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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69844 ***
+
+                      _BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_—
+
+
+             HISTORY OF ITALIAN PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE
+             THE COLLECTORS
+             HOMER MARTIN, POET IN LANDSCAPE
+             ESTIMATES IN ART
+             THE PORTRAITS OF DANTE
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  GIOTTO: DORMITION OF THE VIRGIN
+
+  _Berlin_
+]
+
+
+
+
+                              A HISTORY OF
+                            ITALIAN PAINTING
+
+
+                                  _By_
+
+                        FRANK JEWETT MATHER, JR.
+                             PH.D., L.H.D.
+
+        Professor of Art and Archaeology in Princeton University
+
+                                   ❦
+
+                                 LONDON
+
+                        STANLEY PAUL & CO., LTD.
+
+                   31, ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W. C. 2
+
+                                  1923
+
+
+
+
+                Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+                                  _To_
+
+                                =B. B.=
+
+                             IN FRIENDSHIP
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+
+
+This book has grown out of lectures which were delivered at the
+Cleveland Art Museum in 1919–20. There I had ideal hearers, beginners
+who wanted to learn and were willing to follow a serious discussion.
+Since I aim at the same sort of a reader now, I have only slightly
+retouched and amplified the original manuscript. This is frankly a
+beginner’s book. I have had to omit whatever might confuse the novice,
+including many painters inherently delightful. Controversial problems
+for the same reason have been when possible avoided. When, however, I
+have had to cope with such, I have depended more on my own eyes and
+judgment than on the written words of others. But the latest literature
+has also been used, so that even the adept should here and there find
+something to his purpose.
+
+For opinions on contested points, I have given my authority or personal
+reason in notes, which, in order not to clutter up the text, are printed
+at the end. By the same token, hints on reading and private study are
+tucked away in the last pages where they will not bother readers who do
+not need or want them. While I hope the book will be welcome in the
+classroom, I have had as much in mind the intelligent traveller in
+Europe and the private student. Throughout I have had before me the kind
+of introduction to Italian painting that would have been helpful to me
+thirty years ago in those days of bewildered enthusiasm when I was
+making my _Grand Tour_.
+
+                                                              THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+ CHAPTER                                                          PAGE
+      I. GIOTTO AND THE NEW FLORENTINE HUMANISM                      1
+     II. SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIAEVAL STYLE            59
+    III. MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM                              109
+     IV. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE             157
+      V. DAWN OF THE GOLDEN AGE: BOTTICELLI AND LEONARDO DA VINCI  201
+     VI. THE GOLDEN AGE: RAPHAEL AND MICHELANGELO                  263
+    VII. VENETIAN PAINTING BEFORE TITIAN                           323
+   VIII. TITIAN AND VENETIAN PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE           389
+     IX. THE REALISTS AND ECLECTICS                                451
+         NOTES                                                     473
+         HINTS FOR READING                                         489
+         INDEX                                                     491
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+                 GIOTTO AND THE NEW FLORENTINE HUMANISM
+
+  The Florentine ideal of Mass and Emotion—Its Humanism—The City of
+      Florence about 1300—The Position and Methods of the Painter—The
+      General demand for Religious Painting—Accelerated by the religious
+      reforms of 1200, and changed in character—Insufficiency of the
+      current Italo-Byzantine Style—Experiments towards a new manner:
+      Duccio and the Sienese, Cimabue, Cavallini and the “Isaac
+      Master”—Giotto—Immediate followers of Giotto, Andrea Orcagna and
+      the return to sculptural methods—Later Panoramists, Andrea
+      Bonaiuti and the Spanish Chapel.
+
+
+Leonardo da Vinci, from the summit of Florentine art, has written “What
+should first be judged in seeing if a picture be good is whether the
+movements are appropriate to the mind of the figure that moves.” And
+again he has expressed somewhat differently the highest merits of
+painting as “the creation of relief (projection) where there is none.”
+For Florence, at least, these notions are authoritative, and they may
+well serve as text for most that I shall say about Florentine painting.
+To give significant emotion convincing mass—this was the problem of the
+Florentine painter from the moment when Giotto about the year 1300 began
+to find himself, to that day more than two centuries and a half later
+when Michelangelo died. No Florentine master of a strenuous sort ever
+failed to perceive this mission, and no unstrenuous artist was ever
+fully Florentine. This twofold aim—humanistic, in choice and mastery of
+emotion; scientific, in search for those indications which most vividly
+express mass where no mass is—this twofold endeavor Florence shared with
+the only greater city of art, Athens. Thus Florence is to the art of
+today what Athens was to that of classical antiquity.
+
+In these two little communal republics were discovered and worked out to
+perfection all our ideals of humanistic beauty. Florence saw God, His
+Divine Son, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints quite as Athens had seen
+the gods of Olympus, the demi-gods, and the heroes simply as men and
+women of the noblest physical and moral type. Both agreed in magnifying
+and idealizing the people one ordinarily sees. For greater beauty,
+Athens represented them nude or lightly draped; for greater dignity,
+Florence chose the solemn garb of the Roman forum. Whether pagan or
+Christian, the guardians of a people’s morality were to be above haste,
+excitement, or any transient emotion. They were to express intensities
+of feeling, but a feeling more composed, permanent, and disciplined,
+than that of every day. Judgment and criticism count for as much in both
+arts as emotional inspiration. The great Florentine artist is a thinker;
+he is often poet and scientist, sculptor and architect, besides being a
+painter. Behind his painting lies always a problem of mind, and as sheer
+personalities the greatest painters of Siena, Venice, and Lombardy often
+seem mere nobodies when compared even with the minor Florentines. We
+should know something about a city that produced personality so
+generously, and before considering Giotto, the first great painter
+Florence bred, we shall do well to look at Florence as he saw it about
+the year 1300, being a man in the thirties.
+
+Florence was then as now a little city, its population about 100,000
+souls, but it was growing. The old second wall of about two miles’
+circuit was already condemned in favor of a turreted circuit of over
+six. Up the Arno the forest-clad ridge of Vallombrosa was much as it is
+today; down the valley the jagged peaks of the Carrara mountains barred
+the way to the sea. The surrounding vineyards and olive orchards by
+reason of encroaching forest were less extensive than they are now, but
+through every gate and from every tower one could see smiling fields
+guarded by battlemented villas. In the city, the fortress towers of the
+old nobility, partizans mostly of the foreign Emperor, rose thickly, but
+already dismantled at their fighting tops, for the people, meaning
+strictly the ruling merchant and manufacturing classes, had lately taken
+the rule from the old nobles. Many of these had fled; some had been
+banished, as was soon to be that reckless advocate of the emperor, Dante
+Alighieri, an excellent poet of love foolishly dabbling in politics.
+Other patricians sulked in their fortress palaces. Some shrewdly got
+themselves demoted and joined the ruling trade guilds. Of these guilds a
+big four, five, or six, governed the city, while a minor dozen had
+political privilege. Only guild members voted for the city officers. The
+guilds combined the function of a trade union and an employer’s
+association, including all members of the craft from the youngest
+apprentice to the richest boss-contractor. Such a guild as the notaries,
+must have been much like a bar association, while the wholesale
+merchants’ guild must have resembled a chamber of commerce. The guild
+folk had early allied themselves with the Pope, the only permanent
+representative of the principle of order in Italy. The Pope was also the
+bulwark of the new free communes against the claims of the Teutonic
+Emperors. So in Florence piety, liberty, and prosperity were convertible
+terms.
+
+Within the narrow walls was a bustling, neighborly, squabbling and
+making-up life. Everybody knew everybody else. The craftsman worked in
+the little open archways you may still see in the Via San Gallo, in
+sight and hearing of the passing world. Of weavers’ shops alone there
+were 300. No western city was ever prouder than Florence in those days.
+Her credit was good from the Urals to the Pentland Hills. Her gold
+florin was everywhere standard exchange. She had secret ways of
+finishing the fine cloths that came in ships and caravans from Ghent,
+Ypres, and Arras; she handled the silks of China and converted the raw
+pelts of the north into objects of fashion.
+
+Her civic pride was actively expressing itself in building. Between 1294
+and 1299 she had projected a new cathedral, the great Franciscan church
+of Santa Croce, a new town hall, and the massive walls we still see. For
+stately buildings she had earlier had only the Baptistry, in which every
+baby was promptly christened, and the new church of the Friars Preachers
+(Dominicans), Santa Maria Novella. In considering this Florence you must
+think of a hard-headed, full-blooded, ambitious community, frankly
+devoted to money-making, but desiring wealth chiefly as a step towards
+fame. Since the painter could provide fame in this world and advance
+one’s position in the next, his estate was a favored one.
+
+The painter himself was just a fine craftsman. He kept a shop and called
+it such—a _bottega_. He worked only to order. There were no exhibitions,
+no museums, no academies, no art schools, no prizes, no dealers. The
+painters modestly joined the guild of the druggists (_speziali_), who
+were their color makers, quite as the up-to-date newspaper reporter
+affiliates himself with the typographical union. When a rich man wanted
+a picture, he simply went to a painter’s shop and ordered it, laying
+down as a matter of course the subject and everything about the
+treatment that interested him. If the work was of importance, a contract
+and specifications were drawn up. The kind of colors, pay by the job or
+by the day, the amount to be painted by the contracting artist himself,
+the time of completion, with or without penalty—all this was precisely
+nominated in the bond. Naturally the painter used his shop-assistants
+and apprentices as much as possible. Often he did little himself except
+heads and principal figures. But he made the designs and carefully
+supervised their execution on panel or wall. A Florentine painter’s
+_bottega_ then had none of the preciousness of a modern painter’s
+studio. It was rather like a decorator’s shop of today, the master being
+merely the business head and guiding artistic taste. When we speak of a
+fresco by Giotto, we do not mean that Giotto painted much of it, any
+more than a La Farge window implies that our great American master of
+stained-glass design himself cut and set the glass. The painter of
+Florence had to be a jack-of-all-trades, a color grinder, a cabinet
+maker, and a wood carver; a gilder; to be capable of copying any design
+and of inventing fine decorative features himself. He must be equally
+competent in the delicate methods of tempera painting as in the resolute
+procedures of fresco.
+
+These two methods set distinct limits to the work and its effects. The
+colors were ground up day by day in the shop. Each had its little pot.
+There was no palette. Hence only a few colors were used, and with little
+mixing. For tempera painting a good wooden panel—preferably of
+poplar—was grounded with successive coats of finest plaster of Paris in
+glue and rubbed down to ivory smoothness. The composition was then
+copied in minutely from a working drawing. The gold background inherited
+from the workers in mosaic was laid on in pure leaf. The composition was
+first lightly shaded and modelled either in green or brown earth, and
+then finished up a bit at a time, in colors tempered with egg or
+vegetable albumen. The paints were thick and could not be swiftly
+manipulated; the whole surface set and so hardened that retouching was
+difficult. How so niggling a method produced so broad and harmonious
+effects will seem a mystery to the modern artist. It was due to system
+and sacrifice. Though the work was done piecemeal, everything was
+thought out in advance. Dark shadows and accidents of lighting which
+would mar the general blond effect were ignored. The beauty desired was
+not that of nature, but that of enamels and semi-precious stones. These
+panels are glorious in azures, cinnabars, crimsons, emerald-greens, and
+whites partaking of all of these hues. Their delicacy is enhanced by
+carved frames, at this moment, 1300, simply gabled and moulded; later
+built up and arched and fretted with the most fantastic gothic features.
+
+If the painter in tempera required chiefly patience and delicacy, the
+painter in fresco must have resolution and audacity. He must calculate
+each day’s work exactly, and a whole day’s work could be spoiled by a
+single slip of the hand in the tired evening hour. For fresco, the
+working sketch was roughly copied in outline on a plaster wall. Then any
+part selected for a day’s work was covered with a new coat of fine
+plaster. The effaced part of the design must be rapidly redrawn on the
+wet ground. Then the colors were laid on from their little pots, and
+only the sound mineral colors which resist lime could be employed. The
+vehicle was simply water. The colors were sucked deep into the wet
+plaster, and united with it to form a surface as durable as the wall
+itself. Generally the colors were merely divided into three
+values,—light, pure colors, and dark. Everything was kept clear, rather
+flat, and blond, highly simple and beautifully decorative. One of the
+later painters, Cennino Cennini (active about 1400), tells us that a
+single head was a day’s work for a good _frescante_. The touch had to be
+sure, for a mis-stroke meant scraping the wet plaster off, relaying it,
+and starting all over again. The fresco painter accordingly needed
+discipline and method. Nothing could be farther from modern
+inspirational methods. Where everything was systematized and calculated
+in advance, you will see it was quite safe for a master to entrust his
+designs to pupils who knew his wishes. Every fresco when dry was more or
+less retouched in tempera, but the best artists did this sparingly,
+knowing that the retouches would soon blacken badly or flake off.
+
+So much for the shop methods. Now for him who makes shops possible—the
+patron. A wealthy Florentine as naturally wanted to invest in a frescoed
+chapel as a wealthy American does in a fleet of motor cars. Considering
+the changed value of money, one indulgence was about as costly as the
+other. But the Florentine never quite regarded paintings as luxuries.
+They were necessary to him. He loved them. They enhanced his prestige in
+this world and improved his chances in the next. Then to beautify a
+church was really to magnify the liberty and prosperity of Florence,
+which largely derived from the Holy See. Recall that every Florentine
+was born a Catholic, baptized in the fair Church of St. John with the
+name of a saint. This saint, he believed, could aid him morally and
+materially, was in every sense his celestial patron. It paid to do the
+saint honor, and that could best be done through the painter’s art. The
+poorest man might have a small portrait of his patron, a rich man might
+endow a chapel and cause all his patron’s miracles to be pictured on the
+wall. Think also that every altar—a dozen or more in every large
+church—was a shrine[1], containing the bread and wine that by the
+never-ceasing miracle of the Mass became the Saviour’s body and blood;
+and was also a reliquary or tomb, containing in whole or part the body
+of some saint. Every altar then, and every chapel inclosing one, cried
+out for a twofold interpretation of its meaning. Everything about the
+Eucharist had to be explained (involving pretty nearly all of Biblical
+history), and the particular relic required similar illumination. Since
+many of the faithful could not read, and the Catholic Church has ever
+been merciful as regards sermonizing, these explanations of the altar as
+miracle shrine of Our Lord and as tomb of a particular saint were best
+made pictorially, and generally were so made.
+
+Such motives for picture-making Florence of course shared with the
+entire Christian world. It remains to explain why she wanted more
+painting and better than any other mediæval city. She wanted more
+painting chiefly because of her exceptional civic pride and prosperity,
+she wanted better painting because she had moved ahead of the world
+towards finer, more passionate, and conscious experiences of life which
+the older painting was powerless to express. About the year 1200, a
+century before the time we are considering, there flourished two great
+religious leaders who gave to Christianity a new dignity and appeal. St.
+Dominic, with his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, endeavored to make
+Christianity more reasonable, St. Francis of Assisi endeavored to make
+it more heartfelt and compassionate. They founded two monastic orders
+with divergent yet harmonious aims. The Dominicans called men to a life
+of study and self-examination, enlisting the human reason to explain and
+justify the universe under the Christian scheme; the Franciscans called
+men to poverty, humility, and chastity, and service to the unfortunate.
+Between the two—one supplying the light of the reason and the other the
+light of the heart—they overcame heresies which had menaced both
+Christianity and civilization and roused the Church out of its dogmatic
+slumber. It was no longer enough for the Church to threaten. Men yielded
+to her now only on condition that their heads be convinced or their
+hearts touched. In Florence, where a rationalizing shrewdness and a real
+warm-heartedness singularly blended, the double appeal was irresistible.
+By and large the whole city either schematized with the Dominicans or
+slummed with the Franciscans. Here was urgent new matter requiring an
+art that could move and persuade.
+
+Together with this religious revival and the political and commercial
+progress we have noted, came a literary revival. Before the end of the
+13th century such poets as Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante
+Alighieri had so reshaped the rude vulgar tongue that it became worthy
+of its Latin succession. The refinements of chivalric love came to
+Florence in melodious verse, and what the poets called the “sweet new
+style,” _il dolce stil nuovo_, in diction presaged a similar sweet new
+style of painting. Alongside of the poets, Brunetto Latini in the
+_Tesoro_ shows glimmerings of scientific interest, and Giovanni Villani
+lends substance and dignity to the work of the chronicler. Already the
+sculptors Nicola and Giovanni of neighboring Pisa had grasped the
+beauties respectively of classic sculpture and the noble intensity of
+that of the Gothic North. All this immensely increased that sum of fine
+thinking, feeling, and seeing which underlies all great art.
+
+To express these new emotions the old painting was inadequate. Italy
+through the so-called Dark Ages produced art abundantly. Wherever power
+and order asserted themselves amid the welter of war and oppression,
+stately buildings rose and these were decorated. Thus at Rome, where the
+popes gradually added temporal to spiritual power, splendid basilicas
+grew over the tombs of the martyrs. At Ravenna, through the 6th and 7th
+centuries the seat of the Byzantine and Gothic sovereignties,
+magnificent churches and baptistries were covered with pictorial
+mosaics. In Sicily, at Messina, Cefalù and Palermo, the sway of the
+Norman kings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries expressed itself in
+churches and civic buildings of the utmost splendor, which were adorned
+with mosaics by Greek masters. When the fugitives from the valleys of
+the Po, Adige, and Piave, and Brenta fled from Attila to the Venetian
+fens, there again was a beginning of great building. Wherever there was
+a powerful primate as at Milan, Como, Parma, Pisa, or a wide ruling
+abbot as at Subiaco, Monte Cassino, Capua, you will find art.
+
+But hardly, except perhaps in architecture, Italian art. We have
+sporadic provincial expressions dominated from afar by the prestige of
+the Eastern Roman Empire. At Constantinople there was a permanent court,
+a ceremonious civilization, an artistic blending of the traditions of
+old Greece and of the mysterious Levant. The merchants of the world
+sought from Byzantium, jewelry, enamels, embroideries, brocades, carved
+ivories, and pictured manuscripts. She was to the early Middle Ages what
+Paris is to ours—the æsthetic fashion maker of the world,—and her
+skilled artists went far afield as so many missionaries of the Byzantine
+style. We find them making the mosaics of Ravenna in the 6th and 7th
+centuries, of St. Mark’s at Venice from the 9th century, of many Roman
+churches from an even earlier date, of Palermo in the 12th, and of the
+Baptistry at Florence in the 13th. This Byzantine manner, as practiced
+by the travelling Greek artists and by their innumerable Italian
+imitators, is the real starting point and jump-off place for Italian
+painting. Hence in first studying the Byzantine style we do but imitate
+the Italian painters who immediately preceded Giotto.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 1. Byzantine Narrative Style about 1300. Detail from Mosaic Book
+    Covers in the Opera del Duomo.
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 2. Mosaic in the Cathedral, Pisa. St. John, left, is by Cimabue,
+    1302; the Christ is in good Byzantine tradition; the Virgin, right,
+    is some twenty years later.
+]
+
+Byzantine pictures have come down to us on the largest and on the
+smallest scale—in the great mosaics and wall paintings, and as well on
+small panels and in the illustrated books used in the ritual of the
+church. Both are important. The mural decorations are what the early
+Italian painter had constantly before his eye; the miniatured psalters,
+Gospels, lectionaries, chorals and prayer books, afforded the patterns
+from which he drew with little alteration the standard compositions of
+the Annunciation to Mary, the Nativity of Christ, His Adoration by the
+Shepherds and Kings, His Baptism, the Raising of Lazarus, the Last
+Supper, Crucifixion, Descent into Hell, Resurrection, and Ascension. But
+Byzantine design is most imposing in its monumental phase. The most
+careless traveller still feels awe before those solemn figures of Christ
+supreme ruler (_Pantokrator_) and his Mother queen of heaven which are
+seen throned against a background of azure or gold and attended by
+solemn figures of apostles and martyrs, Figure 2. The forms are
+flat,—silhouettes enriched by interior tracery, the arrangement in the
+space formal, symmetrical, highly decorative. The smaller narrative
+compositions,[2] Figure 1, are clearly conceived but have small
+emotional appeal. For this reason the Italians of the Golden Age spoke
+of the Byzantine style as rude. This is an error. Rude in the hands of
+half-trained local imitators, the style as formulated in the 9th century
+at Constantinople was highly sophisticated and decoratively of great
+refinement. It was based on an admirable system of color spotting and a
+fine understanding of silhouette. The contours were cast in easy
+conventional curves. These were enriched within by hatchings and
+splintery angles of gold which contrasted effectively with the fluent
+outlines. Everything was done by precept and copybook. In four centuries
+before the year 1300, the style showed little change, indeed is still
+alive in the mountains of Macedonia and, until the Revolution, in
+Russia. The Byzantine artist seldom looked at a fellow mortal with
+artistic intent. He looked at some earlier picture or considered his own
+color preferences. Conventional and anæmic as the narrative style was,
+it did all that was required of it. Nothing better serves the purpose of
+an authoritative Church than the awe-inspiring Christs of the Lombard
+and Sicilian and Roman apses, and so long as the Church felt no duty
+beyond that of plain statement of her claims, the unfelt narratives from
+the Scriptures served every religious need.
+
+It was different when under the leading of St. Dominic and St.
+Francis,[3] the Church eagerly wished to persuade men. Men may well have
+been frightened or even instructed by a Byzantine picture; nobody was
+ever persuaded by one. It took a century to work away from the Byzantine
+style, so deeply was it rooted. In fact, from the year 1226, that of St.
+Francis’s death, to about the end of the century, such artists as Guido
+of Siena, Coppo di Marcovaldo, Giunta of Pisa, Jacopo Torriti, Giovanni
+Cosma, Duccio, and Cimabue chiefly restudied the old Byzantine manner.
+They wished to learn how to build creditably before they began to tear
+down. Such reverent experiment extending over two generations only
+proved that the breach with Byzantine formalism was inevitable.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 3. Tuscan Master about 1285.—_Otto Kahn, N.Y._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 4. Cimabue. Madonna in Majesty.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+With the deepening and broadening of personal, civic, and religious
+emotions, the painter found new exactions laid upon him which the
+bloodless art of Byzantium could not satisfy. New life called for new
+forms to express it. We find in sculpture from about the year 1260, that
+of Giovanni Pisano’s first pulpit—wholly classical in its dignity—a
+kindred endeavor in advance of the art of painting. The renewal took
+three forms: the more conservative spirits accepted the Byzantine
+formulas but endeavored to refine on them in a realistic sense, to add
+grace to austerity. Such moderate development of the old style fixed the
+character of the school of Siena and was magnificently initiated by its
+greatest artist, Duccio, active about 1300. A very beautiful Madonna of
+this general tendency is in the collection of Mr. Otto Kahn at New York,
+Figure 3. It has been quite variously attributed.[4] It seems to me,
+however, a pure Tuscan work by Coppo or a painter akin to him. For the
+greater spirits such a reform was inadequate. Refine the Byzantine
+formulas to the utmost—there was no gain, rather loss in strength.
+Accordingly a vehement spirit like Cimabue,[1–5] acknowledgedly father
+of the Florentine school, accepts the Byzantine tradition loyally, but
+seeks to make its rigid mannerisms express the new religious passions.
