The Book of Art for Young People Part 3

This tragedy entirely overwhelmed Botticelli, who thenceforward almost abandoned painting, and gave up his last years to the practices of the religious life. It was at this time, says Mr. Horne, and under the influence of these emotions, in the year 1500, when he was sixty years of age, that he painted the picture here reproduced, as an ill.u.s.tration to the prophecies of Savonarola, and a tribute to his memory. Savonarola had been wont to use the descriptions, in the Book of Revelations, of the woes that were to fall upon the earth before the building of the new Jerusalem, to ill.u.s.trate his prophecy of the scourge that was to come upon Italy, before the Church became purified from the wickedness of the times. At the top of the picture is written in Greek:

I, Sandro, painted this picture at the end of the year 1500, during the troubles of Italy, in the half year after the first year of the loosing of the Devil for 3-1/2 years, in accordance with the fulfilment of the 11th chapter of the Revelations of St. John. Then shall the Devil be chained, according to the 12th chapter, and we shall see him trodden down as in the picture.

The Devil which was loosed for three and a half years stood for the stage of wickedness through which Botticelli believed that Florence was pa.s.sing in 1500. In the bottom corners of the picture you can see minute little devils running away discomfited; otherwise all is pure joy and peace, symbolic of the gladness to come upon Italy when the Church had been purified:

When Life is difficult, I dream Of how the angels dance in Heaven.

Of how the angels dance and sing In gardens of eternal spring, Because their sins have been forgiven....

And never more for them shall be The terrors of mortality.

When life is difficult, I dream Of how the angels dance in Heaven....[2]

[Footnote 2: By Lady Alfred Douglas.]

That is what Botticelli dreamed. He saw the beautiful angels in green, white, and red dancing with joy, because of the birth of their Saviour, and into their hands he put scrolls, upon which were written:--'Glory to G.o.d in the Highest.' The rest of the verse, 'Peace and goodwill towards men' is on the scrolls of the shepherds, brought by the angel to behold the Babe lying in the manger. The three men, embraced with such eagerness and joy by the three angels in the foreground, are Savonarola and his two chief companions, burnt with him, who, after their long suffering upon earth, have found reward and happiness in heaven.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NATIVITY From the picture by Sandro Botticelli, in the National Gallery, London]

Such is the meaning of this beautiful little picture, as spiritual in idea as any of the paintings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But while the earlier painters had striven with inadequate powers to express the religious feeling that was in them, Botticelli's skill matched his thought. His drawing of the angels in their Greek dresses is very lovely, and one scarce knows in any picture a group surpa.s.sing that of the three little ones upon the roof of the manger, nor will you soon see a lovelier Virgin's face than hers. Botticelli had great power of showing the expression in a face, and the movement in a figure. Here the movements may seem overstrained, a fault which grew upon him in his old age; the angel, with the two shepherds on the right, has come skimming over the ground and points emphatically at the Babe, and the angel in front embraces Savonarola with vehemence.

The artists of the early Renaissance had learnt with so much trouble to draw figures in motion that their pleasure in their newly acquired skill sometimes made them err by exaggeration as their predecessors by stiffness.

The way in which Botticelli treated this subject of the Nativity of Christ, is, as you see, very different from the way in which Hubert van Eyck painted the Three Maries at the Sepulchre. We saw how the latter pictured the event as actually taking place outside Jerusalem.

To Botticelli the Nativity of Christ was emblematic of a new and happier life for people in Florence, with the Church regenerated and purified, as Christ would have wished it to be. To him the Nativity was a symbol of purity, so he painted the picture as a commentary on the event, not as an ill.u.s.tration of the Biblical text.

The angels rejoice in heaven as the shepherds upon earth, the devils flee away discomfited, and Savonarola and his companions obtain peace after the tribulations of life. Such was the message of Botticelli in the picture here reproduced.

CHAPTER VI

RAPHAEL

The original of our next picture is very small, only seven inches square, yet I hope it will instantly appeal to you. The name of the artist, Raphael, is perhaps the most familiar of all the names of the Old Masters, mainly, it may be, because he was the painter of the Sistine Madonna, the best known and best loved of Madonnas.

When Raphael drew and painted this picture of the 'Knight's Dream,'

about the year 1500, he was himself like a young knight, at the outset of his short and brilliant career. As a boy he was handsome, gifted, charming. His nature is said to have been as lovely as his gifts were great, and he pa.s.sed his short life in a triumphant progress from city to city and court to court, always working hard and always painting so beautifully that he won the admiration of artists, princes, and popes. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter living in the town of Urbino, in Central Italy, but Raphael when quite young went to Perugia to study with the painter Perugino, a native of that town.

