Renaissance in Italy Volume III Part 12

Lionardo's turn for physical science led him to study the technicalities of art with fervent industry. Whatever his predecessors had acquired in the knowledge of materials, the chemistry of colours, the mathematics of composition, the laws of perspective, and the illusions of _chiaroscuro,_ he developed to the utmost. To find a darker darkness and a brighter brightness than had yet been shown upon the painter's canvas; to solve problems of foreshortening; to deceive the eye by finely graduated tones and subtle touches; to submit the freest play of form to simple figures of geometry in grouping, were among the objects he most earnestly pursued.

At the same time his deep feeling for all things that have life, gave him new power in the delineation of external nature. The branching of flower-stems, the outlines of fig-leaves, the att.i.tudes of beasts and birds in motion, the arching of the fan-palm, were rendered by him with the same consummate skill as the dimple on a cheek or the fine curves of a young man's lips.[242] Wherever he perceived a difficulty, he approached and conquered it. Love, which is the soul of art--Love, the bondslave of Beauty and the son of Poverty by Craft--led him to these triumphs. He used to buy caged birds in the marketplace that he might let them loose. He was attached to horses, and kept a sumptuous stable; and these he would draw in eccentric att.i.tudes, studying their anatomy in detail for his statue of Francesco Sforza.[243] In the "Battle of the Standard," known to us only by a sketch of Rubens,[244] he gave pa.s.sions to the horse--not human pa.s.sion, nor yet merely equine--but such as horses might feel when placed upon a par with men. In like manner the warriors are fiery with b.e.s.t.i.a.l impulses--leonine fury, wolfish ferocity, fox-like cunning. Their very armour takes the shape of monstrous reptiles. To such an extent did the interchange of human and animal properties haunt Lionardo's fancy.

From what has been already said we shall be better able to understand Lionardo's love of the bizarre and grotesque. One day a vine-dresser brought him a very curious lizard. The master fitted it with wings injected with quicksilver to give them motion as the creature crawled.

Eyes, horns, and a beard, a marvellous dragon's mask, were placed upon its head. This strange beast lived in a cage, where Lionardo tamed it; but no one, says Vasari, dared so much as to look at it.[245] On quaint puzzles and perplexing schemes he mused a good part of his life away. At one time he was for making wings to fly with; at another he invented ropes that should uncoil, strand by strand; again, he devised a system of flat corks, by means of which to walk on water.[246] One day, after having sc.r.a.ped the intestines of a sheep so thin that he could hold them in the hollow of his hand, he filled them with wind from a bellows, and blew and blew until the room was choked, and his visitors had to run into corners. Lionardo told them that this was a proper symbol of genius.

Such stories form what may be called the legend of Lionardo's life; and some of them seem simple, others almost childish.[247] They ill.u.s.trate what is meant when we call him the wizard of the Renaissance. Art, nature, life, the mysteries of existence, the infinite capacity of human thought, the riddle of the world, all that the Greeks called Pan, so swayed and allured him that, while he dreamed and wrought and never ceased from toil, he seemed to have achieved but little. The fancies of his brain were, perhaps, too subtle and too fragile to be made apparent to the eyes of men. He was wont, after years of labour, to leave his work still incomplete, feeling that he could not perfect it as he desired: yet even his most fragmentary sketches have a finish beyond the scope of lesser men. "Extraordinary power," says Vasari, "was in his case conjoined with remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness and magnanimous daring." Yet he was constantly accused of indolence and inability to execute.[248]

Often and often he made vast preparations and accomplished nothing. It is well known how the Prior of S. Maria delle Grazie complained that Lionardo stood for days looking at his fresco, and for weeks never came near it; how the monks of the Annunziata at Florence were cheated out of their painting, for which elaborate designs had yet been made; how Leo X., seeing him mix oils with varnish to make a new medium, exclaimed, "Alas!

this man will do nothing; he thinks of the end before he makes a beginning." A good answer to account for the delay was always ready on the painter's lips, as that the man of genius works most when his hands are idlest; Judas, sought in vain through all the thieves' resorts in Milan, is not found; I cannot hope to see the face of Christ except in Paradise.

