A Political and Social History of Modern Europe Part 19

Humanism, whose seed was sown by Petrarch in the fourteenth century and whose fruit was plucked by Erasmus in the sixteenth, still lives in higher education throughout Europe and America. The historical "humanities"--Latin, Greek, and history--are still taught in college and in high school. They const.i.tute the contribution of the dominant intellectual interest of the sixteenth century.

ART IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: Humanism and the Renaissance of Art]

The effect of the revived interest in Greek and Roman culture, which, as we have seen, dominated European thought from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, was felt not only in literature and in the outward life of its devotees--in ransacking monasteries for lost ma.n.u.scripts scripts, in critically studying ancient learning, and in consciously imitating antique behavior--but likewise in a marvelous and many-sided development of art.

The art of the middle ages had been essentially Christian--it sprang from the doctrine and devotions of the Catholic Church and was inextricably bound up with Christian life. The graceful Gothic cathedrals, pointing their roofs and airy spires in heavenly aspiration, the fantastic and mysterious carvings of wood or stone, the imaginative portraiture of saintly heroes and heroines as well as of the sublime story of the fall and redemption of the human race, the richly stained gla.s.s, and the spiritual organ music--all betokened the supreme thought of medieval Christianity. But humanism recalled to men's minds the previous existence of an art simpler and more restrained, if less ethereal. The reading of Greek and Latin writers heightened an esteem for pagan culture in all its phases.

Therefore, European art underwent a transformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While much of the distinctively medieval culture remained, civilization was enriched by a revival of cla.s.sical art. The painters, the sculptors, and the architects now sought models not exclusively in their own Christian masters but in many cases in pagan Greek and Roman forms. Gradually the two lines of development were brought together, and the resulting union--the adaptation of cla.s.sical art-forms to Christian uses--was marked by an unparalleled outburst of artistic energy.

From that period of exuberant art-expression in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, our present-day love of beautiful things has come down in unbroken succession. With no exaggeration it may be said that the sixteenth century is as much the basis of our modern artistic life as it is the foundation of modern Protestantism or of modern world empire. The revolutions in commerce and religion synchronized with the beginning of a new era in art. All arts were affected--architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving, and music.

[Sidenote: Architecture]

In architecture, the severely straight and plain line of the ancient Greek temples or the elegant gentle curve of the Roman dome was subst.i.tuted for the fanciful lofty Gothic. A rounded arch replaced the pointed. And the ancient Greek orders--Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian-- were dragged from oblivion to embellish the simple symmetrical buildings. The newer architecture was used for ecclesiastical and other structures, reaching perhaps its highest expression in the vast cathedral of St. Peter, which was erected at Rome in the sixteenth century under the personal direction of great artists, among whom Raphael and Michelangelo are numbered.

[Sidenote: In Italy]

The revival of Greek and Roman architecture, like humanism, had its origin in Italy; and in the cities of the peninsula, under patronage of wealthy princes and n.o.ble families, it attained its most general acceptance. But, like humanism, it spread to other countries, which in turn it deeply affected. The chronic wars, in which the petty Italian states were engaged throughout the sixteenth century, were attended, as we have seen, by perpetual foreign interference. But Italy, vanquished in politics, became the victor in art. While her towns surrendered to foreign armies, her architects and builders subdued Europe and brought the Christian countries for a time under her artistic sway.

[Sidenote: In France]

Thus in France the revival was accelerated by the military campaigns of Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, which led to the revelation of the architectural triumphs in Italy, the result being the importation of great numbers of Italian designers and craftsmen. Architecture after the Greek or Roman manner at once became fashionable. Long, horizontal lines appeared in many public buildings, of which the celebrated palace of the Louvre, begun in the last year of the reign of Francis I (1546), and to-day the home of one of the world's greatest art collections, is a conspicuous example.

[Sidenote: In Other Countries]

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the new architecture similarly entered Spain and received encouragement from Philip II.

About the same time it manifested itself in the Netherlands and in the Germanies. In England, its appearance hardly took place in the sixteenth century. it was not until 1619 that a famous architect, Inigo Jones (1573-1651), designed and reared the cla.s.sical banqueting house in Whitehall, and not until the second half of the seventeenth century did Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), by means of the majestic St.

Paul's cathedral in London, render the new architecture popular in England.

[Sidenote: Sculpture]

Sculpture is usually an attendant of architecture, and it is not surprising, therefore, that transformation of the one should be connected with change in the other. The new movement snowed itself in Italian sculpture as early as the fourteenth century, owing to the influence of the ancient monuments which still abounded throughout the peninsula and to which the humanists attracted attention. In the fifteenth century archaeological discoveries were made and a special interest fostered by the Florentine family of the Medici, who not only became enthusiastic collectors of ancient works of art but promoted the study of the antique figure. Sculpture followed more and more the Greek and Roman traditions in form and often in subject as well. The plastic art of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was strikingly akin to that of Athens in the fifth or fourth centuries before Christ.