+At times he is successful at this unlikely task of putting new wine into
+old bottles. His great enthroned Madonna at Florence, Figure 4, with
+solemn angels in attendance and grim patriarchs below her throne, may
+have been painted as early as 1285. It is faithful to the old monumental
+tradition—akin to the Christs and Marys of the mosaics—in its impressive
+richness is one of the most majestic things the century produced. It
+reveals the docility of its creator but only partially his power. We
+have hardly his hand but surely an echo of his influence in the tragic
+crucifix in the museum of Santa Croce. It is the moment of agony, and
+the powerful body writhes against the nails, while the head sinks in
+death. It may represent hundreds of similar crosses that stood high in
+air on the rood beam before the chancel, in sight both of the preacher
+and his public.
+
+Somewhere about 1294, Cimabue was called to Assisi to decorate the
+church in which St. Francis was buried. His part was the choir and
+transepts of the upper church. In the cross vault he painted the four
+evangelists, on the walls he spread the stories of St. Peter and St.
+Paul, the legends of the Virgin scenes from the Apocalypse, the gigantic
+forms of the archangels and a Calvary, Figure 5, that is one of the most
+moving expressions of Christian art. Chipped and blackened, their lights
+become dark through chemical change, these wall paintings retain an
+immense power and veracity. The Byzantine forms gain a paradoxical
+solidity, like that of bronze. The convulsion of the figure of Christ is
+given back in the wild gestures of the mourning women and the terrified
+Jews. It is the moment of the earthquake and the opening of tombs; a
+cosmic terror and despair pervade the place. The work is hampered and
+rude but completely expressive. The sensitive Japanese critic and man of
+the world, Okakura Kakuzo, used to regard these sooty frescoes in the
+transepts of the Franciscan basilica as the high point of all European
+art, which should at least induce the tourist and the student to give a
+second look at these battered and fading masterpieces. Recently an
+inscribed date, 1296, has been discovered on the choir wall which
+settles a long vexed question of chronology. The upper part of the work
+in the transepts and choir must have been going on for some years
+earlier, and the entire decoration of the Upper Church should roughly be
+comprised between 1294 and 1300. Cimabue died about 1302 while working
+on the apsidal mosaic at Pisa, where the St. John is by his hand, Figure
+2. He had brought life and passion into Italian painting, as his younger
+contemporary Giovanni Pisano had into Italian sculpture. Cimabue’s
+defect—that of a noble spirit—was the faith that the old pictorial form
+could contain the new surging emotions.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 5. Cimabue. Calvary. Fresco.—_Upper Church, Assisi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 6. Pietro Cavallini. Dormition of the Virgin. Mosaic.—_S. M. in
+    Trastevere, Rome._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 7. Pietro Cavallini. Apostles, fresco, from Last Judgment.—_Santa
+    Cecelia in Trastevere._
+]
+
+Colder spirits, as is often the case, more readily found the right way.
+And the discovery was made at Rome where the sculptured columns, arches,
+and sarcophagi, the pagan wall paintings and the earliest Christian
+mosaics combined to continue the lesson of classic humanism. A
+remarkable family of decorators, the Cosmati; with such contemporaries
+as Jacopo Torriti and Filippo Rusuti begin very cautiously to free
+themselves from Byzantine trammels. But it was a painter, Pietro
+Cavallini,[5] who more fully grasped that glory that had been Rome. In
+1291 he designed for the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere a Madonna
+and four stories of the Christ Child in mosaic. Here we glimpse a new
+pictorial form, Figure 6. Those Byzantine hooks and hatchings which were
+quite false to form give way to a reasonable structure in light and
+dark, the hair no longer wild and ropy, is disposed in sculpturesque
+locks, the draperies are no longer a cobweb pattern, but cast in broad
+and classic folds. All these improvements may be noted in more complete
+form in the frescoed Last Judgment which has recently been uncovered in
+the church of Santa Cecilia, Figure 7. Here the heads of Christ and the
+Apostles are well built in carefully graduated light and shade, while
+the draperies suggest Hellenistic statuary. But the renovation is on the
+whole cold and academic. Cavallini has not much more to say than the
+Byzantines, but that little he says with far greater gravity and
+truthfulness. He was a lucid and industrious but not a fine or strong
+spirit. His work later at Naples—in the Church of the Donna Regina,
+about 1310—shows that when he will express strong emotions he becomes
+merely hectic. Yet he recovered for Italian painting more than a hint of
+the choice naturalism of old Rome, and that is his sufficient glory.
+There is greater power and knowledge than his in the work of such
+contemporaries as the unknown painters of the frescoed heads of prophets
+in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome and of the stories of Isaac in the Upper
+Church at Assisi.[6] These show a resolute and intelligent effort to
+draw in masses of light and shade, and as well an ambition to recover
+the gravity of the early Christian mosaics. It is no wonder that some
+critics ascribe such dramatic and superbly constructed frescoes as The
+Betrayal of Esau to young Giotto, Figure 8, but the art is too mature
+for any young artist. We have rather to do with a great personality of
+Roman training who broke the way for Giotto. Cavalcaselle suggests, I
+think rightly, that the Florentine, Gaddo Gaddi, may have done some of
+this work. But we are safe only in calling this great painter “The Isaac
+Master.”
+
+To recapitulate, there were three ways, all imperfect, open to a young
+and progressive painter who like Giotto di Bondone was forming a style
+about the year 1300. He might with the Sienese evade the issue of
+passion and naturalism, choosing for gracefulness, he might try over
+again the great adventure of his master Cimabue, endeavoring to bring
+emotion into the old unfit forms, or he might, like Pietro Cavallini,
+let emotion take care of itself and work academically towards better
+structure, drapery, light, and shade. His choice was absolutely
+momentous for modern painting, and I want you to feel that the issue was
+quite consciously and vividly before him, for he had spent much of his
+youth as a humble assistant in the basilica at Assisi, where frescoes in
+the vehement Tuscan manner of Cimabue and in the dignified Roman style
+of the Isaac Master were being painted side by side. His decision was to
+combine the merits of the two manners—to seek, like his master,
+sincerity and depth of emotion, but to embody it in the new and nobler
+forms of the Roman school. This decision virtually fixed the character
+of Christian art in Italy—it was to be warm and humanistic, but it was
+to revive much of that abstract nobility which old Rome had inherited
+from Greece. Thus Italian painting at the outset took a classic stamp
+which when true to itself it has never lost. In fundamental ideas of
+beauty, there is no real difference between Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo
+da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 8. “The Isaac Master.” Esau before Isaac. Fresco.—_Upper Church,
+    Assisi._
+]
+
+Giotto di Bondone,[7] according to the best information we have on a
+disputed point, was born in 1266, at the village of Colle, in the lovely
+valley of the Mugello. His people were prosperous and his way smooth. I
+see no reason for doubting the charming legend told by Ghiberti that
+Cimabue found the lad Giotto by the roadside diligently scratching the
+outlines of a sheep on a slate, and that that was the beginning of their
+association. In any case, we may surmise that he was early with Cimabue
+as apprentice and eventually went with the Master to Assisi to grind
+colors, clean brushes, and paint under direction. To be at that moment
+in the Franciscan Basilica was to be at the greatest creative center of
+the world. It seems to me likely that Giotto may have had a considerable
+part in the actual painting of the Old and New Testament stories in the
+nave, and I believe we may find his earliest designs in certain frescoes
+of the upper rows. The Lamenting over Christ’s Body, for example,
+singularly combines the energy of Cimabue with the dignity of Cavallini,
+and there are significant echoes of the composition in Giotto’s later
+version of the same theme at Padua. Tradition also ascribes to Giotto,
+maybe correctly, the Resurrection and Pentecost on the entrance wall.[8]
+
+After 1296, according to Vasari’s entirely credible account, young
+Giotto took over the direction of the work for the newly elected
+Franciscan General, Giovanni dal Muro. What share he had in the
+vivacious and justly loved stories of St. Francis,[9] in the lower range
+of the nave, is greatly disputed. Of the twenty-eight frescoes involved,
+it seems clear to me that the first and the last three are by an artist
+more nearly in the Sienese tradition, that Nos. II to XVIII inclusive
+are designed by Giotto in the style of the Old Testament stories above
+and painted by him with a certain amount of assistance, and that the
+rest are largely inspired by Giotto but executed in his absence and
+without his final control. What is more important is the variety and
+vivacity of these narratives. Young Giotto is free to improvise, as he
+was not in the standard Bible subjects, and the mood shifts readily. We
+have charity, with St. Francis giving his cloak to a beggar, in an
+idyllic landscape; family strife in St. Francis renouncing his father,
+Figure 9; sorcery in the exorcism of the devils from Arezzo; an odd
+mixture of ogreishness and witchcraft, in St. Francis’s Fire Ordeal
+before the Soldan, Figure 11; a great pious intentness, in the
+choristers at the Cradle Rite; intense physical appetite, in the Miracle
+of the Spring; an entrancing blend of reverence and humor, in the Sermon
+to the Birds, Figure 10; stark tragedy in the Death of the Knight of
+Celano.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 10. The Sermon to the Birds.—_Upper Church, Assisi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 9.—St. Francis renounces His Father.—_Upper Church, Assisi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 11. St. Francis before the Soldan.—_Upper Church, Assisi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 12. Early Sketch Copy after Giotto’s Mosaic of the Navicella.
+    Compare Fig. 31.—_Metropolitan Museum, New York._
+]
+
+Giotto is still chiefly a sprightly illustrator. He is as yet
+insensitive to composition. He often perfunctorily splits his groups,
+giving each a landscape—or architectural back-screen quite in the
+Byzantine manner. His story-telling is brusque and without rhythm. His
+sense of form is already strong and growing, but there is little of the
+ease and style of the Isaac frescoes just above. In vitality the stories
+of St. Francis mark a great advance, but they lack the gravity and
+exquisiteness of balance proper to the best mural decoration.
+
+It was at Rome that young Giotto was to broaden and refine his art. He
+was called thither before the year 1300 to design the great mosaic of
+Christ walking on the Sea of Galilee beside the tempest-tossed boat of
+the Apostles. It stood over the inside cloister-portal of old St.
+Peter’s, and has been many times moved in the rebuilding of the church,
+and with each move restored, so that what we now see in the porch is
+entirely remade. From certain fragments of the old mosaic, and old
+sketch copies, Figure 12, we may judge that the Navicella, as the
+Italians loved to call it, was an elaborate composition of great
+dramatic power, the logical consummation of the experiments at Assisi.
+Our best version of the Navicella is Andrea Bonaiuti’s adaptation,
+Figure 31, for the vault of the Spanish Chapel, 1365.
+
+But Giotto was soon to renounce the facile method of diffuse and genial
+narrative in favor of a concise and massive style, akin to sculptured
+relief, and deeply influenced by the antique. The arches and the columns
+of Imperial Rome are teaching their silent lesson, the simple and noble
+forms of Cavallini and his nameless rivals show how painting may vie
+with sculpture in sense of mass and reality. With the problem of the
+representation of mass on a flat surface, Giotto wrestled eagerly and
+triumphantly. With a genius that few painters have equalled, he grasped
+the truth that the figure painter’s problem of representing space is
+chiefly that of emphatically suggesting mass. If you convince the eye of
+the tangibility of your objects, the mind will supply elbow room and air
+to breathe. It isn’t necessary to simulate a box, as the Sienese
+painters often did. The painter who can give a convincing sense of mass
+may handle accessories and perspective with the utmost freedom,
+according to the inner law of his design. The painter who thinks first
+of his space is in every way more bound to the smaller probabilities.
+Much thinking of this sort must have been done by Giotto before he
+worked out his new style at Padua.
+
+After his return from Rome, Giotto sojourned for a time in Florence, and
+in 1304 or thereabouts painted the gigantic Madonna formerly in the
+Trinità, Figure 13. It is impressive in mass, admirable in the intent
+expression of the attendant angels, rich in color, but the great figure
+is unhappily crowded by the canopy. Giotto is still a bit uncertain as
+to the rendering of space, and makes a good if unpleasing effort to
+suggest depth despite the limitations of a gold background. With all its
+nobility and tenderness, this is by no means so good a decoration as the
+great Madonna by Cimabue, Figure 4, which hangs nearby in the Uffizi.
+
+With the problems of space and mass, Giotto was soon to cope
+triumphantly. A wealthy citizen of Padua, Enrico Scrovegni, was planning
+a new chapel to the Virgin Annunciate. Doubtless he wished the repose of
+his father’s soul, for his father had been a notorious usurer. Dante
+incontinently puts him in hell with other profiteers. Enrico Scrovegni
+built his chapel near the ruins of a Roman arena and dedicated it March
+25, 1305. The Arena Chapel was a brick box, barrel vaulted within—a
+magnificent space for a fresco painter. Giotto spread upon it the
+noblest cycle of pictures known to Christian art. Over the chancel arch
+he painted the Eternal, surrounded by swaying angels, and listening to
+the counter-pleas of Justice and Mercy concerning doomed mankind, with
+the Archangel Gabriel serenely awaiting the message that should bring
+Christ to Mary’s womb and salvation to earth. This is the Prologue.
+Opposite on the entrance wall is the Epilogue—a last judgment, with
+Christ enthroned as Supreme Judge amid the Apostles, and the just being
+parted from the wicked. Amid the just you may see Enrico Scrovegni
+presenting the chapel to three angels.
+
+The side walls are ruled off into three rows of pictures, with ornate
+border bands and a basement of sculpturesque figures symbolizing the
+seven virtues and vices. The story reads down from above. Below the
+azure vault and still a little in the curve are the stories of the
+Childhood of the Virgin—nothing in the chapel more simple and stately
+than these.[10] The middle course is devoted to the early deeds of
+Christ, from his birth to the expulsion of the money lenders from the
+temple. The lower row depicts His Passion ending with the Miracle of
+Pentecost. Much later a disciple of Giotto completed the story with the
+last days of the Virgin, in the Choir. Thus the narrative in its
+broadest sense is a life of the Virgin Mary, including that of her
+Divine Son, and both lives are brought into an eternal scheme of things
+by the prologue, which shows a relenting God, and the Epilogue which
+shows a now relentless Christ awarding bliss and woe to the race for all
+eternity.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 13. Giotto. Madonna Enthroned.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+The first impression of a visitor to the chapel will be a feeling of awe
+qualified by joy in the loveliest of colors. The whites of the classical
+draperies dominate. They are shot with rose, or pale blue, or grey
+green. Certain old enamels have the same quality of making the most
+splendid crimsons, blues, and greens seem merely foils to foreground
+masses of white which seem to include by implication all the positive
+colors. It is this bright and original color scheme balancing crimsons
+and azures with violets and greens which makes a thing of beauty out of
+what would otherwise be a stilted checkerboard arrangement.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 13_a_. St. Joachim and St. Anna at the Beautiful Giotto
+    Gate.—_Arena, Padua._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 14. Giotto. The Flight into Egypt.—_Arena, Padua._
+]
+
+Next the eye will realize splendid people gravely occupied with solemn
+acts. There is the strangest blend of passion and decorum. See the eager
+old man who clutches his wife before a massive city gate while she
+caresses him tenderly, Figure 13_a_, note the firm gentleness of the
+bearded priest who handles a screaming baby before the altar, mark the
+sense of strain and hurry where a mother and child mounted on an ass,
+Figure 14, are pushed and dragged along by an old man and attendants. Or
+again, what sinister power in the scene where three Jewish magistrates
+press money upon a haggard, bearded, nervous man. You do not need the
+bat-like demon prompting him to know that it is the arch-traitor Judas,
+Figure 15. Then there is a strange, serene, processional composition,
+with the Virgin moving homeward among her friends to a solemn music,
+Figure 16. It has a rhythm like the frieze of the Parthenon. Perhaps
+your eye will fix longest on the scene where about the pale body of the
+dead Christ women wail with outstretched hands, or tend the broken body,
+while bearded men, accustomed to the hardness of life, stand in mute
+sympathy with folded hands, Figure 17. It is what the Gospel ought to
+look like. How Giotto shows every feeling, pushing its expression just
+to the verge, and there stopping, so that idyl and tragedy, devotion and
+wrath, treachery and fealty, fear and courage, each keeps its proper and
+distinguishing aspect, while all are invested in a common dignity and
+nobility. You will perhaps never have seen an art at once so varied and
+moving, and nevertheless so monumental, and you may well be curious as
+to the method.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 15. Giotto. Judas betraying Christ.—_Arena, Padua._
+]
+
+You will see readily that these compositions are conceived sculpturally.
+Every one with the slightest change could be cut in marble. Indeed the
+seven Virtues, Figure 18, and seven Vices impersonated in monochrome on
+the dado of the chapel are direct imitations of sculpture. The figures
+throughout the life of Christ and the Virgin are of even size, and
+usually all on one plane. The landscapes and architectural features are
+arranged simply as frames or backgrounds for the figure groups. The
+figures are, whenever the subject permits, clad in drapery of a classic
+cast. Expression is conveyed not much by the faces, which have a uniform
+Gothic intentness, but by the action of the entire figure and especially
+of the hands. The forms are rather squat and massive, yet have a homely
+gracefulness. There is nothing like perspective, and small regard for
+distance, yet the figures have convincing bulk and move gravely in
+adequate space. All this is due to the most consummate draughtsmanship.
+Giotto simplifies his seeing; what he cares for is the thrust of the
+shoulder, or the poise of hip, the swing of the back from the pelvis,
+the projection of the chest, the balance of the head on the neck and its
+attachment to the shoulders. All these essential facts of mass he
+represents by the simplest lines of direction, by broad masses of light
+and shade, often merely by the tugging lines in drapery that tell of the
+form beneath. The cave men would have understood Giotto, and so would
+the post-impressionists of today. Conciseness, economy, force,
+mass—these are the technical qualities of the work, as human insight and
+tenderness are its grace. As the great analytical critic Bernard
+Berenson has well remarked, this painting makes the strongest possible
+appeal to our tactile sense, stirring powerfully all our memories of
+touch, and presenting the painted indications as so many swiftly grasped
+clues to reality. We have to do with a magnificently conceived
+shorthand. No artist before or since has made a greater expenditure of
+mind or achieved a more notable inventiveness than Giotto in the Arena
+Chapel.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 16. Giotto. The Virgin returning from her wedding.—_Arena,
+    Padua._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 17. Giotto. Lamentation over Christ.—_Arena, Padua._
+]
+
+It was dedicated March 25, 1305, Giotto being nearly forty years old,
+and it was probably not completely painted on the day of dedication,
+since many draperies were borrowed from St. Mark’s, Venice, to cover,
+presumably, the still unpictured parts of the walls. Giotto lived some
+four years in Padua, brought his family there, received the exiled poet
+Dante and with him joked not too decorously about his own ugliness and
+that of his children. It seems likely enough, though not certain, that
+he followed the banished Pope to Avignon about 1309, and spent some
+years in Southern France. What is certain is that he was again in
+Florence by 1312, and that, having found his own solution of the problem
+of mass in the Arena Chapel, he thereafter rested comfortably on his
+discovery, never was quite as strenuous again, and spent his later years
+at a new problem—that of decorative symmetry.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 18. Giotto. Hope.—_Arena, Padua._
+]
+
+The first experiment towards a sweeter and more complex style was made
+in the cross vaults of the Lower Church of Assisi, immediately above the
+tomb of St. Francis. The subjects were the three virtues of the
+Franciscan vow—Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience—with a St. Francis in a
+glory of angels. In these great triangular compositions, allegory and
+symbolism run riot, and we do well to recall Hazlitt’s shrewd remark on
+Spenser’s “Faery Queene”—“the allegory will not bite.” Indeed one might
+forget it for the radiance of the azures, moss-greens, rose pinks, and
+deeper violets, for the delightful contrast of the freely composed
+groups with the intricate geometrical formality of the rich borders. Yet
+to ignore the allegory completely would be to forget the master’s
+intention. We may savor it best in the great composition: St. Francis
+Marries his Lady Poverty, Figure 18_a_. The bridal group stands on a
+central crag, Christ serving as priest, St. Francis slipping a ring on
+the gaunt hand of a haggard, yet strangely fascinating bride clothed in
+a single ragged garment. Her bare feet show through a crisply drawn and
+blossomless rose tree. Two urchins at the foot of the little cliff stand
+ready to stone so unseemly a bride. From the central group to right and
+left, earnest groups of angels spread in a descending curve. In the
+lower angle, left, a young man gives his rich cloak to an old beggar,
+while an angel points to the bridal: Poverty is accepted. At the lower
+right corner, another angel attempts to detain a young man who passes
+with a gesture of contempt in the company of two portly priests: Poverty
+is rejected by such. From the apex of the great triangle, the hands of
+God descend to welcome two angels, one of which offers the cloak given
+to the beggar, and the other a model of the church which is the splendid
+covering for the body of the Saint. The fantastic beauty of this and its
+companion pieces can only be appreciated on the spot. No frescoes of
+Italy surpass these for loveliness of color and perfection of condition.
+It is the most beautiful pictured Gothic ceiling in the world, perhaps
+the most fantastically beautiful of all figured ceilings whatever.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 18_a_. Giotto. St. Francis’ Mystic Marriage with Poverty.—_Lower
+    Church, Assisi._
+]
+
+Because the figures are a little slight and the expression a bit
+sentimentalized, and the proportions rather arbitrarily handled to meet
+the exigencies of the curved spaces, many good critics, including
+Venturi and Berenson, deny these compositions to Giotto. One of them,
+the St. Francis in Glory, is clearly of inferior design and quality. For
+the others, it seems to me that the designs can only be by Giotto, while
+the execution is mostly by a charming assistant whose work in this
+ceiling and elsewhere in this church makes us wish we knew his name. No
+middle-aged painter of established repute was likely to undertake
+personally the dirty and fatiguing work of painting a ceiling in fresco.
+If we are right in supposing that Giotto may have designed this ceiling,
+shortly after his return from Avignon, say, after 1312, he would have
+been towards fifty years old, and provided with a shop-staff of
+well-trained assistants. From this time on, indeed, we may assume that
+he rather directed the work of others than painted himself. Such a view
+will permit us to accept as school works many fine pictures the design
+of which a too strict criticism has denied to Giotto. For example, the
+admirable Coronation of the Virgin, in Santa Croce, Florence, seems to
+me completely designed by Giotto, and the logical next step after the
+Franciscan allegories, though there can be little actual painting by the
+master on the panel, and his personal contribution may have been limited
+to a small working drawing. Indeed the only one of the later panels
+which seems to show throughout his actual handiwork is the lovely
+Dormition of the Virgin at Berlin, Frontispiece, which was painted for
+the Church of Ognissanti.
+
+At about this period I think we may set the several crucifixes in
+Florentine churches, without inquiring too narrowly whether they are by
+the master or by scholars. Giotto has developed a singularly noble type.