Again, when an equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza had been modelled in all its parts, another model was begun because Da Vinci would fain show the warrior triumphing over a fallen foe.[249] The first motive seemed to him tame; the second was unrealisable in bronze. "I can do anything possible to man," he wrote to Lodovico Sforza, "and as well as any living artist either in sculpture or painting." But he would do nothing as taskwork, and his creative brain loved better to invent than to execute.[250] "Of a truth," continues his biographer, "there is good reason to believe that the very greatness of his most exalted mind, aiming at more than could be effected, was itself an impediment; perpetually seeking to add excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection. This was without doubt the true hindrance, so that, as our Petrarch has it, the work was r.e.t.a.r.ded by desire." At the close of that cynical and positive century, the spirit whereof was so well expressed by Cosimo de'

Medici,[251] Lionardo set before himself aims infinite instead of finite.

His designs of wings to fly with symbolise his whole endeavour. He believed in solving the insoluble; and nature had so richly dowered him in the very dawntime of discovery, that he was almost justified in this delusion. Having caught the Proteus of the world, he tried to grasp him; but the G.o.d changed shape beneath his touch. Having surprised Silenus asleep, he begged from him a song; but the song Silenus sang was so marvellous in its variety, so subtle in its modulations, that Lionardo could do no more than recall scattered phrases. His Proteus was the spirit of the Renaissance. The Silenus from whom he forced the song was the double nature of man and of the world.

By ill chance it happened that Lionardo's greatest works soon perished.

His cartoon at Florence disappeared. His model for Sforza's statue was used as a target by French bowmen. His "Last Supper" remains a mere wreck in the Convent delle Grazie. Such as it is, blurred by ill-usage and neglect, more blurred by impious re-painting, that fresco must be seen by those who wish to understand Da Vinci. It has well been called the compendium of all his studies and of all his writings; and, chronologically, it is the first masterpiece of the perfected Renaissance.[252] Other painters had represented the Last Supper as a solemn prologue to the Pa.s.sion, or as the mystical inauguration of the greatest Christian sacrament.[253] But none had dared to break the calm of the event by a dramatic action. The school of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Ghirlandajo, Perugino, even Signorelli, remained within the sphere of symbolical suggestion; and their work gained in dignity what it lost in intensity. Lionardo combined both. He undertook to paint a moment, to delineate the effect of a single word upon twelve men seated at a table, and to do this without sacrificing the tranquillity demanded by ideal art, and without impairing the divine majesty of Him from whose lips that word has fallen. The time has long gone by for detailed criticism or description of a painting known to everybody. It is enough to observe that the ideal representation of a dramatic moment, the life breathed into each part of the composition, the variety of the types chosen to express varieties of character, and the scientific distribution of the twelve Apostles in four groups of three around the central Christ, mark the appearance of a new spirit of power and freedom in the arts. What had hitherto been treated with religious timidity, with conventional stiffness, or with realistic want of grandeur, was now humanised and at the same time transported into a higher intellectual region; and though Lionardo discrowned the Apostles of their aureoles, he for the first time in the history of painting created a Christ not unworthy to be worshipped as the _praesens Deus_. We know not whether to admire most the perfection of the painter's art or his insight into spiritual things.[254]

If we are forced to feel that, with Da Vinci, accomplishment fell short of power and promise, the case is very different with Raphael. In him there was no perplexity, no division of interests. He was fascinated by no insoluble mystery and absorbed by no seductive problems. His faculty and his artistic purpose were exactly balanced, adequate, and mutually supporting. He saw by intuition what to do, and he did it without let or hindrance, exercising from his boyhood till his early death an unimpeded energy of pure productiveness. Like Mozart, to whom he bears in many respects a remarkable resemblance, Raphael was gifted with inexhaustible fertility and with unwearied industry. Like Mozart, again, he had a nature which converted everything to beauty. Thought, pa.s.sion, emotion, became in his art living melody. We almost forget his strength in admiration of his grace; the travail of his intellect is hidden by the serenity of his style. There is nothing over-much in any portion of his work, no sense of effort, no straining of a situation, not even that element of terror needful to the true sublime. It is as though the spirit of young Greece had lived in him again, purifying his taste to perfection and restraining him from the delineation of things stern or horrible.

