The life and writings of Henry Fuseli Volume III Part 11

That he could not soon do it, is evident from the profusion of ornamental glitter and tinsel colouring in the frescoes of the Chapel Riccardi. He succeeded better at Pisa, where his Scripture stories cover an entire wing of Campo Santo. This enormous enterprise, which, in the phrase of Vasari might smite with fear a legion of painters,[51] he is said to have completely achieved in two years. Everywhere inferior to his model in composition, design, and expression, he often goes beyond him in vastness and amenity of scenery, a certain play of ideas and picturesque exuberance. After all, perhaps more than one hand shared in the execution. Benozzo lived long, and lies buried near his work, where public grat.i.tude had placed his sepulchre, and inscribed it with an eulogy.[52]

Filippo Lippi, a Carmelitan friar, studied and imitated the works of Masaccio, especially in compositions of small proportion, with great success. Suavity of conception and colour animates his angels and Madonnas: in the large historic frescoes at Pieve di Prato, he introduced proportions exceeding the natural size, praised as his masterpieces by Vasari, who has related Lippi's escape from the convent; his captivity among the Moors; the pictures which he painted at Naples, Padoua, and elsewhere; his premature death by poison from the relatives of the female by whom he had a natural son, Filippino Lippi. Fra Filippo died at Spoleti, 1469, on the point of finishing his great work in the dome, where Lorenzo de' Medici, who had demanded but not obtained his ashes from the citizens, entombed them under a stately monument inscribed by Angelo Poliziano. His scholars and imitators were F.

Diamante of Prato, the partner of his last work; F. Pesello of Florence, and Pesellino his son, whom, if we believe Vasari, shortness of life alone intercepted from superior excellence.

About this period the first attempts of painting in oil were made at Florence, by Andrea dal Castagno, of detested memory, who had improved himself by looking at Masaccio. Domenico, called Veneziano, to whom Antonello of Messina had communicated the novel mystery of Johan Van Eyk, after practising it with success at home, Loretto, and other parts of the Papal State, came to exercise it at Florence: caressed and encouraged, he excited the envy and cupidity of Castagno, who under the mask of submissive attachment, wheedled himself into his confidence, obtained the secret, and then a.s.sa.s.sinated the hapless donor. The treacherous but complete acquisition added l.u.s.tre to his practice during life, but time has swept the sacrilegious produce of his hand, and left nothing to the memory of "Andrea degli Impiccati," but the execration of posterity.[53]

The farther we leave Masaccio behind, the nearer we approach the golden epoch, the more lurid becomes the atmosphere of art. Mediocrity, tinsel ostentation, and tasteless diligence mark the greater number of that society of craftsmen whom Sixtus IV. conscribed (1474, Manni,) to decorate or rather to disfigure the panels of the grand Chapel which took its name from him (La Sistina): one of its sides was to be occupied by subjects from the Pentateuch, the other by Gospel stories. Pietro Perugino excepted, the artists convoked were nearly all Florentines or Tuscans; viz. Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Bigordi, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca, Signorelli of Cortona, and Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, with their a.s.sistants. The superintendence of the whole the Pope, with the usual vanity and ignorance of princes, gave to Sandro, the least qualified of the group, whose barbarous taste and dry minuteness palsied, or a.s.similated with his own, the powers of his a.s.sociates, and rendered the whole a monument of puerile ostentation, and conceits unworthy of its place. Nor is it from what there remains of either, that the names of Luca Signorelli and Domenico Bigordi claim that attention which history owes to the first as the real precursor of Michael Angelo, and to the second as the master of his rudiments.

Luca Egidio Signorelli, of Cortona,[54] less to be considered as the reviver of Masaccio's style than as the founder of that which distinguished the succeeding epoch, might have led its banners, as his life stretched beyond that of Raphael and Lionardo, had his principle been more uniform. The greater part of his works exhibit the evident struggle of his own perceptions with the prescriptive ones of his time, and a kind of coalition between the barbarity of the expiring and the emanc.i.p.ated taste of the rising aera. The best evidence of this is in the Duomo of Orvieto, where in the mixed imagery of final dissolution and infernal punishment, he has scattered ideas of original conception, character and att.i.tude, in copious variety, but not without numerous remnants of Gothic alloy. The angels who announce the impending doom or scatter plagues, exhibit with awful simplicity bold foreshortenings, whilst the St. Michael presents only the tame heraldic figure and att.i.tude of a knight all cased in armour. In the expression of the condemned groups and daemons, he chiefly dwells on the supposed perpetual renewal of the pangs attending on the last struggles of life with death, contrasted with the inexorable scowl or malignant grin of fiends methodizing torture: a horrid feature reserved by Dante for the last pit of his Inferno, and far beyond the culinary abominations of Sandro Botticelli.[55]