+The Christ is no longer contorted in agony as in the crucifixes by
+Cimabue. He is dead, with his head quietly sunk on the powerful breast,
+and the body relaxed. The conception is humanistic. One feels chiefly
+the pity of stretching that glorious thing that is a man’s body on a
+cross. Probably the earliest of these crucifixes is that at Santa Maria
+Novella, while the finest is at San Felice. About 1320 we may set the
+dismembered _ancona_, painted for Cardinal Gaetano Stefaneschi, which
+originally stood on the high altar of St. Peter’s, Rome. The tarnished
+fragments which you may still see in the sacristy, are more splendid in
+color than any other tempera painting whatsoever. Probably only the
+central panels, Christ and St. Peter enthroned, are from Giotto’s hand,
+the side panels representing the martyrdom of Peter and Paul may well be
+both designed and executed by the accomplished assistant who carried out
+the allegories at Assisi.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 19. Giotto. Naming of St. John the Baptist.—_Peruzzi Chapel,
+    Santa Croce._
+]
+
+So far we have seen Giotto a wanderer. Assisi, Rome, Padua, Rimini,
+delighted to do him honor, but apparently Florence had claimed few works
+from his hand. We have record of frescoes in the Badia which may have
+been early works. It was the decoration of Arnolfo’s great Franciscan
+church of Santa Croce that finally recalled Giotto and evoked his most
+accomplished work. He completed in the transepts of Santa Croce four
+chapels and as many altar-pieces. The frescoes were white-washed in the
+16th century, and the panels broken up and lost. But in the last century
+the white-wash was scraped off from two of the chapels, and there we may
+see, so far as defacement and repainting permit, the masterpieces of the
+early Florentine school. We may reasonably guess the date of this work
+to be somewhere about 1320, Giotto being nearly sixty.
+
+In the chapel maintained by that noble family, the Peruzzi, Giotto
+spread on the side walls three stories from the life of St. John the
+Baptist, and as many more from that of St. John the Evangelist. The
+figures are superb, magisterial in pose; the draperies grand and ample
+after the classical fashion. Upon bulk and relief there is less
+insistence than at Padua. Giotto has passed the experimental stage as
+regards form, is less strenuous and more at his ease. Nothing is more
+stately in the chapel than the presentation of the infant Baptist to his
+father, who is temporarily stricken with dumbness, Figure 19. Simeon
+gravely writes the name John; Elizabeth with her adoring group of
+attendants carefully offers the vivacious child to his father’s gaze.
+The gestures are slow, definite, determined. The group beautifully fills
+the square space without crowding it. The composition, unlike the widely
+spaced Paduan designs, is drawn together into a mass.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 20. Giotto. Resuscitation of Drusiana by St. John.—_Peruzzi
+    Chapel, Santa Croce._
+]
+
+Upon the Feast of Herod with Salome modestly dancing John Ruskin[11] has
+expended just eulogies in the petulant yet important little book
+“Mornings in Florence.” What is notable in the scene is its general
+decorum and the pathetic indecision of the weak King.
+
+But the most accomplished design as such is the miracle of the
+Resuscitation of Drusiana by St. John the Evangelist, Figure 20. Even
+the inscenation before a fine Romanesque city is adequately, if very
+simply, realized. The gesture of the apostle is of majestic power, the
+contrast of the massive, upright, columnar forms of the elders, with the
+sharply bent forms of Drusiana, her mourners and bier bearers, is
+admirably invented, and the drastic portraiture of a cripple at the left
+adds a tang of reality while in no wise detracting from the dignity of
+the scene. We have a work in the grand style, massively conceived,
+warmly felt, wrought into an elaborate and satisfying symmetry. The
+Ascension of St. John has an even graver and more ample rhythm. The
+Golden Age of Raphael and Titian will have little to add to this except
+the minor graces.
+
+In the adjoining chapel of the Bardi family, Giotto, a little later, I
+believe, painted six stories of St. Francis, and four figures of the
+great Franciscan saints, St. Louis of France, St. Louis of Toulouse, St.
+Clare, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Over the entrance arch he set an
+animated picture of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, the wounds of
+the Saviour. Nearly thirty years earlier he had done this subject for
+the Church at Assisi, and in an altar-piece which has passed from Pisa
+to the Louvre. By comparing the rigid, angular figures of the earlier
+composition and their ill-adjusted accessories, with this easy and
+beautifully balanced arrangement, you may see how far Giotto had gone in
+the direction of grace, and you will not fail also to note how much more
+tragic the earlier and less calculated work is.
+
+For the first time, in the Bardi chapel, Giotto conceives the decoration
+of the side walls as a whole. From the pointed lunettes above, through
+the three compositions on each wall, there is an architectural axis,
+sometimes arbitrarily imposed, about which the figures are symmetrically
+distributed. Often the scene is a screen with projecting wings as in the
+St. Francis before the Sultan of Morocco, or a similar fore-court, as in
+the Mourning for St. Francis. It will be well to compare the story of
+St. Francis renouncing his father, Figure 21, with the same subject at
+Assisi. You will recall that St. Francis, when rebuked by his father for
+a rash and impulsive act of charity, stripped off his clothes, then
+threw them at his father’s feet, and took refuge under the robe of the
+Bishop of Assisi. In the earlier version the architectural background
+splits the composition in two, adding to its intensity perhaps, but
+displeasing to the eye. Here in the late version a fine building seen in
+perspective both unifies the two groups and serves as apex for the
+decorative axis of the entire side wall.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 21. Giotto. St. Francis renounces his Father. Compare FIG.
+    9.—_Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce._
+]
+
+More remarkable still is the contrast between St. Francis Braving the
+Fire Ordeal before the Soldan, Figure 22, as depicted at Assisi and
+Florence. We have to do not merely with an immense advance in decorative
+composition, the accessories at Assisi being trivial and fantastic; not
+merely with progress towards a gracious symmetry and more massive and
+impressive form, but also with a complete change of moral point of view.
+At Assisi the Soldan is an ogre exacting a cruel test. The Moslem
+priests are a cowardly pack of magicians ignobly slinking away, St.
+Francis a grim fanatic. At Florence the Soldan is a noble and humane
+gentleman, amazed at an unreasonable ordeal forced upon his wise men.
+The Moslem doctors are splendid scholars grudgingly shrinking from an
+unfair test, St. Francis an alert little enthusiast half gloating over
+the confusion he has thrown into the enemy camp. With a by no means
+orthodox feeling, old Giotto, humanistic Giotto, almost seems to take,
+or at least to see, the pagans’ side of it. He who had written a manly
+poem against the excesses and hypocrisies of the Franciscan ideal of
+poverty, is now capable of criticizing the more extravagant propagandism
+of the saint himself.
+
+It is a criticism that admits all tenderness and sympathy, as may be
+seen in the famous fresco representing the Mourning over the body of St.
+Francis while his soul is translated to heaven, Figure 23. Again John
+Ruskin is your best interpreter to this picture, which after all only
+needs to be seen. It combines all the qualities for which Giotto had
+striven—warmth, vivacity, ingenuity, unexpectedness in the narrative
+details; massiveness and dignity of the individual forms; and a
+decorative symmetry at once monumental, formal, and delightfully varied.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 22. Giotto. St. Francis before the Soldan. Compare Fig.
+    11.—_Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 23. Giotto. Death of St. Francis.—_Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce._
+]
+
+With this noble and deeply felt composition we virtually take leave of
+Giotto. For though he lived for many years yet, the works of his old age
+have largely perished. In the chapel at Assisi dedicated to St. Mary
+Magdalen are fine frescoes in which he surely had a leading part. From
+1330 to 1333 he worked at Naples for King Robert of Anjou. Nothing
+remains from this visit except certain shrewd jests which the painter
+exchanged with the King. In 1334 Florence recalled him, and made him
+_capomaestro_ of the Cathedral. Giotto designed the flower-like tower
+which rises lightly beside the temple of Our Lady of the Flower,
+invented and perhaps cut in marble certain reliefs on the base
+representing the crafts of men, but did not live to see the loveliest of
+bell towers finished. The task was completed by his pupil and artistic
+executor, Taddeo Gaddi. In the last years Giotto conceived vast
+compositions of a religious and political sort for the public buildings
+of the Commune. There were allegories of a strong and weak state, in the
+Bargello, the prison-fortress of the Captain of the People. These great
+symbolical designs are a kind of missing link between Giotto and the
+panoramic painters who followed him. We may find an echo of this lost
+work in the Civic Allegories in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. These
+were doing at the moment of Giotto’s death by a Sienese painter,
+Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who had studied the great Florentine master
+devoutly. Nothing of Giotto’s latest phase is left save a few figures in
+the battered frescoes in the Bargello which contain the idealized
+portrait of youthful Dante, Figure 24, and the gracious Dormition of the
+Virgin at Berlin, Frontispiece.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 24. Giotto. Dante, tracing from the ruined fresco in the
+    Bargello.
+]
+
+Just before Giotto died, the tyrant of Milan borrowed him from Florence.
+Giotto soon returned, to die early in the year 1337, being seventy years
+old. Almost single-handed he had made Italian painting. He had lent life
+and warmth to the cold and academic reform of the Roman painters. He had
+expressed a maximum of feeling, without sacrifice of dignity. He had
+worked out beautiful and impressive forms of composition wherein
+symmetry and contrast met harmoniously. He had mastered the expression
+of mass on a plane surface with a certainty and energy no artist before
+had even imagined, and that few since have equalled. He had forecast and
+led the way in every manner of realistic figure painting.
+
+Florence, when true to herself, could only repeat Giotto in one phase or
+another of his activity. In her casual and sprightly mood, she carries
+on the method of Giotto’s stories of St. Francis at Assisi, in mystical
+reflection and symbolism she must build on the allegories over St.
+Francis’ tomb and on the lost political frescoes; in her mood of
+strenuous search for reality she can but repeat the Paduan chapter of
+Giotto’s strivings, in rare moments of vision and fulfilment she will
+merely begin where the Santa Croce frescoes of Giotto ended.
+
+However Giotto be ranked, and personally I see no greater artist on the
+rolls of history, his is indisputably the greatest single achievement;
+for no other artist who accomplished so much began with so little. It
+was no exaggeration that made Lorenzo Ghiberti regard the advent of
+Giotto as the coming to life of an art that had been buried for
+centuries. It is indeed the measured classicism of Giotto’s art that
+constitutes its greatness—its sweet and lucid reasonableness, its rugged
+yet disciplined strength. Seneca or Marcus Aurelius would have
+understood it perfectly, as Giotto himself, for his mellow wisdom and
+wit, would have been a welcome visitor at Horace’s Sabine farm. In his
+broad and flexible insight, his love of mankind, his clear perceptions
+of aims and ready acceptance of limitations, in his pathos without
+exaggeration, in his constructive skill without ostentation, in his
+simplicity without bareness, he is the authentic and indispensable link
+between the beauty of Greece and Rome and that of the Italian Golden
+Age. To know him is to know almost everything that is needful about
+older European painting, not to know him is to lack the very rudiments
+of an artistic education.
+
+
+Giotto left many followers,[12] not one of whom at all understood his
+greatness. Like his friend Dante, he was distantly admired, but really
+loved only in bits. As perceptive a person as the artist biographer
+Vasari lavishes praise upon Giotto for his more trivial inventions—the
+Christ Child struggling out of the arms of the High Priest, for example.
+So Giotto’s followers picked unintelligently from his great
+accomplishment, choosing what the master himself would least have
+valued—his simple contours without his significant mass, his variety and
+vivacity without his warmth and restraint. On their own account they
+added complication. The sparse economy of Giotto’s best work could never
+have appealed to Florence at large. Something richer and gayer was
+wanted, more like Florentine life itself as it became after the general
+loosening up of manners and morals following the plague of 1348. Its
+chronicler, the author of the “Decameron,” fairly represents the new
+spirit. The best of the younger painters have indeed something of
+Boccaccio’s mentality—his light touch, his charm, his panoramic
+richness, his fluid and undisciplined grace. Thus arises what I may call
+the panoramic style of fresco painting—superficial, full of episodes and
+accessories, still religious in theme, but mundane in spirit, often
+cleverly conceived, and very superficially felt. These artists had
+grasped neither the meaning of Giotto’s drawing nor the beauty of his
+decorative formulas, they saw only his variety and energy. Meanwhile a
+great Sienese painter, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a profound admirer of
+Giotto, had worked out a nobly spectacular form of painting in which the
+stage setting was elaborate and realistic. He painted much in Florence
+about 1334 and his novelties allured the new men. So we find fresco
+painting tending in a scenic direction, and panel painting following the
+same course more conservatively—not merely in Florence and Siena, but
+throughout Northern Italy as well.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 25. Giotto’s Assistant at Assisi. Flight into Egypt. Compare
+    Figure 14.—_Lower Church, Assisi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 26. Taddeo Gaddi. St. Joachim Meets St. Anna. Compare FIG.
+    13_a_.—_Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce._
+]
+
+Many of Giotto’s immediate pupils are mere names to us. Maso, whom the
+sculptor commentator Ghiberti praised for his sweetness, Stefano whom he
+dubbed the “ape of nature,” Puccio Capanna—their work must be at Assisi,
+but criticism has not succeeded in clearly disengaging it. The nameless
+master who executed the Franciscan allegories at Assisi and designed the
+stories of Christ’s youthful days, in the adjoining right transept, is
+the most accomplished and individual follower of Giotto. He works for
+grace, pathos, sumptuousness, and decorative breadth. He is a Giotto
+with the angles rubbed down. By comparing Giotto’s Flight of the Holy
+Family to Egypt, with the later version at Assisi, Figure 25, we may
+grasp the difference between master and scholar. Giotto is brusque,
+harsh, noble; the flight through a rocky defile gives a sense of urgency
+and peril; the composition carries forward like the ram of a battleship.
+In the version at Assisi the flight has become an attractive family
+excursion through a romantic valley; the mood is gentle, charming,
+unspecific. A moment in an epic has been attenuated into an idyl. This
+master never fails to express a dreamy sort of poetry, and in such
+compositions as the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Calvary, he
+commands a genuine pathos. He is exactly what Giotto might have been,
+had he skipped the strenuous Paduan phase, and become a decorator
+without the preliminary discipline of the draughtsman. There are reasons
+for thinking that this work was done by a shop assistant of Giotto’s,
+who for many years directed the decoration of the Lower Church at Assisi
+in Giotto’s stead. Some of the work in the Childhood of Christ, I
+believe, may be as late as 1330 to 1335.
+
+Taddeo Gaddi is a more definite and less pleasing personality. He was
+Giotto’s godson and his assistant for twenty-four years, presumably from
+1313 to 1337, as well as his artistic executor. Whether in panel or
+fresco, he was an admirable craftsman; in tempera, a fine colorist. His
+panels are widely scattered, some ten being in the United States; his
+frescoes, all that we need to note, are in Santa Croce. In the
+Baroncelli Chapel, just after Giotto’s death, Taddeo finished these
+frescoes of the early life of the Virgin, repeating themes which Giotto
+had used both in Padua and elsewhere in Santa Croce itself. His way of
+competing with Giotto is to stir and add and mix things up. Compare the
+meeting of Anna and Joachim at the Beautiful Gate in the two masters;
+Giotto at Padua is grave, noble, heartfelt; how he discriminates between
+the masculine clutch of the old husband and the tender embrace of the
+wife—how drastic the conception is, but also how clear and stately. Poor
+Taddeo on the other hand brings the sacred pair together with the bounce
+of a modern dance, Figure 26. He brings no brains to bear, and almost no
+feelings, just a sprightly and wholly casual inventiveness. Certain
+delightful little panels with stories of Christ and St. Francis which he
+did in Giotto’s shop for the doors of the sacristy wardrobes of Santa
+Croce remind us of the pity that he ever ceased to be an interpreter of
+a greater man’s designs. In the fresco of Job’s trials, in the Campo
+Santo, Pisa, he seems nearly a great artist. Conceivably he worked on
+designs of his late master. At least he had a certain critical sense,
+for at an artist’s reunion at San Miniato, about 1360, he told Andrea
+Orcagna and the rest of the company that painting had constantly
+declined since Giotto and was declining every day. He transmitted, his
+sound craftsmanship to a son, Agnolo, who decorated the Choir of Santa
+Croce with the legends of the Cross. He carried down the panoramic style
+to the end of the 14th century, practicing it with more taste than his
+father, achieving a grace without much inwardness or force.
+
+A later contemporary of Giotto’s, Buonamico Buffalmacco,[13] seems to
+have inherited something of Giotto’s power, but the identification of
+his work is very uncertain, and he lives for us chiefly as an egregious
+wag in the pages of the Italian story writers.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 27. Giottino. Deposition—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+From another contemporary and possibly a scholar of Giotto, Bernardo
+Daddi, we have many panel pictures and a few frescoes at Santa Croce. He
+is an admirable craftsman, and a sincere illustrator, within his
+limitations, applying very competently to panel painting something of
+the panoramic realism of Ambrogio Lorenzetti. A prolific artist, his
+exquisitely finished little panels are quite common. In America are good
+examples in the New York Historical Society, in the Platt Collection,
+Englewood, and a more monumental piece in the Johnson Collection,
+Philadelphia. He lived well beyond the middle of the century.
+
+Giottino, who possibly is to be identified with Giotto’s pupil Maso, is
+a more delicate spirit with unusual resources of pathos. His best work
+is an altar-piece of the Deposition, Figure 27, painted about 1360 for
+the Church of San Remigio at Florence and now in the Uffizi. A
+preference for isolated figures and for vertical lines is noteworthy, as
+is the wistfulness of the attendant donors. Similar qualities of
+delicate precision as of dispersion are in the frescoes in Santa Croce
+which represent the Miracles of Pope Sylvester. The note is feminine and
+rather Sienese than genuinely Florentine.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 28. Andrea Orcagna. Christ conferring authority upon St. Peter
+    and St. Thomas Aquinas.—_Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella._
+]
+
+Outside of Giotto’s _bottega_ arose the rare continuers of his
+tradition. Such an artist flourished about the middle of the century in
+the person of Andrea di Cione, better known by his nickname of Orcagna.
+He was more of a sculptor and architect than a painter, a man of dignity
+and force, a poet and thinker. Although not a pupil of Giotto, he
+studied that master’s work admiringly, and sought to reproduce its
+massiveness. Its brusqueness he largely rejected. Instead of sketching
+the draperies summarily, he drew the folds carefully after the model; he
+liked to treat the panel and wall as a whole, where Giotto had accepted
+the tradition of subdivision; he gave to his faces a greater sweetness
+and he occasionally attempted foreshortenings and impetuosities of
+gesture that Giotto would have avoided. Unluckily Orcagna’s most
+important frescoes have perished. We may grasp his nobility in the
+altar-piece which he finished and dated in 1357, Figure 28, for the
+chapel of the Strozzi family at Santa Maria Novella. The formality of
+the composition is noteworthy, as is the stately sweetness of the
+Madonna. The subject is Christ delegating his Power and Wisdom
+respectively to St. Peter and to St. Thomas Aquinas.
+
+In the same chapel the figure of Christ leaning forward over a cloud and
+making the sublime gesture that decrees the end of the world and the
+Judgment Day, Figure 29, is probably designed by Orcagna, as are the
+larger figures below. We have here one of the freest and grandest
+conceptions of the period. The lovely garden-like heaven and the quaint
+and ingenious hell on the side walls are by Orcagna’s brother, Nardo di
+Cione. The mood is less grave than Orcagna’s, variety counts for more.
+The heads of the saints are of a most delicate beauty. Nardo has many of
+the qualities of the panoramic painters without their heedlessness. He
+represents a compromise between the severity of Giotto and the
+diffuseness of his own day. He worked indefatigably until 1366, and his
+younger brother, Jacopo, and his imitator, Mariotto, continued the
+manner almost into the new century.
+
+Orcagna was perhaps more versatile than critics have supposed. Recently
+discovered fragments of frescoes in Santa Croce, Figure 30, show a
+drastic power that no other Florentine possessed. The theme is miserable
+folk in time of pestilence crying out to Death to end their sorrows. The
+entire fresco would have shown Death passing them by and poising the
+scythe for prosperous and happy folk beyond. The whole scene exists in
+the famous frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo which, while traditionally
+ascribed to Orcagna, are unquestionably of Sienese inspiration. They
+will occupy us later. Orcagna’s solitary position in Florence reminds us
+that artistic succession is rarely from master to pupil, but from great
+soul to great soul across intervening mediocrity.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 30. Andrea Orcagna. They call Death in Vain. Fragment from ruined
+    fresco of the Triumph of Death.—_Santa Croce._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 29. Andrea Orcagna. Upper part of Fresco of Last
+    Judgment.—_Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella._
+]
+
+Giorgio Vasari regarded Gherardo Starnina (active before 1400) as an
+important link between Giotto and the Renaissance, and if Professor
+Suida is right in ascribing the frescoes of the legend of St. Nicholas
+in the Castellani Chapel, Santa Croce, to Starnina, Vasari was quite
+right. About this mysterious pupil of Antonio Veneziano who worked in
+Spain, we really know almost nothing. But the St. Nicholas frescoes have
+a grimness and gravity which points back to Giotto and withal a careful
+fusion of light and shade which anticipates Masolino and Masaccio.
+Meanwhile Giotto’s own great compositions in still undiminished splendor
+and impressiveness stood ready to give lessons to the eye and mind that
+could read them aright. Before such later panoramists as Niccolò di
+Pietro Gerini, Mariotto di Nardo, and Spinello Aretino were gone, that
+eye was already busy, in the person of a rugged little boy of San
+Giovanni in Valdarno. He may have already been called Masaccio for his
+untidiness. He was to rebuild on Giotto and create the grand style of
+the Renaissance.
+
+A mere catalogue of those painters who pursued the panoramic method with
+ability can hardly be expected. One and all they followed the Sienese
+narrative style. Prominent would be certain incomers from other cities,
+Giovanni da Milano, Antonio Veneziano, and Spinello Aretino. These are
+typical decorators of the last quarter of the 14th century.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 31. Andrea Bonaiuti, The Navicella, fresco, closely imitated from
+    Giotto’s Mosaic at St. Peter’s, Rome.—_Spanish Chapel._
+]
+
+We do better to fix our attention upon the most remarkable example of
+the Florentine panoramic style, the decoration of the Spanish Chapel,
+the chapter house attached to the Dominican Church of Santa Maria
+Novella.[14] The work was begun by Andrea Bonaiuti in the year 1365, as
+we know from a recently discovered document. As decoration it is
+delightful, if rather superficially so. The artist treats his spaces as
+wholes, declining to cut them up into oblongs after the earlier fashion.
+He covers his great surfaces with ease and taste, has a knack at
+illustration, and a fine sense of color. The great Calvary over the
+triumphal arch imposes from its very vastness; the triangles of the
+cross vault, including a spirited transcript of Giotto’s Navicella,
+Figure 31, are composed with clarity and skill; the famous composition
+of the Dominican theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, enthroned above the
+Liberal Arts and Sciences, and their representatives in history,
+combines an almost Byzantine formality and grandeur with prettiness and
+ingenuity in details. But the method is better shown in the decoration
+opposite, which represents the dual earthly powers, the Pope and the
+Emperor, enthroned equally, and supported by the representatives of the
+spiritual orders and secular estates, Figure 32. The group which
+symbolizes the right government of society, according to mediæval ideas,
+is set before a church which quite faithfully shows what the Cathedral
+of Florence was then intended to be. High up in the arch is the goal of
+all earthly endeavor—Heaven with Christ enthroned amid the angels; an
+altar with a lamb before Him, symbolizing His sacrifice; His Mother
+kneeling as intercessor for mankind. The Gate of Heaven with St. Peter
+in attendance, is naïvely set above the church on a sort of aerial raft.