Perugia stands upon a high hill, like the hill in the background of the picture of the 'Knight's Dream,' only higher, for from it you can overlook the wide Umbrian plain as far as a.s.sisi--the home of St.

Francis--which lies on the slope of the next mountain. That beautiful Umbrian landscape, in which all the towns look like castles perched upon the top of steep hills, with wide undulating ground between, occurs frequently in the pictures of Perugino, and often in those of his pupil Raphael. If you have once seen the view from Perugia for yourself, you will realize how strongly it took hold of the imagination of the young painter. Raphael had a most impressionable mind. It was part of his genius that, from every painter with whom he came in contact he imbibed the best, almost without knowing it. The artists of his day, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the other great men, were each severally employed in working out once and for all some particular problem in connection with their art. Michelangelo, a giant in intellect, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, studied the human body as it had not been studied since the days of ancient Greece. His sculptured figures on the tombs of the Medici in Florence rank second only to those of the greatest Greek sculptors, and his ceiling in the Sistine Chapel is composed of a series of masterpieces of figure-painting. He devoted himself largely in his sculpture and his painting to the representation of the naked human body, and made it futile in his successors to plead ignorance as an excuse for bad drawing.

As a colourist he was not pre-eminent, and his few panel pictures are for the most part unfinished.

Leonardo da Vinci, the older contemporary of Raphael, first in Florence and afterwards in the north of Italy, left a colossal reputation and but few pictures, for in his search after perfection he became dissatisfied with what he had done and is said to have destroyed one masterpiece after another. For him the great interest in the aspect of man and woman was not so much the form of the body as the expression of the face. What was fantastic and weird fascinated him. At Windsor are designs he made for the construction of an imaginary beast with gigantic claws. He once owned a lizard, and made wings for it with quicksilver inside them, so that they quivered when the lizard crawled.

He put a dragon's mask over its head, and the result was ghastly. The tale gives us a side light on this extraordinary personage. When you are led to read more about him you will feel the fascination of his strong, yet perplexing personality. The faces in his pictures are wonderful faces, with a fugitive mocking smile and a seeming burden of strange thought. By mastery of the most subtle gradations of light, his heads have an appearance of solidity new in painting, till Raphael and some of his contemporaries learnt the secret from Leonardo.

Heretofore, Italian painters had been contented to bathe their pictures in a flood of diffused light, but he experimented also with effects of strong light and shade on the face. His landscape backgrounds are an almost unearthly cold grey, and include the strangest forms of rock and mountain. His investigations into several of the scientific problems connected with art led to results which affected in an important degree the work of many later artists.

If Raphael had less originality than Michelangelo or Leonardo, if Leonardo was the first artist to obtain complete mastery over the expression of the face and Michelangelo over the drawing of the figure, Raphael was able to profit at once by whatever they accomplished. Yet never was he a mere imitator, for all that he absorbed became tinged with a magical charm in his fertile brain, a charm so personal that his work can hardly be mistaken for that of any other artist.

Our picture of a 'Knight's Dream' was probably painted while Raphael was under the influence of a master named Timoteo Viti, whose works you are not likely to know, or much care about when you see them. It was just after he had painted it that he came into Perugino's hands.

Although the 'Knight's Dream' is so small, and Raphael was but a boy when he painted it, the picture has the true romantic air, characteristic of the joyful years of the early Renaissance. He does not seem to have felt the conflict between the old religious ideal and the new pursuit of worldly beauty as Botticelli felt it. Yet he chose the compet.i.tion of these two ideals as the subject of this picture.

The Knight, clothed in bright armour and gay raiment, bearing no relation at all to the clothes worn in 1500, rests upon his shield beneath the slight shade of a very slender tree. In his dream there appear to him two figures, both of whom claim his knightly allegiance for life: one, a young and lovely girl in a bright coloured dress with flowers in her hair, tempts him to embrace a life of mirth, of

Jest and youthful Jollity, Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles, Nods and Becks and wreathed Smiles.

The other resembles the same poet's

Pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast, and demure.

She holds sword and book, symbols of stern action and wise accomplishment. Which the knight will choose we are not told, perhaps because Raphael himself never had to make the choice. He was too gifted and too fond of work to be tempted from it by anything whatever. Always joyous and always successful, he was able to paint any subject, sacred, profane, ancient, or modern, so long as it was a happy one. He was too busy and too gay to feel pain and sorrow, as Botticelli felt them, and to paint sad subjects. To him the visible world was good and beautiful, and the invisible world lovely and happy likewise. His Madonnas are placid or smiling mothers. The fat and darling babies they hold are indeed divine but not awesome. Yet the extraordinary sweetness of expression, n.o.bility of form, and beauty of colouring in the Madonnas make you almost hold your breath when you look at them.

