Fra Bartolommeo Part 1

Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea D'Agnolo.

by Leader Scott.

FOREWORD

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: the three great names of the n.o.blest period of the Renaissance take our minds from the host of fine artists who worked alongside them. Nevertheless beside these giants a whole host of exquisite artists have place, and not least among them the three painters with whom Mr. Leader Scott has dealt in these pages. Fra Bartolommeo linking up with the religious art of the preceding period, with that of Masaccio, of Piero de Cosimo, his senior student in the studio of Cosimo Roselli, and at last with that of the definitely "modern" painters of the Renaissance, Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo himself, is a transition painter in this supreme period. Technique and the work of hand and brain are rapidly taking the place of inspiration and the desire to convey a message. The aesthetic sensation is becoming an end in itself. The scientific painters, perfecting their studies of anatomy and of perspective, having a conscious mastery over their tools and their mediums, are taking the place of such men as Fra Angelico.

As a painter at this end of a period of transition--a painter whose spiritual leanings would undoubtedly have been with the earlier men, but whose period was too strong for him--Fra Bartolommeo is of particular interest; and Albertinelli, for all the fiery surface difference of his outlook is too closely bound by the ties of his friendship for the Frate to have any other viewpoint.

Andrea del Sarto presents yet another phenomenon: that of the artist endowed with all the powers of craftsmanship yet serving an end neither basically spiritual nor basically aesthetic, but definitely professional. We have George Vasari's word for it; and Vasari's blame upon the extravagant and too-well-beloved Lucrezia. To-day we are so accustomed to the idea of the professional att.i.tude to art that we can accept it in Andrea without concern. Not that other and earlier artists were unconcerned with the aspect of payments. The history of Italian art is full of quarrels and bickerings about prices, the calling in of referees to decide between patron and painter, demands and refusals of payment. Even the unworldly Fra Bartolommeo was the centre of such quarrels, and although his vow of poverty forbade him to receive money for his work, the order to which he belonged stood out firmly for the _scudi_ which the Frate's pictures brought them. In justice to Andrea it must be added that this was not the only motive for his activities; it was not without cause that the men of his time called him "_senza errori_," the faultless painter; and the production of a vast quant.i.ty of his work rather than good prices for individual pictures made his art pay to the extent it did. A pot-boiler in masterpieces, his works have place in every gallery of importance, and he himself stands very close to the three greatest; men of the Renaissance.

Both Fra Bartolommeo and Albertinelli are little known in this country.

Practically nothing has been written about them and very few of their works are in either public galleries or private collections. It is in Italy, of course, that one must study their originals, although the great collections usually include one or two. Most interesting from the viewpoint of the study of art is the evolution of the work of the artist-monk as he came under the influence of the more dramatic modern and frankly sensational work of Raphael, of the Venetians and of Michelangelo. In this case (many will say in that of the art of the world) this tendency detracted rather than helped the work. The draperies, the dramatic poses, the artistic sensation arrests the mind at the surface of the picture. It is indeed strange that this devout churchman should have succ.u.mbed to the temptation, and there are moments when one suspects that his somewhat spectacular pietism disguised the spirit of one whose mind had little to do with the mysticism of the mediaeval church. Or perhaps it was that the strange friendship between him and Albertinelli, the man of the cloister and the man of the world, effected some alchemy in the mind of each. The story of that lifelong friendship, strong enough to overcome the difficulties of a definite partnership between the strict life of the monastery and the busy life of the _bottega_, is one of the most fascinating in art history.

Mr. Leader Scott has in all three lives the opportunity for fascinating studies, and his book presents them to us with much of the flavour of the period in which they lived. Perhaps to-day we should incline to modify his acceptance of the Vasari att.i.tude to Lucrezia, especially since he himself tends to withdraw the charges against her, but leaves her as the villainess of the piece upon very little evidence. The inclusion of a chapter upon Ghirlandajo, treated merely as a follower of Fra Bartolommeo, scarcely does justice in modern eyes to this fine artist, whose own day and generation did him such honour and paid him so well. But the author's general conclusions as to the place in art and the significance of the lives of the three painters with whom he is chiefly concerned remains unchallenged, and we have in the volume a necessary study to place alongside those of Leonardo, of Michelangelo and of Raphael for an understanding of the culmination of the Renaissance in Italy.

HORACE SHIPP.

FRA BARTOLOMMEO.

CHAPTER I.

