Renaissance in Italy Volume III Part 20

[362] Notice lib. i. cap. 40, p. 90, the dialogue between Cellini and the old woman, on his return to the paternal house: "Oh dimmi, gobba perversa," &c.

[363] "Per essere il mondo intenebrato di peste e di guerra," is a phrase of Cellini's, i. 40.

[364] Lib. i. cap. 51.

[365] Lib. i. cap. 74. Clement was dead, and Paul III. had just been elected, 1534. Paul sent Cellini a safe-conduct and pardon for Pompeo's murder to Florence in 1535. Lib. i. cap. 81.

[366] Lib. ii. cap. 104.

[367] Lib. i. cap. 64.

[368] See, however, what is said about the mountain villages of Norcia being good for incantations. That district in Roman times was famous for such superst.i.tions. Burckhardt, _Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien_, pp. 427-428, gives curious information on this topic.

[369] Lib. i. cap. 76.

[370] Lib. i. cap. 88. "That mad melancholy philosopher Lorenzino." Cf.

i. 80 and 81. "Molte volte lo trovavo a dormicchiare dopo desinare con quel suo Lorenzino, che poi l'ammazz, e non altri; ed io molto mi maravigliavo che un duca di quella sorte cos si fidava ... il duca' che lo teneva quando per pazzericcio, e quando per poltrone." Cf. again, cap.

89.

[371] This glimpse of Bembo in his Paduan villa is very pleasing. Lib. i.

cap. 94.

[372] "Quei diavoli di quei gentiluomini tedeschi." This is, however, the language he uses about nearly all foreigners--Spaniards, French, and English.

[373] Lib. i. cap. 96. "Io ero tutto armato di maglia con istivali grossi e con uno scoppietto in mano, e pioveva quanto Iddio ne sapeva mandare,"

&c.

[374] Lib. i. cap. 98.

[375] _Ib._ cap. 101.

[376] See lib. i. cap. 38, 43.

[377] The Governor, perplexed by Cellini's vaunt that if he only tried he was sure he could fly, put him under strict guard, saying, "Benvenuto e un pipistrello contrafatto, ed io sono un pipistrello da dovero."

[378] Lib. i. cap. 125.

[379] Lib. i. cap. 105.

[380] "Il Papa diventato cos pessima bestia," lib. i. 58; "Il Papa entrato in un b.e.s.t.i.a.l furore," _ib_. 60; "Quel povero uomo di Papa Clemente," _ib_. 103.

[381] _Ib_. 36, 101, 111.

[382] The scene is well described, lib. i. 127. The Pope was wont to have a weekly debauch, and the cardinal chose this favourable moment for his appeal: "Gli usava una volta la settimana di fare una c.r.a.pula a.s.sai gagliarda, perche da poi la gomitava.... Allora il papa, sentendosi appressare all' ora del suo vomito, e perche la troppa abbundanzia del vino ancora faceva l' ufizio suo, disse," &c.

[383] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 485.

[384] See especially the visit to the Paris workshop, lib. ii. cap. 15, and the scene in the Gallery at Fontainebleau, ib. 41.

[385] His quarrels, for example, with the d.u.c.h.ess of Florence.

[386] Lib. ii. cap. 83, 84, 87, 70, 71.

[387] "That beastly big ox, Bandinelli." Cf. cap. 70 for the critique. It may be said here, in pa.s.sing, that the insult of Bandinelli, "Oh sta cheto, soddomitaccio," seems to have been justified by Benvenuto's conduct, though of course he carefully conceals it in his memoirs. After the charge brought against him by Cencio, for instance, he thought it better to leave Florence.--_Ib_. cap. 61, 62.

[388] Edgar Quinet, _Les Revolutions d'Italie_, p. 358.