In the 'Knight's Dream' there is a simple beauty in the pose and grouping of the figures. You can hardly fancy three figures better arranged for the purpose of the subject. There is something inevitable about them, which is the highest praise due to a mastery of design in the art of composition. Raphael's surpa.s.sing gift was in fitting beautiful figures into any given s.p.a.ce, so that it seems as though the s.p.a.ce had been made to fit the figures, instead of the figures to fit the s.p.a.ce. You could never put his round Madonnas into a square frame. The figures would look as wrong as in a round frame they look right. If you were to cut off a bit of the foreground in any of his pictures and add the extra piece to the sky, you would make the whole look wrong, whereas perhaps you might add on a piece of sky to Hubert van Eyck's 'Three Maries' without spoiling the effect.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE KNIGHT'S DREAM From the picture by Raphael, in the National Gallery, London]

The colouring of the picture, too, is jewel-like and lovely, but the uncoloured drawing is itself full of charm. The grace of line, which was to distinguish all the works of his mature years, is already manifest in this effort of his boyhood. It seems to foretell the sweep of the Virgin's drapery in the Sistine Madonna, and the delightful maze of curves flowing together and away again and returning upon themselves which outline the face, the arms, hands, and draperies of St. Catherine in the National Gallery. You will find it well worth a little trouble to look long and closely at one of Raphael's well-known Madonnas till you clearly see how the composition of all the parts of it is formed by the play of long and graceful curves.

You can see from the drawing of the 'Knight's Dream,' which is hung quite near the painting in the National Gallery, how carefully Raphael thought out the detail of the picture before he began to paint. He seems even to have been afraid that he might not be able to draw it again so perfectly; therefore he placed the drawing over the panel and p.r.i.c.ked it through. The marks of the pin are quite clear, and it brings one nearer this great artist to follow closely the process of his work. It makes the young boy genius of 1500 almost seem akin to the struggling boy and girl artists of the present time.

From Perugia Raphael went to Florence, where he painted a number of his most beautiful Madonnas. Then, in 1508, he was called to Rome by Pope Julius II. to decorate some rooms in the Vatican Palace. The Renaissance popes were possessed of so great wealth, and spent it to such purpose, that its spending influenced the art of their age. Many of the rooms in the Vatican had been decorated by Botticelli and other good artists of the previous half-century, but already the new pope considered their work out of date and ordered it to be replaced by Michelangelo and Raphael. For nine years Raphael worked at the decoration of the palace, always being pressed, hurried, and even worried by two successive popes who employed him. The wall s.p.a.ces which he had to fill were often awkwardly broken up with windows and doors, but he easily overcame whatever difficulties were encountered. To succeed apparently without struggle was a peculiar gift granted to Raphael above any other artist of his day. The frescoes painted by him in the Vatican ill.u.s.trated subjects from Greek philosophy and medieval Church history, as well as from the Old and New Testament.

As an ill.u.s.trator of sacred writ he never attempted that verisimilitude in Eastern surroundings to which Hubert van Eyck leaned, neither was he satisfied with the dress of his own day in which other painters were wont to clothe their sacred characters. The historical sense, which has driven some modern artists to much antiquarian research to discover exactly what Peter and Paul must have worn, did not exist before the nineteenth century. Raphael felt, nevertheless, that the clothes of the Renaissance were hardly suitable for Noah and Abraham, so he invented a costume of his own, founded upon Roman dress, but different from oriental or contemporary clothes. The Scripture ill.u.s.trations of Raphael most familiar to you may probably be his cartoon designs for tapestry in the South Kensington Museum, which were bought by Charles I. In these you can see what is meant about the clothes, but you will not be surprised at them, because the same have been adopted by the majority of Bible ill.u.s.trators ever since the days of Raphael. His pictures became so popular that it was thought whatever he did must be right. The dress was a mere detail in his work, but it was easy to copy and has been copied persistently from that day to this. It is curious to think that the long white robes, which Christ wears in the ill.u.s.trations of our present-day Sunday School books and other religious publications, are all due to imitation of Raphael's designs.