THOUGHTS ON THE RENAISSANCE.

It seems to be a law of nature that progress, as well as time, should be marked by periods of alternate light and darkness--day and night.

This law is nowhere more apparent than in the history of Art. Three times has the world been illuminated by the full brilliance of Art, and three times has a corresponding period of darkness ensued.

The first day dawned in Egypt and a.s.syria, and its works lie buried in the tombs of prehistoric Pharaohs and Ninevite kings. The second day the sun rose on the sh.o.r.es of many-isled Greece, and shed its rays over Etruria and Rome, and ere it set, temples and palaces were flooded with beauty. The G.o.ds had taken human form, and were come to dwell with men.

The third day arising in Italy, lit up the whole western world with the glow of colour and fervour, and its fading rays light us yet.

The first period was that of mythic art; the world like a child wondering at all around tried to express in myths the truths it could not comprehend.

The second was pagan art which satisfies itself that in expressing the perfection of humanity, it unfolds divinity. The third era of Christian art, conscious that the divine lies beyond the human, fails in aspiring to express infinitude.

Tracing one of these periods from its rise, how truly this similitude of the dawn of day is carried out. See at the first streak of light how dim, stiff, and soulless all things appear! Trees and objects bear precisely the relation to their own appearance in broad daylight as the wooden Madonnas of the Byzantine school do to those of Raphael.

Next, when the sun--the true light--first appears, how it bathes the sea and the hills in an ethereal glory not their own! What fair liquid tints of blue, and rose, and glorious gold! This period which, in art, began with Giotto and ended with Botticelli, culminated in Fra Angelico, who flooded the world of painting with a heavenly spiritualism not material, and gave his dreams of heaven the colours of the first pure rays of sunshine.

But as the sun rises, nature takes her real tints gradually. We see every thing in its own colour; the gold and the rose has faded away with the truer light, and a stern realism takes its place. The human form must be expressed, in all its solidity and truth, not only in its outward semblance, but the hidden soul must be seen through the veil of flesh. And in this lies the reason of the decline; only to a few great masters it was given to reveal spirituality in humanity--the others could only emulate form and colour, and failed.

It is impossible to contemplate art apart from religion; as truly as the celestial sun is the revealer of form, so surely is the heavenly light of religion the first inspirer of art.

Where would the Egyptian, a.s.syrian, and Etruscan paintings and sculptures have been but for the veneration of the mystic G.o.ds of the dead, which both prompted and preserved them?

What would Greek sculpture have been without the deified personifications of the mysterious powers of nature which inspired it? and it is the fact of the pagan religion being both sensuous and realistic which explains the perfection of Greek art. The highest ideal being so low as not to soar beyond the greatest perfection of humanity, was thus within the grasp of the artist to express. Given a manly figure with the fullest development of strength; a female one showing the greatest perfection of form; and a n.o.ble man whose features express dignity and mental power;--the ideal of a Hercules, a Venus, and a Jupiter is fully expressed, and the pagan mind satisfied. The spirit of admirers was moved more by beauty of form than by its hidden significance. In the great Venus, one recognises the woman before feeling the G.o.ddess.

As with their sculpture, without doubt it was also with painting. Mr.

Symonds, in his _Renaissance of the Fine Arts_, speaks of the Greek revival as entirely an age of sculpture; but the solitary glance into the more perishable art of painting among the Greeks, to be seen at Cortona, reveals the exquisite perfection to which this branch was also brought. It is a painting in encaustic, and has been used as a door for his oven by the contadino who dug it up--yet it remains a marvel of genius. The subject is a female head--a muse, or perhaps only a portrait; the delicacy and mellowness of the flesh tints equal those of Raphael or Leonardo, and a lock of hair lying across her breast is so exquisitely painted that it seems to move with her breath. The features are of the large-eyed regular Greek type, womanly dignity is in every line, but it is an essentially pagan face--the Christian soul has never dawned in those eyes! With this before us, we cannot doubt that Greek art found its expression as much in colour as in form and that the same religion inspired both.

In an equal degree Renaissance Art has its roots in Christianity; but the religion is deeper and greater, and has left art behind.

The early Christians must have felt this when they expressed everything in symbols, for these are merely suggestive, and allow the imagination full play around and beyond them; they are mere stepping-stones to the ideal which exists but is as yet inexpressible.

