What is a Naturalist? I venture upon the following definition:--A man
with a native gift for science who has taken to art. His purpose is not
to extract the material and spiritual significance of objects, thus
communicating them to us more rapidly and intensely than we should
perceive them ourselves, and thereby giving us a sense of heightened
vitality; his purpose is research, and his communication consists of
nothing but facts. From this perhaps too abstract statement let us take
refuge in an example already touched upon--the figure of the Almighty in
Uccello's "Sacrifice of Noah." Instead of presenting this figure as
coming toward us in an attitude and with an expression that will appeal
to our sense of solemnity, as a man whose chief interest was artistic
would have done--as Giotto, in fact, did in his "Baptism"--Uccello seems
to have been possessed with nothing but the scientific intention to find
out how a man swooping down head-foremost would have looked if at a
given instant of his fall he had been suddenly congealed and suspended
in space. A figure like this may have a mathematical but certainly has
no psychological significance. Uccello, it is true, has studied every
detail of this phenomenon and noted down his observations, but because
his notes happen to be in form and colour, they do not therefore
constitute a work of art. Wherein does his achievement differ in quality
from a coloured map of a country? We can easily conceive of a relief map
of Cadore or Giverny on so large a scale, and so elaborately coloured,
that it will be an exact reproduction of the physical aspects of those
regions, but never for a moment should we place it beside a landscape by
Titian or Monet, and think of it as a work of art. Yet its relation to
the Titian or Monet painting is exactly that of Uccello's achievement to
Giotto's. What the scientist who paints--the naturalist, that is to
say,--attempts to do is not to give us what art alone can give us, the
life-enhancing qualities of objects, but a reproduction of them as they
are. If he succeeded, he would give us the exact visual impression of
the objects themselves, but art, as we have already agreed, must give us
not the mere reproductions of things but a quickened sense of capacity
for realising them. Artistically, then, the naturalists, Uccello and
his numerous successors, accomplished nothing. Yet their efforts to
reproduce objects as they are, their studies in anatomy and perspective,
made it inevitable that when another great genius did arise, he should
be a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, and not a Giotto.
[Page heading: ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO]
Uccello, as I have said, was the first representative of two strong
tendencies in Florentine painting--of art for dexterity's sake, and art
for scientific purposes. Andrea del Castagno, while also unable to
resist the fascination of mere science and dexterity, had too much
artistic genius to succumb to either. He was endowed with great sense
for the significant, although, it is true, not enough to save him
completely from the pitfalls which beset all Florentines, and even less
from one more peculiar to himself--the tendency to communicate at any
cost a feeling of power. To make us feel power as Masaccio and
Michelangelo do at their best is indeed an achievement, but it requires
the highest genius and the profoundest sense for the significant. The
moment this sense is at all lacking, the artist will not succeed in
conveying power, but such obvious manifestations of it as mere
strength, or, worse still, the insolence not infrequently accompanying
high spirits. Now Castagno, who succeeds well enough in one or two such
single figures as his Cumæan Sibyl or his Farinata degli Uberti, which
have great, if not the greatest, power, dignity, and even beauty,
elsewhere condescends to mere swagger,--as in his Pipo Spano or Niccolo
di Tolentino--or to mere strength, as in his "Last Supper," or, worse
still, to actual brutality, as in his Santa Maria Nuova "Crucifixion."
Nevertheless, his few remaining works lead us to suspect in him the
greatest artist, and the most influential personality among the painters
of the first generation after Masaccio.
VI.
[Page heading: DOMENICO VENEZIANO]
To distinguish clearly, after the lapse of nearly five centuries,
between Uccello and Castagno, and to determine the precise share each
had in the formation of the Florentine school, is already a task fraught
with difficulties. The scantiness of his remaining works makes it more
than difficult, makes it almost impossible, to come to accurate
conclusions regarding the character and influence of their somewhat
younger contemporary, Domenico Veneziano. That he was an innovator in
technique, in affairs of vehicle and medium, we know from Vasari; but as
such innovations, indispensable though they may become to painting as a
craft, are in themselves questions of theoretic and applied chemistry,
and not of art, they do not here concern us. His artistic achievements
seem to have consisted in giving to the figure movement and expression,
and to the face individuality. In his existing works we find no trace of
sacrifice made to dexterity and naturalism, although it is clear that he
must have been master of whatever science and whatever craft were
prevalent in his day. Otherwise he would not have been able to render a
figure like the St. Francis in his Uffizi altar-piece, where tactile
values and movement expressive of character--what we usually call
individual _gait_--were perhaps for the first time combined; or to
attain to such triumphs as his St. John and St. Francis, at Santa Croce,
whose entire figures express as much fervour as their eloquent faces.
As to his sense for the significant in the individual, in other words,
his power as a portrait-painter, we have in the Pitti one or two heads
to witness, perhaps, the first great achievements in this kind of the
Renaissance.
[Page heading: FRA FILIPPO LIPPI]
No such difficulties as we have encountered in the study of Uccello,
Castagno, and Veneziano meet us as we turn to Fra Filippo. His works are
still copious, and many of them are admirably preserved; we therefore
have every facility for judging him as an artist, yet nothing is harder
than to appreciate him at his due. If attractiveness, and attractiveness
of the best kind, sufficed to make a great artist, then Filippo would be
one of the greatest, greater perhaps than any other Florentine before
Leonardo. Where shall we find faces more winsome, more appealing, than
in certain of his Madonnas--the one in the Uffizi, for instance--more
momentarily evocative of noble feeling than in his Louvre altar-piece?