+Below is a novel realistic touch, the villa-studded sky line of hills
+which encloses Florence. The real guide to St. Peter’s presence is
+always a Dominican monk, usually St. Dominic himself is intended—the
+founder and militant evangelist of the order, as St. Thomas Aquinas was
+its systematic theologian. In the lower range of the picture, St.
+Dominic confutes the heretics, who tear their wicked books in despair.
+Above he vainly beseeches careless gentlefolk at dalliance in an orange
+grove; still higher, he leads the truly penitent to Heaven’s gate. At
+the foot the Domini Canes (a bad pun for Dominicans) are vigilant. The
+moral of the fresco is, happy the world which trusts its worldly and
+religious business to the Emperor and the Pope, and its personal
+religious problems to the Dominicans. It is a kind of glorified poster
+for the order.
+
+In its sprightliness, variety, complication and facile charm, it is a
+fine example of the panoramic style. It lacks every quality of
+seriousness whether as a composition or in the drawing of the figures.
+But its fairy tale profuseness and ease have made it ever since it was
+painted, one of the most popular decorations in Italy. Its success shows
+the kind of taste with which the few disciplined artists of the
+fourteenth century had to contend. Such obstacles have ever been the
+fate of the artist who cares enough for his art to practice it
+austerely.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 32. Andrea Bonaiuti. Dominican Allegory of Church and State.
+    Fresco.—_Spanish Chapel._
+]
+
+Work of the facile and superficial character of the Spanish Chapel
+Florence produced in abundance for two generations after Giotto’s death.
+His faithful but dull disciple, Taddeo Gaddi, as we have seen, gloomily
+foresaw the downfall of the art of painting. But as in a great
+personality the recreations and even dissipations seldom permanently
+eclipse the greater purpose, so Florence was big enough to indulge for a
+time her weaker side. Had Taddeo Gaddi been more intelligent, or even
+more hopeful, he would have seen that new masters must arise, and that
+there would soon be pictures in Florence at which Giotto come back to
+earth would gaze with that humility with which he had once viewed the
+marble gods of Rome, with that understanding sympathy which he had borne
+to all his fellow mortals.
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER I
+
+
+               ON THE DIGNITY AND WEALTH OF OLD FLORENCE
+
+Giovanni Villani, _Historie_, XII, 4, regrets the passing of decorum
+with the advent of the French and the Duke of Athens in 1342, but wealth
+increased.
+
+“Formerly the clothing and costumes [of the Florentines] was the most
+beautiful, noble and distinguished of any nation, in the manner of the
+togaed Romans.” Evidently the look of things favored the art of a
+Giotto.
+
+In book XI, ch. 91–93, Villani gives remarkable and quite modern
+statistics which I paraphrase and quote, in part from the Giunta
+edition, Venice, 1559. The time is about 1340.
+
+“We found by diligence that in these times there were in Florence 25,000
+men fit to bear arms, from 15 to 70 years old, among whom there were
+1506 nobles.... There were then in Florence 65 fully equipped knights,
+though before the middle class which now rules was organized, there were
+more than 250 knights.... There was estimated to be 90,000 ... men,
+women and children in the city. There is supposed to be generally in the
+city 1,500 foreigners, travellers, and soldiers not counting in the
+population the clergy, monks, and nuns.... In the outlying districts are
+supposed to be 80,000 people. We have found from the rector who baptizes
+the children (since for every male who was baptized in San Giovanni—in
+order to have the count—was dropped a black bean, and for every female a
+white) that for every year in these times there were from 5,800 to
+6,000, the males generally exceeding by 300 to 500 a year.
+
+“We find that the boys and girls at [primary] school were from 8,000 to
+10,000. The boys who study the abacus (calculation) and arabic numbers,
+in six schools, from 1,000 to 1,200. And those who are learning [Latin]
+grammar and logic, in four great schools, from 550 to 600.
+
+“The churches, which were then in Florence and in the suburbs, counting
+the abbeys, and monastic churches, we find to be 110, of which 57,
+parish churches ... 5 abbeys and two priories with 80 monks, 24 convents
+of nuns, with more than 500 women, 10 friaries with more than 700
+friars, 30 hospitals with more than 1000 beds to lodge the poor and
+infirm, and from 250 to 300 chaplain priests.
+
+“The shops of the cloth makers (_arte della lana_) were 200 and more,
+and they made from 70,000 to 80,000 bolts, at a value of more than
+1,200,000 gold florins, although fully a third part staid in the city
+for the workers, without gain for the cloth handlers, and the workers
+are more than 30,000 persons....
+
+“The warehouses of the art of the _Calimala_, for the French and
+transalpine cloth, were 20, which brought in per year more than 10,000
+bolts of a value of 300,000 gold florins, all of which was sold in
+Florence....
+
+Banks of money changers 80.... Shops of bootmakers ... 300. The college
+of judges, from 80 to 100. And notaries from 600 up, doctors of physic
+and surgery 60, and druggists’ shops 100....
+
+“The greater part of the well-to-do, rich, and noble citizens with their
+families, staid in the country for four months, and some, more, a
+year.”...
+
+“Other dignities and magnificences of our city of Florence I should not
+fail to bring to memory, for information of such as shall come after us.
+It was, within, well built with many beautiful palaces and houses, and
+in these times they were continually demolishing, thus bettering the
+building by making it more comfortable and rich, bringing in from
+outside the examples for every sort of betterment and beauty. Churches,
+cathedrals, friaries of every rule, monasteries, magnificent and rich.
+Furthermore, there was no citizen who did not have a country place,
+great or small, which was not richly built, indeed far greater buildings
+than in the city; and every citizen sinned by inordinate spending,
+whence they were thought crazy. But it was so magnificent a thing to
+see, that a foreigner, not used to coming in, believed, because of the
+rich structures for three miles about, that it was all one city after
+the manner of Rome, not to mention the rich palaces, towers, court
+yards, terraced gardens, still further from the city, which in any other
+country would have been called the rural districts. In short one would
+have thought that within six miles of the city were more rich and noble
+inhabitants, than, taking them together, two Florences could have
+produced. And let this suffice for telling of the facts of Florence.”
+
+
+                  GIOTTO’S VIEW OF FRANCISCAN POVERTY
+
+Giotto’s humanistic detachment from the Franciscan doctrine of voluntary
+poverty is well illustrated in his poem which is quoted in part from
+Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s translation. The original is in G. Milanesis’
+edition of Vasari, _Le Vite_, Vol. I, Florence 1878, pp. 426–8.
+
+              “Many there are, praisers of Poverty;
+              The which as man’s best state is register’d
+                When by free choice preferr’d,
+              With strict observance, having nothing here.
+              For this they find certain authority
+              Wrought of an over-nice interpreting.
+                Now as concerns such thing,
+              A hard extreme to me it doth appear,
+                Which to commend I fear,
+              For seldom are extremes without some vice,
+                Let every edifice,
+              Of work or word, secure foundation find;
+                Against the potent wind,
+              And all things perilous, so well prepared—
+              That it needs no correction afterward.”
+
+
+          A CONTRACT WITH ORCAGNA FOR THE ALTAR-PIECE OF 1357
+
+Tommaso di Rossello Strozzi left a rough note of the terms of the
+contract for the altar-piece of his chapel. Doubtless the actual
+contract was much fuller. The minute is published by Filippo Baldinucci,
+_Opere_, Milano 1811, Vol IV. p. 397.
+
+“Herewith is to be written [on my part] and Andrea called Orcagna that I
+Tommaso di Rossello aforesaid have given to paint for the altar-piece
+which is made for the altar of [the chapel] in Santa Maria Novella, of a
+breadth of five braccia, 1 sol. [over 10 feet] there or thereabouts. The
+aforesaid Andrea is to paint in fine and splendid colors; and gold,
+silver and everything else are truly to be used in the entire panel and
+pinnacles, that is [gold] leaf. Only in the side columns may silver be
+used.... And [with] as many figures as [directed] by me Tommaso it shall
+be completed. And the said panel to be entirely painted by his own hand.
+
+“[1] 354 in twenty months....
+
+“Should it come about that the aforesaid Andrea should not give it to us
+completed and painted.”
+
+“He should pay me for every additional week that he works at the
+painting as it shall seem right to the judgment of the here named
+arbitrators.”...
+
+“Should it come to more than the aforesaid price, we will take the
+judgment of Carlo, Paolo and Fra Jacopo.”
+
+Such is approximately the sense of this very difficult and quite
+grammarless annotation of Tommaso Strozzi. The arbitrators must have had
+occasion to act, for the panel is dated 1357, two years after the
+promised time.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 33. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Madonna of San Francesco.
+]
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+             SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIÆVAL STYLE
+
+  On the Romantic instability of Siena—Fidelity to Byzantine
+      Ideals—Guido, Coppo, the Master of the Altar-front of St.
+      Peter—Duccio and his great Majesty of the Madonna—His twofold
+      tendency: to elaborated staged narrative; to sparse and exquisite
+      decoration—Simone Martini and the Idealistic chivalric style—The
+      Brothers Lorenzetti and the popular panoramic style—Second half of
+      the Fourteenth Century—The Fifteenth Century: Sassetta and
+      Giovanni de Paolo—Matteo, Benvenuto and Neroccio—The Renaissance
+      and the downfall of the School, Francesco di Giorgio, Sodoma.
+
+
+As you enter Siena by the wide Camollia gate you will read in Latin
+“Siena opens her Heart still wider to thee”:—_Cor magis tibi Sena
+pandit._ Thus Siena avows herself the city of the heart. Where Florence
+studied and calculated, she mused and dreamed; where Florence was solid,
+she was volatile. For unrewarding idealisms she had a kind of genius.
+Long after the other Italian communes had seen it was worst possible
+business to support the emperor, Siena was faithful to that lost cause.
+Every few years she changed her form of government, and seldom for the
+better. Merrymaking and pageantry were universal in old Italy, but Siena
+alone had a Spendthrift Club (_Brigata Spendereccia_) devoted to
+continual pleasure, and a poet, Folgore da San Gemignano, to celebrate
+its gaieties. Siena was ardent in inconstant fashion. Early in the 14th
+century was found a nude marble Venus so beautiful that it was set up in
+the great square and thronged with admirers. Then the war with Florence
+went badly, and at a few words from a pious fanatic, the citizenry
+smashed up the image and secretly buried the bits on Florentine soil to
+bring bad luck to the foe. Naturally no bad luck ensued to Florence, but
+Siena had enjoyed two delightful emotional crises. You will see why
+Siena never could produce a realistic art, any more than Ireland has
+produced one. Her eye was not on the object but on her own state of
+mind. Thus Florence will produce historians, scientists, and
+politicians, while Siena will produce saints and miracles.
+
+Amid this romantic inconstancy, the continuing thread was the cult of
+the Blessed Virgin. No other city thought so delicately of her, and no
+other art has represented her so ideally. Had she not saved the city? In
+1259 the Florentine Guelfs and their allies marched with overwhelming
+force to the very gates of Siena. Ruin was imminent and despair abroad,
+when by a common impulse the populace marched penitently to the
+Cathedral and before the rude picture of the Queen of Heaven solemnly
+committed the city into her hands. In ecstacy of renewed faith the
+inferior army of Siena fell upon the invaders at Montaperti and utterly
+routed them. In gratitude Siena remained the city of the Virgin. When in
+1310 the painter Duccio replaced the rude effigy of the Madonna of
+Victory with one of the finest Madonnas known to art, Fig. 37, the whole
+city suspended business and escorted the picture from the studio to the
+Cathedral with hymns and litanies in honor of their divine patroness.
+
+Nowhere else has painting paid such homage to the Virgin Mary. In other
+cities it was enough to represent her enthroned with a handful of angels
+or saints in attendance. The Sienese painters multiplied the celestial
+escort until it became a heavenly court over which the Mother of God
+presides in sweet majesty. Siena also grasped at the then not quite
+orthodox subject of the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven. You see
+her slender form rising amid a glory of angels more than a hundred years
+before the theme was common elsewhere.
+
+These brief hints will tell of the temper of Siena. You will not expect
+such a city to be like Florence, interested in facts and charmed by the
+human spectacle. She will be rather engrossed with the beauty of old
+legends and in rare forward-looking moments concerned with her own
+devout imaginings. She will not wish the saints to be like the people
+one knows, but like denizens of some divine, far-off fairyland. Her
+painting will not be humanistic but of an unworldly idealism.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 34. Guido of Siena. Madonna.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+Such being the temper of Siena, her artists, unlike those of Florence,
+had no quarrel with the Byzantine style. Its splendid irreality only
+needed to be made flexible and gracious. Siena has really no new ideas
+to express, merely feelings more tender and exquisite. Her pictorial
+reforms are reverent and gradual, backward-looking, mediæval. Her art
+from 1300 to 1500, as lovely within its narrow limits as the closed
+garden of the Virgin, has the great interest of teaching us what
+capacities for growth lay in the mediæval tradition itself—what painting
+in Italy would have been had Siena exercised her temporary might after
+Montaperti and razed Florence five years before Giotto was born.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 35. Sienese about 1275. Altar-front of St. Peter.—_Siena._
+]
+
+A little earlier than the year 1225, when Florence called in strangers
+to adorn the Baptistery with mosaics in the Greek style, Guido of Siena
+signed and dated 1221 the most famous of his madonnas. Unhappily the
+enthroned Virgin of the Palazzo Pubblico was repainted some fifty years
+later, a fact which has led many critics unnecessarily to doubt the
+date.[15] But from half a dozen other pictures by Guido we may learn
+that he was a diligent and rather heavy-handed imitator of the current
+Greek formulas, Figure 34. At the battle of Montaperti the Sienese
+captured an excellent Florentine painter, Coppo di Marcovaldo, and in
+1261 he painted the admirable madonna which is still in the church of
+the Servi. It shows a sensitive use of the Byzantine conventions. There
+is pensiveness and almost shyness in the face and posture of the Virgin,
+and loving intentness in that of the Child. Their relation is to each
+other and not as in earlier madonnas to the devout public. These
+intimate qualities have been ascribed, I think wrongly, to restoration.
+But they appear even more emphatically in the entirely unrestored
+Madonna, Figure 3, in the collection of Mr. Otto Kahn, which I think may
+be a Coppo[16], and is in any case of similar date and feeling.
+
+The same process of sweetening the old style while accepting it, is
+shown in the famous altar-piece of St. Peter in the Academy at Siena,
+Figure 35. The gaunt figure of the Saint is completely traditional, the
+little stories of the Annunciation and Nativity at the side show a new
+vivacity and a new grace. Siena met the innovating painter more than
+half way, for the indignant citizens soon marred with their knives the
+crucifiers of the head of the Christian Church. The date of the panel
+will not be far from 1275, and already the painter of genius who was to
+create the sweet, new style was learning his trade.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 36. Duccio Purcellai Madonna.—_Santa Maria Novella, Florence._
+]
+
+Of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the father of the Sienese school, and
+everything considered its greatest master, we have numerous records,[17]
+and by no means all to his credit. He must have had the artistic
+temperament in a degree then unusual. The court records show half a
+dozen fines against him, and he was not scrupulous about paying his
+debts. One forgets these foibles before those Madonnas which are a
+consummate expression of taste and those narratives which are a triumph
+of tact and ingenuity. Duccio’s mind does not grasp the harsher and more
+heroic emotions, but within the realm of the tender and pathetic he is
+supreme. His elegance appears in his first important work, the famous
+Rucellai Madonna, Figure 36, in Santa Maria Novella at Florence, which
+tradition erroneously ascribes to Cimabue. It is presumably the great
+panel which Duccio contracted to paint in 1285.[18] He was probably
+young and unconsidered, for he took all the risks, agreeing that the
+picture might be rejected at the will of the patrons. The Society of
+Saint Mary the Virgin would have been foolish indeed to reject the most
+gracious Madonna the world had then seen. Characteristic of Duccio are
+the swaying curves of the contours and especially of the draperies, the
+thin, delicately folded robes of the Child and the attendant angels and
+the sensitively drawn bare feet. Working in Florence and doubtless
+impressed by Cimabue, Duccio has retained in this early work a certain
+austerity which gives way in his later work to a more feminine
+sweetness. For that very reason the Rucellai Madonna is perhaps the
+greatest Madonna of the century, since without loss of the stately
+Byzantine qualities, she gains the new attributes of grace. It was no
+wonder that when the name of Duccio had faded out of the Florentine
+memory, Florence ascribed this noble Madonna to the venerated founder of
+her native school, Cimabue. Recent criticism has righted the unconscious
+wrong thus done to Siena.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 37. Duccio. Madonna in Majesty.—_Opera del Duomo, Siena._
+]
+
+To mature his style Duccio needed only to intensify the qualities of
+sweetness and grace which are evident already in the Rucellai Madonna.
+The stages of his growth are represented in minor works at Siena and in
+British and Roman collections. But his fame, for the layman, is
+associated with the magnificent altar-piece which he executed for the
+Cathedral of Siena, and only the special student need look beyond it. On
+the 9th of October, 1309, Duccio contracted with the trustees of the
+Cathedral to do a great altar-piece wholly with his own hands, at the
+rate of sixteen soldi a day and expenses. He promised to take no other
+work during the painting. It was finished in June of 1311 and carried in
+solemn procession from the bottega outside the Porta a Stalloreggi to
+the Cathedral. A chronicler describes the cortege “parading about the
+Campo, as is usual, all the bells pealing a glory in devotion for so
+noble a picture as this is.... And all that day they kept praying with
+many alms which were given to poor folk, praying to God and His Mother,
+who is our advocate, that she defend us in her infinite mercy from every
+adversity and every ill, and save us from the hands of traitors and foes
+of Siena.” Most characteristic of the febrile patriotism of Siena is
+this constant dread of the traitor.
+
+About a year before this ceremony the trustees enlarged the scheme for
+the picture, making an additional contract for thirty-eight stories to
+be paid at the rate of two florins and a half each. These were put on
+the back of the altar-piece, covering very fully the life of Christ and
+that of the Virgin. Thus the front of the altar-piece represents the
+decorative and monumental ideals of Sienese painting while the back
+exemplifies its feeling for narrative. Everything that Sienese painting
+was to be is already in germ in this marvellous work.
+
+In depicting the Virgin “in Majesty,” Figure 37, Duccio has magnified
+the theme. Earlier pictures show only a handful of angels in attendance.
+Here we have a cloud of celestial witnesses, the four patrons of Siena
+kneeling in the foreground, at the sides charming alternation of grim,
+bearded evangelists, orientally soft girl martyrs, and youthful
+archangels. Seven years earlier Cimabue had conceived a similar great
+Majesty for the Church of Santa Chiara at Pisa.[19] Doubtless Duccio had
+seen it, and, though it is lost to us, we may assume, that the Sienese
+artist outdid his prototype both in sweetness and splendor.
+
+In many ways Duccio’s Majesty is highly traditional. It shows the
+Byzantine horror of voids, is a little crowded. But this defect would be
+less apparent if it were raised on its historiated base (_predella_)
+with its original pinnacles above. Everything derives from Byzantine
+exemplars, reverently improved in a realistic direction. Duccio has
+dared to paint the Christ as a laddie; and not as a little old man; he
+has shown the soft forms of His body through light draperies; he has
+kept the austerity of the Byzantine apostles but has attenuated their
+harshness; he has worked the insipid female masks of the older art into
+forms of a positive and dreamy grace. One feels the tender mood of the
+work in the Latin jingle at the foot of the throne, typical of dozens of
+similar dedications in Siena:
+
+                        Mater Sancta Dei
+                        Sis caussa Senis requei
+                        Sis Duccio vita
+                        Te quia pinxit ita
+
+which I may rudely paraphrase:
+
+                 Holy Mother of God: grant Siena rest,
+                 Grant life to Duccio,—he did his best.
+
+All the sensibility of the City of the Virgin is in these prattling
+rhymes with which they loved to hallow and offer great pictures.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 38. Duccio. Entry into Jerusalem; Christ Washing the Apostles’
+    Feet; Last Supper. From the back of the great Madonna.—_Opera del
+    Duomo, Siena._
+]
+
+If the front of this panel shows only moderate innovations, the case is
+not so for the back. The two score stories from the Bible or early
+Christian legend, in the distribution of the figures follow faithfully
+the standard Italo-Byzantine compositions. Where Duccio steps in is in
+bettering the forms, giving grace to the draperies, and animation to the
+gestures—above all in providing contemporary architectural accessories,
+and coping with the problem of space. He also carries to their ultimate
+refinement certain decorative formulas which the Byzantine painters had
+glimpsed but not fully realized. Thus two quite opposed tendencies pass
+into Sienese painting from Duccio;—a rather small preoccupation with
+accessories and the problem of space, and a pure æstheticism concerned
+with finesses of decorative arrangement—in short, the prose and the
+poetry of Sienese painting.
+
+Sienese narrative painting tends to be scrupulous about details and
+inscenation, quite as a good story-teller naturally provides incidents
+that make for plausibility. We may see how Duccio’s mind works in the
+familiar theme of Christ entering Jerusalem, Figure 38. Duccio sets the
+spectator in a garden with an open gate, thus throwing the scene back a
+little. Above the procession and the rejoicing throng rises a city wall,
+and still higher against the sky bristle Gothic towers and spires. Thus
+the theme gains picturesqueness and variety. One forgets that there is
+hardly space for the welcoming throng before the gate, and that the
+donkey’s four feet are on a level although he is going up hill. These
+little maladjustments show that while Duccio took infinite pains in
+inventing the setting, he borrowed the figure groups bodily from earlier
+Byzantine compositions in which the setting was simpler. In this
+piecing-together process he turns some pretty sharp corners, but he
+never sacrifices clarity and expressiveness.
+
+In the scene where the maid servant catches the Galilean burr in Peter’s
+voice, Figure 39, and asks if he be not a follower of Jesus, we find
+Duccio’s method quite at its best. Nothing could be better than the
+sudden turn of the girl with one foot on the steps. Fine, too, is the
+concentration of the crowd on the exciting problem of gossip.