Raphael found in this world nothing but its joy, and communicated to his ideal the beauty of untouched virginity. Brescia might be sacked with sword and flame. The Baglioni might hew themselves to pieces in Perugia.

The plains of Ravenna might flow with blood. Urbino might change masters and obey the viperous Duke Valentino. Raphael, meanwhile, working through his short May-life of less than twenty [Handwritten: 40] years, received from nature and from man a message that was harmony unspoiled by one discordant note. His very person was a symbol of his genius. Lionardo was beautiful but stately, with firm lips and penetrating glance; he conquered by the magnetism of an incalculable personality. The loveliness of Raphael was fair and flexible, fascinating not by power or mystery, but by the winning charm of open-hearted sweetness. To this physical beauty, rather delicate than strong, he united spiritual graces of the most amiable nature. He was gentle, docile, modest, ready to oblige, free from jealousy, binding all men to him by his cheerful courtesy.[255] In morals he was pure. Indeed, judged by the lax standard of those times, he might be called almost immaculate. His intellectual capacity, in all that concerned the art of painting, was unbounded; but we cannot place him among the many-sided heroes of the Renaissance. What he attempted in sculpture, though elegant, is comparatively insignificant; and the same may be said about his buildings. As a painter he was capable of comprehending and expressing all things without excess or sense of labour.

Of no other artist do we feel that he was so instinctively, unerringly right in what he thought and did.

Among his mental faculties the power of a.s.similation seems to have been developed to an extraordinary degree. He learned the rudiments of his art in the house of his father Santi at Urbino, where a Madonna is still shown--the portrait of his mother, with a child, perhaps the infant Raphael, upon her lap. Starting, soon after his father's death, as a pupil of Perugino, he speedily acquired that master's manner so perfectly that his earliest works are only to be distinguished from Perugino's by their greater delicacy, spontaneity, and inventiveness. Though he absorbed all that was excellent in the Peruginesque style, he avoided its affectations, and seemed to take departure for a higher flight from the most exquisite among his teacher's early paintings. Later on, while still a lad, he escaped from Umbrian conventionality by learning all that was valuable in the art of Masaccio and Fra Bartolommeo. To the latter master, himself educated by the influence of Lionardo, Raphael owed more, perhaps, than to any other of his teachers. The method of combining figures in ma.s.ses, needful to the general composition, while they preserve a subordinate completeness of their own, had been applied with almost mathematical precision by the Frate in his fresco at S. Maria Nuova.[256] It reappears in all Raphael's work subsequent to his first visit to Florence[257]

(1504-1506). So great, indeed, is the resemblance of treatment between the two painters that we know not well which owed the other most. Many groups of women and children in the Stanze, for example--especially in the "Miracle of Bolsena" and the "Heliodorus"--seem almost identical with Fra Bartolommeo's "Madonna della Misericordia" at Lucca. Finally, when Raphael settled in Rome, he laid himself open to the influence of Michael Angelo, and drank in the cla.s.sic spirit from the newly discovered antiques. Here at last it seemed as though his native genius might suffer from contact with the potent style of his great rival; and there are many students of art who feel that Raphael's later manner was a declension from the divine purity of his early pictures. There is, in fact, a something savouring of overbloom in the Farnesina frescoes, as though the painter's faculty had been strained beyond its natural force. Muscles are exaggerated to give the appearance of strength, and open mouths are multiplied to indicate astonishment and action. These faults may be found even in the Cartoons.

Yet who shall say that Raphael's power was on the decline, or that his n.o.ble style was pa.s.sing into mannerism, after studying both the picture of the "Transfiguration" and the careful drawings from the nude prepared for this last work?