Where in Florentine painting is there anything more fascinating than the
playfulness of his children, more poetic than one or two of his
landscapes, more charming than is at times his colour? And with all
this, health, even robustness, and almost unfailing good-humour! Yet by
themselves all these qualities constitute only a high-class illustrator,
and such by native endowment I believe Fra Filippo to have been. That he
became more--very much more--is due rather to Masaccio's potent
influence than to his own genius; for he had no profound sense of either
material or spiritual significance--the essential qualifications of the
real artist. Working under the inspiration of Masaccio, he at times
renders tactile values admirably, as in the Uffizi Madonna--but most
frequently he betrays no genuine feeling for them, failing in his
attempt to render them by the introduction of bunchy, billowy,
calligraphic draperies. These, acquired from the late Giottesque painter
(probably Lorenzo Monaco) who had been his first master, he seems to
have prized as artistic elements no less than the tactile values which
he attempted to adopt later, serenely unconscious, apparently, of their
incompatibility. Filippo's strongest impulse was not toward the
pre-eminently artistic one of re-creation, but rather toward expression,
and within that field, toward the expression of the pleasant, genial,
spiritually comfortable feelings of ordinary life. His real place is
with the _genre_ painters; only his _genre_ was of the soul, as that of
others--of Benozzo Gozzoli, for example--was of the body. Hence a sin of
his own, scarcely less pernicious than that of the naturalists, and
cloying to boot--expression at any cost.
VII.
[Page heading: NATURALISM IN FLORENTINE ART]
From the brief account just given of the four dominant personalities in
Florentine painting from about 1430 to about 1460, it results that the
leanings of the school during this interval were not artistic and
artistic alone, but that there were other tendencies as well, tendencies
on the one side, toward the expression of emotion (scarcely less
literary because in form and colour than if in words), and, on the
other, toward the naturalistic reproduction of objects. We have also
noted that while the former tendency was represented by Filippo alone,
the latter had Paolo Uccello, and all of Castagno and Veneziano that the
genius of these two men would permit them to sacrifice to naturalism
and science. To the extent, however, that they took sides and were
conscious of a distinct purpose, these also sided with Uccello and not
with Filippo. It may be agreed, therefore, that the main current of
Florentine painting for a generation after Masaccio was naturalistic,
and that consequently the impact given to the younger painters who
during this period were starting, was mainly toward naturalism. Later,
in studying Botticelli, we shall see how difficult it was for any one
young at the time to escape this tide, even if by temperament farthest
removed from scientific interests.
Meanwhile we must continue our study of the naturalists, but now of the
second generation. Their number and importance from 1460 to 1490 is not
alone due to the fact that art education toward the beginning of this
epoch was mainly naturalistic, but also to the real needs of a rapidly
advancing craft, and even more to the character of the Florentine mind,
the dominant turn of which was to science and not to art. But as there
were then no professions scientific in the stricter sense of the word,
and as art of some form was the pursuit of a considerable proportion of
the male inhabitants of Florence, it happened inevitably that many a lad
with the natural capacities of a Galileo was in early boyhood
apprenticed as an artist. And as he never acquired ordinary methods of
scientific expression, and never had time for occupations not
bread-winning, he was obliged his life long to make of his art both the
subject of his strong instinctive interest in science, and the vehicle
of conveying his knowledge to others.
[Page heading: ALESSIO BALDOVINETTI]
This was literally the case with the oldest among the leaders of the new
generation, Alessio Baldovinetti, in whose scanty remaining works no
trace of purely artistic feeling or interest can be discerned; and it is
only less true of Alessio's somewhat younger, but far more gifted
contemporaries, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea Verrocchio. These also we
should scarcely suspect of being more than men of science, if Pollaiuolo
once or twice, and Verrocchio more frequently, did not dazzle us with
works of almost supreme art, which, but for our readiness to believe in
the manifold possibilities of Florentine genius, we should with
exceeding difficulty accept as their creation--so little do they seem to
result from their conscious striving. Alessio's attention being largely
devoted to problems of vehicle--to the side of painting which is
scarcely superior to cookery--he had time for little else, although that
spare time he gave to the study of landscape, in the rendering of which
he was among the innovators. Andrea and Antonio set themselves the much
worthier task of increasing on every side the effectiveness of the
figure arts, of which, sculpture no less than painting, they aimed to be
masters.