"Myths and symbols always mark the dawn of a religion, incarnation and realism its full growth." So after a time when the first vague wonder and ecstasy are over, symbols no longer content people; they want to bring religion home to them in a more tangible form, to humanize it, in fact. From this want it arises that nature next to religion inspires art, and finally takes its place. For it follows as a matter of course that as art is a realistic interpreter of the spiritual, so it is more easy to follow nature than spirituality, nature being the outward or realistic expression of the mind of G.o.d.

It was a saying of Buffalmacco, who was _not_ one of the most devout painters of the fourteenth century, "Do not let us think of anything but to cover our walls with saints, and out of disrespect to the demons to make men more devout." And Savonarola, though he has been accused of being one of the causes of the decline, thus upheld the sacred influences of art; when he exclaimed in one of his fervent bursts of eloquence, "You see that Saint there in the Church and say, 'I will live a good life and be like him.'" If these were the feelings of the least devout and the religious fanatic, how hallowed must the influences of Christian painting have been to the intermediate ranks. Mr. Symonds beautifully expresses the tendency of that time: "The eyes of the worshipper should no longer have a mere stock or stone to contemplate; his imagination should be helped by the dogmatic presentation of the scenes of sacred history, and his devotion quickened by lively images of the pa.s.sion of our Lord.... The body and soul moreover should be reconciled, and G.o.d's likeness should be once more acknowledged in the features and limbs of men." [Footnote: Symonds' _Renaissance of the Fine Arts_, chap. i. p. 11.]

The school of Giotto was the first to feel this need of the soul. He, taking his ideas from nature, clothed the soul in a thin veil; the Italians call his school that of poetic art; it reached sentiment and poetry, but did not pa.s.s them. Yet the thirteenth century was sublime for the expression of the idea; one only has to study the intense meaning in the works of Giotto, and Orcagna, Duccio, and the Lorenzetti of Siena to perceive this. The fourteenth century, on the contrary, rendered itself glorious for manifestation of form. "Artists thought the veil of ideality a poor thing, and wished to give the solidity of the body to the soul; they stole every secret from nature; the senses were content, but not sentiment." [Footnote: _Purismo nell' Arte_, da Cesare Guasti.]

The artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of whom we have to speak, blended the two schools, and became perfection as far as they went. Michelangelo drew more from the vigorous thirteenth-century masters, and Raphael from the more sensuous followers of Masaccio and Lippi. The former tried to put the Christian soul into his works, but its infinite depth was unattainable. As his many unfinished works prove, he always felt some great overwhelming meaning in his inmost soul, which all his pa.s.sionate artistic yearnings were inadequate to express.

Raphael tried to bring realism into religion through painting, and to give us the scenes of our Lord's and the Apostles' lives in such a humanized aspect, that we should feel ourselves of his nature. But the incarnation of religion in art defeated its own ends; sensuousness was introduced in place of the calm, unearthly spirituality of the earlier masters. Compare the cartoon of S. Paul preaching at Athens, in which he has all the majesty of a Caesar in the Forum, with the lowly spirit of the Apostle's life! In truth, Raphael failed to approach nearer to sublimity than Fra Angelico, with all his faulty drawing but pure spirit.

After him, artists loved form and colour for themselves rather than for the spiritual meaning. Miss Owen [Footnote: _Art Schools of Medieval Christendom_, edited by Ruskin.] accuses Raphael of having rendered Art pagan, but this seems blaming him for the weakness of his followers, who took for their type his works rather than his ideal. The causes of the decline were many, and are not centred in one man. As long as Religion slumbered in monasticism and dogma, Art seizing on the human parts, such as the maternity of the Madonna, the personifications of saints who had lived in the world, was its adequate exponent. The religion awakened by the aesthetic S. Francis, who loved all kinds of beauty, was of the kind to be fed by pictures. But when Savonarola had aroused the fervour of the nation to its highest point, when beauty was nothing, the world nothing, in comparison to the infinity of G.o.d;--then art, finding itself powerless to express this overwhelming infinity, fell back on more earthly founts of inspiration, the cla.s.sics and the poets.

Lorenzo de' Medici and Pope Nicholas V. had fully as much to do with the decline as Savonarola. The Pope in Rome, and Lorenzo in Florence, led art to the verge of paganism; Savonarola would have kept it on the confines of purism; it was divided and fell, pa.s.sing through the various steps of decadence, the mannerists and the eclectics, to rise again in this nineteenth century with what is after all its true aim, the interpretation of nature, and the ill.u.s.tration of the poetry of a nation.