So delicate was the a.s.similative tendency in Raphael, that what he learned from all his teachers, from Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Masaccio, Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and the antique, was mingled with his own style without sacrifice of individuality. Inferior masters imitated him, and pa.s.sed their pictures off upon posterity as Raphael's; but to mistake a genuine piece of his painting for the performance of another is almost impossible.

Each successive step he made was but a liberation of his genius, a stride toward the full expression of the beautiful he saw and served. He was never an eclectic. The masterpieces of other artists taught him how to comprehend his own ideal.

Raphael is not merely a man, but a school. Just as in his genius he absorbed and comprehended many diverse styles, so are many worthy craftsmen included in his single name. Fresco-painters, masters of the easel, workmen in mosaic and marquetrie, sculptors, builders, arras-weavers, engravers, decorators of ceilings and of floors, all laboured under his eye, receiving designs from, his hand, and executing what was called thereafter by his name.[258] It was thus partly by his facility and energy, partly by the use he made of other men, that Raphael was able to achieve so much. In the Vatican he covered the walls and ceilings of the Stanze with historical and symbolical frescoes that embrace the whole of human knowledge. The cramping limits of ecclesiastical tradition are transcended. The synod of the antique sages finds a place beside the synod of the Fathers and the company of Saints.

Parna.s.sus and the allegory of the virtues front each other. The legend of Marsyas and the mythus of the Fall are companion pictures. A new catholicity, a new orthodoxy of the beautiful, appears. The Renaissance in all its breadth and liberality of judgment takes ideal form. Nor is there any sense of discord; for the genius of Raphael views both revelations, Christian and pagan, from a point of view of art above them. To his pure and unimpeded faculty the task of translating motives so diverse into mutually concordant shapes was easy. On the domed ceilings of the Loggie he painted sacred history in a series of exquisitely simple compositions, known as Raphael's Bible. The walls and pilasters were adorned with arabesques that antic.i.p.ated the discovery of Pompeii, and surpa.s.sed the best of Roman frescoes in variety and freedom. With his own hands he coloured the incomparable "Triumph of Galatea" in Agostino Chigi's villa on the Tiber, while his pupils traced the legend of Cupid and Psyche from his drawings on the roof of the great banquet hall. Remaining within the circuit of Rome, we may turn from the sibyls of S. Maria della Pace to the genii of the planets in S. Maria del Popolo, from the "Violin-player" of the Sciarra palace to the "Transfiguration" in the Vatican: wherever we go, we find the masterpieces of this youth, so various in conception, so equal in performance. And then, to think that the palaces and picture-galleries of Europe are crowded with his easel-pictures, that his original drawings display a boundless store of prodigal inventive creativeness, that the Cartoons, of which England is proud, are alone enough to found a mighty master's fame!

The vast ma.s.s of Raphael's works is by itself astounding. The accuracy of their design and the perfection of their execution are literally overwhelming to the imagination, that attempts to realise the conditions of his short life. There is nothing, or but very little, of rhetoric in all this world of pictures. The brain has guided the hand throughout, and the result is sterling poetry. The knowledge, again, expressed in many of his frescoes is so thorough that we wonder whether in his body lived again the soul of some accomplished sage. How, for example, did he appropriate the history of philosophy, set forth so luminously in the "School of Athens," that each head, each gesture, is the epitome of some system?

Fabio Calvi may, indeed, have supplied him with serviceable notes on Greek philosophy. But to Raphael alone belongs the triumph of having personified the dry elements of learning in appropriate living forms. The same is true of the "Parna.s.sus," and, in a less degree, of the "Disputa." To the physiognomist these frescoes will always be invaluable. The "Heliodorus,"

the "Miracle of Bolsena," and the Cartoons, display a like faculty applied with more dramatic purpose. Pa.s.sion and action take the place of representative ideas; but the capacity for translating into perfect human form what has first been intellectually apprehended by the artist, is the same.