[Page heading: POLLAIUOLO AND VERROCCHIO]
To confine ourselves, however, as closely as we may to painting, and
leaving aside for the present the question of colour, which, as I have
already said, is, in Florentine art, of entirely subordinate importance,
there were three directions in which painting as Pollaiuolo and
Verrocchio found it had greatly to advance before it could attain its
maximum of effectiveness: landscape, movement, and the nude. Giotto had
attempted none of these. The nude, of course, he scarcely touched;
movement he suggested admirably, but never rendered; and in landscape
he was satisfied with indications hardly more than symbolical, although
quite adequate to his purpose, which was to confine himself to the human
figure. In all directions Masaccio made immense progress, guided by his
never failing sense for material significance, which, as it led him to
render the tactile values of each figure separately, compelled him also
to render the tactile values of groups as wholes, and of their landscape
surroundings--by preference, hills so shaped as readily to stimulate the
tactile imagination. For what he accomplished in the nude and in
movement, we have his "Expulsion" and his "Man Trembling with Cold" to
witness. But in his works neither landscape nor movement, nor the nude,
are as yet distinct sources of artistic pleasure--that is to say, in
themselves life-enhancing. Although we can well leave the nude until we
come to Michelangelo, who was the first to completely realise its
distinctly artistic possibilities, we cannot so well dispense with an
enquiry into the sources of our æsthetic pleasure in the representation
of movement and of landscape, as it was in these two directions--in
movement by Pollaiuolo especially, and in landscape by Baldovinetti,
Pollaiuolo, and Verrocchio--that the great advances of this generation
of Florentine painters were made.
VIII.
[Page heading: REPRESENTATION OF MOVEMENT]
Turning our attention first to movement--which, by the way, is not the
same as motion, mere change of place--we find that we realise it just as
we realise objects, by the stimulation of our tactile imagination, only
that here touch retires to a second place before the muscular feelings
of varying pressure and strain. I see (to take an example) two men
wrestling, but unless my retinal impressions are immediately translated
into images of strain and pressure in my muscles, of resistance to my
weight, of touch all over my body, it means nothing to me in terms of
vivid experience--not more, perhaps, than if I heard some one say "Two
men are wrestling." Although a wrestling match may, in fact, contain
many genuinely artistic elements, our enjoyment of it can never be quite
artistic; we are prevented from completely realising it not only by our
dramatic interest in the game, but also, granting the possibility of
being devoid of dramatic interest, by the succession of movements being
too rapid for us to realise each completely, and too fatiguing, even if
realisable. Now if a way could be found of conveying to us the
realisation of movement without the confusion and the fatigue of the
actuality, we should be getting out of the wrestlers more than they
themselves can give us--the heightening of vitality which comes to us
whenever we keenly realise life, such as the actuality itself would give
us, _plus_ the greater effectiveness of the heightening brought about by
the clearer, intenser, and less fatiguing realisation. This is precisely
what the artist who succeeds in representing movement achieves: making
us realise it as we never can actually, he gives us a heightened sense
of capacity, and whatever is in the actuality enjoyable, he allows us to
enjoy at our leisure. In words already familiar to us, he _extracts the
significance of movements_, just as, in rendering tactile values, the
artist extracts the corporeal significance of objects. His task is,
however, far more difficult, although less indispensable:--it is not
enough that he should extract the values of what at any given moment is
an actuality, as is an object, but what at no moment really is--namely
movement. He can accomplish his task in only one way, and that is by so
rendering the one particular movement that we shall be able to realise
all other movements that the same figure may make. "He is grappling with
his enemy now," I say of my wrestler. "What a pleasure to be able to
realise in my own muscles, on my own chest, with my own arms and legs,
the life that is in him as he is making his supreme effort! What a
pleasure, as I look away from the representation, to realise in the same
manner, how after the contest his muscles will relax, and rest trickle
like a refreshing stream through his nerves!" All this I shall be made
to enjoy by the artist who, in representing any one movement, can give
me the logical sequence of visible strain and pressure in the parts and
muscles.
It is just here that the scientific spirit of the Florentine naturalists
was of immense service to art. This logic of sequence is to be attained
only by great, although not necessarily more than empiric, knowledge of
anatomy, such perhaps as the artist pure would never be inclined to work
out for himself, but just such as would be of absorbing interest to
those scientists by temperament and artists by profession whom we have
in Pollaiuolo and, to a less extent, in Verrocchio. We remember how
Giotto contrived to render tactile values. Of all the possible outlines,
of all the possible variations of light and shade that a figure may
have, he selected those that we must isolate for special attention when
we are actually realising it. If instead of figure, we say figure in
movement, the same statement applies to the way Pollaiuolo rendered
movement--with this difference, however, that he had to render what in
actuality we never can perfectly isolate, the line and light and shade
most significant of any given action. This the artist must construct
himself out of his dramatic feeling for pressure and strain and his
ability to articulate the figure in all its logical sequences, for, if
he would convey a sense of movement, he must give the line and the
light and shade which will best render not tactile values alone, but the
sequences of articulations.
[Page heading: "BATTLE OF THE NUDES"]
It would be difficult to find more effective illustration of all that
has just been said about movement than one or two of Pollaiuolo's own
works, which, in contrast to most of his achievements, where little more
than effort and research are visible, are really masterpieces of
life-communicating art. Let us look first at his engraving known as the
"Battle of the Nudes." What is it that makes us return to this sheet
with ever renewed, ever increased pleasure? Surely it is not the hideous
faces of most of the figures and their scarcely less hideous bodies. Nor
is it the pattern as decorative design, which is of great beauty indeed,
but not at all in proportion to the spell exerted upon us. Least of all
is it--for most of us--an interest in the technique or history of
engraving. No, the pleasure we take in these savagely battling forms
arises from their power to directly communicate life, to immensely
heighten our sense of vitality. Look at the combatant prostrate on the
ground and his assailant bending over, each intent on stabbing the
other. See how the prostrate man plants his foot on the thigh of his
enemy, and note the tremendous energy he exerts to keep off the foe,
who, turning as upon a pivot, with his grip on the other's head, exerts
no less force to keep the advantage gained. The significance of all
these muscular strains and pressures is so rendered that we cannot help
realising them; we imagine ourselves imitating all the movements, and
exerting the force required for them--and all without the least effort
on our side. If all this without moving a muscle, what should we feel if
we too had exerted ourselves! And thus while under the spell of this
illusion--this hyperæsthesia not bought with drugs, and not paid for
with cheques drawn on our vitality--we feel as if the elixir of life,
not our own sluggish blood, were coursing through our veins.