The first great apostle of the new sculpture was Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), whose marvelous doors on the baptistery at Florence elicited the comment of Michelangelo that they were "worthy of being placed at the entrance of paradise." Slightly younger than Ghiberti was Donatello (1383-1466), who, among other triumphs, fashioned the realistic statue of St. Mark in Venice. Luca della Robbia (1400-1482), with a cla.s.sic purity of style and simplicity of expression, founded a whole dynasty of sculptors in glazed terra-cotta. Elaborate tomb- monuments, the construction of which started in the fifteenth century, reached their highest magnificence in the gorgeous sixteenth-century tomb of Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, the founder of the princely family of Visconti in Milan. Michelangelo himself was as famous for his sculpture as for his painting or his architecture; the heroic head of his David at Florence is a work of unrivaled dignity. As the style of cla.s.sic sculpture became very popular in the sixteenth century, the subjects were increasingly borrowed from pagan literature. Monuments were erected to ill.u.s.trious men of ancient Rome, and Greek mythology was once more carved in stone.

The extension of the new sculpture beyond Italy was even more rapid than the spread of the new architecture. Henry VII invited Italian sculptors to England; Louis XII patronized the great Leonardo da Vinci, and Francis I brought him to France. The tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain was fashioned in cla.s.sic form. The new sculpture was famous in Germany before Luther; in fact, it was to be found everywhere in sixteenth-century Europe.

[Sidenote: Painting]

Painting accompanied sculpture. Prior to the sixteenth century, most of the pictures were painted directly upon the plaster walls of churches or of sumptuous dwellings and were called frescoes, although a few were executed on wooden panels. In the sixteenth century, however, easel paintings--that is, detached pictures on canvas, wood, or other material--became common. The progress in painting was not so much an imitation of cla.s.sical models as was the case with sculpture and architecture, for the reason that painting, being one of the most perishable of the arts, had preserved few of its ancient Greek or Roman examples. But the artists who were interested in architecture and sculpture were likewise naturally interested in painting; and painting, bound by fewer antique traditions, reached a higher degree of perfection in the sixteenth century than did any of its allied arts.

Modern painting was born in Italy. In Italy it found its four great masters--Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and t.i.tian. The first two acquired as great a fame in architecture and in sculpture as in painting; the last two were primarily painters.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a Florentine by birth and training, was patronized in turn by the Sforza family of Milan, by the Medici of Florence, and by the French royal line. His great paintings--the Holy Supper and Madonna Lisa, usually called La Gioconda--carried to a high degree the art of composition and the science of light and shade and color. In fact, Leonardo was a scientific painter--he carefully studied the laws of perspective and painstakingly carried them into practice.

He was also a remarkable sculptor, as is testified by his admirable horses in relief. As an engineer, too, he built a ca.n.a.l in northern Italy and constructed fortifications about Milan. He was a musician and a natural philosopher as well. This many-sided man liked to toy with mechanical devices. One day when Louis XII visited Milan, he was met by a large mechanical lion that roared and then reared itself upon its haunches, displaying upon its breast the coat-of-arms of France: it was the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo influenced his age perhaps more than any other artist. He wrote extensively. He gathered about himself a large group of disciples. And in his last years spent in France, as a pensioner of Francis I, he encouraged painting in that country as well as in Italy.

Michelangelo (1475-1564), Florentine like Leonardo, was probably the most wonderful of all these artists because of his triumphs in a vast variety of endeavors. It might almost be said of him that "jack of all trades, he was master of all." He was a painter of the first rank, an incomparable sculptor, a great architect, an eminent engineer, a charming poet, and a profound scholar in anatomy and physiology.

Dividing his time between Florence and Rome, he served the Medici family and a succession of art-loving popes. With his other qualities of genius he combined austerity in morals, uprightness in character, a lively patriotism for his native city and people, and a proud independence. To give any idea of his achievements is impossible in a book of this size. His tomb of Julius II in Rome and his colossal statue of David in Florence are examples of his sculpture; the cathedral of St. Peter, which he practically completed, is his most enduring monument; the mural decorations in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, telling on a grandiose scale the Biblical story from Creation to the Flood, are marvels of design; and his grand fresco of the Last Judgment is probably the most famous single painting in the world.

[Sidenote: Raphael]

Younger than Michelangelo and living only about half as long, Raphael (1483-1520), nevertheless, surpa.s.sed him in the harmonious composition and linear beauty of his painting. For ineffable charm of grace, "the divine" Raphael has always stood without a peer. Raphael lived the better part of his life at Rome under the patronage of Julius II and Leo X, and spent several years in decorating the papal palace of the Vatican. Although he was, for a time, architect of St. Peter's cathedral, and displayed some apt.i.tude for sculpture and for the scholarly study of archaeeology, it is as the greatest of modern painters that he is now regarded. Raphael lived fortunately, always in favor, and rich, and bearing himself like a prince.

[Sidenote: t.i.tian]

t.i.tian (c. 1477-1576) was the typical representative of the Venetian school of painting which acquired great distinction in bright coloring.

Official painter for the city of Venice and patronized both by the Emperor Charles V and by Philip II of Spain, he secured considerable wealth and fame. He was not a man of universal genius like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo; his one great and supreme endowment was that of oil painting. In harmony, light, and color, his work has never been equaled. t.i.tian's portrait of Philip II was sent to England and proved a potent auxiliary in the suit of the Spanish king for the hand of Mary Tudor. His celebrated picture of the Council of Trent was executed after the aged artist's visit to the council about 1555.