+Well-observed, their actions as they warm their feet and hands at the
+fire. Vivid, too, the impulsive gesture of Peter as he denies the
+charge. The place, a court yard with a staircase leading right into the
+picture above, which represents the court room where Jesus is being
+questioned, is most elaborately planned. One looks back through a portal
+into farther spaces. All this was so new and interesting that I presume
+the Sienese have never noticed to this day that the seated group would
+never fit in the space assigned to it and that the positions of the
+figures are ambiguous. The picture does admirably its work of telling a
+story spiritedly, and that is enough.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 39. Duccio. Peter denies Christ.—_Opera del Duomo, Siena._
+]
+
+Duccio’s Calvary, Figure 41, is remarkable for breadth, spectacular
+effectiveness, and a measured pathos. As usual he multiplies actors and
+incidents while keeping the orderliness of the arrangement. The
+slightness of all the forms, their little weight and uncertain balance
+are apparent. And there is, on the same principle of taste, a similar
+attenuation of emotion. Where Giotto at Padua gave stark tragedy, Duccio
+offers a gentle flutter of restrained grief.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 40. Duccio. The Marys at the Tomb.—_Opera del Duomo._
+]
+
+Such is the average of these narratives, clear, picturesque,
+circumstantial, infused with a generalized and never very intense
+emotion. There are some, mostly composed with few figures, which reveal
+a great fastidiousness of arrangement. In such a composition as the
+Marys at the Tomb, Figure 40, Duccio reveals himself as pure æsthete, as
+consummate master of linear composition. The motive is essentially
+insignificant, merely that the Marys shrunk at the sight of the angel at
+the tomb, but out of that motive of withdrawal is wrought through the
+little panel a lovely rhythm to which everything contributes—the rise of
+the cliffs and their crinkly edges, the contrasting angles of the tomb
+and its impossibly tilted lid, the reciprocal curve of the angel. We
+grasp in the picture a general truth which reaches far beyond Duccio and
+Siena, that a too conscious struggle for style precludes any complete
+expression of emotional significance. For this picture is as trivial as
+a narrative as it is exquisite as a decoration.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 41. Duccio. Calvary.—_Opera del Duomo._
+]
+
+Duccio, who disappears from our sight about the year 1318, fixed once
+for all the character of the Sienese school. In narrative it was to
+adopt the placid and tender tone of legend, most unlike the urgent and
+dramatic mood of Giotto. The Sienese artist was too reverent to raise
+the question how did this happen, and how did the persons feel; he asked
+rather “How do we feel about it as believers?” The beauty of the work,
+then, is not that of outer reality but of revery and meditation. It
+never has the tang and variety of good Florentine narrative painting,
+but within its lovingly modulated monotony, Sienese narrative painting
+is supremely charming.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 42. Simone Martini. Madonna in Majesty. Fresco.—_Palazzo
+    Pubblico, Siena._
+]
+
+Duccio also started in Siena a somewhat worried and petty concern with
+accessories, architecture, complications of perspective. He inaugurated
+a tradition of material splendor in gilding, tooling, delicate
+graduation of color which remained the glory of Sienese painting for
+nearly two centuries. So far as we know he painted only in tempera on
+panel, and the Sienese generally were to triumph in this feminine form
+of work rather than in the masculine methods of fresco. Finally Duccio
+took over from Byzantine art and perfected certain finesses of highly
+simplified and abstract composition, a pure æstheticism distinctly
+Sienese and wholly alien to the warm humanism of Florence. You will find
+this austerely lovely style at its best in Simone Martini, and surviving
+as late as Sassetta and the middle of the fifteenth century.
+
+After Duccio, Sienese painting divides itself into two tendencies, one
+aristocratic, chivalric and æsthetic, deriving from his decorative
+manner; the other popular, narrative and realistic, deriving from his
+minutely staged scenes on the back of the great altar-piece. Of the
+aristocratic style Simone Martini is the greatest exemplar, of the
+popular style, the brothers Lorenzetti.
+
+Simone Martini was born in 1283 or thereabouts. We first meet him as an
+artist in the great frescoed Majesty of the Virgin, Figure 42, completed
+in 1315 for the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. The arrangement is like that of
+Duccio’s Majesty, finished only five years earlier, and the facial types
+are generally those of Duccio. But the great fresco gains clarity and
+impressiveness from the added space, from the picturesque motive of a
+canopy, from the isolation and elevation of the Madonna above her
+escort, and from the rich Gothic forms of the throne, which are a
+novelty in painting. While most of the faces show the orientalism of
+Duccio, the Madonna has the level-browed, intent character of Gothic
+art, and the Child is realistic. Gothic again is the graceful border
+with its fine medallions, and the bright colors of the whole. It is the
+most splendid enthroned Virgin in the world, and she is conceived
+chivalrically as a sort of tournament queen with her paladins upholding
+a canopy, and angel pages on their knees offering roses and lilies.
+
+To the Sienese this was a political picture, as a rhymed inscription in
+Italian shows. The saintly patrons of Siena address the Virgin:
+
+               “Angelic flowers, roses and lilies
+               With which the heavenly meadow is adorned,
+               Delight me less than do good counsels.
+               But sometimes I see such as verily
+               Despise me and my city betray,
+               And gain praise the more for evil words,
+               With such as merit condemnation.”
+
+The Virgin answers the saints patrons somewhat evasively:
+
+                 “Fix my delights in your minds,
+                 So that I shall, as ye wish,
+                 Fulfil your honorable requests.
+                 But if the powerful molest the weak,
+                 Oppressing whether with shame or harm—
+                 Let not your prayers be made for these
+                 Nor for whomsoever betrays my city.”
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 43. Simone Martini. St. Martin Knighted.—_Lower Church, Assisi._
+]
+
+In Simone’s work this great Majesty is an exception. He preferred
+generally to work on a more restricted scale, to burn the lamp of
+æsthetic sacrifice. I can merely allude to the great idealized portrait
+of St. Louis of Toulouse, in S. Lorenzo, Naples. It was painted for King
+Robert of Anjou, whose kneeling figure appears in the picture, sometime
+after 1317. The thing is resplendent in gold and azure, adorned by
+curiously twisted Gothic borders; in sentiment it is impassive as a
+Buddhist painting.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 44. Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi. The Annunciation.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+About the year 1325,[20] we may surmise, Simone was called to Assisi to
+fresco the Chapel of St. Martin in the Lower Church. He set upon the
+walls so many fairy tales, tender and sprightly in sentiment, provided
+with the few essential accessories that a rapid story-teller would need.
+What more charming than the boy Martin praying while they bind on him
+the equipment of a knight, Figure 43, and musicians sound a fanfare!
+What more gallant than the lad setting out on crusade against the
+Teutons who lurk in a cleft of the background! This gracious childlike
+quality, quite akin to the tender phase of Duccio, is exceptional in
+Simone, who habitually is the strenuous decorator.
+
+His sparse and austere methods appear clearly in the commemorative
+fresco of Guidoriccio, hired general of Siena, and conqueror of
+Sassoforte. It is in the Palazzo Pubblico and duly dated 1328. Nothing
+is realistic but the horse and rider. They are isolated, hold alone a
+field made up of pure symbols for camps, and fortresses and craggy
+hill-tops, yet the martial effect is unmistakable and the composition
+most quaintly impressive.
+
+The quintessence of Simone’s later art is in the famous Annunciation of
+the Uffizi, Figure 44. In order to justify the most nervously exquisite
+of linear arrangements he has chosen the least significant moment of the
+event. His Virgin is merely a sullen princess resenting an intrusion;
+the Gabriel, an etherialized courtier pleading a cause with apologies.
+But the contrast of the advancing and shrinking motives gave Simone
+precisely what he wanted. He builds up areas richly colored or brocaded,
+bounded by sharp curves, relieved by flutters and spirals of flying
+drapery, and accentuated by such details as the olive twigs and the lily
+which have the crisp incisiveness of finest metal work. As a triumph of
+pure decoration Gothic painting has nothing better to show than this
+lovely panel which was finished in 1333 for the chapel of Sant’ Ansano
+at Siena. It has little quality of heart in it, and no reverence save
+that of consummate workmanship.
+
+Great honors awaited Simone. He was called to the exiled papal court at
+Avignon in 1339, met Petrarch, painted Petrarch’s Laura and is lauded in
+one of the poet’s sonnets. Of Simone’s work at Avignon we have only a
+few small panels scattered between Antwerp, Paris, Liverpool, and
+Berlin. The compositions, most of which belonged to a composite
+altar-piece depicting Christ’s passion, waver between his old simple
+style and a crowded and animated mood reminiscent of Duccio, and
+influenced by the Lorenzetti. Simone is unable to resist the universal
+tendency towards diffuse narrative, and in so far as he yields to it, he
+is less than himself. Christ Bearing His Cross, in the Louvre,
+exemplifies the extravagance and morbidness of this latest manner,
+Figure 45. His strength lies in sacrifice and abstraction, his real
+affinities are the contemporary Buddhist painters of China and Japan,
+though of course he knew nothing of them. He died in 1344, leaving
+behind him a tradition of fastidious artistry which was potent in Siena
+for over a century.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 45. Simone Martini. Christ bearing His Cross.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+As late as 1450, Lorenzo Ghiberti informs us in his “Commentaries,”[21]
+the Sienese regarded Simone Martini as their greatest painter. He
+differed from them, preferring, himself, Ambrogio Lorenzetti. This was
+an eminently Florentine choice, Ambrogio’s warmth, concreteness, and
+elaboration were on the whole Florentine. He worked for several years at
+Florence, must have known Giotto, certainly studied him with discerning
+admiration. With his elder brother, Pietro, Ambrogio Lorenzetti gave to
+Duccio’s tradition of detailed narrative painting its perfected form.
+They were great fresco painters, and most characteristic as such. In
+panel painting they are less original, but they bring into this highly
+conventional art a great ardor and curiosity. They represent the popular
+average of Siena as Simone Martini represented its aristocratic
+minority.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 46. Pietro Lorenzetti. Madonna with Saints, 1320.—_Pieve,
+    Arezzo._
+]
+
+We first meet Pietro Lorenzetti as an artist in the altar-back at the
+Pieve, Arezzo,[22] Figure 46, which was finished in 1320. It is an
+_ancona_, or compartmented piece and the most splendid that has come
+down in Romanesque form. The figures are of two sorts. The Madonna is of
+intent Gothic type, and the fine motive of holding off the Christchild
+at elbow length in order to see him better is borrowed from Giovanni
+Pisano, who in turn took it from French Gothic sculpture. So are the
+forms above in the Annunciation new and graceful, while the little boxed
+room with its plastic column is also novel. The Assumption of the
+Madonna in the highest pinnacle is probably the earliest occurrence of
+this famous Sienese theme in painting. But all the figures of saints in
+the three orders of the side panels are taken almost without change from
+Duccio’s great altar-piece. It would be interesting to trace Pietro’s
+emancipation through a dozen panels. No one better combined dignity with
+grace, and feeling, and splendor. His work in fresco is fragmentary and
+confused with that of his younger brother. We are certain of nothing
+except a fragment of a deeply felt Calvary in the Church of St.
+Francesco, at Siena. Many critics ascribe to him the agitated and wildly
+picturesque frescoes of the Passion in the left transept of the Lower
+Church at Assisi.[23] But this, I think, is a mistake. Pietro is never
+in his certain works so lively and indecorous and casual. We have to do
+with an artist influenced by Duccio working about 1330, Pietro himself
+may appear as the Stigmatization, Figure 47, and one or two of the other
+simpler compositions. The other frescoes are chiefly interesting as
+showing the dangers of the panoramic method of Siena. Take the Last
+Supper, Figure 48. The theme is simply lost in the fantastic richness of
+the accessories. It is hard to find Christ or Judas, for the eye seeks
+the radiating rafters or the scullery where cats lurk and eager
+scullions wipe the dishes.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 47. Pietro Lorenzetti, or Follower. St. Francis receiving the
+    Stigmata. Fresco.—_Lower Church, Assisi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 48. School of Pietro Lorenzetti. The Last Supper. Fresco.—_Lower
+    Church, Assisi._
+]
+
+In the Birth of the Virgin, dated 1342, Figure 49, Pietro spoils a
+carefully studied and well-felt picture by elaboration of the setting.
+The frame is conceived as the plastic front of a Gothic room within and
+behind which, spaces are multiplied confusingly. Here the pedantic
+preoccupation with the problem of space offends the eye and destroys the
+unity of what in a simpler setting would be a monumental composition. It
+illustrates the dangers of that smaller realism which from Duccio down
+afflicted the more progressive painters of Siena. Such a picture enables
+us to appreciate the tact and thoughtfulness with which Ambrogio
+Lorenzetti approached his narrative themes.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 49. Pietro Lorenzetti. Birth of the Virgin.—_Opera del Duomo,
+    Siena._
+]
+
+Ambrogio Lorenzetti was born about the beginning of the century. In 1331
+and later he painted remarkable frescoes for the Church of St. Francis.
+These if complete would afford the most interesting comparisons with
+Giotto at Florence, but the two that remain are among the best narrative
+paintings of the time. What will first strike the observer in the story
+of St. Louis of Toulouse renouncing his throne as he takes the
+Franciscan vow, Figure 50, is the variety and orderliness of the
+emotions. The devotion of the saint is well offset by the intense,
+melancholy curiosity of his brother Robert, who becomes king through the
+sacrifice. The audience is divided into admiring Franciscans and idly
+marveling courtiers, the whole well dominated by the kindly and reverend
+figure of the Pope. Remarkable is the methodical division of the spaces.
+A slender column establishes the picture plane and sets the figures
+back. A sort of desk in a hollow square defines and isolates the
+monastic group, while the courtiers have their appropriate location in a
+third plane of alcoves. Florence has next to nothing of this sort at
+this period, and it may be noted that this careful division of spaces is
+not matter of display and curiosity as in Duccio, but is logical and
+effective as regards the persons of the narrative.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 50. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Prince Louis of Toulouse receives the
+    Franciscan Vow.—_San Francesco, Siena._
+]
+
+Of similar significance, but more dramatic and picturesque, is the
+martyrdom of the Franciscan missionaries before the Sultan of Morocco.
+The elaborated spaces make for clarity, the entirely professional and
+impersonal cruelty of the Moorish tyrant and his bodyguard is splendidly
+caught and effectively contrasted with the courageous submission of the
+martyrs. Lorenzo Ghiberti praises the energy and character of this work,
+and the observer of today feels as deeply its romantic appeal. All the
+figures are set on receding platforms, the problem of space is solved
+along lines of intelligent literalism.[24]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 51. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Madonna in Majesty.—_Massa Marittima._
+]
+
+It would be a pleasure to dwell on the Madonnas of Ambrogio. The tragic
+Madonna of S. Francesco, Figure 33, the Madonna with St. Dorothy and St.
+Lucy, in the Siena Academy, the Virgin in Mr. Dan Fellowes Platt’s
+collection are among the best. No other early Italian so combined
+nobility with motherly warmth. His splendor and sweet dignity may best
+be felt in the Majesty of the Virgin, Figure 51, in the little town of
+Massa Marittima. The central motive, Mary and the Child embracing, is
+almost Ambrogio’s invention. He rings the changes on it in lovely
+modulations, while always retaining monumentality. This picture is as
+stately as Duccio’s Majesty, and as resplendent as Simone Martini’s,
+while having qualities of ardor and fancifulness all its own. The
+fairy-like Virtues on the steps of the Madonna’s throne especially show
+the rich vein of pure fantasy which accompanied Ambrogio’s robustness.
+The picture may be dated about 1336 or later.
+
+Previous to its painting Ambrogio had passed some years at Florence,
+where he must have studied and known Giotto, and where he himself
+influenced powerfully the beginnings of the new panoramic style.
+Whatever frescoes he himself did there have perished, and the only
+memorials of his visit are certain delightful little panels telling with
+vivacity and utmost circumstantiality the legends of St. Nicholas. At
+Florence he must have analyzed Giotto’s great political frescoes, now
+lost, which depicted in symbols good and bad government. These were
+surely the inspiration for the political symbols and illustrations which
+Ambrogio, in the year 1337 and later, painted in the great hall of the
+Palazzo Pubblico at Siena.
+
+The most famous is the Allegory of the State. The Commune sits
+enthroned, above in the air are the theological virtues—Faith, Hope and
+Charity; seated at the side are the four secular virtues—Prudence,
+Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude—and with them two additional
+personifications useful to a state—Magnanimity and Peace. The graceful
+relaxed figure of Peace, Figure 52, with her filmy drapery is famous.
+Below the platform on which the Commune sits with attendant virtues, are
+the grim, disciplined forms of men-at-arms and a throng of magistrates
+and citizenry. At the left are symbolized Concord and Justice as the
+supporters of a well-ruled state. Here the symbolism is childishly
+obvious. Concord holds her smoothing plane. From her hand go strings
+which bind in fellowship a group of citizens below and lead above to the
+figure of Justice. Still higher is Wisdom. Justice deals punishment with
+one hand and grants aid with the other; the Middle Ages never admitted
+that Justice was merely punitive. The figures of Justice and Concord are
+superb,—Ambrogio’s Madonna type on a heroic scale.
+
+As a pictorial representation of the finest mediæval ideas of
+statecraft, this fresco is of incomparable interest. As a decoration it
+is hardly successful. The theme has hampered the artist, the handling of
+the figures in several scales with the largest above, produces confusion
+and topheaviness. Beautiful in the parts, it is disappointing in the
+whole.
+
+Far better merely as decoration is the companion fresco which represents
+the Effects of Good Government, Figure 53. We have a peaceful city, the
+entrancing spectacle of Siena as she was about the year 1339. Girls are
+dancing a carol in the foreground with the quaintest dignity, mounted
+merchants are passing, and if the picture were better preserved, we
+should see the mechanics—or “artists” as they still call themselves in
+Italy—working cheerily in their shops. In its richness without
+confusion, this is the very triumph of the panoramic realism which
+Ambrogio made popular throughout Italy.
+
+There are many more frescoes in this series, mostly by imitators of
+Ambrogio. The Sienese region is full of works by him or by his faithful
+followers. His panel pictures are in many galleries of Europe and
+America. They all confirm the record of Ghiberti that Ambrogio had the
+habits of a nobleman—a great sympathy, a fine scrupulousness, a real
+magnanimity. Certain contemporaries seem greater, Giotto surely, Simone
+Martini perhaps, but no Italian painter until Raphael himself reveals so
+complete and harmonious a development. We find no trace of the brothers
+Lorenzetti after 1348. Presumably they perished in the great plague of
+that year.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 52. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Peace, from the Fresco of Good
+    Government.—_Palazzo Pubblico, Siena._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 54. Luca Tommé. The Assumption of the Virgin.—_Jarves Coll., New
+    Haven, Conn._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 53. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Results of Good Government—The Peaceful
+    City. Fresco.—_Palazzo Pubblico, Siena._
+]
+
+For a century after the plague year, 1348, the painters of Siena
+imitated either the narrative realism of Ambrogio or the decorative
+sparseness of Simone Martini. It is customary to align them as of one
+camp or the other. We may indeed say that such painters as Lippo Memmi,
+Andrea Vanni, and Naddo Ceccarelli faithfully echo Simone, while such a
+master as the influential Bartolo di Fredi, who is traceable as late as
+1388, seems completely Lorenzettian. But most of the painters follow
+freely both tendencies, employing Simone’s formulas in altar-pieces with
+few figures, and Ambrogio’s in narrative. Such eclecticism produced
+abundantly works of charm, for delicate sentiment and ornate
+workmanship, but rather few works of originality. Perhaps because of
+willingly accepted limitations, the average is higher than that of
+Florence. Throughout Italy it was a more popular style than the
+Florentine. It dominated the coast region from Naples to Valencia,
+penetrated into Umbria and the Adriatic marshes, and even got a
+temporary foothold in Florence itself. It fitted in better with mediæval
+ideals than the art of Giotto and Orcagna, which implied classical
+antiquity and anticipated the humanism of the Renaissance. On the whole
+Sienese art runs down after the Lorenzetti died, losing the robustness
+which Ambrogio had learned of Giotto, but its decline is gentle and
+interrupted by beneficent reactions towards its established glories. We
+may pass rapidly, and chiefly considering types, the fifty-odd years
+between the Lorenzetti and the new century.
+
+Luca Tommé is credited with an exquisite little Assumption, Figure 54,
+in the Jarves Collection at Yale University. The picture, though it may
+be as late as 1370, repeats loyally the formulas which Pietro Lorenzetti
+invented nearly fifty years earlier. Perhaps Bartolo di Fredi, a rather
+superficial and over-fecund artist, best represents the average
+condition as the fourteenth century closed. In such a panel as the
+Adoration of the Magi, in the Siena Academy, Figure 55, we see the
+familiar theme for the first time expanded in a Lorenzettian sense. It
+becomes a pageant, probably under the influence of contemporary mystery
+plays. It is best conceived in the little scenes in the background; the
+facial types and the simplified setting on the whole recall Simone
+Martini. In other narrative pictures Bartolo vies with Ambrogio
+Lorenzetti in complication of planes and architecture. On the whole he
+is a rather faint echo, but his note while thin is also true.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 55. Bartolo di Fredi. Adoration of the Magi.—_Siena._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 56. Barna. The Transfiguration.—_Collegiata, S. Gemignano._
+]
+
+The declining century produced only one robust painter in Siena, the
+mysterious Barna whose damaged frescoes of the Passion we see in the
+Collegiate Church of San Gemignano. The forms are those of Simone
+Martini, the compositions even more sparse than his, denuded of all
+accessories, and powerfully impressive for this reason. The mood is
+brusque and tragic, with nothing of Sienese sweetness. Barna seems a
+kind of provincial Giotto misplaced and unrealized in the Sienese
+country. In the fresco of the Transfiguration, Figure 56, he rises to
+sublimity. Fra Angelico will merely repeat him in San Marco sixty years
+later. Vasari tells us that Barna died from a fall from his painting
+scaffold in 1381, and that he was then young. If so, his originality was
+tremendous, for he cleared away ruthlessly all the delightful but
+trivial stage furniture so diligently collected by Duccio and the
+Lorenzetti. Modern criticism ascribes to him several panels, and I
+venture to add to the list the simple and stately Marriage of St.
+Catherine in the Boston Museum of Art. Certainly it is one of the most
+serious creations of the period. The type of the Christ and the concise
+and characterful arrangement seem to mark it as a fine Barna. The base
+is interesting, representing the composing of a blood feud, and Miracles
+of St. Michael and St. Margaret. While the simple pattern continues the
+tradition of Simone, Barna avoids Simone’s linear grace-notes. The
+finical element of the predecessor yields to a kind of realism. Barna is
+really the critic of the Sienese school. He silently insists that one
+may be decorative without too much artifice, and dramatic without
+overtaxing the stage carpenter, a very solitary and elevated spirit, to
+whom full justice has not yet been done.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 57. The Three Living and Three Dead, detail from the Lorenzettian
+    fresco, The Triumph of Death.—_Campo Santo, Pisa._
+]
+
+Most remarkable among the works inspired by the Lorenzetti is the
+coarsely effective Triumph of Death, Figure 57. in the famous cemetery
+cloister, Campo Santo, at Pisa. It represents the hazards of the mortal
+life in view of certain death and judgment. At the left a royal hunting
+party is stopped short by the sight and stench of three festering bodies
+in coffins. The Hermit, Saint Macarius, points the obvious lesson that
+kings and lords and fair ladies will turn to dust. In the centre,
+miserable folk beckon and cry to Death to descend and put them out of
+their distress. The harridan death ignores the prayer and flies over a
+pile of corpses towards a gay garden party. Death loves to cut down the
+young and gay and happy, leaving the old and crippled to prolonged
+sorrow. In the upper left hand corner you have monks going about their
+quiet pursuits. The whole adjoining fresco is given up to the lives of
+such desert saints. At the upper right are angels and fiends struggling
+for little nude forms that represent human souls. This motive is a sort
+of overflow from a picture of the Last Judgment. The grim moral of the
+three pictures is that the worldly life is one of mortal peril, which
+may best be avoided by renouncing the world and joining a monastic
+order. The work was completed about 1375, is in the rougher following of
+the Lorenzetti, and has been famous ever since it was painted on the
+cloister wall. Entirely Sienese in its conception, in its ruggedness it
+transcends the usual softness of the school. It is the last significant
+work of the 14th century.