[Page heading: "HERCULES STRANGLING DAVID"]
Let us look now at an even greater triumph of movement than the Nudes,
Pollaiuolo's "Hercules Strangling Antæus." As you realise the suction of
Hercules' grip on the earth, the swelling of his calves with the pressure
that falls on them, the violent throwing back of his chest, the stifling
force of his embrace; as you realise the supreme effort of Antæus, with
one hand crushing down upon the head and the other tearing at the arm of
Hercules, you feel as if a fountain of energy had sprung up under your
feet and were playing through your veins. I cannot refrain from
mentioning still another masterpiece, this time not only of movement, but
of tactile values and personal beauty as well--Pollaiuolo's "David" at
Berlin. The young warrior has sped his stone, cut off the giant's head,
and now he strides over it, his graceful, slender figure still vibrating
with the rapidity of his triumph, expectant, as if fearing the ease of
it. What lightness, what buoyancy we feel as we realise the movement of
this wonderful youth!
IX.
[Page heading: VERROCCHIO AND LANDSCAPE]
In all that concerns movement, Verrocchio was a learner from Pollaiuolo,
rather than an initiator, and he probably never attained his master's
proficiency. We have unfortunately but few terms for comparison, as the
only paintings which can be with certainty ascribed to Verrocchio are
not pictures of action. A drawing however like that of his angel, in the
British Museum, which attempts as much movement as the Hercules by
Pollaiuolo, in the same collection, is of obviously inferior quality.
Yet in sculpture, along with works which are valuable as harbingers of
Leonardo rather than for any intrinsic perfection, he created two such
masterpieces of movement as the "Child with the Dolphin" in the
courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Colleoni monument at
Venice--the latter sinning, if at all, by an over-exuberance of
movement, by a step and swing too suggestive of drums and trumpets. But
in landscape Verrocchio was a decided innovator. To understand what new
elements he introduced, we must at this point carry out our
determination to enquire into the source of our pleasure in landscape
painting; or rather--to avoid a subject of vast extent for which this is
not the place--of landscape painting as practised by the Florentines.
[Page heading: LANDSCAPE PAINTING]
Before Verrocchio, his precursors, first Alessio Baldovinetti and then
Pollaiuolo, had attempted to treat landscape as naturalistically as
painting would permit. Their ideal was to note it down with absolute
correctness from a given point of view; their subject almost invariably
the Valdarno; their achievement, a bird's-eye view of this Tuscan
paradise. Nor can it be denied that this gives pleasure, but the
pleasure is only such as is conveyed by tactile values. Instead of
having the difficulty we should have in nature to distinguish clearly
points near the horizon's edge, we here see them perfectly and without
an effort, and in consequence feel great confirmation of capacity for
life. Now if landscape were, as most people vaguely believe, a pleasure
coming through the eyes alone, then the Pollaiuolesque treatment could
be equalled by none that has followed, and surpassed only by Rogier van
der Weyden, or by the quaint German "Master of the Lyversberg Passion,"
who makes us see objects miles away with as great a precision and with
as much intensity of local colour as if we were standing off from them a
few feet. Were landscape really this, then nothing more inartistic than
gradation of tint, atmosphere, and _plein air_, all of which help to
make distant objects less clear, and therefore tend in no way to
heighten our sense of capacity. But as a matter of fact the pleasure we
take in actual landscape is only to a limited extent an affair of the
eye, and to a great extent one of unusually intense well-being. The
painter's problem, therefore, is not merely to render the tactile values
of the visible objects, but to convey, more rapidly and unfailingly than
nature would do, _the consciousness_ of an unusually intense degree of
well-being. This task--the communication by means purely visual of
feelings occasioned chiefly by sensations non-visual--is of such
difficulty that, until recently, successes in the rendering of what is
peculiar to landscape as an art, and to landscape alone, were accidental
and sporadic. Only now, in our own days, may painting be said to be
grappling with this problem seriously; and perhaps we are already at the
dawn of an art which will have to what has hitherto been called
landscape, the relation of our music to the music of the Greeks or of
the Middle Ages.
[Page heading: VERROCCHIO'S LANDSCAPES]
Verrocchio was, among Florentines at least, the first to feel that a
faithful reproduction of the contours is not landscape, that the
painting of nature is an art distinct from the painting of the figure.
He scarcely knew where the difference lay, but felt that light and
atmosphere play an entirely different part in each, and that in
landscape these have at least as much importance as tactile values. A
vision of _plein air_, vague I must grant, seems to have hovered before
him, and, feeling his powerlessness to cope with it in full effects of
light such as he attempted in his earlier pictures, he deliberately
chose the twilight hour, when, in Tuscany, on fine days, the trees stand
out almost black against a sky of light opalescent grey. To render this
subduing, soothing effect of the coolness and the dew after the glare
and dust of the day--the effect so matchlessly given in Gray's
"Elegy"--seemed to be his first desire as a painter, and in presence of
his "Annunciation" (in the Uffizi), we feel that he succeeded as only
one other Tuscan succeeded after him, that other being his own pupil
Leonardo.
