Renaissance in Italy Volume III Part 4

Whether Giovanni Pisano had any share in the sculpture on the facade of the cathedral at Orvieto, is not known for certain. Vasari a.s.serts that Niccola and his pupils worked upon this series of bas-reliefs, setting forth the whole Biblical history and the cycle of Christian beliefs from the creation of the world to the last judgment. Yet we know that Niccola himself died at least twelve years before the foundation of the church in 1290; nor is there any proof that his immediate scholars were engaged upon the fabric. The Orvietan archives are singularly silent with regard to a monument of so large extent and vast importance, which must have taxed to the uttermost the resources of the ablest stone-carvers in Italy.[66]

Meanwhile, what Vasari says is valuable only as a witness to the fame of Niccola Pisano. His manner, as continued and developed by his school, is unmistakable at Orvieto: but in the absence of direct information, we are left to conjecture the conditions under which this, the closing if not the crowning achievement of thirteenth-century sculpture, was produced.

When the great founder of Italian art visited Siena in 1266 for the completion of his pulpit in the Duomo, he found a guild of sculptors, or _taglia-pietri_, in that city, numbering some sixty members, and governed by a rector and three chamberlains. Instead of regarding Niccola with jealousy, these craftsmen only sought to learn his method. Accordingly it seems that a new impulse was given to sculpture in Siena; and famous workmen arose who combined this art with that of building. The chief of these was Lorenzo Maitani, who died in 1330, having designed and carried to completion the Duomo of Orvieto during his lifetime.[67] While engaged in this great undertaking, Maitani directed a body of architects, stone-carvers, bronze-founders, mosaists, and painters, gathered together into a guild from the chief cities of Tuscany. It cannot be proved that any of the Pisani, properly so called, were among their number. Lacking evidence to the contrary, we must give to Maitani, the master-spirit of the company, full credit for the sculpture carried out in obedience to his general plan. As the church of S. Francis at a.s.sisi formed an epoch in the history of painting, by concentrating the genius of Giotto on a series of masterpieces, so the Duomo of Orvieto, by giving free scope to the school of Pisa, marked a point in the history of sculpture. It would be difficult to find elsewhere even separate works of greater force and beauty belonging to this, the first or architectural, period of Italian sculpture; and nowhere has the whole body of Christian belief been set forth with method more earnest and with vigour more sustained.[68] The subjects selected by these unknown craftsmen for ill.u.s.tration in marble, are in many instances the same as those afterwards painted in fres...o...b.. Michael Angelo and Raphael at Borne. Their treatment, for example, of the creation of Adam and Eve, adopted in all probability from still earlier and ruder workmen, after being refined by the improvements of successive generations, may still be observed in the triumphs of the Sistine Chapel and the Loggie.[69] It was the practice of Italian artists not to seek originality by diverging from the traditional modes of presentation, but to prove their mastery by rendering these as perfect and effective as the maturity of art could make them. For the Italians, as before them for the Greeks, plagiarism was a word unknown, in all cases where it was possible to improve upon the invention of less fortunate predecessors. The student of art may, therefore, now enjoy the pleasure of tracing sculpturesque or pictorial motives from their genesis in some rude fragment to their final development in the master-works of a Lionardo or a Raphael, where scientific grouping of figures, higher idealisation of style, the suggestion of freer movement, and more varied dramatic expression yield at last the full flower that the simple germ enfolded.

Among the most distinguished scholars of Niccola Pisano's tradition must now be mentioned Andrea da Pontadera, called Andrea Pisano, who carried the manner of his master to Florence, and helped to fulfil the destiny of Italian sculpture by submitting it to the rising art of painting. Under the direction of Giotto he carved statues for the Campanile and the facade of S. Maria del Fiore; and in the first gate of the Baptistery, he bequeathed a model of bas-relief in bronze, which largely influenced the style of masters in the fifteenth century. To overpraise the simplicity and beauty of design, the purity of feeling, and the technical excellence of Andrea's bronze-work, would be difficult. Many students will always be found to prefer his self-restraint and delicacy to the more florid manner of Ghiberti.[70] What we chiefly observe in this gate is the control exercised by the sister art of painting over his mode of conception and treatment. If Giovanni Pisano developed the dramatic and emphatic qualities of Gothic sculpture, Andrea was attracted to its allegories; if Giovanni infused romantic vehemence of feeling into the frigid cla.s.sicism of his father, Andrea diverged upon another track of picturesque delineation. A new sun had now arisen in the heavens of art. This was the sun of Giotto, whose genius, eminently pictorial, brought the Italians to a true sense of their aesthetical vocation, illuminating with its brightness the elder and more technically finished craft of the stone-carver. Sculpture, which in the school of Niccola Pisano had been subordinate to architecture, became a sub-species of painting in the hands of Andrea.

It was thus, as I have elsewhere stated, that the twofold doom of plastic art in Italy was accomplished. In order to embody the ideas of Christianity, art had to think more of expression than of pure form.