The first room he finished for Julius II. was so rich in effect and beautiful in colour that the Pope could scarcely wait for more rooms as fine. Raphael had to call in a large number of a.s.sistants to enable him to cover the walls fast enough to please the Pope, and the quality of the work began to deteriorate. The uneven merit of his frescoes foretold the consequence of overwork despite his matchless facility and power. But in his panel pictures, when he was not hurried, his work continued to improve until he reached his crowning achievement in the Sistine Madonna painted three years before his death.

Raphael was thirty-seven when he died in 1520, and very far from coming to the end of his powers of learning. Each picture that he painted revealed to him new difficulties to conquer, and new experiments to try, in his art. We seem compelled to think that had he lived and laboured for another score of years, the history of painting in Italy might have been different. In Rome and Florence no successor attempted to improve upon his work. His pupils and a.s.sistants were more numerous than those of any other painter, but when they had obtained some of his facility of drawing and painting they were contented. None of them had Raphael's genius, yet all wished to paint like him; so that for the following fifty years Rome and Florence and Southern Italy were flooded with inferior Raphaelesque paintings, which tended to become more slip-shod in execution as time went on, and more devoid of any personal note. It was just as though his imitators had learnt to write beautifully and then had had little to say.

Leonardo da Vinci died a few months before Raphael. Several of his pupils were artists of ability, and lived to carry on his traditions of painting in the north of Italy. Leonardo himself had been so erratic, produced so little, and so few of his pictures survive, that many know him best in his pupils' work, or through copies and engravings of his great 'Last Supper'--a picture that became an almost total wreck upon the walls of the Refectory in Milan, for which it was painted. His influence upon his contemporaries at Milan was very great, so that during some years hardly a picture was painted there which did not show a likeness to the work of Leonardo. He had created a type of female beauty all his own. The face will impress itself upon your memory the first time you see it, whether in a picture by Leonardo or in one by a pupil. You can see it in the National Gallery in the great 'Madonna of the Rocks,' and in the magnificent drawing at Burlington House.

It is not a very beautiful face, but it haunts the memory, and the Milanese artists of Leonardo's day never threw off their recollection of it.

With far less power than Leonardo, one of his imitators, Bernardino Luini, painted pictures of such charm and simplicity that almost everyone finds them delightful. If you could see his picture of the angels bearing St. Catherine, robed in red, through the air to her last resting-place upon the hill, you would feel the beauty and peace of his gentle nature revealed in his art. But the spell of Leonardo vanished with the death of those who had known him in life. The last of his pupils died in 1550, and with him the Leonardo school of painting came to an end.

There is one more painter belonging to the full Renaissance too famous to remain entirely unmentioned. This is Correggio, a painter affected also by the pictures of Raphael and Leonardo, but individual in his vision and his work. He pa.s.sed his life in Parma, in the north of Italy, inheriting a North Italian tradition, and hearing only echoes of the world beyond. His canvases are thronged with fair shapes, pretty women and dancing children, ethereally soft and lovely. But it is in his native town that the angels soar aloft with the Virgin in the dome of the cathedral, and the children frolic on the walls of the convent.

These are his masterpieces you would like best.

In 1550 the impetus given to painting in Italy by the Renaissance was drawing to an end. The great central epoch may be said to have terminated in Tuscany a few years after the deaths of Leonardo and Raphael in 1520. But we have said nothing yet of Venice, where, in 1520, artists whose visions and whose record of them were to be as wonderful as those of Botticelli and Raphael, were as yet sleeping in their cradles.

CHAPTER VII

THE RENAISSANCE IN VENICE

A visit to Venice is one of the joys which perhaps few of us have yet experienced. But whether we have been there or not, we all know that the very sound of her name is enchanting for those who are fresh from her magic--her sunrises and sunsets unmatched for colour, and her streets for silence.

The Venetians were a proud and successful people, wealthier by virtue of their great sea-trade than the citizens of Florence or of any other town in Italy; their foremost men lived in great high-roomed palaces, richly furnished, and decorated with pictures of a sumptuous pageantry.

But the Venetians were not merely a luxurious people. The poetry of the lagoons, and the glory of the sunset skies, imparted to their lives the wealth of a rare romance. Even in Venice to-day, now that the steamers have spoilt the peace of the ca.n.a.ls and the old orange-winged sailing-boats no longer crowd against the quays, the dreamy atmosphere of the city retains its spell.

Few artists ever felt and expressed this atmosphere better than Giorgione, the painter of the first of our Venetian pictures. He was one of the great artists of the Renaissance who died young, ten years before Raphael, but their greatness is scarcely comparable. Like Raphael, Giorgione was precocious, but unlike him he painted in a style of his own that from the very beginning owed little to any one else.