From Italy as a center, great painting became the heritage of all Europe. Italian painters were brought to France by Louis XII and Francis I, and French painters were subsidized to imitate them. Philip II proved himself a liberal patron of painting throughout his dominions.

[Sidenote: Durer]

In Germany, painting was developed by Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), a native of Nuremberg, who received a stimulus from Italian work and was royally patronized by the Emperor Maximilian. The career of Durer was honored and fortunate: he was on terms of friendship with all the first masters of his age; he even visited and painted Erasmus. But it is as an etcher or engraver, rather than as a painter, that Durer's reputation was earned. His greatest engravings--such as the Knight and Death, and St. Jerome in his Study--set a standard in a new art which has never been reached by his successors. The first considerable employment of engraving, one of the most useful of the arts, synchronized with the invention of printing. Just as books were a means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating ideas, so engravings on copper or wood were the means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating pictures which gave vividness to the ideas, or served in place of books for those who could not read.

The impetus afforded by this extraordinary development of painting continued to affect the sixteenth century and a greater part of the seventeenth. The scene shifted, however, from Italy to the Spanish possessions. And Spanish kings, the successors of Philip II, patronized such men as Rubens (1577-1640) and Van Dyck (1599-1641) in the Belgian Netherlands, or Velasquez (1590-1660) and Murillo (1617-1682) in Spain itself.

[Sidenote: Rubens and Van Dyck]

If the work of Rubens displayed little of the earlier Italian grace and refinement, it at any rate attained to distinction in the purely fanciful pictures which he painted in bewildering numbers, many of which, commissioned by Marie de' Medici and King Louis XIII of France, are now to be seen in the Louvre galleries in Paris. And Van Dyck raised portrait painting to unthought-of excellence: his portraits of the English royal children and of King Charles I are world-famous.

[Sidenote: Velasquez]

[Sidenote: Murillo]

Within the last century, many connoisseurs of art have been led to believe that Velasquez formerly has been much underrated and that he deserves to rank with the foremost Italian masters. Certainly in all his work there is a dignity, power, and charm, especially in that well- known Maids of Honor, where a little Spanish princess is depicted holding her court, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, her dwarfs and her mastiff, while the artist himself stands at his easel. The last feat of Velasquez was to superintend the elaborate decorations in honor of the marriage of the Spanish Infanta with King Louis XIV of France.

Murillo, the youngest of all these great painters, did most of his work for the Catholic Church and naturally dealt with ecclesiastical subjects.

A somewhat different type of painter is found in the Dutchman, Rembrandt (1606-1669), who lived a stormy and unhappy life in the towns of Leyden and Amsterdam. It must be remembered that Holland, while following her national career of independence, commerce, and colonial undertaking, had become stanchly Protestant. Neither the immoral paganism of antiquity nor the medieval legends of Catholicism would longer appeal to the Dutch people as fit subjects of art. Rembrandt, prototype of a new school, therefore painted the actual life of the people among whom he lived and the things which concerned them--lively portraits of contemporary burgomasters, happy pictures of popular amus.e.m.e.nts, stern scenes from the Old Testament. His Lesson in Anatomy and his Night Watch in their somber settings, are wonderfully realistic products of Rembrandt's mastery of the brush.

[Sidenote: Rembrandt]

[Sidenote: Music]

Thus painting, like architecture and sculpture, was perfected in sixteenth-century Italy and speedily became the common property of Christian Europe. Music, too, the most primitive and universal of the arts, owes in its modern form very much to the sixteenth century.

During that period the barbarous and uncouth instruments of the middle ages were reformed. The rebeck, to whose loud and harsh strains the medieval rustic had danced, [Footnote: The rebeck probably had been borrowed from the Mohammedans.] by the addition of a fourth string and a few changes in form, became the sweet-toned violin, the most important and expressive instrument of the modern orchestra. As immediate forerunner of our present-day pianoforte, the harpsichord was invented with a keyboard carried to four octaves and the chords of each note doubled or quadrupled to obtain prolonged tones.

[Sidenote: Palestrina]

In the person of the papal organist and choir-master, Palestrina (1524- 1594), appeared the first master-composer. He is justly esteemed as the father of modern religious music and for four hundred years the Catholic Church has repeated his inspired accents. A pope of the twentieth century declared his music to be still unrivaled and directed its universal use. Palestrina directly influenced much of the Italian music of the seventeenth century and the cla.s.sical German productions of the eighteenth.

NATIONAL LITERATURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: Latin and the Vernaculars]

Latin had been the learned language of the middle ages: it was used in the Church, in the universities, and in polite society. If a lecturer taught a cla.s.s or an author wrote a book, Latin was usually employed.

In those very middle ages, however, the nations of western Europe were developing spoken languages quite at variance with the cla.s.sical, scholarly tongue. These so-called vernacular languages were not often written and remained a long time the exclusive means of expression of the lower cla.s.ses--they consequently not only differed from each other but tended in each case to fall into a number of petty local dialects.