Expression is the special sphere of painting; and therefore sculpture followed the lead of the sister art, as soon as painting was strong enough to give that lead, instead of remaining, as in Greece, the mistress of her own domain. On the deeper reasons for this subordination of sculpture to painting I have dwelt already, while showing that a large cla.s.s of subjects, where physical qualities are comparatively indifferent and of no account, were forced upon the artist by Christianity.[71] Humility and charity may be found alike in blooming youth or in ascetic age; nor is it possible to characterize saints and martyrs by those corporeal characteristics which distinguish a runner from a boxer, or a chaste huntress from a voluptuous queen of love. Italian sculpture abandoned the presentation of the naked human body as useless. The emotions written on the face became of more importance than the modelling of the limbs, and recourse was had to allegorical symbols or emblematic att.i.tudes for the interpretation of the artist's thought. Andrea Pisano's figure of Hope, raising hands and eyes toward an offered crown, seems but a repet.i.tion of the motive expressed by Giotto in the chiaroscuro frescoes of the Arena chapel.[72] Owing to similar causes, drapery, which in Greece had served to ill.u.s.trate the structure or the movement of the body it clothed, was used by the Italian sculptors to conceal the limbs, and to enhance by flowing skirt or sinuous fold or agitated scarf some quality of the emotions. The result was that sculpture a.s.sumed a place subordinate to painting, and that the masterpieces of the early Italian carvers are chiefly bas-reliefs--pictures in bronze or marble.[73]

In a like degree, though not for the same reason, sculpture in Italy remained subordinate to architecture, until such time as the neo-h.e.l.lenism of the full Renaissance produced a crowd of pseudo-cla.s.sic statues, destined to take their places--not in churches, but in the courtyards of palaces and on the open squares of cities. The cause of this fact is not far to seek. In ancient Greece the temple had been erected for the G.o.d, and the statue dwelt within the cella like a master in his house.

Christianity forbade an image of the living G.o.d; consequently the Church had another object than to roof the statue of a deity. It was the meeting-place of a congregation bent on worshipping Him who dwells not in houses made with hands, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. The vast s.p.a.ces and aerial arcades of mediaeval architecture had their meaning in relation to the mystic apprehension of an unseen power. It followed of necessity that the carved work destined to decorate a Christian temple could never be the main feature of the building. It existed for the Church, and not the Church for it.[74]

Through Andrea Pisano the style of Niccola was extended to Venice. There is reason to believe that he instructed Filippo Calendario, to whom we should ascribe the sculptured corners of the Ducal Palace. Venice, however, invariably exercised her own controlling influence over the arts of aliens; so we find a larger, freer, richer, and more mundane treatment in these splendid carvings than in aught produced by Pisan workmen for their native towns of Tuscany.

Nino, the sculptor of the "Madonna della Rosa," the chief ornament of the Spina chapel, and Tommaso, both sons of Andrea da Pontadera, together with Giovanni Balduccio of Pisa, continued the traditions of the school founded by Niccola. Balduccio, invited by Azzo Visconti to Milan, carved the shrine of S. Peter Martyr in the church of S. Eustorgio, and impressed his style on Matteo da Campione, the sculptor of the shrine of S. Augustine at Pavia.[75] These facts, though briefly stated, are not without significance. Travellers who have visited the churches of Pavia and Milan, after studying the shrine, or _arca_ as Italians call it, of S. Dominic at Bologna, must have noticed the ascendency of Pisan style in these three Lombard towns, and have felt how widely Niccola's creative genius was exercised. Traces of the same influence may perhaps be observed in the tombs of the Scaligers at Verona.[76]

The most eminent pupil of Andrea Pisano, however, was a Florentine--the great Andrea Arcagnuolo di Cione, commonly known as Orcagna. This man, like the more ill.u.s.trious Giotto, was one among the earliest of those comprehensive, many-sided natures produced by Florence for her everlasting glory. He studied the goldsmith's craft under his father, Cione, pa.s.sing the years of his apprenticeship, like other Tuscan artists, in the technical details of an industry that then supplied the strictest method of design. With his brother, Bernardo, he practised painting. Like Giotto, he was no mean poet;[77] and like all the higher craftsmen of his age, he was an architect. Though the church of Orsammichele owes its present form to Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna, as _capo maestro_ after Gaddi's death, completed the structure; and though the Loggia de' Lanzi, long ascribed to him by writers upon architecture, is now known to be the work of Benci di Cione, yet Orcagna's Loggia del Bigallo, more modest but not less beautiful, prepared the way for its construction. Of his genius as a painter, proved by the frescoes in the Strozzi chapel, I shall have to speak hereafter. As a sculptor he is best known through the tabernacle of Orsammichele, built to enshrine the picture of the Madonna by Ugolino da Siena.[78]

In this monument Orcagna employed carved bas-reliefs and statuettes, intaglios and mosaics, incrustations of agates, enamels, and gilded gla.s.s patterns, with a sense of harmony so refined, and a mastery over each kind of workmanship so perfect, that the whole tabernacle is an epitome of the minor arts of mediaeval Italy. The subordination of sculpture to architectural effect is noticeable; and the Giottesque influence appears even more strongly here than in the gate of Andrea Pisano. This influence Orcagna received indirectly through his master in stone carving; it formed, indeed, the motive force of figurative art during his lifetime.

The subjects of the "Annunciation," the "Nativity," the "Marriage of the Virgin," and the "Adoration of the Three Kings," framed in octagonal mouldings at the base of the tabernacle, ill.u.s.trate the domination of a spirit distinct both from the neo-Romanism of Niccola and the Gothicism of Giovanni Pisano. That spirit is Florentine in a general sense, and specifically Giottesque. Charity, again, with a flaming heart in her hand, crowned with a flaming brazier, and suckling a child, is Giottesque not only in allegorical conception but also in choice of type and treatment of drapery.