CHAPTER X

THE EPIGONI

Full Development and Decline of Painting--Exhaustion of the old Motives--Relation of Lionardo to his Pupils--His Legacy to the Lombard School--Bernardino Luini--Gaudenzio Ferrari--The Devotion of the Sacri Monti--The School of Raphael--Nothing left but Imitation--Unwholesome Influences of Rome--Giulio Romano--Michael Angelesque Mannerists--Misconception of Michael Angelo--Correggio founds no School--Parmigianino--Macchinisti--The Bolognese--After-growth of Art in Florence--Andrea del Sarto--His Followers--Pontormo--Bronzino--Revival of Painting in Siena--Sodoma--His Influence on Pacchia, Beccafumi, Peruzzi--Garofalo and Dosso Dossi at Ferrari--The Campi at Cremona--Brescia and Bergamo--The Decadence in the second half of the Sixteenth Century--The Counter-Reformation--Extinction of the Renaissance Impulse.

In the foregoing chapters I have not sought to write again the history of art, so much as to keep in view the relation between Italian art and the leading intellectual impulses of the Renaissance. In the masters of the sixteenth century--Lionardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and the Venetians--the force inherent in the Italian genius for painting reached full development. What remained was but an after-bloom rapidly tending to decadence. To surpa.s.s those men in their own line seemed impossible. What they had achieved was so transcendent that imitation satisfied their successors; and if they refused imitation, originality had to be sought by deviating into extravagances. Meanwhile no new stock of thoughts had been acquired; and students of history are now well aware that for really great art ideas common to the nation are essential. The motives suggested by mediaeval Christianity, after pa.s.sing through successive stages of treatment in the _quattrocento_, had received the grand and humane handling of the golden age. The motives of revived paganism in like manner were exhausted, and at this time the feeling for antiquity had lost its primal freshness. It might seem superfluous to carry this inquiry further, when we have thus confessedly attained the culminating point of painting.

Yet the sketch attempted in this volume would be incomplete and liable to misinterpretation, if no account were taken of the legacy bequeathed to the next generation by the great masters.

Lionardo da Vinci formed, as we have seen, a school at Milan. It was the special good fortune of his pupils that what he actually accomplished, bore no proportion to the suggestiveness of his teaching and the fertility of his invention. Of finished work he left but little to the world; while his sketches and designs, the teeming thoughts of his creative brain, were an inestimable heritage. The whole of this rich legacy of masterpieces, projected, but not executed, was characterised by a feeling for beauty which has fallen to no other painter. When we examine the sketches in the Royal Collection at Windsor, we perceive that the exceeding sense of loveliness possessed by Lionardo could not have failed to animate his pupils with a high spirit of art. At the same time the extraordinary variety of his drawing--sometimes reminding us of German method, sometimes modern in the manner of French and English draughtsmen--by turns bold and delicate, broad and minute in detail--afforded to his school examples of perfect treatment in a multiplicity of different styles. There was no formality of fixed unalterable precedent in Lionardo, nothing for his scholars to repeat with the monotony of mannerism.

It remained for his disciples, each in his own sphere, with inferior powers and feebler intellect, to perpetuate the genius of their master.

Thus the spirit of Lionardo continued to live in Lombardy after he was dead. There alone imitation was really fruitful, because it did not imply mere copying. Instead of attempting to give a fresh and therefore a strained turn to motives that had already received consummate treatment, Lionardo's successors were able to execute what he had planned but had not carried to completion. Nor was the prestige of his style so oppressive through the ma.s.s of pictures painted by his hand as to check individuality or to prevent the pupil from working out such portions of the master's vein as suited his own talent. Each found enough suggested, but not used, to give his special faculty free scope. This is in fact the reason why the majority of pictures ascribed to Lionardo are really the production of his school. They have the excellence of original work, but not such excellence as Lionardo could have given them. Their completion is due, as searching criticism proves, to lesser men; but the conception belongs to the greatest.

