued to live in Lombardy after he was dead. There alone imitation was really fruitful, because it did not imply mere copying. Instead of attempting to give a fresh and therefore a strained turn to motives that had already received consummate treatment, Lionardo's successors were able to execute what he had planned but had not carried to completion. Nor was the prestige of his style so oppressive through the mass of pictures painted by his hand as to check individuality or to prevent the pupil from working out such portions of the master's vein as suited his own talent. Each found enough suggested, but not used, to give his special faculty free scope. This is in fact the reason why the majority of pictures ascribed to Lionardo are really the production of his school. They have the excellence of original work, but not such excellence as Lionardo could have given them. Their completion is due, as searching criticism proves, to lesser men; but the conception belongs to the greatest.

Andrea Salaino, Marco d'Oggiono, Francesco Melzi, Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio, and Cesare da Sesto, are all of them skilled workmen, losing and finding their individuality, as just described, in the manner of their master. Salaino brings exquisite delicacy of execution; d'Oggiono, wild and bizarre beauty; Melzi, the refinements of a miniaturist; Beltraffio, hard brilliancy of light and colour; Cesare da Sesto, somewhat of effeminate sweetness; and thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend themselves again in what is Lionardo's own. It is surely not without significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover of all things double-natured and twin-souled.

Two painters of the Lombard school, Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, demand separate notice. Without Lionardo it is difficult to say what Luini would have been: so thoroughly did he appropriate his teacher's type of face, and, in oil-painting, his refinement. And yet Luini stands on his own ground, in no sense an imitator, with a genius more simple and idyllic than Da Vinci's. Little conception of his charm can be formed by those who have not seen his frescoes in the Brera and S. Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, in the church of the Angeli at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage church of Saronno. To the circumstance of his having done his best work in places hardly visited until of late years, may in part perhaps be attributed the tardy recognition of a painter eminently fitted to be popular. Luini was essentially a fresco-painter. None, perhaps, of all the greatest Italian frescanti realised a higher quality of brilliancy without gaudiness, by the scale of colours he selected and by the purity with which he used them in simple combinations. His frescoes are never dull or heavy in tone, never glaring, never thin or chalky. He knew how to render them both luminous and rich, without falling into the extremes that render fresco-paintings often less attractive than oil-pictures. His feeling for loveliness of form was original and exquisite. The joy of youth found in Luini an interpreter only less powerful and even more tender than in Raphael. While he shared with the Venetians their sensibility to nature, he had none of their sensuousness or love of pomp. In idyllic painting of a truly great type I know of nothing more delightful than his figures of young musicians going to the marriage feast of Mary, nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned and seated at the foot of the cross.[389] The sentiment for naive and artless grace, so fully possessed by Luini, gave freshness to his treatment of conventional religious themes. Under his touch they appeal immediately to the most untutored taste, without the aid of realistic or sensational effects. Even S. Sebastian and S. Rocco, whom it is difficult to represent with any novelty of attitude or expression, became for him the motives of fresh poetry, unsought but truly felt.[390] Among all the Madonnas ever painted his picture of Mary with the espalier of white roses, and another where she holds the infant Christ to pluck a purple columbine, distinguish themselves by this engaging spontaneity. The frescoes of the marriage of the Virgin and of S. Catherine carried by angels to Mount Sinai might be cited for the same quality of freshness and unstudied poetry.[391]

When the subject demanded the exercise of grave emotion, Luini rose to the occasion without losing his simplicity. The "Martyrdom of S. Catherine" and the fresco of Christ after the Flagellation are two masterpieces, wherein the depths of pathos have been sounded, and not a single note of discord is struck.[392] All harsh and disagreeable details are either eliminated, or so softened that the general impression, as in Pergolese's music, is one of profoundest and yet sweetest sorrow. Luini's genius was not tragic. The nearest approach to a dramatic motive in his work is the figure of the Magdalen kneeling before the cross, with her long yellow hair streaming over her shoulders, and her arms thrown backwards in an ecstasy of grief.[393] He did well to choose moments that stir tender sympathy—the piety of deep and calm devotion. How truly he felt them—more truly, I think, than Perugino in his best period—is proved by the correspondence they awake in us. Like melodies, they create a mood in the spectator.