If, after estimating the range of thought revealed in this portion of Raphael's work, we next consider the labour of the mind involved in the distribution of so many mult.i.tudes of beautiful and august human figures, in the modelling of their drapery, the study of their expression, and their grouping into balanced compositions, we may form some notion of the magnitude of Raphael's performance. It is, indeed, probable that all attempts at reflective a.n.a.lysis of this kind do injustice to the spontaneity of the painter's method. Yet, even supposing that the "Miraculous Draught of Fishes" or the "School of Athens" were seen by him as in a vision, this presumption will increase our wonder at the imagination which could hold so rich a store of details ready for immediate use. That Raphael paid the most minute attention to the details of his work, is shown by the studies made for these two subjects, and by the drawings for the "Transfiguration." A young man bent on putting forth his power the first time in a single picture that should prove his mastery, could not have laboured with more diligence than Raphael at the height of his fame and in full possession of his matured faculty.

When, furthermore, we take into account the variety of Raphael's work, we arrive at a new point of wonder. The drawing of "Alexander's Marriage with Roxana," the "Temptation of Adam by Eve," and the "Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents," engraved by Marc Antonio, are unsurpa.s.sed not only as compositions, but also as studies of the nude in chosen att.i.tudes, powerfully felt and n.o.bly executed. In these designs, which he never used for painting, the same high style is successively applied to a pageant, an idyll, and a drama.[259] The rapture of Greek art in its most youthful moment has never been recaptured by a modern painter with more force and fire of fancy than in the "Galatea." The tenderness of Christian feeling has found no more exalted expression than in the mult.i.tudes of the Madonnas, one more lovely than another, like roses on a tree in June, from the maidenly "Madonna del Gran' Duca" to the celestial vision of the San Sisto, that sublimest lyric of the art of Catholicity.[260] It is only by hurrying through a list like this that we can appreciate the many-sided perfection of Raphael's accomplishment. How, lastly, was it possible that this young painter should have found the time to superintend the building of S. Peter's, and to form a plan for excavating Rome in its twelve ancient regions?[261]

When Lomazzo a.s.signed emblems to the chief painters of the Renaissance, he gave to Michael Angelo the dragon of contemplation, and to Mantegna the serpent of sagacity. For Raphael, by a happier instinct, he reserved man, the microcosm, the symbol of powerful grace, incarnate intellect. This quaint fancy of the Milanese critic touches the truth. What distinguishes the whole work of Raphael, is its humanity in the double sense of the humane and human. Phoebus, as imagined by the Greeks, was not more radiant, more victorious by the marvel of his smile, more intolerant of things obscene or ugly. Like Apollo chasing the Eumenides from his Delphian shrine, Raphael will not suffer his eyes to fall on what is loathsome or horrific. Even sadness and sorrow, tragedy and death, take loveliness from him. And here it must be mentioned that he shunned stern and painful subjects. He painted no martyrdom, no "Last Judgment," and no "Crucifixion," if we except the little early picture belonging to Lord Dudley.[262] His men and women are either glorious with youth or dignified in hale old age. Touched by his innocent and earnest genius, mankind is once more gifted with the harmony of intellect and flesh and feeling, that belonged to h.e.l.las. Instead of asceticism, h.e.l.lenic temperance is the virtue prized by Raphael. Over his niche in the Temple of Fame might be written: "I have said ye are G.o.ds;"--for the children of men in his ideal world are divinized. The G.o.dlike spirit of man is all in all. Happy indeed was the art that by its limitations and selections could thus early express the good news of the Renaissance; while in the spheres of politics and ethics, science and religion, we are still far from having learned its lesson.

Correggio is the Faun or Ariel of Renaissance painting. Turning to him from Raphael, we are naturally first struck by the affinities and differences between them. Both drew from their study of the world the elements of joy which it contains; but the gladness of Correggio was more sensuous than that of Raphael; his intellectual faculties were less developed; his rapture was more tumultuous and Bacchantic. Like Raphael, Correggio died young; but his brief life was spent in comparative obscurity and solitude. Far from the society of scholars and artists, ignorant of courts, unpatronised by princes, he wrought for himself alone the miracle of brightness and of movement that delights us in his frescoes and his easel-pictures.

Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden,

was this lyrist of luxurious ecstasy. In his work there was nothing worldly; that divides him from the Venetians, whose sensuousness he shared: nothing scientific; that distinguishes him from Da Vinci, the magic of whose _chiaroscuro_ he comprehended: nothing contemplative; that separates him from Michael Angelo, the audacity of whose design in dealing with forced att.i.tudes he rivalled, without apparently having enjoyed the opportunity of studying his works. The cheerfulness of Raphael, the wizardry of Lionardo, and the boldness of Michael Angelo, met in him to form a new style, the originality of which is indisputable, and which takes us captive--not by intellectual power, but by the impulse of emotion. Of his artistic education we know nothing; and when we call him the Ariel of painting, this means that we are compelled to think of him as an elemental spirit, whose bidding the air and the light and the hues of the morning obey.

Correggio created a world of beautiful human beings, the whole condition of whose existence is an innocent and radiant wantonness.[263] Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway; nor could he deal with subjects demanding pregnancy of intellectual meaning. He paints the three Fates for instance like young and joyous Bacchantes; if we placed rose-garlands and thyrsi in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of human destinies, they might figure upon the panels of a banquet-chamber in Pompeii. Nor, again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of composition which seeks the highest beauty of design in architectural harmony supreme above the melodies of gracefulness in detail. He was essentially a lyrical as distinguished from an epical or dramatic poet.

The unity of his work is derived from the effect of light and atmosphere, the inbreathed soul of tremulous and throbbing life, which bathes and liquefies the whole. It was enough for him to produce a gleeful symphony by the play of light and colour, by the animation of his figures, and by the intoxicating beauty of his forms. His angels are genii disimprisoned from the chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic Paradise, elemental sprites of nature wantoning in Eden in her prime. They belong to the generation of the fauns. Like fauns, they combine a certain wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy, a delight in rapid motion as they revel amid clouds and flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the painter's style. Correggio's sensibility to light and colour--that quality which makes him unique among painters--was on a par with his feeling for form. Brightness and darkness are woven together on his figures like an impalpable veil, aerial and transparent, enhancing the palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved. His colouring does not glow or burn; blithesome and delicate, it seems exactly such a beauty-bloom as sense requires for its satiety. That cord of jocund colour which may fitly be combined with the smiles of daylight, the clear blues found in laughing eyes, the pinks that tinge the cheeks of early youth, and the warm yet silvery tones of healthy flesh, mingle, as in a pearl-sh.e.l.l, on his pictures. Within his own magic circle Correggio reigns supreme; no other artist having blent the witcheries of colouring, _chiaroscuro_, and wanton loveliness of form, into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous charm. To feel his influence, and at the same moment to be the subject of strong pa.s.sion, or intense desire, or heroic resolve, or profound contemplation, or pensive melancholy, is impossible. The Northern traveller, standing beneath his master-works in Parma, may hear from each of those radiant and laughing faces what the young Italian said to Goethe: _Perche pensa?

pensando s' invecchia_.

Michael Angelo is the prophet or seer of the Renaissance. It would be impossible to imagine a stronger contrast than that which distinguishes his art from Correggio's, or lives more different in all their details, than those which he and Raphael or Lionardo lived respectively. During the eighty-nine years of his earthly pilgrimage he saw Italy enslaved and Florence extinguished; it was his exceeding bitter fate to watch the rapid decay of the arts and to witness the triumph of sacerdotal despotism over liberal thought. To none of these things was he indifferent; and the sorrow they wrought in his soul, found expression in his painting.[264]

Michael Angelo was not framed by nature to fascinate like Lionardo or to charm like Raphael. His manners were severe and simple. When he spoke, his words were brief and pungent. When he wrote, whether in poetry or prose, he used the fewest phrases to express the most condensed meaning. When asked why he had not married, he replied that the wife he had--his art--cost him already too much trouble. He entertained few friends, and shunned society. Brooding over the sermons of Savonarola, the text of the Bible, the discourses of Plato, and the poems of Dante, he made his spirit strong in solitude by the companionship with everlasting thoughts.