+
+Siena passed into the fifteenth century without greatly changing her
+art. In the work of such traditional figures as Taddeo Bartoli one may
+observe a certain coarsening of the tradition. Mere splendor tends to
+replace the old delicacy, narrative painting becomes ever more
+complicated and confused. The latter tendency is manifested in frescoes
+which Domenico di Bartolo painted, between 1440 and 1443 for the
+Hospital of the Scala, Figure 58. Their crowded picturesqueness grows
+legitimately out of the Lorenzettian tradition, as does the elaboration
+of architectural accessories. But the work also implies a certain
+knowledge of the current Florentine discoveries in linear perspective
+and in architecture. A small ingenuity runs pretty wild in these
+decorations, valuable as they are in picturing the times.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 58. Domenico di Bartolo. Clothing the Naked, from fresco series,
+    the Seven Acts of Mercy.—_Scala Hospital, Siena._
+]
+
+About the time these frescoes were designed, a renovation of Sienese
+painting was being made along divergent lines by Stefano di Giovanni,
+nicknamed Sassetta,[25] and by the eager eccentric, Giovanni di Paolo.
+In both cases we have a reactionary reform. Sassetta restudies devoutly
+Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti, infusing his own tender mysticism
+both into decoration and narrative. In a manner he combines the two
+great currents of Siena’s past. We may best approach him through the
+triptych of the Birth of the Virgin in the Collegiate church at Asciano,
+Figure 59. It is his earliest work painted not much later than 1428
+when, being thirty-five years old, he joined the Painters’ Guild. The
+picture is conceived in the strictest Lorenzettian fashion, the frame
+being treated as the front or extension of the painted architecture.
+Aside from this carefully constructed setting, with its successive
+spaces, the casual and familiar distribution of the figures suggests
+strongly Pietro Lorenzetti. But the rich accessories in Sassetta’s hands
+are delicately selected, the humble gestures have an artless grace, the
+secondary figures such as the brocaded handmaid entering from the rear
+are fascinating in their own right. An air of alert gentleness runs
+through the picture. It is shared by persons of all ages. Such episodes
+as the chatting of two old men before a respectfully listening urchin
+add nothing to the story but strongly reinforce the faery charm of the
+whole. Winsomeness has supplanted the monumental quality of the older
+school. Above in the side gables are the scenes of the passing of the
+Virgin’s soul and her funeral procession, both conceived in the manner
+of the Lorenzetti. But the familiar forms are singularly animated by a
+new spirit of tenderness. By a paradox these little stories are really
+more like Duccio than any intervening work.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 59. Sassetta. The Birth of the Virgin.—_Asciano._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 60. Sassetta. Marriage of St. Francis to Poverty.—_Chantilly,
+    France._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 61. Sassetta. Temptation of St. Anthony.—_Jarves Coll., New
+    Haven, Conn._
+]
+
+Sassetta painted seven years on his masterpiece, the now scattered
+_ancona_ for the Franciscan Church at Borgo San Sepolcro. The central
+panel was a St. Francis in ecstacy, now in Bernard Berenson’s
+collection. On the back were eight of the legends of the “Fioretti.” The
+panel was finished in 1444. Especially delightful is the panel at
+Chantilly which represents St. Francis’s mystical betrothal with
+Poverty, Figure 60. This scene is before Monte Amiata, spaced off from
+the group by checkerboard fields. The maidens, Chastity and Obedience,
+sway lily-like beside their more resolute sister, Poverty, upon whose
+timidly offered hand the little saint firmly fixes a ring. Above, the
+celestial trio rises over the mountain line, Poverty turning a regretful
+face to her humble bridegroom. The simple pattern with its swaying lines
+derives from Simone Martini, but there is none of his petulant
+superiority in it, none of his nervousness. The realm is not the airless
+heights of a pure æstheticism but a very human dreamland. Again Duccio
+at his best is the closest analogy. Bernard Berenson in his admirable
+little book _A Painter of the Franciscan Legend_ well describes the
+technical perfection of such work as this. It is conceived in “outlines
+which have in themselves an energy and vitality, that, whether they are
+representative or calligraphic, give off values of movement, and values
+of movement have the power to suggest the unembodied, life unclogged by
+matter, something in brief that comes close to the utmost limits of what
+visual art can do to evoke spirit.”
+
+Apart from these sublimated reveries of Sassetta which express
+themselves in utmost delicacy of line, hue, and touch, he had a
+refreshing, drastic, almost a humorous side, which may be exemplified in
+a Temptation of St. Antony, Figure 61, in the Jarves Collection at New
+Haven. Beside his coral-red hut in a desert bounded by a wood that seems
+the world’s end, the Saint starts away from a demure and very plain
+little girl. He is perplexed, divining rather than seeing the tiny bats’
+wings which mark her as a demon. The horizon is so curved that one
+almost feels the old earth swinging unconcernedly beneath this dilemma.
+A picture full of grotesque and authentic imagination, most true to the
+hobgoblin tradition of the expiring Middle Ages.
+
+Sassetta died in 1450, and his two long-lived pupils, Sano di Pietro
+(1406–1481) and Giovanni di Paolo, (1403–1482) kept something of his
+influence alive for still thirty years.
+
+Sano needs few words. He took nothing from his master but certain formal
+patterns, fine gilding and blithe colors. He repeats himself tediously,
+there are over fifty of his panels in the Siena Academy alone, yet is so
+genuine and unpretending that one forgets his lack of delicacy and
+insight. A little Coronation of the Virgin, at New Haven, may
+sufficiently represent his decorative phase. It is a nosegay of fair
+colors on burnished gold. In narrative painting he is Lorenzettian
+without the _finesse_ of his master. At least he helped prolong a lovely
+tradition beyond its natural term, and that is his chief merit. “A
+famous painter and a man wholly dedicated to God”—(_Pictor famosus et
+homo lotus deditus Deo_)—we read in his death notice. Siena knew how to
+appreciate a traditionalist.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 62. Giovanni di Paolo. Young St. John Baptist goes to the
+    Desert.—_Formerly Charles Butler Coll., London._
+]
+
+Giovanni di Paolo, on the contrary, suffered not from deficient
+originality but from its excess. He selects restlessly from the older
+pictures. You will find pure Duccian figures in his paintings of the
+fifties. He studies the sparse decorative perfections of Simone Martini
+and exaggerates their nervousness. He drives expression into caricature,
+seeks strength in distortion, was the post-impressionist of his day. His
+extravagance is unpleasing in his larger pieces, but is piquant enough
+in his numerous small panels. One of a pair in English private
+possession shows the Youthful St. John jauntily setting off for the
+desert, with a quite cubistic treatment, Figure 62, of the lines of the
+fields. The motive is still more ingeniously employed in one of a
+remarkable set of pictures belonging to Mr. Martin Ryerson of Chicago.
+Giovanni’s predilection for distortion and grimace is shown in The
+Baptism of Christ, a pendant to the story of the youthful John, both
+being parts of one predella.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 63. Matteo di Giovanni. Saint Barbara with Saints.—_S. Domenico._
+]
+
+Giovanni died in 1482 at the advanced age of seventy-nine, having
+faithfully preserved the old Gothic tradition while making it a vehicle
+of his own resolute eccentricity.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 64. Matteo di Giovanni. Massacre of the Innocents.
+]
+
+The slight concession which Siena made to the Renaissance was
+inaugurated by Lorenzo Vecchietta, active from about 1440 to 1480. He
+was primarily a sculptor and his silver altar-back was deemed worthy, in
+1506, to displace the great Majesty of Duccio from the high altar of the
+Cathedral. Vecchietta chiefly shows the effect of his studies as
+architect and sculptor in a severe regard for anatomy, and in the
+Renaissance character of his architectural settings. He painted for the
+Cathedral of Pienza a majestic Assumption, his masterpiece. There are
+numerous frescoes by him at Siena; he is perhaps most agreeable in
+little stories elaborately set amid rich architecture, but he lacks the
+sprightliness of the true narrative tradition. “He was a melancholy and
+solitary person,” writes Vasari, “and always sunk in thought.” He did
+something to give to the Sienese painting of the end of the century a
+new and complicating thoughtfulness.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 65. Benvenuto of Siena. Assumption of the Virgin.—_Metropolitan
+    Museum, New York._
+]
+
+Far the most versatile painter at Siena in the second half of the
+fifteenth century was Matteo di Giovanni.[26] He was not a native, but
+born about 1430 at Borgo San Sepolcro in upper Umbria. There he worked
+for a time with that stern realist Piero della Francesca. Thus Matteo
+brought to Siena better training than his fellows had, but he soon fell
+contentedly into the ways of the place. His madonnas and female saints
+have a new touch. They are more girlish and fragile than their
+predecessors, more exquisite, more fashionable. The type is represented
+in dozens of panels of which Enthroned Saint Barbara, at Saint Domencio,
+dated 1477, Figure 63, is a fine example.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 66. Girolamo di Benvenuto. Love bound by Maidens. Birth
+    Salver.—_Jarves Coll., New Haven, Conn._
+]
+
+In such work Matteo continues the tradition of Sassetta along somewhat
+superficial lines of prettiness. He is far more original in the several
+versions of the Massacre of the Innocents, in which seeking a maximum of
+intensity he achieves only a very interesting sort of caricature. The
+picture at S. Agostino, Figure 64, dated 1482, is perhaps the best of
+the group. We are in the realm of the grisly fairy tale, at an ogre’s
+sports. The crowding, tumult, ornate architecture are simply Matteo’s
+attempts to refurbish the old Lorenzettian tradition. His real quality
+best appears in the outlines prepared for the figure decoration of the
+pavement of the Cathedral. In general his is an engaging but entirely
+undisciplined talent, oscillating after the fashion of the moment, alike
+in Florence and Siena, between mere prettiness and sheer restlessness.
+He died in 1495, Michelangelo’s star being already in the ascendent over
+neighboring Florence.
+
+A kind of petrification of the traditional charm of Siena is in the work
+of Benvenuto di Giovanni, scholar of Sassetta. He cultivates a
+resplendent impassivity, is severe without much background of knowledge.
+His stiffness is gracious enough, like that of an aristocrat who
+maintains amid difficulties the dignity of an older school. His sense of
+formal pattern and skill in modeling in a very blond key may be enjoyed
+in his versions of the favorite theme of the Assumption. One of the best
+of these, dated at the end of the century in the year 1498, is in the
+Metropolitan Museum, Figure 65. Benvenuto was born in 1436 and died
+about 1518. He might, had he chosen, have studied the whole realistic
+development from Fra Angelico to Leonardo da Vinci, but his painting
+keeps a chill virginal quality quite apart from life, its problems and
+allurements.
+
+His son Girolamo continued the manner with less monumentality until his
+death in 1524. To his early activity belongs the delightful salver, Love
+Bound by Maidens, Figure 66, in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. It
+is merely the tray on which the gifts were presented to a young mother
+during the visits of congratulation. It was painted for some member of
+the famous Piccolomini family, presumably about the year 1500. The stern
+maidens who are plucking and binding the stripling Love, doubtless are
+personifications of Chastity, Temperance and the like. In the middle
+distance a knight rides off free to adventure since Love is safely
+bound. It is an odd theme for a gift to a young bride and mother, but
+the Italians never required consistency in their compliments. The
+daintiness of the treatment is typical for Renaissance painting at
+Siena, which never assumes a robust or realistic or humanistic accent.
+
+There is a refinement which is the harbinger of death. It appears in
+Siena in the person of Neroccio di Landi. He sublimates the style of his
+great predecessors, Simone and Sassetta, adding freely the more delicate
+ornamentation of the Renaissance. There is a peculiar pallor in his
+coloring and tension in his modelling. It is an art of nerves and
+ecstasies, wholly etherial. An admirable Annunciation in the Jarves
+Collection at New Haven shows the rich setting, the odd blend of
+precision with a languor that marks Neroccio as true grandson of Simone
+Martini. There are many little panels of Madonnas with saints of amber
+translucency. They have the startling vividness and irreality of an
+hallucination. And there is a portrait of a girl in the Widener
+Collection, Figure 67, which is of a superlatively delicate prettiness.
+Neroccio was born in 1447 and died in 1500. With him passed the special
+fragrance of Sienese art.
+
+Until 1475, Neroccio was in partnership with one whose ambition went far
+to destroy what Neroccio and Siena stood for. Francesco di Giorgio was
+born in 1439. With an ambition and resolution wholly un-Sienese, he
+mastered the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and engineering.
+He met Leonardo da Vinci at Pavia, worked for the tyrants of Milan,
+competed for the façade of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower at
+Florence. As architect and engineer it appears that he became a
+cosmopolitan, in painting it was hardly so. He is most delightful in his
+early phase which is represented by a bride-chest in the Wheelwright
+collection, Boston. It represents Prince Paris insolently appraising the
+charms of the rival goddesses, and at the right riding Troywards in
+disregard of the despair of forsaken Œnone. The classical theme is
+tinged with mediævalism, naturalized as Sienese. Later pictures, such as
+The Nativity, Figure 68, in the Sienese gallery, show Francesco uneasy,
+twisting his figures for grace and display of knowledge, working over
+the old landscape formulas in a semi-realistic sense, adding classical
+architecture, generally trying to break the bounds of the old idealism.
+The result is restlessness or at best an ambiguous charm. Siena is
+beginning to regret her isolation, to make vain efforts to overtake the
+tide of humanistic realism, to envy Florence, and even Perugia and
+Cortona. From the point of view of the Renaissance she was two
+generations behind, and no longer indifferent to the fact.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 67. Neroccio di Landi. Portrait of a Girl.—_Widener Coll., Elkins
+    Park, Pa._
+]
+
+Not merely Francesco di Giorgio tries to do in a decade the work of a
+century, but such younger contemporaries as Fungai and Pacchiarotti look
+to Florence or Umbria. Siena was given no time to reconstruct, and her
+old beautiful art could not readily assume new forms. Siena never
+assimilated the Renaissance. It invaded her, killed her native art and
+substituted one without local flavor. Before Francesco di Giorgio died,
+in 1502, he had seen Luca Signorelli called to Siena and the clever
+decorator Pintorricchio. Siena no longer trusted her own artists.
+Francesco probably took little note of the advent in 1501, of a young
+Piedmontese painter, Antonio Bazzi,[27] nicknamed Sodoma, yet with
+Sodoma remained what little future there was in Sienese painting.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 69. Sodoma. Vision of St. Catherine of Siena. Fresco.—_S.
+    Domenico, Siena._
+]
+
+Sodoma brought to Siena the knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci, the new
+draughtsmanship in light and shade. He assimilated the sensibility of
+Siena but coarsened it. No painter of the time was more overtly
+sentimental. His famous St. Sebastian at Florence tells all that need be
+known about him,—his considerable skill, his exaggerated pathos, his
+clever use of poise and balance, his sober modern tonalities. His
+sentimental power is at its height in the fresco at S. Domenico, Siena,
+which represents S. Catherine swooning at the vision of her lover, the
+Christ, Figure 69. Sodoma worked indefatigably in and about Siena till
+1549. The few local painters of a progressive sort, Domenico Beccafumi,
+Girolamo del Pacchia, either directly imitate Sodoma or draw from
+similar alien sources. The only man of genius Siena produced in these
+years, Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536), soon went to Rome where in
+architecture he held his own with all comers, whereas in painting he
+became a modest imitator of Raphael.
+
+In the ten years after 1500 the old art perished. Siena from being the
+last radiant exemplar of the glory of the mediæval spirit sunk to the
+estate of a fourth class station of the Renaissance. Her idealism could
+not bear the test of reality. Her domain had been that of legend and
+fairy tale and dream, she had ruled it exquisitely for two centuries
+until sheer taste had absorbed her little strength. She had left
+unforgettable records of her most precious feelings, but little record
+of her outer activities. Think how portraits abound in Florentine and
+Venetian art after 1450! There are practically none at Siena. So it
+would be futile to go to Siena for a greater understanding of the active
+life. But if you would requicken the sense of legend, live over again
+the tenderness mankind has ever felt for the beautiful past, hear some
+faint blowing of the horns of elfland—if you want this experience, then
+go to The gracious City of the Virgin and you shall find fulfilled the
+generous motto over her main portal—Siena will open her heart wide to
+thee.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 68. Francesco di Giorgio. Nativity.—_Belle Arti._
+]
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER II
+
+
+                    A SONNET TO THE SPENDTHRIFT CLUB
+
+                                   by
+
+                        FOLGORE DA SAN GEMIGNANO
+
+                            _translated by_
+
+                         DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+           “I give you horses for your games in May,
+             And all of them well trained unto the course—
+             Each docile, swift, erect, a goodly horse:
+           With armor on their chests and bells at play
+           Between their brows, and pennons fair and gay;
+             Fine nets and housings meet for warriors,
+             Emblazoned with the shields ye claim for yours,
+           Gules, argent, or, all dizzy at noon day;
+
+           And spears shall split and fruit go flying up
+           In merry counterchange for wreaths that drop
+             From balconies and casements far above;
+           And tender damsels with young men and youths
+           Shall kiss together on the cheeks and mouths
+             And every day be glad with joyful love.”
+
+
+                        HOW VENUS FARED IN SIENA
+
+  Ghiberti, in his commentaries (ed. Frey, Berlin 1886, p. 57 ff.) tells
+  how a marble Venus, bearing the name of Lysippus was dug up at Siena.
+
+  “I saw it only as drawn by a very great painter of the city of Siena,
+  who was called Ambrogio Lorenzetti. This drawing was kept with
+  greatest care by a very old Carthusian. This brother was a goldsmith,
+  and his father, and was a designer and delighted greatly in the art of
+  sculpture; and he began to tell me how that statue was discovered as
+  they were making an excavation where now are the houses of the
+  Malavolti; how all those instructed and versed in the art of
+  sculpture, with the goldsmiths and painters ran to see this so
+  marvellous and artistic statue. Every one praised it greatly, and also
+  the great painters who then were in Siena—to every one it seemed
+  absolutely perfect. And with all honors they set it upon their
+  fountain, as a most splendid thing. All gathered to place it with
+  greatest rejoicing and honor and they fixed it magnificently upon that
+  fountain, which statue reigned there but passingly.”
+
+  “For as the city had many adversities in the war with the Florentines,
+  and the flower of the citizenry were assembled in council, a citizen
+  rose and spoke about the statue in this tenor: ‘Gentlemen and
+  citizens, having considered that since we have found this statue it
+  has always gone wrong with us, and considering that idolatry is
+  forbidden by our faith, we must believe of all the adversities which
+  we have that God sends them for our errors. And behold in truth that
+  since we have honored this statue we have always gone from bad to
+  worse. I am certain that so long as we keep it in our territory it
+  will always go wrong with us. As a councillor I would advise that it
+  be taken down and shattered and split up and be sent to be buried on
+  the soil of the Florentines.’
+
+  “Unanimously they confirmed the words of their citizen and put them in
+  execution, and the statue was buried upon our soil.”
+
+
+           A PROCESSION ON THE COMPLETION OF DUCCIO’S MAJESTY
+
+  “On the day that it was carried to the Duomo the shops were shut; and
+  the Bishop bade a goodly and devout company of priests and friars
+  should go in solemn procession, accompanied by the Nine Magistrates
+  and all the officers of the Commune and all the people; all the most
+  worthy followed close upon the picture, according to their degree,
+  with lights burning in their hands; and then behind them came the
+  women and children with great devotion. And they accompanied the said
+  picture as far as the Duomo, making procession round the Campo as is
+  the use, all the bells sounding joyously for devotion of so noble a
+  picture as is this. And all that day they offered up prayers, with
+  great alms to the poor, praying God and His Mother who is our
+  advocate, that he may defend us in His infinite mercy from all
+  adversity and all evil, and that He may keep us from the hands of
+  traitors and enemies of Siena.”
+
+  Translated in Edmund G. Gardiner’s _The Story of Siena_, p. 178, from
+  the Anonymous contemporary chronicler published by A. Lisini in
+  _Notizie di Duccio_.
+
+
+           A CONTRACT FOR AN ALTAR-PIECE BY PIETRO LORENZETTI
+
+  “Master Pietro, son of the late Lorenzetto, who was of Siena, solemnly
+  and willingly promises and agrees with the venerable Father Guido, by
+  God’s grace Bishop of Arezzo, who stipulates in the name and stead of
+  the people of St. Mary of Arezzo—to paint a panel of the Blessed
+  Virgin Mary, ... in the centre of which panel shall be a likeness of
+  the Virgin Mary with her Son and with four side figures according to
+  the wish of the aforesaid Lord Bishop, working in the backgrounds of
+  these figures with finest gold leaf, 100 leaves to a florin, ... and
+  the other ornaments of silver and of best and choicest colors; and
+  using in these five figures best ultramarine blue; and in the other
+  adjoining and surrounding spaces (panels) of this picture to be
+  painted likenesses of prophets and saints, according to the wish of
+  this Lord Bishop, with good and choice colors.”
+
+  “It must be six braccia long and five braccia high in the middle,
+  apart from two columns each a half braccia wide, and in each should be
+  six figures worked with the aforesaid gold, and the work shall be
+  approved by this Lord Bishop....”
+
+  “And he [Pietro Lorenzetti] must begin this work according to the wish
+  of this Lord Bishop, immediately after the wooden panel shall have
+  been made, and must continue in this work until the completion of this
+  picture, not undertaking any other work &c. And therefore the said
+  Lord Bishop Guido promises to have given and assigned to him the panel
+  made of wood; and to pay him for his wages for the picture and for
+  colors, gold and silver one hundred and sixty Pisan lire; that is the
+  third part at the beginning of the work, the third part at the middle
+  of the work, and the remaining third part when the work is finished
+  and complete &c.”
+
+  “Done in the church of the Holy Angels in Arcalto outside of and next
+  to the cemetery.”
+
+  Translated and slightly abridged from Borghesi and Banchi, _Nuovi
+  Documenti per la Storia dell’ Arte Senese_, (Doc. 6, p. 10) Siena,
+  1898.
+
+
+  This contract well illustrates the elaborateness and strictness of
+  such agreements. It may be compared with the picture itself (Fig. 46).
+  Apparently the artist persuaded the Bishop to give up the plan of
+  twelve prophets and saints on two side pilasters, and made instead a
+  greater number (15) of figures in the upper arcade and pinnacles.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 70. Andrea del Castagno. David, Slayer of Goliath. Parade
+    Shield.—_Widener Coll., Elkins Park, Pa._
+]
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+                      MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM
+
+  Ghiberti, Brunellesco, and Donatello about 1400 begin to study Nature
+      and the Antique—The new secular spirit—Discontent with the old
+      pictorial style expressed in reaction by Lorenzo Monaco—in
+      cautious reform by Fra Angelico—and Masolino—in revolutionary
+      reform by Masaccio—The Cassoni painters as illustrators of
+      contemporary manners—Masaccio and the new structure in light and
+      shade—The Problem of the Brancacci Frescoes—Masaccio’s enduring
+      influence—The early Florentine Realists—Paolo Uccello and
+      Perspective—Andrea del Castagno and Anatomy—Domenico Veneziano and
+      Oil Painting—Alesso Baldovinetti.