X.
[Page heading: GENRE ARTISTS]
It is a temptation to hasten on from Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio to
Botticelli and Leonardo, to men of genius as artists reappearing again
after two generations, men who accomplished with scarcely an effort what
their precursors had been toiling after. But from these it would be even
more difficult than at present to turn back to painters of scarcely any
rank among the world's great artists, and of scarcely any importance as
links in a chain of evolution, but not to be passed by, partly because
of certain qualities they do possess, and partly because their names
would be missed in an account, even so brief as this, of Florentine
painting. The men I chiefly refer to, one most active toward the middle
and the other toward the end of the fifteenth century, are Benozzo
Gozzoli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Although they have been rarely coupled
together, they have much in common. Both were, as artists, little more
than mediocrities with almost no genuine feeling for what makes painting
a great art. The real attractiveness of both lies entirely outside the
sphere of pure art, in the realms of _genre_ illustration. And here the
likeness between them ends; within their common ground they differed
widely.
[Page heading: BENOZZO GOZZOLI]
Benozzo was gifted with a rare facility not only of execution but of
invention, with a spontaneity, a freshness, a liveliness in telling a
story that wake the child in us, and the lover of the fairy tale. Later
in life, his more precious gifts deserted him, but who wants to resist
the fascination of his early works, painted, as they seem, by a Fra
Angelico who had forgotten heaven and become enamoured of the earth and
the spring-time? In his Riccardi Palace frescoes, he has sunk already to
portraying the Florentine apprentice's dream of a holiday in the country
on St. John's Day; but what a _naif_ ideal of luxury and splendour it
is! With these, the glamour in which he saw the world began to fade away
from him, and in his Pisan frescoes we have, it is true, many a quaint
bit of _genre_ (superior to Teniers only because of superior
associations), but never again the fairy tale. And as the better
recedes, it is replaced by the worse, by the bane of all _genre_
painting, non-significant detail, and positive bad taste. Have London
or New York or Berlin worse to show us than the jumble of buildings in
his ideal of a great city, his picture of Babylon? It may be said he
here continues mediæval tradition, which is quite true, but this very
fact indicates his real place, which, in spite of his adopting so many
of the fifteenth-century improvements, is not with the artists of the
Renaissance, but with the story-tellers and costumed fairy-tale painters
of the transition, with Spinello Aretino and Gentile da Fabriano, for
instance. And yet, once in a while, he renders a head with such
character, or a movement with such ease that we wonder whether he had
not in him, after all, the making of a real artist.
[Page heading: GHIRLANDAIO]
Ghirlandaio was born to far more science and cunning in painting than
was current in Benozzo's early years, and all that industry, all that
love of his occupation, all that talent even, can do for a man, they did
for him; but unfortunately he had not a spark of genius. He appreciated
Masaccio's tactile values, Pollaiuolo's movement, Verrocchio's effects
of light, and succeeded in so sugaring down what he adopted from these
great masters that the superior philistine of Florence could say: "There
now is a man who knows as much as any of the great men, but can give me
something that I can really enjoy!" Bright colour, pretty faces, good
likenesses, and the obvious everywhere--attractive and delightful, it
must be granted, but, except in certain single figures, never
significant. Let us glance a moment at his famous frescoes in Santa
Maria Novella. To begin with, they are so undecorative that, in spite of
the tone and surface imparted to them by four centuries, they still
suggest so many _tableaux vivants_ pushed into the wall side by side,
and in tiers. Then the compositions are as overfilled as the sheets of
an illustrated newspaper--witness the "Massacre of the Innocents," a
scene of such magnificent artistic possibilities. Finally, irrelevant
episodes and irrelevant groups of portraits do what they can to distract
our attention from all higher significance. Look at the "Birth of John";
Ginevra dei Benci stands there, in the very foreground, staring out at
you as stiff as if she had a photographer's iron behind her head. An
even larger group of Florentine housewives in all their finery
disfigures the "Birth of the Virgin," which is further spoiled by a _bas
relief_ to show off the painter's acquaintance with the antique, and by
the figure of the serving maid who pours out water, with the rush of a
whirlwind in her skirts--this to show off skill in the rendering of
movement. Yet elsewhere, as in his "Epiphany" in the Uffizi, Ghirlandaio
has undeniable charm, and occasionally in portraits his talent, here at
its highest, rises above mediocrity, in one instance, the fresco of
Sassetti in Santa Trinita, becoming almost genius.
XI.