Therefore, when he was called to paint the Sistine Chapel, he uttered through painting the weightiest prophecy the world has ever seen expressed in plastic form. His theme is nothing less than the burden of the prophets and the Sibyls who preached the coming of a light upon the world, and the condemnation of the world which had rejected it, by an inexorable judge.

Michelet says, not without truth, that the spirit of Savonarola lives again in these frescoes. The procession of the four-and-twenty elders, arraigned before the people of Brescia to accuse Italy of sin--the voice that cried to Florence, "Behold the sword of the Lord, and that swiftly!

Behold I, even I, do bring a deluge on the earth!" are both seen and heard here very plainly. But there is more than Savonarola in this prophecy of Michael Angelo's. It contains the stern spirit of Dante, aflame with patriotism, pa.s.sionate for justice. It embodies the philosophy of Plato.

The creative G.o.d, who divides light from darkness, who draws Adam from the clay and calls forth new-born Eve in awful beauty, is the Demiurgus of the Greek. Again, it carries the indignation of Isaiah, the wild denunciations of Ezekiel, the monotonous refrain of Jeremiah--"Ah, Lord, Lord!" The cla.s.sic Sibyls intone their mystic hymns; the Delphic on her tripod of inspiration, the Erythraean bending over her scrolls, the withered witch of c.u.mae, the parched prophetess of Libya--all seem to cry, "Repent, repent! for the kingdom of the spirit is at hand! Repent and awake, for the judgment of the world approaches!" And above these voices we hear a most tremendous wail: "The nations have come to the birth; but there is not strength to bring forth." That is the utterance of the Renaissance, as it had appeared in Italy. She who was first among the nations was now last; bound and bleeding, she lay prostrate at the temple-gate she had unlocked. To Michael Angelo was given for his portion--not the alluring mysteries of the new age, not the joy of the renascent world, not the petulant and pulsing rapture of youth: these had been divided between Lionardo, Raphael, and Correggio--but the bitter burden of the sense that the awakening to life is in itself a pain, that the revelation of the liberated soul is itself judgment, that a light is shining, and that the world will not comprehend it. Pregnant as are the paintings of Michael Angelo with religious import, they are no longer Catholic in the sense in which the frescoes of the Lorenzetti and Orcagna and Giotto are Catholic. He went beyond the ecclesiastical standing ground and reached one where philosophy includes the Christian faith. Thus the true spirit of the Renaissance was embodied in his work of art.

Among the mult.i.tudes of figures covering the wall above the altar in the Sistine Chapel there is one that might well stand for a symbol of the Renaissance. It is a woman of gigantic stature in the act of toiling upwards from the tomb. Grave clothes impede the motion of her body: they shroud her eyes and gather round her chest. Part only of her face and throat is visible, where may be read a look of blank bewilderment and stupefaction, a struggle with death's slumber in obedience to some inner impulse. Yet she is rising slowly, half awake, and scarcely conscious, to await a doom still undetermined. Thus Michael Angelo interpreted the meaning of his age.

FOOTNOTES:

[197] "La man che ubbedisce all' intelletto" is a phrase pregnant with meaning, used by Michael Angelo in one of his sonnets. See Guasti, _Le Rime di Michael Angelo_, p. 173. Michael Angelo's blunt criticism of Perugino, that he was _goffo_, a fool in art, and his rude speech to Francia's handsome son, that his father made better forms by night than day, sufficiently indicate the different aims pursued by the painters of the two periods distinguished above.

[198] Though Mantegna seems to have owed all his training to Padua, it is impossible to regard him as what is called a Squarcionesque--one among the artistic hacks formed and employed by the Paduan _impresario_ of third-rate painting. No other eagle like to him was reared in that nest.

His greatness belonged to his own genius, a.s.similating from the meagre means of study within his reach those elements which enabled him to divine the spirit of the antique and to attempt its reproduction. In order to facilitate the explanation of the problem offered by his early command of style, it has been suggested with great show of reason that he received a strong impression from the work executed in bas-relief by Donatello for the church of S. Antonio at Padua. Thus Florentine influences helped to form even the original genius of this greatest of the Lombard masters.