But with the decadence we have happily nothing to do; the artists of whom we speak first, Fra Bartolommeo and Albertinelli, belong to the culmination of art on its rising side, while Andrea del Sarto stands as near to the greatest artists on the other side, and is the last of the group before the decline. On Fra Bartolommeo the spirituality of Fra Angelico still lingered, while the perfection of Raphael illumined him.

Andrea del Sarto, on the other side, had gathered into his hands the gleams of genius from all the great artists who were his elder contemporaries, and so blending them as to form seemingly a style of his own, distinct from any, has left on our walls and in our galleries hundreds of masterpieces of colour, as gay and varied as the tints the orientals weave into their wondrous fabrics.

It might be said with truth that Fra Bartolommeo painted for the soul, and Andrea del Sarto for the eye.

CHAPTER II.

THE "BOTTEGA" OF COSIMO ROSELLI. A.D. 1475-1486.

Amongst the thousand arteries in which the life blood of the Renaissance coursed in all its fulness, none were so busy or so important as the "botteghe" of the artists. In these the genius of the great masters, the Pleiades of stars at the culmination of art in Florence, was either tenderly nursed, or sharply pruned into vigour by struggling against discouragement and envy. In these the spirit of awakened devotion found an outlet, in altarpieces and designs for church frescoes which were to influence thousands. Here the spirit of poetry, brooding in the mysterious lines of Dante, or echoing from past ages in the myths of the Greeks, took form and glowed on the walls in mighty cartoons to be made imperishable in fresco. Here the spirit of luxury was satisfied by beautiful designs for ornaments, dress stuffs, tapestries, vases and "ca.s.soni," &c., which brought beauty into every life, and made each house a poem. The soul, the mind, and the body, could alike be supplied at those fountains of the beautiful, the artshops or schools.

Whilst Michelangelo as a youth was drawing from the cartoons of the Sa.s.setti chapel in the school of Domenico Ghirlandajo, Cosimo Roselli was just receiving as a pupil a boy only a little behind him in genius.

A small, delicate-faced, spiritual-eyed boy of nine years, known as Baccio della Porta, who came with a roll of drawings under his arm and high hopes in his soul, no doubt trotting along manfully beside Cosimo's old friend, Benedetto da Majano, the sculptor, who had recommended his being placed in the studio.

By the table given in the note [Footnote: Pietro, a Genoese, came in 1400 to the parish of S. Michele, at Montecuccioli in Mugello; he was a peasant, and had a son Jacopo, who was father of Paolo, the muleteer; and three other sons, Bartolo, Giusto, and Jacopo, who had a _podere_ at Soffignano, near Prato. Paolo married first Bartolommea, daughter of Zan.o.bi di Gallone, by whom he had a son, Bartolommeo, known as Baccio della Porta, born 1475. The first wife dying, Paolo married Andrea di Michaele di Cenni, who had four sons, Piero, Domenico, Michele, and Francesco; only Piero lived to grow up, and he became a priest.

[_Favoured by Sig. Milanesi._]] it will be seen that Baccio was the son of Paolo, a muleteer, which no doubt was a profitable trade in those days when the country roads were mere mule-tracks, and the traffic between different towns was carried on almost entirely by horses and mulepacks. There is some doubt as to the place of Baccio's birth, which occurred in 1475. Vasari gives it as Savignano near Prato; Crowe and Cavalcaselle [Footnote: Vol. iii. chap. xiii. p. 427.] a.s.sert it was Suffignano, near Florence, where they say Paolo's brothers, Jacopo and Giusto, were contadini or peasants.

But on consulting the post-office authorities we find no place called Suffignano near Florence; it must therefore have been a village near Prato called Soffignano, which from similarity of sound Vasari confused with the larger place, Savignano. This is the more probable, for Rosini a.s.serts that "Benedetto da Majano, _who had bought a podere near Prato_, knew him and took him into his affections, and by his means placed him with Cosimo." [Footnote: Rosini, _Storia della Pittura_, chap. xvii. p.

47.]

It is certainly probable that Paolo's wife lived with his family during his wanderings, because it is the true Italian custom, and Baccio was in that case born in his uncle's house; for it is not till 1480 that we find Paolo retired from trade and set up in a house of his own in Florence at the gate of S. Pier Gattolini, now the Porta Romana.