While admiring the tabernacle of Orsammichele, we are reminded that Orcagna was a goldsmith to begin with, and a painter. Sculpture he practised as an accessory. What the artists of Florence gained in delicacy of execution, accuracy of modelling, and precision of design by their apprenticeship to the goldsmith's trade, was hardly perhaps sufficient to compensate for loss of training in a larger style. It was difficult, we fancy, for men so educated to conceive the higher purposes of sculpture.

Contented with elaborate workmanship and beauty of detail, they failed to attain to such independence of treatment as may be reached by sculptors who do not carry to their work the preconceptions of a narrower handicraft. Thus even Orcagna's masterpiece may strike us not as the plaything of a Pheidian genius condescending for once to "breathe through silver," but of a consummate goldsmith taxing the resources of his craft to form a monumental jewel.[79]

The facade of Orvieto was the final achievement of the first or architectural period of Italian sculpture. Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Orcagna, formed the transition to the second period. To find one characteristic t.i.tle for the style of the fifteenth century is not easy, since it was marked by many distinct peculiarities. If, however, we choose to call it pictorial, we shall sufficiently mark the quality of some eminent masters, and keep in view the supremacy of painting at this epoch. A great public enterprise at Florence brings together in honourable rivalry the chief craftsmen of the new age, and marks the advent of the Renaissance. When the Signory, in concert with the Arte de' Mercanti, decided to complete the bronze gates of the Baptistery in the first year of the fifteenth century, they issued a manifesto inviting the sculptors of Italy to prepare designs for compet.i.tion. Their call was answered by Giacomo della Quercia of Siena, by Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo di Cino Ghiberti of Florence, and by two other Tuscan artists of less note.

The young Donatello, aged sixteen, is said to have been consulted as to the rival merits of the proofs submitted to the judges. Thus the four great masters of Tuscan art in its prime met before the Florentine Baptistery.[80] Giacomo della Quercia was excluded from the compet.i.tion at an early stage; but the umpires wavered long between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, until the latter, with notable generosity, feeling the superiority of his rival, and conscious perhaps that his own laurels were to be gathered in the field of architecture, withdrew his claim. In 1403, Ghiberti received the commission for the first of the two remaining gates.

He afterwards obtained the second; and as they were not finished until 1452, the better part of his lifetime was spent upon them. He received in all a sum of 30,798 golden florins for his labour and the cost of the material employed.

The trial-pieces prepared by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti are now preserved in the Bargello.[81] Their subject is the "Sacrifice of Isaac;" and a comparison of the two leaves no doubt of Ghiberti's superiority. The faults of Brunelleschi's model are want of repose and absence of composition. Abraham rushes in a frenzy of murderous agitation at his son, who writhes beneath the knife already at his throat. The angel swoops from heaven with extended arms, reaching forth one hand to show the ram to Abraham, and clasping the patriarch's wrist with the other. The ram meanwhile is scratching his nose with his near hind leg; one of the servants is taking a thorn from his foot, while the other fills a cup from the stream at which the a.s.s is drinking. Thus each figure has a separate uneasy action. Those critics who contend that the unrest of sixteenth-century sculpture was due to changes in artistic and religious feeling wrought by the Renaissance, would do well to examine this plate, and see how much account must be taken of the artist's temperament in forming their opinion. Brunelleschi adhered to the style and taste of the fifteenth century at its commencement; but the too fervid quality of his character impaired his work as a sculptor. Ghiberti, on the other hand, translated the calm of his harmonious nature into his composition. The angel leans from heaven and points to the ram, which is seated quietly and out of sight of the main actors. Isaac kneels in the att.i.tude of a submissive victim, though his head is turned aside, as if attracted by the rush of pinions through the air; while Abraham has but just lifted his hand, and the sacrifice is only suggested as a possibility by the naked knife. The two servants are grouped below in conversation, one on each side of the browsing a.s.s. This power of telling a story plainly, but without dramatic vehemence; of eliminating the painful details of the subject, and combining its chief motives into one agreeable whole, gave peculiar charm to Ghiberti's manner. It marked him as an artist distinguished by good taste.

How Delia Quercia treated the "Sacrifice of Isaac" we do not know. His bas-reliefs upon the facade of S. Petronio at Bologna, and round the font of S. John's Chapel in the cathedral of Siena, enable us, however, to compare his style with that of Ghiberti in the handling of a subject common to both, the "Creation of Eve."[82] There is no doubt but that Della Quercia was a formidable rival. Had the gates of the Baptistery been entrusted to his execution, we might have possessed a masterpiece of more heroic style. While smoothness and an almost voluptuous suavity of outline distinguish Ghiberti's naked Eve, gliding upheld by angels from the side of Adam at her Maker's bidding, Della Quercia's group, by the concentration of robust and rugged power, antic.i.p.ates the style of Michael Angelo. Ghiberti treats the subject pictorially, placing his figures in a landscape, and lavishing attendant angels. Della Quercia, in obedience to the stricter laws of sculpture, restrains his composition to the three chief persons, and brings them into close connection. While Adam reclines asleep in a beautiful and highly studied att.i.tude, Eve has just stepped forth behind him, and G.o.d stands robed in ma.s.sive drapery, raising His hand as though to draw her into life. There is, perhaps, an excess of dramatic action in the lifted right leg of Eve, and too much of pantomimic language in the expressive hands of Eve and her Creator. The robe, again, in its voluminous and snaky coils, and the triangular nimbus of the Deity, convey an effect of heaviness rather than of majesty. Yet we feel, while studying this composition, that it is a n.o.ble and original attempt, falling but little short of supreme accomplishment. Without this antecedent sketch, Michael Angelo might not have matured the most complete of all his designs in the Sistine Chapel. The similarity between Delia Quercia's bas-relief and Buonarroti's fresco of Eve is incontestable. The young Florentine, while an exile in Bologna, and engaged upon the shrine of S. Dominic, must have spent hours of study before the sculptures of S.