Andrea Salaino, Marco d'Oggiono, Francesco Melzi, Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio, and Cesare da Sesto, are all of them skilled workmen, losing and finding their individuality, as just described, in the manner of their master. Salaino brings exquisite delicacy of execution; d'Oggiono, wild and bizarre beauty; Melzi, the refinements of a miniaturist; Beltraffio, hard brilliancy of light and colour; Cesare da Sesto, somewhat of effeminate sweetness; and thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend themselves again in what is Lionardo's own. It is surely not without significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover of all things double-natured and twin-souled.

Two painters of the Lombard school, Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, demand separate notice. Without Lionardo it is difficult to say what Luini would have been: so thoroughly did he appropriate his teacher's type of face, and, in oil-painting, his refinement. And yet Luini stands on his own ground, in no sense an imitator, with a genius more simple and idyllic than Da Vinci's. Little conception of his charm can be formed by those who have not seen his frescoes in the Brera and S. Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, in the church of the Angeli at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage church of Saronno. To the circ.u.mstance of his having done his best work in places hardly visited until of late years, may in part perhaps be attributed the tardy recognition of a painter eminently fitted to be popular. Luini was essentially a fresco-painter. None, perhaps, of all the greatest Italian _frescanti_ realised a higher quality of brilliancy without gaudiness, by the scale of colours he selected and by the purity with which he used them in simple combinations. His frescoes are never dull or heavy in tone, never glaring, never thin or chalky. He knew how to render them both luminous and rich, without falling into the extremes that render fresco-paintings often less attractive than oil-pictures. His feeling for loveliness of form was original and exquisite. The joy of youth found in Luini an interpreter only less powerful and even more tender than in Raphael. While he shared with the Venetians their sensibility to nature, he had none of their sensuousness or love of pomp.

In idyllic painting of a truly great type I know of nothing more delightful than his figures of young musicians going to the marriage feast of Mary, nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned and seated at the foot of the cross.[389] The sentiment for naive and artless grace, so fully possessed by Luini, gave freshness to his treatment of conventional religious themes. Under his touch they appeal immediately to the most untutored taste, without the aid of realistic or sensational effects. Even S. Sebastian and S. Rocco, whom it is difficult to represent with any novelty of att.i.tude or expression, became for him the motives of fresh poetry, unsought but truly felt.[390] Among all the Madonnas ever painted his picture of Mary with the espalier of white roses, and another where she holds the infant Christ to pluck a purple columbine, distinguish themselves by this engaging spontaneity. The frescoes of the marriage of the Virgin and of S. Catherine carried by angels to Mount Sinai might be cited for the same quality of freshness and unstudied poetry.[391]

When the subject demanded the exercise of grave emotion, Luini rose to the occasion without losing his simplicity. The "Martyrdom of S. Catherine"

and the fresco of Christ after the Flagellation are two masterpieces, wherein the depths of pathos have been sounded, and not a single note of discord is struck.[392] All harsh and disagreeable details are either eliminated, or so softened that the general impression, as in Pergolese's music, is one of profoundest and yet sweetest sorrow. Luini's genius was not tragic. The nearest approach to a dramatic motive in his work is the figure of the Magdalen kneeling before the cross, with her long yellow hair streaming over her shoulders, and her arms thrown backwards in an ecstasy of grief.[393] He did well to choose moments that stir tender sympathy--the piety of deep and calm devotion. How truly he felt them--more truly, I think, than Perugino in his best period--is proved by the correspondence they awake in us. Like melodies, they create a mood in the spectator.

What Luini did not learn from Lionardo, was the art of composition. Taken one by one, the figures that make up his "Marriage of the Virgin" at Saronno, are beautiful; but the whole picture is clumsily constructed; and what is true of this, may be said of every painting in which he attempted complicated grouping.[394] We feel him to be a great artist only where the subject does not demand the symmetrical arrangement of many parts.