Though Luca's style of design was no more that of Masaccio than Michael Agnolo's that of Raphael, less characteristic than grand, and fit to be the vehicle of those conceptions and att.i.tudes which furnished hints of imitation to the painter of the Last Judgement in the Sistina, yet he was master of a grace in celestial scenery and angelic att.i.tudes unapproached by his contemporaries, seldom equalled and never surpa.s.sed by his successors.

Luca Signorelli was a painter of much popularity. Urbino, Volterra, Florence, Rome, his native and many other towns, possess or possessed works of his. He was related to the family of the Vasari of Arezzo, and caressed and encouraged to the art his infant biographer.[56]

Another of the artists employed in the Sistina, inferior to Luca, but of no despicable (though, if we look at Masaccio, too highly rated) powers, was Domenico Bigordi, commonly called Del Ghirlandajo;[57] this is he under whose auspices not only his son Ridolfo, but even Bonaroti and the best artists of the succeeding epoch, began their course.

Precision of outline, decorum of countenance, variety of ideas, facility and diligence, distinguish his works. He is the first of Florentines, who gave depth and keeping to composition: if gold and tinsel glitter are not entirely banished from his colours, they appear at least less often. He was fond of introducing portraits among his actors, but with selection and of distinguished characters; though hands and feet had no part in his attention to physiognomy. The churches Degli Innocenti, Santa Trinita, and Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, possess his most celebrated productions, and many are scattered over Tuscany and the Ecclesiastic State. Of the two which he painted in the Sistina, the Resurrection of Christ perished; the Vocation of Peter and Andrew to the Apostolate Survives.

Cosimo Rosselli and Pier di Cosimo likewise employed at the Sistina, inferior in all essential parts to their compet.i.tors, owe the perpetuity of their names less to their parti-coloured glare and immoderate display of gold and azure, which attracted the vulgar eye of their employer the Pope, than to the luck of having been the masters of Bartolomeo della Porta, and Andrea del Sarto.

Piero and Antonio Pollajuoli, though employed only as statuaries in the same Chapel, possessed no inconsiderable powers as painters. Piero's pictures at S. Miniato discover the scholar of Castagno, austere countenances and deep and ma.s.sy colour; but in novelty of composition and design he yields to his brother and pupil Antonio, whose Martyrdom of St. Sebastian in the Chapel Pucci of that church, though humble in style, crude in colour, and oddly rather than originally conceived, has been numbered with the first productions of the age, because with the earliest traces of legitimate anatomy it exhibits its application, and subordinates enumeration to function. Both the Pollajuoli died at Rome.

Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, having nothing to add of his own to the works of the Sistina, is mentioned here only as the helper of Luca Signorelli and Pietro Perugino; nor is Filippino Lippi, the natural son of Fra Filippo, numbered among the companions of Sandro his master, though the perpetual recurrence of antique customs and dresses in his works makes it probable that he formed his juvenile studies at Rome. Inferior in real capacity to his father, he may be praised rather for the accessory than the substantial parts of his works: he filled with an unequal hand the remaining panels left by Masaccio al Carmine; and in the Minerva at Rome, yields the palm in expression and amenity of ideas to his own scholar Raffaelino del Garbo, whose early works at Monte Oliveto of Florence, and elsewhere, give sufficient evidence that he might have raised himself to the first artists of his day, had not the cravings of a numerous family crushed his powers, and poverty and dejection hastened his death. His contemporary Andrea Verocchio, though a celebrated statuary, and a designer of style, has deserved our notice as a painter, only because he was the master of Lionardo da Vinci, the first name in the annals of Tuscany's golden epoch.