Petronio; so that this seed of Della Quercia's sowing bore after many years the fruit of world-renowned achievement in Rome.

Two other memorable works of Della Quercia must be parenthetically mentioned. These are the Fonte Gaja on the public square of Siena, now unhappily restored, and the portrait of Ilaria del Carretto on her tomb in the cathedral of Lucca. The latter has long been dear to English students of Italian art through words inimitable for their strength of sympathetic criticism.[83]

Ghiberti was brought up as a goldsmith by his stepfather, and it is said that while a youth he spent much of his leisure in modelling portraits and casting imitations of antique gems and coins for his friends. At the same time he practised painting. We find him employed in decorating a palace at Rimini for Carlo Malatesta, when his stepfather recalled him to Florence, in order that he might compete for the gate of the Baptistery. It is probable that from this early training Ghiberti derived the delicacy of style and smoothness of execution that are reckoned among the chief merits of his work. He also developed a manner more pictorial than sculpturesque, which justifies our calling him a painter in bronze. When Sir Joshua Reynolds remarked, "Ghiberti's landscape and buildings occupied so large a portion of the compartments, that the figures remained but secondary objects,"[84] his criticism might fairly have been taxed with some injustice even to the second of the two gates. Yet, though exaggerated in severity, his words convey a truth important for the understanding of this period of Italian art.

The first gate may be cited as the supreme achievement of bronze-casting in the Tuscan prime. In the second, by the introduction of elaborate landscapes and the ma.s.sing together of figures arranged in mult.i.tudes at three and sometimes four distances, Ghiberti overstepped the limits that separate sculpture from painting. Having learned perspective from Brunelleschi, he was eager to apply this new science to his own craft, not discerning that it has no place in n.o.ble bas-relief. He therefore abandoned the cla.s.sical and the early Tuscan tradition, whereby reliefs, whether high or low, are strictly restrained to figures arranged in line or grouped together without accessories. Instead of painting frescoes, he set himself to model in bronze whole compositions that might have been expressed with propriety in colour. The point of Sir Joshua's criticism, therefore, is that Ghiberti's practice of distributing figures on a small scale in s.p.a.cious landscape framework was at variance with the severity of sculptural treatment. The pernicious effect of his example may be traced in much Florentine work of the mid Renaissance period which pa.s.sed for supremely clever when it was produced. What the unique genius of Ghiberti made not merely pardonable but even admirable, became under other hands no less repulsive than the transference of pictorial effects to painted gla.s.s.[85]

That Ghiberti was not a great sculptor of statues is proved by his work at Orsammichele. He was no architect, as we know from his incompetence to do more than impede Brunelleschi in the building of the dome. He came into the world to create a new and inimitable style of hybrid beauty in those gates of Paradise. His susceptibility to the first influences of the cla.s.sical revival deserves notice here, since it shows to what an extent a devotee of Greek art in the fifteenth century could worship the relics of antiquity without pa.s.sing over into imitation. When the "Hermaphrodite"

was discovered in the vineyard of S. Celso, Ghiberti's admiration found vent in exclamations like the following: "No tongue could describe the learning and art displayed in it, or do justice to its masterly style."

Another antique, found near Florence, must, he conjectures, have been hidden out of harm's way by "some gentle spirit in the early days of Christianity." "The touch only," he adds, "can discover its beauties, which escape the sense of sight in any light."[86] It would be impossible to express a reverential love of ancient art more tenderly than is done in these sentences. So intense was Ghiberti's pa.s.sion for the Greeks, that he rejected Christian chronology and reckoned by Olympiads--a system that has thrown obscurity over his otherwise precious notes of Tuscan artists. In spite of this devotion, he never appears to have set himself consciously to reproduce the style of Greek sculpture, or to have set forth h.e.l.lenic ideas. He remained unaffectedly natural, and in a true sense Christian.

The paganism of the Renaissance is a phrase with no more meaning for him than for that still more delicate Florentine spirit, Luca della Robbia; and if his works are cla.s.sical, they are so only in Goethe's sense, when he p.r.o.nounced, "the point is for a work to be thoroughly good, and then it is sure to be cla.s.sical."

One great advantage of the early days of the Renaissance over the latter was this, that pseudo-paganism and pedantry had not as yet distorted the judgment or misdirected the aims of artists. Contact with the antique world served only to stimulate original endeavour, by leading the student back to the fountain of all excellence in nature, and by exhibiting types of perfection in technical processes. To ape the sculptors of Antinous, or to bring to life again the G.o.ds who died with Pan, was not yet longed for.