+
+
+In the two earlier chapters we have considered what Giorgio Vasari calls
+the vigorous childhood of Italian painting. We are now to observe its
+splendid youth. The story appropriately begins with three young men and
+the year 1401 and with a baby, later nicknamed Masaccio, who was born
+that same year. The three young Florentines represent the new
+time-spirit. The lucky one, Lorenzo Ghiberti, has just won a competition
+for the new bronze doors of the Baptistery, and has in that one
+commission more than twenty years of happy work ahead. Ghiberti is
+sensitive and thoughtful beyond the wont of the older craftsmen artists.
+He writes of an antique statue: “It has sweetness of modelling which
+cannot be caught either in a strong or a dim light, only the hand and
+touch can find it.” Ghiberti is a critic and analyst as well as a
+creator. In his “Commentaries,” a product of his old age, he writes:
+“Thus I have always sought for first principles, as to how nature works
+in herself, and how I may approach her, how the eye knows the varieties
+of things, how our visual power works, how visual images come about, and
+in what manner the theory of sculpture and painting should be framed.”
+This is the mood of the Renaissance in its most serious aspect.
+
+This student mood was fully shared by two young friends of Ghiberti.
+Donatello, the sculptor, and Brunellesco, later the designer of the dome
+of the Cathedral at Florence, had lost in the competition for the
+Baptistery doors. They accepted defeat magnanimously, joined forces and
+went to Rome, where their persistent way of poking among the ruins got
+them the name of the treasure seekers. Such indeed they were, but the
+treasure they sought was not gold, but the secrets of the ancient
+sculptors and architects. So Donatello refined and perfected the rugged
+realism he had from nature. As early as 1416 he was to carve the alert
+and noble St. George for Or San Michele. Brunellesco’s life dream was
+that lightest and loveliest of domes which is still the architectural
+crown of Florence, and almost incidentally he threw off designs that
+filled Florence with elegant colonnades and churches which renewed the
+dignity and joyousness of the best Roman building. A resolute spirit,
+Brunellesco once tramped the sixty miles from Florence to Cortona to see
+a newly excavated statue. Not incidentally, then, but by hardest study,
+Brunellesco worked out a correct practice of linear perspective. This
+needed resource for the painter was now available when any one had the
+sense to ask for it, and all the time young Masaccio was growing up in
+San Giovanni up the Arno.
+
+Such is the immediate background for the forward move in painting which
+begins in 1422, or thereabouts, and runs through fifty years of eager
+experimentation. As in the first revival the sculptors and architects
+had shown the way to the painters, so it was again. But there is also a
+remoter social and commercial background for the Early Renaissance which
+we must consider briefly. The great plague of 1348 cuts Florentine
+history sharply in two. It marked an acceleration of gayety and
+worldliness, of sports and pageantry. The chronicler Matteo Villani[28]
+noted with amazement that the plague had caused not repentance but
+dissipation. He was shocked to see the old toga-like costume of the
+Florentines give place to the bobtailed jerkins and parti-colored hose
+borrowed from wicked France. Heritages were many and heirs few. You saw
+the gowns of gentle and noble ladies on backs of hussies or worse—the
+new wives. People ran to “the sin of gluttony, to feasts and taverns,
+delicate viands and games.” As for the poor folk, they no longer wished
+to work at their trades, they expected the costliest food, they married
+“_ad libitum_.” So began that loosening up of the old bourgeois morals
+which culminated in the carnivals of the end of the fifteenth century
+and in the libertine muse of Lorenzo the Magnificent. All this meant an
+inspiring spectacle for the artist to record, and plenty of lavish
+patronage, but also it meant a disintegrating tendency for art. Painting
+is great in Florence in the measure that it escapes the mere
+expansiveness of the times and seeks discipline. As if to assert the
+permanency of the spirit of discipline, the very year that set Matteo
+Villani in despair, 1348, gave him also a chapter on the founding of the
+Studio, a school of higher learning which eventually became the
+University of Florence. And the course of art for most of the fifteenth
+century was to be a constant interplay and rivalry between the Florence
+of the tavern and race-course and the Florence of the Studio, with a
+final victory for the latter.
+
+Oddly enough, the new luxury and gayety and the new scholarship
+conspired to make the old painting inadequate. The panoramic style of
+the fourteenth century was too simple and unornate for the Frenchified
+Florentines; for the new generation of strenuous artists, it was too
+slight and unskilful. All the finer spirits at the beginning of the
+fifteenth century are malcontents. Their unrest expressed itself,
+according to temperament, in progress or reaction. The dominating artist
+of the moment was a reactionary, Don Lorenzo Monaco,[29] Camaldolese
+monk. Turning from the superficiality of the current Florentine style,
+he sought his corrective at Siena, his birthplace, in the decorative
+exquisiteness of Simone Martini and the narrative warmth and breadth of
+the Lorenzetti; and he imports these qualities into Florence in an art
+as aristocratic and retrospective as that of our own Pre-Raphaelites. In
+his hands Gothic painting takes a new and unwarranted lease of life. He
+is a brilliant colorist, a fastidious designer, an austere spirit. Even
+his great Sienese exemplars have hardly surpassed his masterpiece, the
+Coronation of the Virgin, in the Uffizi. It is dated 1413. In the
+richness of the Gothic frame, the profusion of small incidental figures,
+the festooning curves of the swaying saints and angels, and formal
+symmetry of arrangement, it well represents the most florid type of
+Gothic painting as developed at Siena. It is hard to realize that this
+lovely mediæval work was painted at the moment when Brunellesco and his
+friends were already turning sharply to nature and to the vision of
+Hellas. But Lorenzo was a cloistered man, and appropriately a votary of
+past perfections. His devout mood is best expressed in the gracious
+Annunciation, Figure 71, which has happily never left its original altar
+in the Church of the Trinità. Here Lorenzo follows the Lorenzettian
+canons of space. A girlish delicacy in the obedient Virgin is a new
+note, to be echoed more sweetly by Lorenzo’s best follower, Fra
+Angelico. Lorenzo died in 1425. Masaccio had already created the new
+style of painting, but for a couple of decades faithful disciples of Don
+Lorenzo carried on his style.
+
+A lover of Plutarchian parallels and contrasts would swiftly pass from
+Don Lorenzo Monaco to Masaccio. But one may better understand the new
+movement by taking first men who gradually and normally accepted the new
+knowledge. Such are Fra Angelico and Masolino, who began as Gothic
+painters and ended as Renaissance masters. They show us better the
+average drift of the times than does so revolutionary a figure as
+Masaccio.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 71. Lorenzo Monaco, Annunciation.—_Trinità._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 72. Fra Angelico. Annunciation and Adoration of the Magi.—_Museum
+    of S. Marco._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 73. Fra Angelico. Coronation of the Virgin.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+Fra Angelico[30] was born in 1387 and at twenty entered the religious
+state as a Dominican at Fiesole. How soon Fra Giovanni, not yet
+nicknamed Angelico, became a painter we hardly know. But four little
+pictures designed to inclose in their frames relics of the saints may
+represent his beginnings. Three are at San Marco, Florence, one in Mrs.
+John L. Gardner’s collection at Boston. The Little Annunciation with an
+Adoration of the Magi, Figure 72, may represent the work. It is refined,
+tender, of jewel-like freshness of color, graceful in linear
+arrangement, at first sight wholly Sienese in inspiration, and directly
+dependent on Lorenzo Monaco. A kind of veracity under the richness of
+the expression marks the work as after all straightforward and
+Florentine. The date may be about 1425, Fra Angelico, being in his
+middle thirties, and in his art about a century behind the times. In his
+early Gothic manner he conceived some of his masterpieces, such as the
+Coronation of the Virgin, with its glimpse of a celestial cloud land;
+and the whimsically beautiful Last Judgment. Both are at the Museum of
+San Marco. One can believe the report of Vasari that each day Fra
+Angelico prayed before touching brush to such masterpieces. Such
+pictures have the hush and charm of a celestial dreamland, a meditative
+beauty quite un-Florentine.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 74. Fra Angelico. Madonna dei Linaiuoli. Originally an outdoor
+    tabernacle.—_Museum of S. Marco._
+]
+
+All the time Fra Angelico was placidly and intelligently studying the
+new realistic movement launched by Donatello and Masaccio. He adopts
+what suits him, rejecting heavy shadows which would dull his Gothic
+coloring, but adding freely realistic details in anatomy, drapery, and
+architecture. The Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre, Figure 73,
+though it may be only a few months later than that of the Uffizi, no
+longer takes place in a cloudland before lucent gold, but in a quite
+practicable architecture imitating the niche which Michelozzo designed
+in 1423 for Donatello’s St. Louis of Toulouse. The forms too are more
+substantial, more mundane. Soon the architectural accessories become of
+Renaissance type, and as Mr. Langton Douglas has shown, every new
+invention of Michelozzo for a space of ten years is promptly reflected
+in the painting of Fra Angelico. His greatest Madonna, that of the Linen
+Guild, Figure 74, painted in 1433, is almost plastic, recalling the
+severe sweetness of Orcagna. The picture is really cumbered by the rich
+hangings, which with the slender swaying angels in the bevel of the
+frame are already an anachronism. In the Descent from the Cross, Figure
+75, we find Fra Angelico skilfully adopting the new discoveries in
+anatomy and landscape. The treatment is broad and panoramic in the
+tradition of the Lorenzetti but all the details are carefully studied
+from nature and not furnished by formula. A deeply felt scene thus gains
+verisimilitude, comes out of the realm of legend and becomes an
+actuality. The panel was finished in 1440, and, now that Masaccio was
+gone, there was no living painter who could have put into it with equal
+knowledge so much feeling.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 75. Fra Angelico. Deposition.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+The building of the great Dominican Convent of San Marco between 1437
+and 1444 opened to Fra Angelico his great opportunity. It was the gift
+of Cosimo de’ Medici, now unofficial ruler of Florence, who had his good
+reasons for wishing to assure the occasional repose of his busy soul in
+this world and its permanent repose in the next. He often sought
+seclusion in the convent and doubtless saw in progress the fifty or more
+frescoes that Fra Angelico made to adorn it. Fra Angelico was painting
+for deeply religious men, for scholars who had the Scriptures at their
+finger tips, and for this reason perhaps he rejects all smaller
+realisms, reducing his compositions to the mere figures. Thus the San
+Marco frescoes are more concise even than those of Giotto, and they
+reach at their best a simple sublimity as yet unattained in Italian art.
+Highly formal and decorative, they are free from consciously æsthetic
+taint. Sometimes I think Perugino learned much at San Marco and that we
+may thus regard Fra Angelico as indirectly a leading influence on
+Raphael. The sparse, effective method may be illustrated in the fresco
+set over the door of the guest quarters, the _Forestiera_. It represents
+a pilgrim Christ being received by Dominican brothers. Figure 76. In the
+stranger we entertain The Lord Himself is the simple lesson. The figures
+are set against a conventional blue background but are constructed with
+the authority of the new learning.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 76. Fra Angelico. Dominicans receive Christ as Pilgrim. Guest
+    house door.—_S. Marco._
+]
+
+In the Chapter House nearby Fra Angelico painted, about 1440, a great
+Crucifixion, Figure 77. The three laden crosses stand out sharply
+against a murky sky. The setting is a mere platform, on which the
+familiar forms of Mary and the beloved Apostles are almost lost in a
+throng of witnesses of every age. We have the Latin Fathers, and their
+successors—St. Dominic and St. Francis, among others. The arrangement is
+highly formal, the mood that of meditation; the sharper tragedy of the
+theme is not insisted on. The characterization of the saints is precise
+and fine, the drawing of their forms admirable. Had the composition been
+set against a Gothic, blue background, the mood would have seemed merely
+sentimental. What gives it, with all its abstractness, an almost
+sensational tang of reality is the arching sky, slaty above and an
+ominous orange behind the figures. The expedient brings an element of
+definite place and time of day for this rendezvous of saints at a
+mystically renewed Calvary.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 77. Fra Angelico. Mystical Crucification. Chapter House.—_S.
+    Marco._
+]
+
+In the cells of the convent, Fra Angelico and his helpers painted no
+less than forty-three frescoes. These were intended for the private
+devotions of the brother occupying the cell, and the subjects were
+probably chosen not by Fra Angelico himself, but by his cloister mates.
+The best are conceived like the frescoes of the lower story. The
+background is just a veiled sky, there are no accessories, the figures
+loom in an indefinite space. Majestic is the Transfiguration, Figure 78,
+very lovely the Coronation of the Virgin. The angelic painter draws the
+maximum effect from the simplest patterns and briefest means. There is
+the measured and simple dignity of the early Christian mosaics with a
+warmer and more personal feeling. Fra Angelico, when he wishes, can be
+elaborately realistic. He is so in the garden scene where the Risen
+Christ gently rebuffs the Magdalen, in the crowded Adoration of the
+Magi, which tradition assigns to Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell, and in the
+Annunciation, Figure 79, in the corridor with its graceful Renaissance
+_loggia_. In this more circumstantial vein, Fra Angelico is delightful,
+but I think below his best. In all the frescoes at S. Marco, however,
+Fra Angelico appears as a wholly Florentine figure with an art based at
+once on the study of nature and on an understanding admiration for the
+masterpieces of Giotto and Orcagna.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 78. Fra Angelico. Transfiguration, fresco in a cell at _S.
+    Marco_.
+]
+
+Something of his mediævalism, of his Sienese manner, persists in the
+numerous little predella panels, such as those telling delightfully the
+story of the doctor saints, Cosmo and Damian, and the series with the
+life of Christ which adorned the doors of the plate lockers of the
+Church of S. Marco. With their fully developed pictorialism, their
+careful regard for the minor realisms of setting, these little pictures
+are the prelude to his last phase at Rome. They are also the last
+Florentine pictures that observe those traditional iconographical forms
+which had persisted for four centuries.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 79. Fra Angelico. Annunciation. Fresco.—_San Marco._
+]
+
+Fra Angelico ever refused to make money or accept promotion, but became
+despite himself a celebrity. In 1445 he was ordered to Rome by Pope
+Eugenius IV. The frescoes which Fra Angelico then made in the Vatican
+are lost. There was an escape to Orvieto, where Fra Angelico painted
+half the vault of the Chapel of S. Brixio, which Signorelli was later to
+complete. Fra Angelico was peremptorily recalled to Rome in 1447 by the
+new Pope, Nicholas V, who was planning a new chapel in the Vatican. We
+see it today still radiant with the legends of St. Stephen and St.
+Lawrence that Fra Angelico thoughtfully composed more than four hundred
+years ago. Modern critics have generally agreed in finding Fra
+Angelico’s masterpieces in this chapel. If they mean his fullest display
+of knowledge, the opinion is incontestible. Nowhere else has Fra
+Angelico invented such complications of architecture, interiors, street
+perspectives; nowhere has he drawn better figures in greater variety.
+Such frescoes as the lunette with St. Stephen defending himself before
+the Jewish doctors and preaching to the people, Figure 80, or that
+depicting St. Lawrence giving alms to cripples and poor folk before a
+basilica, are learned and rich. But does not their very richness obscure
+both the decorative and emotional appeal? Personally I tend to lose the
+figures in the complexity of the setting. Any of Fra Angelico’s little
+predellas tells its story more feelingly and clearly, and no less ably.
+Under the pressure of competition at Rome, Fra Angelico for the first
+time is ostentatious. To please the Pope he revives in more specious
+form the trivialities of the old panoramic style. Had he grasped
+Masaccio’s invention of aerial perspective and construction in light and
+dark, Fra Angelico might have carried off his elaborate settings
+successfully. As it is, they confuse the eye by too many linear
+elements, and only mildly delight the mind. Even the sensitive mood of
+legend, which is noteworthy in these frescoes, is better represented in
+the smaller panels. In fairness of Gothic fresco coloring, however, they
+are unsurpassed.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 80. Fra Angelico. St. Stephen Preaching, the Saint before the
+    Council. Fresco.—_Chapel of Nicholas V., Vatican._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 81. Masolino. Annunciation.—_Henry Goldman, Esq. New York._
+]
+
+From the point of view of tendency, these frescoes are profoundly
+instructive. They show the irresistible drift towards the formation of a
+new panoramic style, a drift that even Fra Angelico, cloistered saint
+and exquisite self-critic, was unable to escape. In spite of his record
+and better knowledge, he becomes an inaugurator of that picturesque,
+undisciplined, and decentralized manner of narrative which was to be
+represented by Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and their contemporaries.
+
+In his later years Fra Angelico declined the archbishopric of Florence
+and died at Rome in 1455. The tombstone which shows the emaciation of
+his perishable form is in the Roman Church of the Minerva; his
+imperishable monument is his frescoed convent home of S. Marco at
+Florence.
+
+Of the traditional artists Fra Angelico is by far the most important,
+but his contemporary Masolino of Panicale must be considered, partly
+because tradition makes him the master of Masaccio, partly because of
+the problems which cluster about his work. The picture which is here
+drawn of him represents my own investigations, and differs at several
+points from the views of Berenson and Toesca. If we judge Masolino only
+by the work that is unquestionably his, he is not an impressive figure.
+He inherits the grace of the late Gothic style, and he adds rather
+partially and inconsequentially the new discoveries in anatomy and
+linear perspective. Chance took him away from the centre of things,
+Florence. He worked mostly in Lombardy, distant Hungary, provincial
+Tuscany, and Rome. He has industry and charm, but nowhere shows much
+intelligence. On the whole he is a poorer story-teller than his Gothic
+predecessors, and only their fair equal in panel painting. Had Vasari
+not ascribed to him, I believe erroneously, the early miracles of St.
+Peter in the Church of The Carmine, at Florence, the general historian
+of art would need to pay little attention to Masolino. But he has been
+entangled in one of the most important of artistic problems, that of
+Masaccio, so we cannot ignore him.
+
+Masolino[31] was born in 1384, and, according to Vasari, was trained by
+the mysterious Starnina. We have no very early works to show his
+progress, and it is merely a good guess that the radiant Annunciation,
+Figure 81, in the possession of Mr. Henry Goldman, New York, may be
+considerably earlier than 1420. It shows the gentleness and animation
+which are constant in Masolino. It combines the Sienese calligraphic
+manner with those smaller realisms of inscenation which ultimately
+derive from Duccio. It has coloristic audacities of its own in the
+spotting of brightest vermillion. It gives small hint of the
+Renaissance. At a later date than 1420, by which time ordinary
+perspective began to be understood, I doubt if Masolino would have
+indulged in that preposterous and unnecessary central pillar which
+starts above in middle distance and ends below in the picture plane. A
+Madonna at Bremen, dated 1423, shows him still as Gothic as Lorenzo
+Monaco, who indeed seems to have influenced him dominatingly.
+
+In this same year, it is likely that he painted the frescoes in the
+Collegiate Church at Castiglione d’Olona, a lovely village at the foot
+of the Alps. Masolino had to deal with refractory spaces, the narrow
+triangular sectors of the apse. This has caused elongation of the
+figures and piling up of fantastic architecture merely to fill the
+spaces. The mood is gentle and graceful, the treatment quite Gothic.
+These six stories of the Virgin must have satisfied Masolino’s humanist
+patron, Cardinal Branda Castiglione; for several years later he
+re-employed the painter to decorate the adjoining Baptistery. Masolino
+at forty, in the Collegiate Church, was still completely Gothic. If we
+may believe Vasari, at that age he suddenly mastered the new style. Only
+on such a theory can he have painted the Adam and Eve and the St. Peter
+reviving Tabitha, in the Brancacci Chapel, which are in the new
+chiaroscuro technic. Since Masolino, years after the time when he was
+working in that chapel, is still incompletely modern as regards light
+and shade, it is easier to suppose that what he actually painted in the
+Brancacci Chapel, about 1424, was merely the vault and the three
+lunettes, which have since been destroyed. Thus all the frescoes now
+visible in this famous chapel would be by Masaccio or his continuer,
+Filippino Lippi. Such was the view of the excellent critic Cavalcaselle
+more than fifty years ago. However that be, Masolino by 1427 was at Buda
+(now Budapest), where he worked for that extraordinary Florentine exile
+and soldier of fortune, Pippo Spano. After that trip, we hear no more of
+Masolino at Florence—rather oddly, since the Brancacci Chapel, which he
+had begun, still had three unpictured spaces after Masaccio’s death in
+1428. Apparently the Brancacci family did not consider Masolino
+competent to complete the work he had begun. If so, they were wise.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 82. Masolino. Baptism of Christ, detail of fresco.—_Baptistery,
+    Castiglione d’Olona._
+]
+
+We next find Masolino, after an interval of more than ten years,
+decorating the Baptistery at Castiglione d’Olona for his old patron,
+Cardinal Branda. The date is 1435. By this time Masolino had learned a
+good deal, but had hardly assimilated his new attainments. Whether as
+decoration or as story-telling, the stories of St. John the Baptist are
+at once confused and pretentious, with little to recommend them save the
+loveliness of their Gothic color, the prettiness of the heads, and
+certain vivacious and well-observed gestures. In the great fresco of the
+Baptism of Christ, Figure 82, the incidental nudes are so carefully
+anatomized that they distract from the general effect, while the deep
+river valley unhappily draws the eye away from the figures in the
+foreground. A similarly pictorially inept use of foreshortened
+Renaissance colonnades appears in the opposite fresco depicting the
+Feast of Herod and the delivery of the head of St. John to Herodias. If
+it were not for the physical discomfort of travelling to the end of
+those interminable colonnades and returning to note what is happening
+nearby in them, these stories themselves would seem vivacious and
+well-conceived, the female heads attractive, the color gay and pleasing.
+The method of composition is still Lorenzettian and the modern
+architectural features inorganic.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 83. Masolino. St. Catherine disputing with the Pagan Doctors.
+    Fresco.—_S. Clemente, Rome._
+]
+
+A few years later Masolino was swept to Rome by the great wave of
+rebuilding and redecorating which accompanied Pope Martin V’s return
+from Avignon. There in the Chapel of the Sacrament, in the venerable
+Basilica of S. Clemente, which had formerly been Cardinal Branda’s
+titular Church, Masolino achieved his maturest work. Completely
+repainted, we may still see the legends of St. Catherine, and a finely
+theatrical Calvary by Masolino, and as well legends of St. Ambrose by a
+follower of Masaccio. Here Masolino’s gift as a story-teller is at its
+best. He has learned to subordinate his accessories, and the childlike
+character of his themes enlists his talent in its most engaging aspect.