Vinci, a burgh of Lower Valdarno, had the honour of giving a surname to Lionardo, the natural son[58] of one Ser Piero, a state notary at Florence. Elevated by nature above the common standard of men, born to discover, he joined to boundless inquiry intrepidity of pursuit, and lofty conception to minute investigation, nor only in the arts connected with his own, music and poesy, but in science, philosophy, mathematics, mechanics, hydrostatics: this wide mental range, supported by equal vigour and gracefulness of body, was commended by every accomplishment of a gentleman. Such was the genius whom Nature had destined to establish art on elements, to open the realms of light and shade, to inspire the subject with its tone, and to poise expression between insipidity and caricature.

Notwithstanding the distractions of so many diverging inclinations, for powers they could not yet be called, an innate attachment to the art appears to have predominated at the earliest period to such a degree that Ser Piero determined to place Lionardo under his friend Verocchio, whom he soon excelled in painting,[59] and in modelling equalled.

The obscurity which involves the life of Lionardo from his boyish years, through the bloom of youth, to the vigour of manhood, can only be accounted for by that independence of mind which made him prefer indulgence of his own various inclinations to a decided, steady, and if more confined, more lucrative pursuit of art. By what means he, whom Vasari describes as possessing "nothing,"[60] was enabled to gratify studies and fancies equally expensive, no where appears; it appears not that he was patronized by the great and rich; he escaped the eye of the Medici;[61] it was reserved for Lodovico Sforza to discover and to conduct the first citizen of Florence to Milano, and for aught we are told, rather from expectation of amus.e.m.e.nt than motives of homage.

Lodovico was a dilettante in music, and wished to increase the harmony of his concerts with the silver tones of the lyre, invented and constructed by Lionardo, who, we are told, soon distanced all rival performers, and by the aid of his powers as an "Improvisatore," became the object of general admiration: it was then, and perhaps not till then, that the Duke cast a steadier eye on his superior accomplishments, and allowed the musician to become a benefactor to the public in adopting his plans for the establishment and direction of an academy; and granting the means for carrying into effect the still more important ones of conducting the Adda to Milano, and a navigable ca.n.a.l from Martisana to Chiavenna, and the Valteline, &c. plans and effects only interrupted by the fall of the Sforzas and the captivity of Lodovico.

FOOTNOTES:

[44] This picture has been confounded with another of the same subject by the same master, and the addition of the Donor's portrait, Frate Elia, which exists no more. The mutilated inscription on that mentioned above, has been thus restored by Lanzi,

JuNTA PISa.n.u.s JunTINI Me fecit.

[45] Born 1240, died 1300.

[46] "Oh che dolce cosa e questa prospettiva!" Oh what a dulcet thing is this perspective! This exclamation, usual with Paolo nodding over his compa.s.ses when his wife called him to bed, though too late to furnish the hint of a Novel to Boccaccio, has been fondly repeated by some grave writers from Vasari to the author of Lorenzo de' Medici, and has contributed to place Paolo, with the mystic help of his surname, in rather a ludicrous light.

[47] Maffei's Verona Ill.u.s.trata, t. iii. p. 277.

[48] He was the precursor of Michael Agnolo, and deserved the motto by which Borghini marked some of their designs in the portfolio of Vasari, (Vita di Donato.) viz.

? ???at?? ???a???t??e?, ? ???a???t?? ???at??e?.

[49] "Vi e un monacho vecchio con due grucce sotto le braccia, nel qual si vide un affetto mirabile, e forse speranza di riaver la sanita."--Vasari, Vita di P. Uccello, t. ii. p. 56.

[50] Born in 1401.

[51] "Opera Terribilissima--impresa chi arebbe giustamente fatto paura a una legione di pittori." On the whole, Vasari seems to lay more stress on the quant.i.ty than the quality of Benozzo's works.

[52] 1478.

[53] 1478, when by the conspiracy of the Pazzi and their adherents, Giuliano de' Medici was a.s.sa.s.sinated in S. Maria del Fiore, and his brother Lorenzo wounded, it was resolved by the Signoria that paintings of the conspirators, hung by their feet, should be exposed in front of the Governor's palace; and the commission being given to Andrea, he executed it with such felicity of resemblance, such variety of hanging att.i.tudes, and so much to the contentment of connoisseurs, that from that instant he lost the name of Andrea dal Castagno in that of "Andrea degli Impiccati," or of the hanged.--_Vasari._ Of this exhibition the loss may be regretted, as it would have showed us Andrea in his element.

[54] 1439-40--1521.

[55] There is to the old edition in folio, of Dante, by Niccolo della Magna, a print of the Inferno annexed, which bears the name of Sandro Botticelli; Vasari in his Life says, that he commented a part of Dante and figured his Inferno and published it.