Of the impunity with which a sculptor in that period could submit his genius to the service and the study of ancient art without sacrificing individuality, Donatello furnishes a still more ill.u.s.trious example than Ghiberti. Early in his youth Donatello journeyed with Brunelleschi to Rome, in order to acquaint himself with the monuments then extant. How thoroughly he comprehended the cla.s.sic spirit is proved by the bronze patera wrought for his patron Ruberto Martelli, and by the frieze of the triumphant Bacchus.[87] Yet the great achievements of his genius were Christian in their sentiment and realistic in their style. The bronze "Magdalen" of the Florentine Baptistery and the bronze "Baptist" of the Duomo at Siena[88] are executed with an unrelenting materialism, not alien indeed to the sincerity of cla.s.sic art, but divergent from antique tradition, inasmuch as the ideas of repentant and prophetic asceticism had no place in Greek mythology.

Donatello, with the uncompromising candour of an artist bent on marking character, felt that he was bound to seize the very pith and kernel of his subject. If a Magdalen were demanded of him, he would not condescend to model a Venus and then place a book and skull upon a rock beside her; nor did he imagine that the bloom and beauty of a laughing Faun were fitting attributes for the preacher of repentance. It remained for later artists, intoxicated with antique loveliness and corroded with worldly scepticism, to reproduce the outward semblance of Greek deities under the pretence of setting forth the myths of Christianity. Such compromise had not occurred to Donatello. The motive of his art was clearly apprehended, his method was sincere; certain phases of profound emotion had to be represented with the physical characteristics proper to them. The result, ugly and painful as it may sometimes be, was really more concordant with the spirit of Greek method than Lionardo's "John" or Correggio's "Magdalen." That is to say, it was straightforward and truthful; whereas the strange caprices of the later Renaissance too often betrayed a double mind, disloyal alike to paganism and to Christianity, in their effort to combine divergent forces.

It may still be argued that such conceptions as sorrow for sin and mortification of the flesh, unflinchingly portrayed by haggard gauntness in the saints of Donatello, are unfit for sculpturesque expression.

A more felicitous embodiment of modern feeling was achieved by Donatello in "S. George" and "David." The former is a marble statue placed upon the north wall of Orsammichele; the latter is a bronze, cast for Cosimo de'

Medici, and now exhibited in the Bargello.[89] Without striving to idealise his models, the sculptor has expressed in both the Christian conception of heroism, fearless in the face of danger, and sustained by faith. The naked beauty of the boy David and the mailed manhood of S.

George are raised to a spiritual region by the type of feature and the pose of body selected to interpret their animating impulse. These are no mere portraits of wrestlers, such, as peopled the groves of Altis at Olympia, no ideals of physical strength translated into bra.s.s and marble, like the "Hercules" of Naples or the Vatican. The one is a Christian soldier ready to engage Apollyon in battle to the death; the other the boy-hero of a marvellous romance. The body in both is but the shrine of an indwelling soul, the instrument and agent of a faith-directed will; and the crown of their conflict is no wreath of laurel or of parsley. In other words, the value of S. George and David to the sculptor lay not in their strength and youthful beauty--though he has endowed them with these excellent gifts--so much as in their significance for the eternal struggle of the soul with evil. The same power of expressing Christian sentiment in a form of perfect beauty, transcending the Greek type by profounder suggestion of feeling, is ill.u.s.trated in the well-known low-relief of an angel's head in profile, technically one of Donatello's most masterly productions.[90]

It is no part of my present purpose to enumerate the many works of Donatello in marble and bronze; yet some allusion to their number and variety is necessary in order to show how widely his influence was diffused through Italy. In the monuments of Pope John XXIII., of Cardinal Brancacci, and of Bartolommeo Aragazzi, he subordinated his genius to the treatment of sepulchral and biographical subjects according to time-honoured Tuscan usage. They were severally placed in Florence, Naples, and Montepulciano. For the cathedral of Prato he executed bas-reliefs of dancing boys; a similar series, intended for the bal.u.s.trades of the organ in S. Maria del Fiore, is now preserved in the Bargello museum. The exultation of movement has never been expressed in stone with more fidelity to the strict rules of plastic art. For his friend and patron, Cosimo de' Medici, he cast in bronze the group of "Judith and Holofernes"--a work that ill.u.s.trates the clumsiness of realistic treatment, and deserves to be remembered chiefly for its strange fortunes. When the Medici fled from Florence in 1494, their palace was sacked; the new republic took possession of Donatello's "Judith," and placed it on a pedestal before the gate of the Palazzo Vecchio, with this inscription, ominous to would-be despots: _Exemplum salutis publicae cives posuere. MCCCCXCV_. It now stands near Cellini's "Perseus" under the Loggia de' Lanzi. For the pulpits of S. Lorenzo, Donatello made designs of intricate bronze bas-reliefs, which were afterwards completed by his pupil Bertoldo. These, though better known to travellers, are less excellent than the reliefs in bronze wrought by Donatello's own hand for the church of S. Anthony at Padua.[91] To that city he was called in 1451, in order that he might model the equestrian statue of Gattamelata. It still stands on the Piazza, a masterpiece of scientific bronze-founding, the first great portrait of a general on horseback since the days of Rome.[92] At Padua, in the hall of the Palazzo della Ragione, is also preserved the wooden horse, which is said to have been constructed by the sculptor for the n.o.ble house of Capodilista. These two examples of equestrian modelling marked an epoch in Italian statuary.