[Page heading: LEONARDO]
All that Giotto and Masaccio had attained in the rendering of tactile
values, all that Fra Angelico or Filippo had achieved in expression, all
that Pollaiuolo had accomplished in movement, or Verrocchio in light and
shade, Leonardo, without the faintest trace of that tentativeness, that
painfulness of effort which characterised his immediate precursors,
equalled or surpassed. Outside Velasquez, and perhaps, when at their
best, Rembrandt and Degas, we shall seek in vain for tactile values so
stimulating and so convincing as those of his "Mona Lisa"; outside
Degas, we shall not find such supreme mastery over the art of movement
as in the unfinished "Epiphany" in the Uffizi; and if Leonardo has been
left far behind as a painter of light, no one has succeeded in conveying
by means of light and shade a more penetrating feeling of mystery and
awe than he in his "Virgin of the Rocks." Add to all this, a feeling for
beauty and significance that have scarcely ever been approached. Where
again youth so poignantly attractive, manhood so potently virile, old
age so dignified and possessed of the world's secrets! Who like Leonardo
has depicted the mother's happiness in her child and the child's joy in
being alive; who like Leonardo has portrayed the timidity, the newness
to experience, the delicacy and refinement of maidenhood; or the
enchantress intuitions, the inexhaustible fascination of the woman in
her years of mastery? Look at his many sketches for Madonnas, look at
his profile drawing of Isabella d'Este, or at the _Belle Joconde_, and
see whether elsewhere you find their equals. Leonardo is the one artist
of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched
but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the
cross-section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of
muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever
transmuted it into life-communicating values; and all without intention,
for most of these magical sketches were dashed off to illustrate purely
scientific matter, which alone absorbed his mind at the moment.
And just as his art is life-communicating as is that of scarcely
another, so the contemplation of his personality is life-enhancing as
that of scarcely any other man. Think that great though he was as a
painter, he was no less renowned as a sculptor and architect, musician
and improviser, and that all artistic occupations whatsoever were in his
career but moments snatched from the pursuit of theoretical and
practical knowledge. It would seem as if there were scarcely a field of
modern science but he either foresaw it in vision, or clearly
anticipated it, scarcely a realm of fruitful speculation of which he
was not a freeman; and as if there were hardly a form of human energy
which he did not manifest. And all that he demanded of life was the
chance to be useful! Surely, such a man brings us the gladdest of all
tidings--the wonderful possibilities of the human family, of whose
chances we all partake.
Painting, then, was to Leonardo so little of a preoccupation that we
must regard it as merely a mode of expression used at moments by a man
of universal genius, who recurred to it only when he had no more
absorbing occupation, and only when it could express what nothing else
could, the highest spiritual through the highest material significance.
And great though his mastery over his craft, his feeling for
significance was so much greater that it caused him to linger long over
his pictures, labouring to render the significance he felt but which his
hand could not reproduce, so that he rarely finished them. We thus have
lost in quantity, but have we lost in quality? Could a mere painter, or
even a mere artist, have seen and felt as Leonardo? We may well doubt.
We are too apt to regard a universal genius as a number of ordinary
brains somehow conjoined in one skull, and not always on the most
neighbourly terms. We forget that genius means mental energy, and that a
Leonardo, for the self-same reason that prevents his being merely a
painter--the fact that it does not exhaust a hundredth part of his
energy--will, when he does turn to painting, bring to bear a power of
seeing, feeling, and rendering, as utterly above that of the ordinary
painter as the "Mona Lisa" is above, let us say, Andrea del Sarto's
"Portrait of his Wife." No, let us not join in the reproaches made to
Leonardo for having painted so little; because he had much more to do
than to paint, he has left all of us heirs to one or two of the
supremest works of art ever created.
XII.
[Page heading: BOTTICELLI]
Never pretty, scarcely ever charming or even attractive; rarely correct
in drawing, and seldom satisfactory in colour; in types, ill-favoured;
in feeling acutely intense and even dolorous--what is it then that makes
Sandro Botticelli so irresistible that nowadays we may have no
alternative but to worship or abhor him? The secret is this, that in
European painting there has never again been an artist so indifferent to
representation and so intent upon presentation. Educated in a period of
triumphant naturalism, he plunged at first into mere representation with
almost self-obliterating earnestness; the pupil of Fra Filippo, he was
trained to a love of spiritual _genre_; himself gifted with strong
instincts for the significant, he was able to create such a type of the
thinker as in his fresco of St. Augustin; yet in his best years he left
everything, even spiritual significance, behind him, and abandoned
himself to the presentation of those qualities alone which in a picture
are _directly_ life-communicating, and life-enhancing. Those of us who
care for nothing in the work of art but what it represents, are either
powerfully attracted or repelled by his unhackneyed types and quivering
feeling; but if we are such as have an imagination of touch and of
movement that it is easy to stimulate, we feel a pleasure in Botticelli
that few, if any, other artists can give us. Long after we have
exhausted both the intensest sympathies and the most violent
antipathies with which the representative elements in his pictures may
have inspired us, we are only on the verge of fully appreciating his
real genius. This in its happiest moments is an unparalleled power of
perfectly combining values of touch with values of movement.
Look, for instance, at Botticelli's "Venus Rising from the Sea."
