The Age of the Reformation Part 53

Louvain, in the Netherlands, had 3000 students in 1500 and 1521; in 1550 the number rose to 5000. It was divided into colleges on the plan still found in England. Each college had a president, three professors and twelve fellows, entertained gratis, in addition to a larger number of paying scholars. The most popular cla.s.ses often reached the number of 300. The foundation of the Collegium Trilingue by Erasmus's friend Jerome Busleiden in 1517 was an attempt, as its name indicates, to give instruction in Greek and Hebrew as well as in the Latin cla.s.sics. A blight fell upon the n.o.ble inst.i.tution during the wars of religion.

Under the supervision of Alva it founded professorships of catechetics and subst.i.tuted the decrees of the Council of Trent for the _Decretum_ of Gratian in the law school. Exhausted by the hemorrhages caused by the Religious War and starved by the Lenten diet of Spanish Catholicism, it gradually decayed, while its {673} place was taken in the eyes of Europe by the Protestant University of Leyden. [Sidenote: 1575] A second Protestant foundation, Franeker, [Sidenote: 1585] for a time flourished, but finally withered away.

Spanish universities were crowded with new numbers. The maximum student body was reached by Salamanca in 1584 with 6778 men, while Alcala pa.s.sed in zenith in 1547 with the respectable enrollment of 1949. The foundation of no less than nine new universities in Spain bears witness to the interest of the Iberian Peninsula in education.

Four new universities opened their doors in Italy during the year 1540-1565. The Sapienza at Rome, in addition to these, was revived temporarily by Leo X in 1513, and, after a relapse to the dormant state, again awoke to its full power under Paul III, when chairs of Greek and Hebrew were established.

[Sidenote: Contribution to progress]

The services of all these universities cannot be computed on any statistical method. Notwithstanding all their faults, their dogmatic narrowness and their academic arrogance, they contributed more to progress than any other inst.i.tutions. Each academy became the center of scientific research and of intellectual life. Their influence was enormous. How much did it mean to that age to see its contending hosts marshalled under two professors, Luther and Adrian VI! And how many other leaders taught in universities:--Erasmus, Melanchthon, Reuchlin, Lefevre, to mention only a few. Pontiffs and kings sought for support in academic p.r.o.nouncements, nor could they always force the doctors to give the decision they wished. In fact, each university stood like an Acropolis in the republic of letters, at once a temple and a fortress for those who loved truth and ensued it.

[1] Besancon was then an Imperial Free City.

{674}

SECTION 4. ART

[Sidenote: Art the expression of an ideal]

The significant thing about art, for the historian as for the average man, is the ideal it expresses. The artist and critic may find more to interest him in the development of technique, how this painter dealt with perspective and that one with "tactile values," how the Florentines excelled in drawing and the Venetians in color. But for us, not being professionals, the content of the art is more important than its form.

For, after all, the glorious cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the marvellous paintings of the Renaissance were not mere iridescent bubbles blown by or for children with nothing better to do. They were the embodiments of ideas; as the people thought in their hearts so they projected themselves into the objects they created.

The greatest painters the world has seen, and many others who would be greatest in any other time, were contemporaries of Luther. They had a gospel to preach no less sacred to them than was his to him; it was the glad tidings of the kingdom of this world: the splendor, the loveliness, the wonder and the n.o.bility of human life. When, with young eyes, they looked out upon the world in its spring-tide, they found it not the vale of tears that they had been told; they found it a rapture. They saw the naked body not vile but beautiful.

[Sidenote: Leonardo, 1452-1519]

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter of wonder, but not of nave admiration of things seen. To him the miracle of the world was in the mystery of knowledge,--and he took all nature as his province. He gave his life and his soul for the mastery of science; he observed, he studied, he pondered everything. From the sun in the heavens to the insect on the ground, nothing was so large as to impose upon him, nothing too small to escape him. Weighing, measuring, experimenting, {675} he dug deep for the inner reality of things; he spent years drawing the internal organs of the body, and other years making plans for engineers.

When he painted, there was but one thing that fascinated him: the soul.

To lay bare the mind as he had dissected the brain; to take man or woman at some self-revealing pose, to surprise the hidden secret of personality, all this was his pa.s.sion, and in all this he excelled as no one had ever done, before or since. His battle picture is not some gorgeous and romantic cavalry charge, but a confused melee of horses snorting with terror, of men wild with the l.u.s.t of battle or with hatred or with fear. His portraits are either caricatures or prophecies: they lay bare some trait unsuspected, or they probe some secret weakness. Is not his portrait of himself a wizard? Does not his Medusa chill us with the horror of death? Is not Beatrice d'Este already doomed to waste away, when he paints her?