Gaudenzio Ferrari was a genius of a different order, more robust, more varied, but less single-minded than Luini. His style reveals the influences of a many-sided, ill-a.s.similated education; blending the manners of Bramantino, Lionardo, and Raphael without proper fusion. Though Ferrari travelled much, and learned his art in several schools, he, like Luini, can only be studied in the Milanese district--at his birthplace Varallo, at Saronno, Vercelli, and Milan. It is to be regretted that a painter of such singular ability, almost unrivalled at moments in the expression of intense feeling and the representation of energetic movement, should have lacked a simpler training, or have been unable to adopt a manner more uniform. There is a strength of wing in his imaginative flight, a swiftness and impetuosity in his execution, and a dramatic force in his conception, that almost justify Lomazzo's choice of the eagle for his emblem. Yet he was unable to collect his powers, or to rule them. The distractions of an age that had produced its masterpieces, were too strong for him; and what he failed to find was balance. His picture of the "Martyrdom of S. Catherine," where reminiscences of Raphael and Lionardo mingle with the uncouth motives of an earlier style in a medley without unity of composition or harmony of colouring, might be chosen as a typical instance of great resources misapplied.[395]

The most pleasing of Ferrari's paintings are choirs of angels, sorrowing or rejoicing, some of them exquisitely and originally beautiful, all animated with unusual life, and poised upon wings powerful enough to bear them--veritable "birds of G.o.d."[396] His dramatic scenes from sacred history, rich in novel motives and exuberantly full of invention, crowd the churches of Vercelli; while a whole epic of the Pa.s.sion is painted in fresco above the altar of S. Maria delle Grazie at Varallo, covering the wall from bas.e.m.e.nt to ceiling. The prodigality of power displayed by Ferrari makes up for much of crudity in style and confusion in aim; nor can we refuse the tribute of warmest admiration to a master, who, when the schools of Rome and Florence were sinking into emptiness and bombast, preserved the fire of feeling for serious themes. What was deadly in the neo-paganism of the Renaissance--its frivolity and worldliness, corroding the very sources of belief in men who made of art a decoration for their sensuous existence--had not penetrated to those Lombard valleys where Ferrari and Luini worked. There the devotion of the Sacri Monti still maintained an intelligence between the people and the artist, far more fruitful of results to painting than the patronage of splendour-loving cardinals and n.o.bles.[397]

Pa.s.sing from Lionardo to Raphael, we find exactly the reverse of what has. .h.i.therto been noticed. Raphael worked out the mine of his own thought so thoroughly--so completely exhausted the motives of his invention, and carried his style to such perfection--that he left nothing unused for his followers. We have seen that he formed a school of subordinates in Rome who executed his later frescoes after his designs. Some of these men have names that can be mentioned--Giulio Romano, of whom more hereafter; Perino del Vaga, the decorator of Genoese palaces in a style of overblown but gorgeous Raphaelism; Andrea Sabbatini, who carried the Roman tradition down to Naples; Francesco Penni, Giovanni da Udine, and Polidoro da Caravaggio. Their work, even while superintended by Raphael himself, began to show the signs of decadence. In his Roman manner the dramatic element was conspicuous; and to carry dramatic painting beyond the limits of good style in art is unfortunately easy. The Hall of Constantine, left unfinished at his death, still further proved how little his pupils could do without him.[398] When Raphael died, the breath whose might sustained and made them potent, ceased. For all the higher purposes of genuine art, inspiration pa.s.sed from them as colour fades from eastern clouds at sunset, suddenly.

It has been customary to account for this rapid decline of the Roman school by referring to the sack of Rome in 1527. No doubt the artists suffered at that moment at least as severely as the scholars; their dispersion broke up a band of eminent painters, who might in combination and compet.i.tion have still achieved great things. Yet the secret of their subsequent failure lay far deeper; partly in the full development of their master's style, already described; and partly in the social conditions of Rome itself. Patrons, stimulated by the example of the Popes, desired vast decorative works; but they expected these to be performed rapidly and at a cheap rate. Painters, familiarised with the execution of such undertakings, forgot that hitherto the conception had been not theirs but Raphael's. Mistaking hand-work for brain-work, they audaciously accepted commissions that would have taxed the powers of the master himself.