[56] He was the nephew of Lazzaro Vasari, a helper of Pietro della Francesca, and great uncle of Giorgio the biographer; who in the Life of Luca, with not less fondness than vanity, relates the admonition and encouragement he gave to his father and himself, in a visit which he paid in his old age to their family at Arezzo.--Vita di L. Signorelli, t. iii. p. 9.

[57] His father, who was a goldsmith, invented and first manufactured the garlands which were at that time the fashionable head-dress of the Florentine girls.--Vasari, Vita di D. Ghirlandajo, vol. ii. p. 410.

[58] Among the uncertainties of dates, those relative to the birth of illegitimate children, for obvious reasons the most frequent, are the most perplexing. The birth of Lionardo has been fixed at various dates, viz. 1443; Lett. Pittor. t. ii. p. 192; 1445, according to the computation of Vasari; 1455, by Dargenville; 1467, by Padre Resta; with more probability 1444, by D.V. Pagave of Milano, followed by Fiorillo; but with most at 1452, by Durazzini, adopted by Lanzi. It seems improbable that Verocchio, the friend of Ser Piero, should have been only twelve years older than his pupil. Lionardo died in 1519.

[59] In the figure of the Angel, conceived and executed by him, in the Baptism of the Saviour, at St. Salvi, which excelled the work of Verocchio so much, that indignant to be outdone by a boy, he dropped the pencil, and for ever abandoned painting. The statues of St. Thomas, in Orsanmichele at Florence, and of the Horse of Collevere at Venice, prove that Verocchio's real talent was sculpture: but the models of the three statues cast in bronze, by Rustici, for S. Giov. at Florence, and that of the great horse at Milano, place the pupil at least upon a level with the master in that branch of art.

[60] "E non avendo egli, si pu dir nulla, e poco lavorando, del continuo tenne servitori, e cavalli, &c." For all this it is the more difficult to account, as an attempt to possess himself of the philosopher's stone has never been mentioned among Lionardo's eccentricities, though he was familiar with alchymists.

[61] Lorenzo de' Medici occurs not in the Life of Lionardo, and his acquaintance with Leo X. and Giuliano de' Medici relates to the latter periods of it.

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

We are now arrived at the epoch which forms the distinctive character of the Tuscan school, the epoch of Michael Agnolo. In placing him here, chronology has been less attended to than the spirit of works; for Fra Bartolomeo, Andrea del Sarto, and others, his contemporaries or juniors, belong more properly to the period of Lionardo than his; the elements of which he gave in the Cartoon of Pisa, and the consummation in the Capella Sistina, on which his school and the imitation of his style were founded; and to which the politics of his time, the splendid oligarchy of the Medici, and the fierce republican spirit of their opponents, gave an energy and produced efforts, unknown to society in repose.

Notwithstanding the insinuating arts by which the Medici had debauched public affection, and that undermining power which at last changed influence to tyranny, they were in less than a century[62] three times exiled from their country. The first, the banishment of Cosmo, called the Father of his Country, lasted not above one year, and drew no consequences; for the interval between it and the next (1494) was marked with uniform success, and its last twenty years[63] with the splendid administration and the extended patronage of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

His Garden near the church of S. Marco, which he opened as a repository and a school of art, has been little less celebrated than the Hesperian ones of old: it contained, if not all that had been discovered, what could be purchased of antique statues, ba.s.so-relievoes, and fragments of every kind; and the apartments were hung with pictures, cartoons, and designs of Donatello, Brunellesco, Paolo Uccello. Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, Masaccio, &c.; here the student was not only instructed, but, by the magnificence of the founder, supported; and it may without exaggeration be a.s.serted, that whatever rose to eminence in the art at that period, was the offspring of Lorenzo's garden.