[Sidenote: The Last Supper]

The Last Supper had been treated a hundred times before him, now as a eucharistic sacrament, now as a monastic meal, now as a gathering of friends. What did Leonardo make of it? A study of character. Jesus has just said, "One of you will betray me," and his divine head has sunk upon his breast with calm, immortal grief. John, the Beloved, is fairly sick with sorrow; Peter would be fiercely at the traitor's throat; Thomas darts forward, doubting, to ask, "Lord, is it I?" Every face expresses deep and different reaction. There sits Judas, his face tense, the cords of his neck standing out, his muscles taut with the supreme effort not to betray the evil purpose which, nevertheless, lowers on his visage as plainly as a thunder cloud on a sultry afternoon.

Throughout life Leonardo was fascinated with an enigmatic smile that he had seen somewhere, perhaps in Verocchio's studio, perhaps on the face of some {676} woman he had known as a boy. His first paintings were of laughing women, and the same smile is on the lips of John the Baptist and Dionysus and Leda and the Virgin and St. Anne and Mona Lisa! What was he trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Muntz "sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic.

Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the l.u.s.t of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the return to the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias." Though some great critics, like Reinach, have a.s.serted that Mona Lisa [Sidenote: Mona Lisa]

is only subtle as any great portrait is subtle, it is impossible to regard it merely as that. It is a psychological study. And what means the smile? In a word, s.e.x,--not on the physical side so studied and glorified by other painters, but in its psychological aspect. For once Leonardo has stripped bare not the body but the soul of desire,--the pa.s.sion, the l.u.s.t, the trembling and the shame. There is something frightening about Leda caught with the swan, about the effeminate Dionysus and John the Baptist's mouth "folded for a kiss of irresistible pleasure." If the stories then told about the children of Alexander VI and about Margaret of Navarre and Anne Boleyn were true, Mona Lisa was their sister.

Everything he touched acquires the same psychological penetration. His Adoration of the Magi is not an effort to delight the eye, but is a study, almost a criticism, of Christianity. All sorts of men are brought before the miraculous Babe, and their reactions, of wonder, of amazement, of devotion, of love, of skepticism, of scoffing, and of indifference, are perfectly recorded.

{677} [Sidenote: The Venetians]

After the cool and stormy spring of art came the warm and gentle summer.

Life became so full, so beautiful, so pleasant, so alluring, that men sought for nothing save to quaff its goblet to the dregs. Venice, seated like a lovely, wanton queen, on her throne of sparkling waters, drew to her bosom all the devotees of pleasure in the whole of Europe. Her argosies still brought to her every pomp and glory of vestment with which to array her body sumptuously; her lovers lavished on her gold and jewels and palaces and rare exotic luxuries. How all this is reflected in her great painters, the Bellinis and Giorgione and t.i.tian and Tintoretto!

Life is no longer a wonder to them but a banquet; the malady of thought, the trouble of the soul is not for them. Theirs is the realm of the senses, and if man could live by sense alone, surely he must revel in what they offer. They dye their canva.s.ses in such blaze of color and light as can be seen only in the sunset or in the azure of the Mediterranean, or in tropical flowers. How they clothe their figures in every conceivable splendor of orphrey and ermine, in jewels and shining armor and rich stuff of silk and samite, in robe of scarlet or in yellow dalmatic! Every house for them is a palace, every bit of landscape an enchanted garden, every action an ecstasy, every man a hero and every woman a paragon of voluptuous beauty.

The portrait is one of the most characteristic branches of Renaissance painting, for it appealed to the newly aroused individualism, the grandiose egotism of the so optimistic and so self-confident age. After Leonardo no one sought to make the portrait primarily a character study.

t.i.tian and Raphael and Holbein and most of their contemporaries sought rather to please and flatter than to a.n.a.lyse. [Sidenote: t.i.tian, c.

1490-1576] But withal there is often a truth to nature that make many {678} of the portraits of that time like the day of judgment in their revelation of character. t.i.tian's splendid harmonies of scarlet silk and crimson satin and gold brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France; than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish b.e.s.t.i.a.lity with human thought and self-command that fascinates in Raphael's portrait of Leo X and his two cardinals? On the other hand, what a profusion of strong and n.o.ble men and women gaze at us from the canvases of that time. They are a study of infinite variety and of surpa.s.sing charm.

The secularization of art proceeded even to the length of affecting religious painting. Susanna and Magdalen and St. Barbara and St.

Sebastian are no longer starved nuns and monks, bundled in shapeless clothes; they become maidens and youths of marvellous beauty. Even the Virgin and Christ were drawn from the handsomest models obtainable and were richly clothed. This tendency, long at work, found its consummation in Raphael Sanzio of Urbino.