Throughout, the tactile imagination is roused to a keen activity, by
itself almost as life heightening as music. But the power of music is
even surpassed where, as in the goddess' mane-like tresses of hair
fluttering to the wind, not in disorderly rout but in masses yielding
only after resistance, the movement is directly life-communicating. The
entire picture presents us with the quintessence of all that is
pleasurable to our imagination of touch and of movement. How we revel in
the force and freshness of the wind, in the life of the wave! And such
an appeal he always makes. His subject may be fanciful, as in the "Realm
of Venus" (the "Spring"); religious, as in the Sixtine Chapel frescoes
or in the "Coronation of the Virgin"; political, as in the recently
discovered "Pallas Taming a Centaur"; or even crudely allegorical, as in
the Louvre frescoes,--no matter how unpropitious, how abstract the idea,
the vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life-communicating movement
is always there. Indeed, at times it seems that the less artistic the
theme, the more artistic the fulfilment, the painter being impelled to
give the utmost values of touch and movement to just those figures which
are liable to be read off as mere empty symbols. Thus, on the figure
representing political disorder--the Centaur--in the "Pallas,"
Botticelli has lavished his most intimate gifts. He constructs the torso
and flanks in such a way that every line, every indentation, every boss
appeals so vividly to the sense of touch that our fingers feel as if
they had everywhere been in contact with his body, while his face gives
to a still heightened degree this convincing sense of reality, every
line functioning perfectly for the osseous structure of brow, nose, and
cheeks. As to the hair--imagine shapes having the supreme life of line
you may see in the contours of licking flames, and yet possessed of all
the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to
its own desire!
[Page heading: LINEAL DECORATION]
In fact, the mere subject, and even representation in general, was so
indifferent to Botticelli, that he appears almost as if haunted by the
idea of communicating the _unembodied_ values of touch and movement. Now
there is a way of rendering even tactile values with almost no body, and
that is by translating them as faithfully as may be into values of
movement. For instance:--we want to render the roundness of a wrist
without the slightest touch of either light or shade; we simply give the
movement of the wrist's outline and the movement of the drapery as it
falls over it, and the roundness is communicated to us almost entirely
in terms of movement. But let us go one step further. Take this line
that renders the roundness of the wrist, or a more obvious example, the
lines that render the movements of the tossing hair, the fluttering
draperies, and the dancing waves in the "Birth of Venus"--take these
lines alone with all their power of stimulating our imagination of
movement, and what do we have? Pure values of movement abstracted,
unconnected with any representation whatever. This kind of line, then,
being the quintessence of movement, has, like the essential elements in
all the arts, a power of stimulating our imagination and of directly
communicating life. Well! imagine an art made up entirely of these
quintessences of movement-values, and you will have something that holds
the same relation to representation that music holds to speech--and this
art exists, and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro
Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but
in Europe never. To its demands he was ready to sacrifice everything
that habits acquired under Filippo and Pollaiuolo,--and his
employers!--would permit. The representative element was for him a mere
_libretto_: he was happiest when his subject lent itself to translation
into what may be called a lineal symphony. And to this symphony
everything was made to yield; tactile values were translated into values
of movement, and, for the same reason--to prevent the drawing of the eye
inward, to permit it to devote itself to the rhythm of the line--the
backgrounds were either entirely suppressed or kept as simple as
possible. Colour also, with almost a contempt for its representative
function, Botticelli entirely subordinated to his lineal scheme,
compelling it to draw attention to the line, rather than, as is usual,
away from it.
This is the explanation of the value put upon Botticelli's masterpieces.
In some of his later works, such as the Dresden _predelle_, we have, it
is true, bacchanals rather than symphonies of line, and in many of his
earlier paintings, in the "_Fortezza_," for instance, the harness and
trappings have so disguised Pegasus that we scarcely know him from a
cart horse. But the painter of the "Venus Rising from the Sea," of the
"Spring," or of the Villa Lemmi frescoes is the greatest artist of
lineal design that Europe has ever had.
XIII.
[Page heading: POPULARISERS OF ART]
Leonardo and Botticelli, like Michelangelo after them, found imitators
but not successors. To communicate more material and spiritual
significance than Leonardo, would have taken an artist with deeper
feeling for significance; to get more music out of design than
Botticelli, would have required a painter with even greater passion for
the re-embodiment of the pure essences of touch and movement. There were
none such in Florence, and the followers of Botticelli--Leonardo's were
all Milanese, and do not here concern us--could but imitate the patterns
of their master: the patterns of the face, the patterns of the
composition, and the patterns of the line; dragging them down to their
own level, sugaring them down to their own palate, slowing them down to
their own insensitiveness for what is life-communicating. And although
their productions, which were nothing but translations of great man's
art into average man's art, became popular, as was inevitable, with the
average man of their time, (who comprehended them better and felt more
comfortable in their presence than in that of the originals which he
respectfully admired but did not so thoroughly enjoy), nevertheless we
need not dwell on these popularisers nor on their popularisations--not
even on Filippino, with his touch of consumptive delicacy, nor
Raffaelino del Garbo, with his glints of never-to-be-fulfilled promise.
[Page heading: FRA BARTOLOMMEO]
Before approaching the one man of genius left in Florence after
Botticelli and Leonardo, before speaking of Michelangelo, the man in
whom all that was most peculiar and much that was greatest in the
striving of Florentine art found its fulfilment, let us turn for a
moment to a few painters who, just because they were men of manifold
talent, might elsewhere almost have become masters. Fra Bartolommeo,
Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and Bronzino were perhaps no less gifted as
artists than Palma, Bonifazio Veronese, Lotto, and Tintoretto; but their
talents, instead of being permitted to flower naturally, were scorched
by the passion for showing off dexterity, blighted by academic ideals,
and uprooted by the whirlwind force of Michelangelo.