When Donato di Nicolo di Betto Bardi, called Donatello because men loved his sweet and cheerful temper, died in 1466 at the age of eighty, the brightest light of Italian sculpture in its most promising period was extinguished. Donatello's influence, felt far and wide through Italy, was of inestimable value in correcting the false direction toward pictorial sculpture which Ghiberti, had he flourished alone at Florence, might have given to the art. His style was always eminently masculine. However tastes may differ about the positive merits of his several works, there can be no doubt that the principles of sincerity, truth to nature, and technical accuracy they ill.u.s.trate, were all-important in an age that lent itself too readily to the caprices of the fancy and the puerilities of florid taste. To regret that Donatello lacked Ghiberti's exquisite sense of beauty, is tantamount to wishing that two of the greatest artists of the world had made one man between them.

Donatello did not, in the strict sense of the term, found a school.[93]

Andrea Verocchio, goldsmith, painter, and worker in bronze, was the most distinguished of his pupils. To all the arts he practised, Verocchio applied limited powers, a meagre manner, and a prosaic mind. Yet few men have exercised at a very critical moment a more decided influence. The mere fact that he numbered Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and Pietro Perugino among his scholars, proves the esteem of his contemporaries; and when we have observed that the type of face selected by Lionardo and transmitted to his followers, appears also in the pictures of Lorenzo di Credi and is first found in the "David" of Verocchio, we have a right to affirm that the master of these men was an artist of creative genius as well as a careful workman. Florence still points with pride to the "Incredulity of Thomas" on the eastern wall of Orsammichele, to the "Boy and Dolphin" in the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, and to the "David" of this sculptor: but the first is spoiled by heaviness and angularity of drapery; the second, though fanciful and marked by fluttering movement, is but a caprice; the third outdoes the hardest work of Donatello by its realism. Verocchio's "David," a lad of some seventeen years, has the lean, veined arms of a stone-hewer or gold-beater. As a faithful portrait of the first Florentine prentice who came to hand, this statue might have merit but for the awkward cuira.s.s and kilt that partly drape the figure.

The name of Verocchio is best known to the world through the equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni. When this great Condottiere, the last surviving general trained by Braccio da Montone, died in 1475, he bequeathed a large portion of his wealth to Venice, on condition that his statue on horseback should be erected in the Piazza di S. Marco. Colleoni, having long held the baton of the Republic, desired that after death his portrait, in his habit as he lived, should continue to look down on the scene of his old splendour. By an ingenious quibble the Senators adhered to the letter of his will without infringing a law that forbade them to charge the square of S. Mark with monuments. They ruled that the piazza in front of the Scuola di S. Marco, better known as the Campo di S. Zanipolo, might be chosen as the site of Colleoni's statue, and to Andrea Verocchio was given the commission for its erection.

Andrea died in 1488 before the model for the horse was finished. The work was completed, and the pedestal was supplied by Alessandro Leopardi. To Verocchio, profiting by the example of Donatello's "Gattamelata," must be a.s.signed the general conception of this statue; but the breath of life that animates both horse and rider, the richness of detail that enhances the ma.s.sive grandeur of the group, and the fiery spirit of its style of execution were due to the Venetian genius of Leopardi. Verocchio alone produced nothing so truly magnificent. This joint creation of Florentine science and Venetian fervour is one of the most precious monuments of the Renaissance. From it we learn what the men who fought the bloodless battles of the commonwealths, and who aspired to princ.i.p.ality, were like.

"He was tall," writes a biographer of Colleoni,[94] "of erect and well-knit figure, and of well-proportioned limbs. His complexion tended rather to brown, marked withal by bright and sanguine flesh-tints. He had black eyes; their brilliancy was vivid, their gaze terrible and penetrating. In the outline of his nose and in all his features he displayed a manly n.o.bleness combined with goodness and prudence." Better phrases cannot be chosen to describe his statue.

While admiring this masterpiece and dwelling on its royal style, we are led to deplore most bitterly the loss of the third equestrian statue of the Renaissance. Nothing now remains but a few technical studies made by Lionardo da Vinci for his portrait of Francesco Sforza. The two elaborate models he constructed and the majority of his minute designs have been destroyed. He intended, we are told, to represent the first Duke of the Sforza dynasty on his charger, trampling the body of a prostrate and just conquered enemy. Rubens' transcript from the "Battle of the Standard,"

enables us to comprehend to some extent how Lionardo might have treated this motive. The severe and cautious style of Donatello, after gaining freedom and fervour from Leopardi, was adapted to the ideal presentation of dramatic pa.s.sion by Lionardo. Thus Gattamelata, Colleoni, and Francesco Sforza would, through their statues, have marked three distinct phases in the growth of art. The final effort of Italian sculpture to express human activity in the person of a mounted warrior has perished. In this sphere we possess nothing which, like the tombs of S. Lorenzo in relation to sepulchral statuary, completes a series of development.

If Donatello founded no school, this was far more the case with Ghiberti.