[Sidenote: Raphael, 1483-1520]

It is one of those useful coincidences that seem almost symbolic that Raphael and Luther were born in the same year, for they were both the products of the same process--the decay of Catholicism. When, for long ages, a forest has rotted on the ground, it may form a bed of coal, ready to be dug up and turned into power, or it may make a field luxuriant in grain and fruit and flowers. From the deposits of medieval religion the miner's son of Mansfeld extracted enough energy to turn half Europe upside down; from the same fertile swamp Raphael culled the most exquisite {679} blossoms and the most delicious berries. To change the metaphor, Luther was the thunder and Raphael the rainbow of the same storm.

[Sidenote: Religious art]

The chief work of both of them was to make religion understanded of the people; to adapt it to the needs of the time. When faith fails a man may either abandon the old religion for another, or he may stop thinking about dogma altogether and find solace in the mystical-aesthetic aspect of his cult. This second alternative was worked to its limit by Raphael. He was not concerned with the true but with the beautiful.

By far the larger part of his very numerous pictures have religious subjects. The whole Bible--which Luther translated into the vernacular--was by him translated into the yet clearer language of sense.

Even now most people conceive biblical characters in the forms of this greatest of ill.u.s.trators. Delicacy, pathos, spirituality, idyllic loveliness--everything but realism or tragedy--are stamped on all his canvases. "Beautiful as a Raphael Madonna" is an Italian proverb, and so skilfully selected a type of beauty is there in his Virgins that they are neither too ethereal nor too sensuous. Divine tenderness, motherhood at its holiest, gazes calmly from the face of the Sistine Madonna, "whose eyes are deeper than the depths of waters stilled at even." The simple mind, unsophisticated by lore of the pre-Raphaelite school, will worship a Raphael when he will but revel in a t.i.tian. Strangely touched by the magic of this pa.s.sionate lover both of the church and of mortal women, the average man of that day, or of this, found, and will find, glad tidings for his heart in the very color of Mary's robe. "Whoever would know how Christ transfigured and made divine should be painted, must look," says Vasari, on Raphael's canvases.

The church and the papacy found an ally in Raphael, {680} whose pencil ill.u.s.trated so many triumphs of the popes and so many mysteries of religion. In his Disputa (so-called) he made the secret of transubstantiation visible. In his great cartoon of Leo I turning back Attila he gave new power to the arm of Leo X. His Parna.s.sus and School of Athens seemed to make philosophy easy for the people. Indeed, it is from them that he has reaped his rich reward, for while the Pharisees of art pick flaws in him, point out what they find of shallowness and of insincerity, the people love him more than any other artist has been loved. It is for them that he worked, and on every labor one might read as it were his motto, "I will not offend even one of these little ones."

If Raphael's art was safe in his own hands there can be little doubt that it hastened the decadence of painting [Sidenote: Decadence of religious art] in the hands of his followers. His favorite pupil, Giulio Romano, caught every trick of the master and, like the devil citing Scripture, painted pictures to delight the eye so licentious that they cannot now be exhibited. Andrea del Sarto sentimentalized the Virgin, turning tenderness to bathos. Correggio, the most gifted of them all, could do nothing so well as depict sensual love. His pictures are hymns to Venus, and his women, saints and sinners alike, are houris of an erotic paradise. Has the ecstasy of amorous pa.s.sion amounting almost to mystical transport ever been better suggested than in the marvellous light and shade of his Jupiter and Io? These and many other contemporary artists had on their lips but one song, a paean in praise of life, the pomps and glories of this goodly world and the delights and beauties of the body.

But to all men, save those loved by the G.o.ds, there comes some moment, perhaps in the very heyday of success and joy and love, when a sudden ruin falls upon the world. The death of one loved more than self, {681} disease and pain, the betrayal of some trust, the failure of the so cherished cause--all these and many more are the gates by which tragedy is born. And the beauty of tragedy is above all other beauty because only in some supreme struggle can the grandeur of the human spirit a.s.sert its full majesty. In Shakespeare and Michelangelo it is not the torture that pleases us, but the triumph over circ.u.mstance.

[Sidenote: Michelangelo, 1475-1564]

No one has so deeply felt or so truly expressed this as the Florentine sculptor who, amidst a world of love and laughter, lived in wilful sadness, learning how man from his death-grapple in the darkness can emerge victor and how the soul, by her pa.s.sion of pain, is perfected. He was interested in but one thing, man, because only man is tragic. He would paint no portraits--or but one or two--because no living person came up to his ideal. All his figures are strong because strength only is able to suffer as to do. Nine-tenths of them are men rather than women, because the beauty of the male is strength, whereas the strength of the woman is beauty. Only in a few of his early figures does he attain calm,--in a Madonna, in David or in the Men Bathing, all of them, including the Madonna with its figures of men in the background, intended to exhibit the perfection of athletic power.

But save in these early works almost all that Michelangelo set his hand to is fairly convulsed with pa.s.sion. Leda embraces the swan at the supreme moment of conception; Eve, drawn from the side of Adam, is weeping bitterly; Adam is rousing himself to the hard struggle that is life; the slaves are writhing under their bonds as though they were of hot iron; Moses is starting from his seat for some tremendous conflict.