Fra Bartolommeo, who in temperament was delicate, refined, graceful, and
as a painter had a miniaturist's feeling for the dainty, was induced to
desert his lovely women, his exquisite landscape, and his gentleness of
expression for figures constructed mechanically on a colossal scale, or
for effects of the round at any cost. And as evil is more obvious than
good, Bartolommeo, the painter of that masterpiece of colour and light
and shade, of graceful movement and charming feeling, the "Madonna with
the Baptist and St. Stephen" in the Cathedral at Lucca, Bartolommeo, the
dainty deviser of Mr. Mond's tiny "Nativity," Bartolommeo, the artificer
of a hundred masterpieces of pen drawing, is almost unknown; and to most
people Fra Bartolommeo is a sort of synonym for pomposity. He is known
only as the author of physically colossal, spiritually insignificant
prophets and apostles, or, perchance, as the painter of pitch-dark
altar-pieces: this being the reward of devices to obtain mere relief.
[Page heading: ANDREA DEL SARTO]
Andrea del Sarto approached perhaps as closely to a Giorgione or a
Titian as could a Florentine, ill at ease in the neighbourhood of
Leonardo and Michelangelo. As an artist he was, it is true, not endowed
with the profoundest sense for the significant, yet within the sphere of
common humanity who has produced anything more genial than his "Portrait
of a Lady"--probably his wife--with a Petrarch in her hands? Where out
of Venetia can we find portraits so simple, so frank, and yet so
interpretive as his "Sculptor," or as his various portraits of
himself--these, by the way, an autobiography as complete as any in
existence, and tragic as few? Almost Venetian again is his "St. James"
caressing children, a work of the sweetest feeling. Even in colour
effect, and technique, how singularly close to the best Venetian
painting in his "Dispute about the Trinity"--what blacks and whites,
what greys and purplish browns! And in addition, tactile values peculiar
to Florence--what a back St. Sebastian's! But in a work of scarcely less
technical merit, the "Madonna of the Harpies," we already feel the man
not striving to get the utmost out of himself, but panting for the grand
and magnificent. Even here, he remains almost a great artist, because
his natural robustness comes to his rescue; but the "Madonna" is too
obviously statuesque, and, good saints, pray why all these draperies?
The obviously statuesque and draperies were Andrea's devices for keeping
his head above water in the rising tide of the Michelangelesque. As you
glance in sequence at the Annunziata frescoes, on the whole so full of
vivacity, gaiety, and genuine delight in life, you see from one fresco
to another the increased attention given to draperies. In the Scalzo
series, otherwise masterpieces of tactile values, the draperies do their
utmost to smother the figures. Most of these paintings are closed in
with ponderous forms which have no other purpose than to serve as a
frame, and as clothes-horses for draperies: witness the scene of
Zacharias in the temple, wherein none of the bystanders dare move for
fear of disturbing their too obviously arranged folds.
Thus by constantly sacrificing first spiritual, and then material
significance to pose and draperies, Andrea loses all feeling for the
essential in art. What a sad spectacle is his "Assumption," wherein the
Apostles, the Virgin herself, have nothing better to do than to show off
draperies! Instead of feeling, as in the presence of Titian's "Assunta,"
wrapt to heaven, you gaze at a number of tailor's men, each showing how
a stuff you are thinking of trying looks on the back, or in a certain
effect of light. But let us not end on this note; let us bear in mind
that, despite all his faults, Andrea painted the one "Last Supper" which
can be looked at with pleasure after Leonardo's.
[Page heading: PONTORMO]
Pontormo, who had it in him to be a decorator and portrait-painter of
the highest rank, was led astray by his awe-struck admiration for
Michelangelo, and ended as an academic constructor of monstrous nudes.
What he could do when expressing _himself_, we see in the lunette at
Poggio a Caiano, as design, as colour, as fancy, the freshest, gayest,
most appropriate mural decoration now remaining in Italy; what he could
do as a portrait-painter, we see in his wonderfully decorative panel of
Cosimo dei Medici at San Marco, or in his portrait of a "Lady with a
Dog" (at Frankfort), perhaps the first portrait ever painted in which
the sitter's social position was insisted upon as much as the personal
character. What Pontormo sank to, we see in such a riot of meaningless
nudes, all caricatures of Michelangelo, as his "Martyrdom of Forty
Saints."
[Page heading: BRONZINO]
Bronzino, Pontormo's close follower, had none of his master's talent as
a decorator, but happily much of his power as a portrait-painter. Would
he had never attempted anything else! The nude without material or
spiritual significance, with no beauty of design or colour, the nude
simply because it was the nude, was Bronzino's ideal in composition, and
the result is his "Christ in Limbo." But as a portrait-painter, he took
up the note struck by his master and continued it, leaving behind him a
series of portraits which not only had their effect in determining the
character of Court painting all over Europe, but, what is more to the
point, a series of portraits most of which are works of art. As
painting, it is true, they are hard, and often timid; but their air of
distinction, their interpretive qualities, have not often been
surpassed. In his Uffizi portraits of Eleanora di Toledo, of Prince
Ferdinand, of the Princess Maria, we seem to see the prototypes of
Velasquez' queens, princes, and princesses: and for a fine example of
dignified rendering of character, look in the Sala Baroccio of the
Uffizi at a bust of a young woman with a missal in her hand. |
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