His supposed pupil, Antonio del Pollajuolo, showed no sign of Ghiberti's influence, but struck out for himself a style distinguished by almost brutal energy and bizarre realism--characteristics the very opposite to those of his master. If the bronze relief of the "Crucifixion" in the Bargello be really Pollajuolo's, we may even trace a leaning to Verocchio in his manner. The emphatic pa.s.sion of the women recalls the group of mourners round the death-bed of Selvaggia Tornabuoni in Verocchio's celebrated bas-relief. Pollajuolo, like so many Florentine artists, was a goldsmith, a painter, and a worker in niello, before he took to sculpture.

As a goldsmith he is said to have surpa.s.sed all his contemporaries, and his mastery over this art influenced his style in general. What we chiefly notice, however, in his choice of subjects is a frenzy of murderous enthusiasm, a grimness of imagination, rare among Italian artists. The picture in the Uffizzi of "Hercules and Antaeus" and the well-known engraving of naked men fighting a series of savage duels in a wood, might be chosen as emphatic ill.u.s.trations of his favourite motives. The fiercest emotions of the Renaissance find expression in the clenched teeth, strained muscles, knotted brows, and tense nerves, depicted by Pollajuolo with eccentric energy. We seem to be a.s.sisting at some of those combats _a steccato chiuso_ wherein Sixtus IV. delighted, or to have before our eyes a fray between Crocensi and Vallensi in the streets of Rome.[95] The same remarks apply to the terra-cotta relief by Pollajuolo in the South Kensington Museum. This piece displays the struggles of twelve naked men, divided into six pairs of combatants. Two of the couples hold short chains with the left hand, and seek to stab each other with the right. In the case of another two couples the fight is over, and the victor is insulting his fallen foe. In each of the remaining pairs one gladiator is on the point of yielding to his adversary. There are thus three several moments of duel to the death, each ill.u.s.trated by two couples. The mathematical distribution of these dreadful groups gives an effect of frozen pa.s.sion; while the vigorous workmanship displays not only an enthusiasm for muscular anatomy, but a real sympathy with blood-fury in the artist.

There was, therefore, a certain propriety in the choice of Pollajuolo to cast the sepulchre of Sixtus IV. in bronze at Rome. The best judges complain, not without reason, that the allegories surrounding this tomb are exaggerated and affected in style; yet the dead Pope, stretched in pomp upon his bier, commands more than merely historical interest; while the figures, seated as guardians round the old man, terrible in death, communicate an impression of monumental majesty. Criticised in detail, each separate figure may be faulty. The composition, as a whole, is picturesque and grandiose. The same can scarcely be said about the tomb of Innocent VIII., erected by Antonio and his brother Piero del Pollajuolo.

While it perpetuates the memory of an uninteresting Pontiff, it has but little, as a work of art, to recommend it. The Pollajuoli were not great sculptors. In the history of Italian art they deserve a place, because of the vivid personality impressed upon some portions of their work. Few draughtsmen carried the study of muscular anatomy so far as Antonio.[96]

Luca della Robbia, whose life embraced the first eighty years of the fifteenth century, offers in many important respects a contrast to his contemporaries Ghiberti and Donatello, and still more to their immediate followers. He made his art as true to life as it is possible to be, without the rugged realism of Donatello or the somewhat effeminate graces of Ghiberti. The charm of his work is never impaired by scientific mannerism--that stumbling-block to critics like De Stendhal in the art of Florence; nor does it suffer from the picturesqueness of a sentimental style. How to render the beauty of nature in her most delightful moments--taking us with him into the holiest of holies, and handling the sacred vessels with a child's confiding boldness--was a secret known to Luca della Robbia alone. We may well find food for meditation in the innocent and cheerful inspiration of this man, whose lifetime coincided with a period of sordid pa.s.sions and debased ambition in the Church and States of Italy.

Luca was apprenticed in his youth to a goldsmith; but of what he wrought before the age of forty-five, we know but little.[97] At that time his faculty had attained full maturity, and he produced the groups of dancing children and choristers intended for the organ gallery of the Duomo.

Wholly free from affectation, and depending for effect upon no merely decorative detail, these bas-reliefs deserve the praise bestowed by Dante on the sculpture seen in Purgatory:[98]--

Dinanzi a noi pareva si verace, Quivi intagliato in un atto soave, Che non sembrava immagine che tace.

Movement has never been suggested in stone with less exaggeration, nor have marble lips been made to utter sweeter and more varied music. Luca's true perception of the limits to be observed in sculpture, appears most eminently in the glazed terra-cotta work by which he is best known. An ordinary artist might have found the temptation to aim at showy and pictorial effects in this material overwhelming. Luca restrained himself to pure white on pale blue, and preserved an exquisite simplicity of line in all his compositions. There is an almost unearthly beauty in the profiles of his Madonnas, a tempered sweetness in the modulation of their drapery and att.i.tude, that prove complete mastery in the art of rendering evanescent moments of expression, the most fragile subtleties of the emotions that can stir a tranquil spirit. Andrea della Robbia, the nephew of Luca, with his four sons, Giovanni, Luca, Ambrogio, and Girolamo, continued to manufacture the glazed earthenware of Luca's invention. These men, though excellent artificers, lacked the fine taste of their teacher.

Coa.r.s.er colours were introduced; the eye was dazzled with variety; but the power of speaking to the soul as Luca spoke was lost.[99]

After the Della Robbias, this is the place to mention Agostino di Gucci or di Duccio,[100] a sculptor who handled terra-cotta somewhat in the manner of Donatello's flat-relief, introducing more richness of detail and aiming at more pa.s.sion than Luca's taste permitted. For the oratory of S.