Every figure lavished on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel reaches, when it does not surpa.s.s, the limit of human physical development. Sibyl and Prophet, {682} Adam and Eve, man and G.o.d are all hurled together with a riot of strength and "terribilita."

The almost supernatural terror of Michelangelo's genius found fullest scope in ill.u.s.trating the idea of predestination that obsessed the Reformers and haunted many a Catholic of that time also. In the Last Judgment [Sidenote: The Last Judgment] the artist laid the whole emphasis upon the d.a.m.nation of the wicked, hurled down to external torment by the sentence, "Depart from me, ye cursed," uttered by Christ, not the meek and gentle Man of Sorrows, but the _rex tremendae majestatis_, a Hercules, before whom Mary trembles and the whole of creation shudders.

A quieter, but no less tragic work of art is the sculpture on the tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici at Florence. The hero himself sits above, and both he and the four allegorical figures, two men and two women, commonly called Day and Night, Morning and Evening, are lost in pensive, eternal sorrow.

So they brood for ever as if seeking in sleep and dumb forgetfulness some anodyne for the sense of their country's and their race's doom.

But it is not all pain. t.i.tian has not made joy nor Raphael love nor Leonardo wonder so beautiful as Michelangelo has made tragedy. His sonnets breathe a worship of beauty as the symbol of divine love. He is like the great, dark angel of Victor Hugo:

Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:--Je suis l'amour.

Mais son front sombre etait plus charmant que le jour, Et je voyais, dans l'ombre ou brillaient ses prunelles, Les astres a travers les plumes de ses ailes.

The contrast between the fertility of Italian artistic genius and the comparative poverty of Northern Europe is most apparent when the northern painters copied most closely their transalpine brothers. The taste for Italian pictures was spread abroad by the many {683} travelers, and the demand created a supply of copies and imitations. Antwerp became a regular factory of such works, whereas the Germans, Cranach, Durer and Holbein were profoundly affected by Italy. Of them all Holbein [Sidenote: Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497-1543] was the only one who could really compete with the Italians on their own ground, and that only in one branch of art, portraiture. His studies of Henry VIII, and of his wives and courtiers, combine truth to nature with a high sense of beauty.

His paintings of More and Erasmus express with perfect mastery the finest qualities of two rare natures.

[Sidenote: Albert Durer, 1471-1528]

Durer seldom succeeded in painting pictures of the most beautiful type, but a few of his portraits can be compared with nothing save Leonardo's studies. The whole of a man's life and character are set forth in his two drawings of his friend Pirckheimer, a strange blend of the philosopher and the hog. And the tragedy is that the lower nature won; in 1504 there is but a potential coa.r.s.eness in the strong face; in 1522 the swine had conquered and but the wreck of the scholar is visible.

As an engineer and as a student of aesthetics Durer was also the northern Leonardo. His theory of art reveals the secret of his genius: "What beauty is, I know not; but for myself I take that which at all times has been considered beautiful by the greater number." This is making art democratic, bringing it down from the small coterie of palace and mansion to the home of the people at large. Durer and his compeers were enabled to do this by exploiting the new German arts of etching and wood-engraving. Pictures were multiplied by hundreds and thousands and sold, not to one patron but to the many. Characteristically they reflected the life and thoughts of the common people in every homely phase. Pious subjects were numerous, because religion bulked large in the common thought, {684} but it was the religion of the popular preacher, translating the life of Christ into contemporary German life, wholesome and a little vulgar. The people love marvels and they are very literal; what could be more marvellous and more literal than Durer's ill.u.s.trations of the Apocalypse in which the Dragon with ten horns and seven heads, and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes are represented exactly as they are described? Durer neither strove for nor attained anything but realism. "I think," he wrote, "the more exact and like a man a picture is, the better the work. . . . Others are of another opinion and speak of how a man should be . . . but in such things I consider nature the master and human imaginations errors." It was life he copied, the life he saw around him at Nuremberg.

But Durer, to use his own famous criterion of portraiture, [Sidenote: 1513-14] painted not only the features of Germany, but her soul. Three of his woodcuts depict German aspirations so fully that they are the best explanation of the Reformation, which they prophesy. The first of these, The Knight, Death and the Devil, shows the Christian soldier riding through a valley of supernatural terrors. "So ist des Menchen Leben nichts anderes dann eine Ritterschaft auf Erden," is the old German translation of Job vii, 1, following the Vulgate. Erasmus in his _Handbook of the Christian Knight_ had imagined just such a scene, and so deeply had the idea of the soldier of Christ sunk into the people's mind that later generations interpreted Durer's knight as a picture of Sickingen or Hutten or one of the bold champions of the new religion.