What Luini did not learn from Lionardo, was the art of composition. Taken one by one, the figures that make up his "Marriage of the Virgin" at Saronno, are beautiful; but the whole picture is clumsily constructed; and what is true of this, may be said of every painting in which he attempted complicated grouping.[394] We feel him to be a great artist only where the subject does not demand the symmetrical arrangement of many parts.

Gaudenzio Ferrari was a genius of a different order, more robust, more varied, but less single-minded than Luini. His style reveals the influences of a many-sided, ill-assimilated education; blending the manners of Bramantino, Lionardo, and Raphael without proper fusion. Though Ferrari travelled much, and learned his art in several schools, he, like Luini, can only be studied in the Milanese district—at his birthplace Varallo, at Saronno, Vercelli, and Milan. It is to be regretted that a painter of such singular ability, almost unrivalled at moments in the expression of intense feeling and the representation of energetic movement, should have lacked a simpler training, or have been unable to adopt a manner more uniform. There is a strength of wing in his imaginative flight, a swiftness and impetuosity in his execution, and a dramatic force in his conception, that almost justify Lomazzo's choice of the eagle for his emblem. Yet he was unable to collect his powers, or to rule them. The distractions of an age that had produced its masterpieces, were too strong for him; and what he failed to find was balance. His picture of the "Martyrdom of S. Catherine," where reminiscences of Raphael and Lionardo mingle with the uncouth motives of an earlier style in a medley without unity of composition or harmony of colouring, might be chosen as a typical instance of great resources misapplied.[395]

The most pleasing of Ferrari's paintings are choirs of angels, sorrowing or rejoicing, some of them exquisitely and originally beautiful, all animated with unusual life, and poised upon wings powerful enough to bear them—veritable "birds of God."[396] His dramatic scenes from sacred history, rich in novel motives and exuberantly full of invention, crowd the churches of Vercelli; while a whole epic of the Passion is painted in fresco above the altar of S. Maria delle Grazie at Varallo, covering the wall from basement to ceiling. The prodigality of power displayed by Ferrari makes up for much of crudity in style and confusion in aim; nor can we refuse the tribute of warmest admiration to a master, who, when the schools of Rome and Florence were sinking into emptiness and bombast, preserved the fire of feeling for serious themes. What was deadly in the neo-paganism of the Renaissance—its frivolity and worldliness, corroding the very sources of belief in men who made of art a decoration for their sensuous existence—had not penetrated to those Lombard valleys where Ferrari and Luini worked. There the devotion of the Sacri Monti still maintained an intelligence between the people and the artist, far more fruitful of results to painting than the patronage of splendour-loving cardinals and nobles.[397]

Passing from Lionardo to Raphael, we find exactly the reverse of what has hitherto been noticed. Raphael worked out the mine of his own thought so thoroughly—so completely exhausted the motives of his invention, and carried his style to such perfection—that he left nothing unused for his followers. We have seen that he formed a school of subordinates in Rome who executed his later frescoes after his designs. Some of these men have names that can be mentioned—Giulio Romano, of whom more hereafter; Perino del Vaga, the decorator of Genoese palaces in a style of overblown but gorgeous Raphaelism; Andrea Sabbatini, who carried the Roman tradition down to Naples; Francesco Penni, Giovanni da Udine, and Polidoro da Caravaggio. Their work, even while superintended by Raphael himself, began to show the signs of decadence. In his Roman manner the dramatic element was conspicuous; and to carry dramatic painting beyond the limits of good style in art is unfortunately easy. The Hall of Constantine, left unfinished at his death, still further proved how little his pupils could do without him.[398] When Raphael died, the breath whose might sustained and made them potent, ceased. For all the higher purposes of genuine art, inspiration passed from them as colour fades from eastern clouds at sunset, suddenly.