Meanwhile moral earnestness and technical conscientiousness were both extinct. The patrons required show and sensual magnificence far more than thought and substance. They were not, therefore, deterred by the vacuity and poor conceptive faculty of the artists from employing them. What the age demanded was a sumptuous parade of superficial ornament, and this the pupils of Raphael felt competent to supply without much effort. The result was that painters who under favourable circ.u.mstances might have done some meritorious work, became mere journeymen contented with the soulless insincerity of cheap effects. Giulio Romano alone, by dint of robust energy and lurid fire of fancy flickering amid the smoke of his coa.r.s.er nature, achieved a triumph in this line of labour. His Palazzo del Te will always remain the monument of a specific moment in Renaissance history, since it is adequate to the intellectual conditions of a race demoralised but living still with largeness and a sense of grandeur.

Michael Angelo formed no school in the strict sense of the word. Yet his influence was not the less felt on that account, nor less powerful than Raphael's in the same direction. During his manhood the painters Sebastian del Piombo, Marcello Venusti, and Daniele da Volterra, had endeavoured to add the charm of oil-colouring to his designs; and long before his death, the seduction of his mighty mannerism had begun to exercise a fatal charm for all the schools of Italy. Painters incapable of fathoming his intention, unsympathetic to his rare type of intellect, and gifted with less than a t.i.the of his native force, set themselves to reproduce whatever may be justly censured in his works. To heighten and enlarge their style was reckoned a chief duty of aspiring craftsmen; and it was thought that recipes for attaining to this final perfection of the modern arts might be extracted without trouble from Michael Angelo's masterpieces. Unluckily, in proportion as his fame increased, his peculiarities grew with the advance of age more manneristic and defined; so that his imitators fixed precisely upon that which sober critics now regard as a deduction from his greatness. They failed to perceive that he owed his grandeur to his personality; and that the audacities which fascinated them, became mere whimsical extravagances when severed from his _terribilita_ and sombre simplicity of impa.s.sioned thought. His power and his spirit were alike unique and uncommunicable, while the admiration of his youthful worshippers betrayed them into imitating the externals of a style that was rapidly losing spontaneity and sense of beauty. Therefore they fancied they were treading in his footsteps and using the grand manner when they covered church-roofs and canvases with sprawling figures in distorted att.i.tudes. Instead of studying nature, they studied Michael Angelo's cartoons, exaggerating by their unintelligent discipleship his wilfulness and arbitrary choice of form.

Vasari's and Cellini's criticisms of a master they both honestly revered, may suffice to ill.u.s.trate the false method adopted by these mimics of Michael Angelo's ideal. To charge him with faults proceeding from the weakness and blindness of the decadence--the faults of men too blind to read his art aright, too weak to stand on their own feet without him--would be either stupid or malicious. If at the close of the sixteenth century the mannerists sought to startle and entrance the world by empty exhibitions of muscular anatomy misunderstood, and by a braggadocio display of meaningless effects--crowding their compositions with studies from the nude, and painting agitated groups without a discernible cause for agitation--the crime surely lay with the patrons who liked such decoration, and with the journeymen who provided it. Michael Angelo himself always made his manner serve his thought. We may fail to appreciate his manner and may be incapable of comprehending his thought; but only insincere or conceited critics will venture to gauge the latter by what they feel to be displeasing in the former. What seems lawless in him, follows the law of a profound and peculiar genius, with which, whether we like it or not, we must reckon. His imitators were devoid of thought and too indifferent to question whether there was any law to be obeyed. Like the jacka.s.s in the fable, they put on the dead lion's skin of his manner, and brayed beneath it, thinking they could roar.