[199] Vasari, vol. v. p. 163, may be consulted with regard to Mantegna's preference for the ideal of statuary when compared with natural beauty, as the model for a painter.

[200] See Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _History of Painting in North Italy_, vol. i. p. 334, for an account of his antiquarian researches in company with Felice Feliciano. His museum was so famous that in 1483 Lorenzo de'

Medici, pa.s.sing through Mantua from Venice, thought it worthy of a visit.

In his old age Mantegna fell into pecuniary difficulties, and had to part with his collection. The forced sale of its chief ornament, a bust of Faustina, is said to have broken his heart. _Ib._ p. 415.

[201] Painted on canvas in tempera for the Marquis of Mantua, before 1488, looted by the Germans in 1630, sold to Charles I., resold by the Commonwealth, bought back by Charles II., and now exposed, much spoiled by time and change, but more by villainous re-painting, on the walls of Hampton Court.

[202] An oil painting in the National Gallery.

[203] The so-called "Triumph of Scipio" in the National Gallery seems to me in every respect feebler than the Hampton Court Cartoons.

[204] The "Madonna della Vittoria," now in the Louvre Gallery, was painted to commemorate the achievements of Francesco Gonzaga in the battle of Fornovo. That Francesco, General of the Venetian troops, should have claimed that action, the eternal disgrace of Italian soldiery, for a victory, is one of the strongest signs of the depth to which the sense of military honour had sunk in Italy. But though the occasion of its painting was so mean, the impression made by this picture is too powerful to be described. It is in every detail grandiose: masculine energy being combined with incomparable grace, religious feeling with athletic dignity, and luxuriance of ornamentation with severe gravity of composition. It is worth comparing this portrait of Francesco Gonzaga with his bronze medal, just as Piero della Francesco's picture of Sigismondo Malatesta should be compared with Pisanello's medallion.

[205] Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, p. 212.

[206] Nothing is known about Mantegna's stay in Florence. He went to meet the Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga at Bologna. This Cardinal, a great amateur of music and connoisseur in relics of antiquity, came to Mantua in August, 1472, where the "Orfeo" of Messer Angelo Poliziano was produced for his amus.e.m.e.nt.

[207] That he could conceive a stern and tragic subject, with all the pa.s.sion it required, is, however, proved not only by the frescoes at Orvieto, but also by the powerful oil-painting of the "Crucifixion" at Borgo San Sepolcro.

[208] This story has been used for verse in a way to heighten its romantic colouring. Such as the lines are, I subjoin them for the sake of their attempt to emphasize and ill.u.s.trate Renaissance feeling:--

"Vasari tells that Luca Signorelli, The morning star of Michael Angelo, Had but one son, a youth of seventeen summers, Who died. That day the master at his easel Wielded the liberal brush wherewith he painted At Orvieto, on the Duomo's walls, Stern forms of Death and Heaven and h.e.l.l and Judgment.

Then came they to him, cried: 'Thy son is dead, Slain in a duel: but the bloom of life Yet lingers round red lips and downy cheek.'

Luca spoke not, but listened. Next they bore His dead son to the silent painting-room, And left on tip toe son and sire alone.

Still Luca spoke and groaned not; but he raised The wonderful dead youth, and smoothed his hair, Washed his red wounds, and laid him on a bed, Naked and beautiful, where rosy curtains Shed a soft glimmer of uncertain splendour Life-like upon the marble limbs below.

Then Luca seized his palette: hour by hour Silence was in the room; none durst approach: Morn wore to noon, and noon to eve, when shyly A little maid peeped in and saw the painter Painting his dead son with unerring hand-stroke, Firm and dry-eyed before the lordly canvas."

[209] See the article on Orvieto in my _Sketches in Italy and Greece_.

[210] The earlier frescoes of Fra Angelico, on the roof, depict Christ as Judge. But there is nothing in common with these works and Signorelli's.