Bernardino at Perugia he designed the facade partly in stone and partly in baked clay--crowded with figures, flying, singing, playing upon instruments of music, with waving draperies and windy hair and the ecstasy of movement in their delicately modelled limbs. If nothing else remained of Agostino's workmanship, this facade alone would place him in the first rank of contemporary artists. He owed something, perhaps, to his material; for terra-cotta has the charm of improvisation. The hand, obedient to the brain, has made it in one moment what it is, and no slow hours of labour at the stone have dulled the first caprice of the creative fancy. Work, therefore, which, if translated into marble, might have left our sympathy unstirred, affects us with keen pleasure in the mould of plastic clay.

What prodigality of thought and invention has been lavished on the terra-cotta models of unknown Italian artists! What forms and faces, beautiful as shapes of dreams, and, like dreams, so airy that we think they will take flight and vanish, lean to greet us from cloisters and palace fronts in Lombardy! To catalogue their mult.i.tude would be impossible. It is enough to select one instance out of many; this shall be taken from the chapel of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio at Milan. High up around the cupola runs a frieze of angels, singing together and dancing with joined hands, while bells composed of fruits and flowers hang down between them. Each angel is an individual shape of joy; the soul in each moves to its own deep melody, but the music made of all is one. Their raiment flutters, the bells chime; the chorus of their gladness falls like voices through a star-lit heaven, half-heard in dreams and everlastingly remembered.

Four sculptors, the younger contemporaries of Luca della Robbia, and marked by certain common qualities, demand attention next. All the work of Antonio Rossellino, Matteo Civitali, Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da Majano, is distinguished by sweetness, grace, tranquillity, and self-restraint--as though these artists had voluntarily imposed limits on their genius, refusing to trespa.s.s beyond a traced circle of religious subjects, or to aim at effects unrealisable by purity of outline, suavity of expression, delicacy of feeling, and urbanity of style. The charm of manner they possess in common, can scarcely he defined except by similes.

The innocence of childhood, the melody of a lute or song-bird as distinguished from the music of an orchestra, the rathe tints of early dawn, cheerful light on shallow streams, the serenity of a simple and untainted nature that has never known the world--many such images occur to the mind while thinking of the sculpture of these men. To charge them with insipidity, immaturity, and monotony, would be to mistake the force of genius and skill displayed by them. We should rather a.s.sume that they confined themselves to certain types of tranquil beauty, without caring to realise more obviously striking effects, and that this was their way of meeting the requirements of sculpture considered as a Christian art. The melody of their design, meanwhile, is like the purest song-music of Pergolese or Salvator Rosa, unapproachably perfect in simple outline, and inexhaustibly refreshing.

Though it is possible to characterise the style of these sculptors by some common qualities observable in their work, it should rather be the aim of criticism to point out their differences. Antonio Rossellino, for example, might be distinguished by his leaning toward the manner of Ghiberti, whose landscape backgrounds he has adopted in the circular medallions of his monumental sculpture. A fine perception of the poetic capabilities of Christian art is displayed in Rossellino's idyllic treatment of the Nativity--the adoration of the shepherds, the hush of reverential stillness in the worship Mary pays her infant son.[101] To the qualities of sweetness and tranquillity rare dignity is added in the monument of the young Cardinal di Portogallo.[102] The sublimity of the slumber that is death has never been more n.o.bly and feelingly portrayed than in the supine figure and sleeping features of this most beautiful young man, who lies watched by angels beneath a heavy-curtained canopy. The genii of eternal repose modelled by Greek sculptors are twin-brothers of Love, on whom perpetual slumber has descended amid poppy-fields by Lethe's stream. The turmoil of the world is over for them; they will never wake again; they do not even dream. Sleep is the only power that still has life in them. But the Christian cannot thus conceive the mystery of the soul "fallen on sleep." His art must suggest a time of waiting and a time of waking; and this it does partly through the ministration of attendant angels, who would not be standing there on guard if the clay-cold corpse had no futurity, partly by breathing upon the limbs and visage of the dead a spirit as of life suspended for a while. Thus the soul herself is imaged in the marble "most sweetly slumbering in the gates of dreams."

What Vespasiano tells us of this cardinal, born of the royal house of Portugal, adds the virtue of sincerity to Rossellino's work, proving there is no flattery of the dead man in his sculpture.[103] "Among his other admirable virtues," says the biographer, "Messer Jacopo di Portogallo determined to preserve his virginity, though he was beautiful above all others of his age. Consequently he avoided all things that might prove impediments to his vow, such as free discourse, the society of women, b.a.l.l.s, and songs. In this mortal flesh he lived as though he had been free from it--the life, we may say, rather of an angel than a man. And if his biography were written from his childhood to his death, it would be not only an ensample, but confusion to the world. Upon his monument the hand was modelled from his own, and the face is very like him, for he was most lovely in his person, but still more in his soul."

While contemplating this monument of the young cardinal, we feel that the Italians of that age understood sepulchral sculpture far better than their immediate successors. They knew how to carve the very soul, according to the lines which our Webster, a keen observer of all things relating to the grave and death, has put into Jolenta's lips:--