His death was followed by the expulsion of his sons, Pietro, Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., and Julian, in the sequel Duke of Nemours. An immediate anarchy succeeded the expulsion; the populace broke into their houses, destroyed or carried off their furniture, and demolished the residence of Giovanni, the garden of Lorenzo, and the palace on the Via Larga,[64] at once. The numerous partisans of the family, however, contrived to save much.[65]

Other circ.u.mstances conspired to render this interval of anarchy pernicious to art, till the return of the Medici in 1512. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, the Dominican Fra Girolamo Savonarola, of enthusiastic memory, by prophecies and sermons, loaded with democratic principles, gained gradually such an ascendancy over the minds of the people, that the Signoria found themselves forced to adopt a senate at large; in other words, to submit to a democracy. But Savonarola, not content with political victory, aimed at a total revolution in morals, and continued to lash the profligacy of public manners, overflowing in voluptuous song and music, or gazing at the lascivious nudities of statues and pictures, as irresistible incentives to vice. It had been customary during carnival, to erect certain cabins in the market-place, to set them on fire on the eve of Ash-Wednesday, and bid them farewell amid the shouts of convivial mirth and the frolic of amorous dalliance. Savonarola inst.i.tuted in 1497 a public festival of another kind: a large scaffold was erected in the market-place, a vast number of the finest specimens in painting and sculpture, offensive from their nudities, were collected; the pictures placed on the first step; the sculptures, especially when portraits of first-rate Florentine belles, disposed on the second; the whole inclosed by foreign precious tapestry, and that, with great solemnity, set on fire. The scaffolding of the next year excelled the first in magnificence; its gorgeous apparel invested the busts of the most celebrated beauties of former years; those of the Bencina, Lena Morella, Bina and Maria de'Lenzi, works of the most eminent sculptors; on it was placed a copy of Petrarca, decorated with gold, missal-painting, and miniatures, estimated at fifty scudi d'oro; and to prevent theft, the whole was constantly guarded. The procession approached, surrounded the scaffold, and amid a concert of consecrating hymns, bells, trumpets, cymbals, and the acclamations of the Signoria and the people, the victims, sprinkled with holy water, were delivered to flame by the torches of the guards.[66] Such was the epidemic influence of this enthusiasm, that even artists, the gentle Fra Bartolomeo, Lorenzo di Credi, and many more caught the infection, and contributed to the sacrifice, till the death of Savonarola and the return of the Medici extinguished the furor.[67]

The democracy, however, gave origin to two works, which not only atoned for the ravages it had committed, but whose splendour no subsequent aera of art has been able to eclipse, or perhaps to equal: the two Cartoons of Lionardo da Vinci and M. Angelo Buonarroti, destined to decorate the senatorial hall, by order of Pietro Soderini. They produced an immediate revolution in art, but disappeared like meteors in the tumult that attended the reinstatement of the Medici and the fall of the Gonfaloniere, 1512.

The third expulsion of the Medici--Hippolyto and Alessandro, the sons of Giuliano the Magnificent, and all their relatives--was the consequence of the sack of Rome, 1527, and the Pontificate of Clemente VII. The Medici, pressed by the moment, consigned part of their technic treasure, their bronzes, cameos, &c. to the care of their client Baccio Bandinelli.[68] During the havoc, Michael Angelo's statue of David lost an arm,[69] and the waxen figures of Leo X. and Clemente VII. in the church of the "Annunciata," were mutilated and carried off; and perhaps much more was lost in the demolition of the suburbs, which took place to secure the town itself against the siege of 1529. But active resistance and lampoons proved equally ineffectual; the destiny of the Medici prevailed, and Florence paid ducal homage in 1530 to Alessandro; whose a.s.sa.s.sination, indeed, by Lorenzo his relative, commonly called Lorenzino, produced, six years afterwards, another sedition and farther damage to their stores of art by the soldiers, who, at the instigation of Alessandro Vitelli, broke into and plundered both their houses. Cosmo the First succeeded Alessandro, and left uninterrupted dominion to his heirs: but if the consolidation of monarchy prevented the momentary devastations of insurrection, it failed to re-produce the splendid period that flashed athwart the storms of democracy.

MICHAEL ANGELO BUONARROTI.

1474--1564.

M. Angelo was born at Castel Caprese, and showed such early proofs of a decided attachment to art, that he was put into the school of Domenico del Ghirlandaio. Here he soon advanced beyond the principles of the master, who, jealous of a rival in his pupil, recommended him to Lorenzo de Medici, for admission among the students of sculpture in his garden; where, under the tuition of Bertoldo,[70] an ancient scholar of Donatello, he soon mastered the elements, and, equally conspicuous for his superiority and diligence, attracted the attention and gained the patronage of Lorenzo, but excited the envy of his fellow-students, one of whom, Torrigiano, on some slight provocation, with a blow of the fist shattered his nose, which left him with a mark for life.