+Such a fresco as St. Catherine urging the mysteries of the faith before
+the Roman doctors, Figure 83, is well-felt and skilfully composed, and
+withal most flimsily drawn. It is incredible that a man who could do the
+Tabitha in the Brancacci Chapel at forty should have relapsed to this
+level at fifty-five. The evidence of the armor[32] worn by the horsemen
+in the Calvary proves that that fresco, and presumably the entire
+decoration of the chapel, cannot be earlier than 1440, while of course
+it cannot be later than Masolino’s own death in 1447.
+
+To this later period belongs, I believe, the diptych at Naples which
+represents two themes rare in early Florentine painting, the Assumption
+of the Virgin, and the Miracle of the Snow, Figure 84. The latter scene
+shows Pope Liberius tracing the foundations of the Basilica of Santa
+Maria Maggiore which were indicated by a miraculous snow-fall in
+midsummer. It is delightful as story-telling, and some of the minor
+figures are entrancing, as is the landscape. Since Michelangelo and
+Giorgio Vasari once admired this picture together at Rome, we should not
+grudge it our admiration. Nor should we fail to note the curious defects
+in construction. The heads of the attendant figures are set on the
+shoulders like a ball on a post. You could blow any of these heads off
+without overtaxing your lungs. The picture shows the utmost of which
+Masolino was capable. It reveals him as lightly touched by the new
+learning and faithful to the old panoramic ideals of narrative which had
+come down from Taddeo Gaddi and the Lorenzetti.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 84. Masolino. Pope Liberius tracing the snow-marked plan of Santa
+    Maria Maggiore.—_Naples._
+]
+
+Logically we should next consider Masaccio, but first we may well give
+an eye to a minor sort of narrative painting which worked in the
+direction of contemporary realism. This was domestic painting as
+distinguished from ecclesiastical or civic.[33] In a prosperous
+Florentine home the chest was the most important article of furniture.
+In the fifteenth century its front was pictured with races, pageants,
+feasts, battles, or the new themes from classical mythology. Every
+patrician bride normally received two such painted cassoni to contain
+her trousseau. For example,[34] Giovanna di Filippo Aldobrandini when
+she married Tommaso di Berto Fini, in 1418, received two bride chests
+depicting the races on St. John’s day. A complete chest in the Bargello,
+Florence, shows the riders carrying to the Baptistery the _palii_, or
+lengths of brocade which were the prizes. The front panel of the
+companion chest is in the Holden Collection, at Cleveland, and
+commemorates with extraordinary vivacity and fidelity the race itself,
+Figure 85. The winner is just preparing to touch the _palio_ which hangs
+from the ceremonial car at the finish. Jesters, policemen, eager women,
+and impatient urchins who pelt the losers make up a remarkable picture
+of contemporary customs. Besides the pictured chests, a well appointed
+room had at the height of a sitter’s shoulder similar but larger panels
+which were called _Spalliere_. And still higher there was, on a still
+larger scale, what were called cornice panels. These too were
+contemporary or mythological in subject matter. Where many a room thus
+had three courses of pictures from the floor to the ceiling there was
+abundant opportunity for the narrative painter and remarkable stimulus
+to invention. The richness and complexity of this household decoration
+doubtless influenced all narrative painting, making for the
+sprightliness which dominates the end of the century.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 85. School of Uccello. A Horse Race. Detail from a _Cassone_
+    Front.—_Cleveland, O._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 86. Masaccio. Birth of St. John Baptist.—_Desco da Parto.
+    Berlin._
+]
+
+Besides these chest and wall panels, pictured salvers were prepared to
+celebrate the birth of a patrician child. Such wooden salvers were used
+to convey the congratulatory gifts which were offered with appalling
+promptness to every young mother. These _Deschi da parto_, or birth
+plates, as the Italians called them, bore pictures alluding either to
+love and beauty or to childbirth. One of the earlier mythological
+salvers is in the Bargello and represents the Judgment of Paris. As yet
+the artist is not sufficiently audacious to display the goddesses in
+classical nudity. The most famous of all birth-plates may serve as our
+introduction to the greatest artist of the first half of the century,
+Masaccio. It is in the Berlin Museum, the subject is the Birth of St.
+John the Baptist, Figure 86, and the date should be about 1422. In the
+excellent proportions of the Renaissance portico, in the gravity and
+mass of the figures, it shows the beginnings of a new and more truthful
+style, based not on previous artistic formulas but on direct and
+masterful observation of nature. Mr. Berenson justly calls it “a little
+giant of a picture.”
+
+Masaccio[35] was born December 21, 1401, at San Giovanni up the Arno.
+His real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Tommaso Guidi. And the
+slightly slurring character of his nickname was apparently given for
+absent-mindedness, untidiness, and a certain clumsiness of person.
+Tradition as late as Vasari declared that Masaccio lived in a world of
+intense speculation concerning his art. Contemporary tax-returns show
+that he died deeply in debt and that he never really knew how much he
+owed. Tradition again insists that he never troubled to collect payments
+due him unless his need of money were extreme.
+
+All the same he was one of the most original minds of all ages, and on
+the formal side, one of the most revolutionary. He came to Florence
+early, probably learned his elements under Masolino, but really drew
+more from the sculptor naturalists of Donatello’s sort. In particular he
+frequented the surly architect Brunellesco and from him learned the new
+art of perspective. January 7, 1422, being twenty-one years old,
+Masaccio was matriculated in the Druggists’ Guild as a licensed painter.
+By this time he surely had made his great discovery and taken his great
+decision. Reviewing the painting of his contemporaries and predecessors,
+he judged that it was all based on unnatural conventions. We can imagine
+him in the Spanish Chapel viewing the carefully charted and contoured
+and colored groups, and saying impatiently “things don’t look like
+that.” And in truth the older painting at its best was a select
+inventory or formal description of what the artist saw, and not a
+representation. One can imagine Masaccio exclaiming, as Francisco Goya
+was to do more than three centuries later, “Lines, always lines, I don’t
+see them in nature.” And, as a matter of fact, there are no lines in
+nature, just the meeting of areas variously colored and lighted,
+contrasts of tone which the eye instantaneously interprets as form.
+
+Young Masaccio, then, makes the radical innovation that the brush should
+work according to nature’s laws, distributing color and light and dark
+so as to give the swiftest and truest representation of mass and
+distance. Besides functional light and shade, Masaccio introduced into
+painting the idea of aerial perspective. He saw that distant objects
+diminished not merely in size but also in definition. He felt the air as
+a palpable veil between the object and the eye, and he painted not
+simply the object but, as well, its veil. By a swift impulse of sheer
+genius this moody lad fixed ideals of naturalistic painting which were
+to remain until yesterday and the Impressionists. In fundamental
+principles Velasquez marks no great advance on Masaccio.
+
+It is only in fresco painting that Masaccio fully reveals his powers. So
+passing with mere mention such panels as The Healing of a Demoniac, in
+the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, the widely scattered parts
+of the altar-piece for the Carmelites at Pisa, dated 1426, and the grim
+Madonna with St. Ann in the Uffizi, the student will best turn directly
+to the Carmelite Church at Florence and enter that sanctuary of art, the
+Chapel of the Brancacci. The Church itself was dedicated April 19, 1422.
+Shortly after that date, young Masaccio did in fresco the dedicatory
+procession with many portraits. Its realism produced a profound
+impression. Nevertheless it was heedlessly destroyed after a century or
+so. By 1424, according to all probability, Masaccio was associated with
+Masolino in the decoration of the Brancacci Chapel. It was dedicated to
+St. Peter, and the prescribed subjects were drawn from the “Acts of the
+Apostles” and “The Golden Legend.” The vaults which contained the four
+evangelists and the three lunettes, which depicted The Calling of Peter
+and Andrew, the Tempest-tossed Ship of the Apostles on Galilee, and
+Peter denying his Lord, were by Masolino. Unhappily these upper frescoes
+have been destroyed. The Chapel now has only two rows of frescoes in
+twelve pictures. Of these three and a part of a fourth, all in the lower
+row, are certainly by Filippino Lippi, who about 1484 completed the
+chapel, probably with the aid of Masaccio’s designs. Three in the upper
+row, are ascribed by many critics to Masolino. According to this view,
+which is largely based on the opinion of Vasari, Masaccio would be
+responsible for only five pictures and most of a sixth. Other critics,
+whose views I share, believe that Masaccio painted eight of the pictures
+and most of a ninth. The difference of opinion, then, concerns three
+pictures which many think unworthy of Masaccio’s genius. The problem
+cannot be fully debated here. The grounds of my opinion, which was that
+of the great Italian critic Cavalcaselle, will appear as we review the
+frescoes themselves.
+
+In general color effect these frescoes are strangely unlike their Gothic
+predecessors. They have nothing of the flower-bed gayety of the Spanish
+Chapel, of Lorenzo Monaco, or of Masolino elsewhere. The effect is of a
+very rich smokiness, a kind of monochrome from which only subdued colors
+emerge. Yellow-browns and silvery grays predominate. There are no hard
+contours. The relief is salient, but one form blends insensibly into
+another. The edges of the figures are established not by lines but by
+contrast of values, the contour is often completely lost. The strong
+assertion of light and dark in a few structural planes builds out the
+forms from an investing shadow. Indeed the whole chapel recalls not the
+Gothic fresco painters, but such far later artists as Velasquez,
+Rembrandt, or even Whistler. The method of the painter, whoever he was,
+is completely modern, and uniform throughout the chapel. He sacrifices
+minute definition to generalizations for mass; and color, to emphatic
+construction in light and shade. To obtain relief in the figures and
+distance in the backgrounds is the main concern. It is in intention a
+luminist art and a modelling art. The procedure is nearly uniform
+throughout the Brancacci Chapel, though it grows abler from fresco to
+fresco. It is a method that Masolino never commanded, not at Castiglione
+d’Olona ten years later, nor still ten years later at San Clemente,
+Rome. Hence I can only believe that the admitted inequalities in the
+Brancacci Chapel merely represent the swift development of Masaccio’s
+genius, and certain interruptions in the work itself.
+
+The first fresco, in the nave alongside, the entrance of the chapel,
+depicts our first parents at the moment of the Temptation in the Garden
+of Eden, Figure 87. It is stilted and awkward, yet withal dignified. The
+theme, which indeed has seldom been a happy one for any artist, has not
+greatly interested the painter. He has made it an occasion for studying
+the nude. We have what the modern student calls an academy. As such, it
+is able. The construction is highly simplified and is wholly in masses
+of light and dark, the contour is freely effaced. The mystery of
+background foliage is well suggested, the placing of the head of the
+serpent between the tree and the figures is a perfect example of the new
+art of aerial perspective. No painter but Masaccio had even the notion
+of such an effect at this moment. Technically the handling of this
+detail is just the same as that of the vastly more beautiful angel in
+the Expulsion from Eden, Figure 91. Finally, the impassive mask of the
+Eve is identical with that of the Virgin, in Masaccio’s panel in the
+Uffizi. We presumably have to do with an experimental phase of Masaccio
+about the year 1423–5. About that time Masolino probably was called to
+Buda to work for the extraordinary Florentine soldier of fortune,
+Filippo Scolari, better known by his nickname of Pippo Spano. If Vasari
+is right, Masaccio had been required to prove his ability to continue
+the work by painting a St. Paul near the bell-cord of the Church, in
+competition with a St. Jerome by Masolino. Both are lost.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 87. Masaccio. The Temptation.—_Brancacci Chapel._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 91. Masaccio. The Expulsion.—_Brancacci Chapel._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 88. Masaccio. St. Peter raising Tabitha and healing the
+    Cripple.—_Brancacci Chapel._
+]
+
+However that be, Masaccio probably succeeded to the work in 1425, his
+twenty-fourth year, and the next fresco after the Adam and Eve may well
+have been the adjoining subjects of Peter raising Tabitha from the Dead
+and healing a Cripple, Figure 88. As a whole the composition is somewhat
+marred by inadvertences and afterthoughts. It shows the influence of
+Masolino in the trite and conventional gestures of the mourners about
+the bier, and in certain strained facial expressions, notably that of
+the turbaned bystander. Such survivals are precisely what one would
+expect in a young painter just emancipated from his master. The entirely
+Masolino-like pair of strollers in the centre seem to be due to an
+afterthought. The first intention is registered in the unnaturally
+straight back of St. Peter’s companion, in the centre. The fresco was
+apparently to have been cut into two compartments by a pilaster at that
+point.[36] When the plan was abandoned in favor of putting two episodes
+in one space, the two unrelated figures had to be added to fill space
+and provide a transition. One is a little ashamed of pointing out small
+defects in what in all essentials is a noble and impassioned work.
+Technically there is nothing better in the Chapel than the establishing
+of the city background. It has scale, admirable atmospheric placing,
+dignity and pictorial significance. How anybody who knows Masolino’s
+niggling and haphazard treatment of such architectural features at
+Castiglione d’Olona can imagine that he had earlier created this
+grandiose setting remains a mystery to me. Even more remarkable are the
+gravity and grandeur of the Peter and the Tabitha. Here we are reminded
+of Giotto. Masaccio must often have pored over the Stories of St. John
+in Santa Croce, and while he by no means adopted Giotto’s shorthand
+indications for mass, he did adopt Giotto’s sense for classic dignity,
+beautifully calculated order, and moderation. As we continue through
+these remarkable frescoes we shall see continually that the quite
+ruthless innovator that was Masaccio was also a reverent traditionalist.
+The particular form of his art was settled between nature and himself,
+as Leonardo da Vinci later justly observed; the spirit of his art
+derived mostly from Giotto. It was highly important for the whole
+ongoing of art in Italy that so revolutionary a spirit was tempered by
+the finest respect for the great classic tradition. And in this great
+fresco of St. Peter’s miracles one may see how a quite homely and
+drastic realism can be invested with abstract power and dignity. How
+different it all is from the small and often charming vivacity which
+Masolino displays at Castiglione d’Olona and at Rome.
+
+Like the Temptation, the Tabitha is more linear and colorful than the
+other frescoes of the Chapel. The painter has not quite mastered the
+radically new method of construction in light and shade. Thus there is a
+technical break between the Tabitha and the frescoes on the back wall,
+which are in a more developed manner. We may assume an interruption in
+the work. Indeed we need not assume it, for records prove that for most
+of the year 1426 Masaccio was occupied with the great altar-piece for
+the Carmelites at Pisa. On October 15, 1426, Masaccio solemnly engaged
+not to do any other work until the altar-piece should be finished. We
+may believe then that the work in the Brancacci Chapel was taken up anew
+towards 1427.
+
+The four frescoes on the back wall, which are divided into two groups by
+the window, are the first of the new work. Of these the most remarkable
+is St. Peter Baptizing, Figure 89. The drawing is magnificent. Light and
+dark, without aid of the line, create so many bosses and pits which not
+merely establish form but suggest the gravest emotions. A few well
+chosen and well placed figures give the sense of a multitude. Mountains
+tower in gigantic scale, one feels the run of the little river from its
+distant source amid high ravines. The simplest modulations of light and
+dark, so many sweeps of a broad brush, establish the constructional
+planes of the figures and the mountains. All the early Italian writers
+mark with wondering admiration the expressiveness of the shivering man
+waiting his turn at the left. It is the smallest merit of the picture.
+Masaccio in this great composition commands a homely and impressive
+majesty, and therein shows himself true successor of Giotto, but he also
+reveals a power of synthesis entirely modern and hardly excelled since
+his day. One has only to turn to Masolino’s Baptism at Castiglione
+d’Olona, Figure 82, with its niggling insistence on details, to
+appreciate the gulf between the master and the pupil.
+
+Across the window from Masaccio’s Baptism is St. Peter Preaching. The
+same towering, mountain background is used. The somewhat linear
+treatment of the faces has led Mr. Berenson, with other critics, to
+ascribe this fresco to Masolino. It seems to me merely less strenuously
+seen, because the subject offers little inspiration. Masaccio has lent
+the theme real dignity, and, in the eager face of the nun at the front
+of the audience achieves an unusual sweetness. Technically there are
+good but not compelling reasons for supposing this fresco may have been
+done among the first, about 1425.
+
+The lower scenes at the back of the Chapel are, at your right, St. Peter
+healing the Sick, by the mere fall of his shadow and, at the left, St.
+Peter giving Alms. In both cases we have Florentine street scenes with a
+classic air lent by the solemn figures of the apostles. We feel the
+figures as far or near, and the air that veils them. There is great
+intentness in the poor folk, and a rugged impersonality in St. Peter and
+St. James. They are not indulging personal compassion so much as
+fulfilling a divine mission. Again the combination of a drastic realism
+with a stylistic majesty is what makes these frescoes unique. They
+contain vivid portraits, among these the traditional portrait of
+Masolino, a gentle, heavy, middle-aged face, bearded, and crowned with a
+sort of tuque—just the man to have conceived the charming but loosely
+organized compositions at Castiglione d’Olona.
+
+What Masaccio looked like we may see in the upper fresco on the right
+wall. He is the alert and determined figure impersonating St. Thomas, at
+the left of the group. The story of the Tribute Money, Figure 90, is one
+of the grandest creations of European art. If, as Leonardo da Vinci
+asserts, the highest task of painting is to show by the pose and
+gestures of the body the emotions of the soul, this is one of the
+greatest paintings. It is remarkable for the dignity lent to an
+apparently unpromising theme. The story is simply that Christ is
+required to pay the _denarius_ when there is no money in the company. By
+a miracle Peter finds the coin in the mouth of a fish and pays it to the
+tax-gatherer. How the creative imagination has magnified this slender
+theme! Masaccio has formed a group of potent and formidable individuals,
+these simple men are fit to shake a world. He has shown them in a moment
+in which discouragement and determination blend. A technicality
+threatens to check the salvation of the world. He has discriminated
+between the assured authority of the Christ and the wrathful energy of
+St. Peter. He has invested the majestic forms with massive draperies
+grandly disposed in simple folds. He has given even the tax-gatherer the
+grace of a Roman athlete. Finally he has set the austere company before
+a noble river plain upon which press the slopes of lofty mountains,
+while the undulating crest of a remoter range almost bars off the sky.
+All objects, human and inanimate, bear firmly on the ground and are
+wrapped in an enveloping atmosphere. In the quality and arrangement of
+the figures, it all derives from Giotto; in the vastness of the scale,
+the introduction of mystery and distance, it is wholly Masaccio’s own.
+Vasari rightly praised the harmony and discretion with which these
+powerful assertions of form are made, and sees here the beginnings of
+the modern style of painting.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 90. Masaccio. The Tribute Money.—_Brancacci Chapel._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 89. Masaccio. St. Peter Baptizing.—_Brancacci Chapel._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 92. Masaccio. The Trinity, Fresco.—_Santa Maria Novella._
+]
+
+The organizing power of Masaccio is at its height in the Tribute Money.
+His emotional intensity is fully involved only in the Expulsion from
+Eden, Figure 91, the adjoining fresco in the nave of the church. Before
+the sword of a serenely inexorable angel, Adam and Eve stalk forth into
+the unknown. Their bodies cringe as they move, with shame and grief. An
+ominous light reduces their bodies to so many pits of shadow and bosses
+of light. Drawing of such accurate economy will only rarely reappear in
+the world, in Leonardo da Vinci, in Rembrandt, in Honoré Daumier. The
+desperate emotion is well contained within the oblong, in a monumental
+balance. Remorse in the two first sinners has its shades. The man’s head
+is pressed into his hands in an attempt at restraint, while Eve’s is
+thrown back in anguished ululation. The high emotional pressure is new,
+and symptomatic, and significantly it is contained within monumental
+bounds. The Italian Renaissance in its striving for expressiveness will
+rarely fail to keep expression noble. The ingrained classicism of the
+Florentine point of view is never more favorably represented than in a
+subject like this which seeks a maximum emotion on terms of order and
+lucidity.
+
+What remains of Masaccio is in a sense anti-climax. Very stately is the
+fresco in this chapel, of the Resurrection of the Prince of Tyre and St.
+Peter enthroned. The beauty is that of fine arrangement and
+characterization. The graceful nude boy and about ten distinguished
+figures behind him were added to the composition, presumably from
+Masaccio’s designs, full fifty years later. They are the work of
+Filippino Lippi, who also added some portraits at the left of this
+fresco. He also filled the three unpainted panels, in an excellent
+imitation of Masaccio’s style. Evidently Masaccio was called rather
+abruptly to his last sojourn at Rome. For the fresco of the Raising of
+the Boy could have been finished in a fortnight.
+
+I have omitted a fine fresco of a Pietà in the Collegiate Church at
+Empoli, though I believe it to be a splendid example of Masaccio’s early
+style, and I can only mention for its magnificent architectural setting
+in Brunellesco’s new style the fresco of the Trinity in Santa Maria
+Novella, Figure 92. It is of his latest manner and of extraordinary
+gravity and mass.
+
+In 1428, being only twenty-six years old, Masaccio drops out of sight at
+Rome. Some report that he was poisoned, others that he was slain in a
+street brawl. We really know nothing about it. What we do know is that
+in the recorded history of art no painter had achieved so greatly in so
+short a time. Within six short years Masaccio created that method of
+painting which stood uncontested till the advent of luminism only forty
+years ago. And he not merely illustrated the method of construction in
+light and dark, painting in atmospheric values rather than in lines and
+charted areas, but he also expressed in the new technic both the noblest
+traditional emotions as also poignant new emotions quite his own. In one
+superb aggressive he had moved three generations into the future. For a
+hundred years the most intelligent and ambitious artists in Florence as
+a matter of course studied and copied in the Brancacci Chapel to form
+their style. Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo,
+Raphael, Andrea del Sarto thus paid homage to the untidy youth from
+Castel San Giovanni, and even the iconoclasts of today, for whom
+Leonardo da Vinci and his peers are scarcely artists at all, envy the
+gravity and force of Masaccio. He is the real father of modern painting,
+which is most true to itself when it tempers an ardent curiosity as
+regards natural appearances with a respect for the great traditions of
+moderation and taste.
+
+Masaccio’s successors, very wisely, did not closely imitate him. They
+saw he was an unsafe and unapproachable model. By a swift impulse of
+genius, and apparently without analytical study of anatomy and
+topography, he had mastered the broad effects that register form.
+Details he neglected. He gives the action of hands and feet, not their
+articulations, the scale of landscape and not its component parts. For
+men of lesser genius, these short-cuts were dangerous. While using
+Masaccio as inspiration, they had to verify his discoveries through
+analytical studies before those innovations could become generally
+available. The process of verification and minute research occupied
+about fifty years and may be said to be complete with the maturity of
+Leonardo da Vinci, say about the date of The Last Supper, 1498.
+
+The successors of Masaccio may be divided into two groups as they
+quietly adopted and popularized the immediately available part of his
+discoveries, or strenuously carried his work forward. To the moderate
+progressive group belong Fra Filippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli, and
+still later Ghirlandaio; the experimentalists are birds of quite a
+different feather.
+
+These Florentine realists may be divided into two generations. The first
+asserts itself before the middle of the fifteenth century, and is
+trained chiefly under the influence of such sculptors as Donatello,
+Brunellesco and Ghiberti. These painters work at the problem of light
+and shade, anatomy, and perspective, accepting in their art the guidance
+of sculpture. The second generation of realists come to their own after
+the middle of the century, are mostly trained as silversmiths, and work
+at the new technic of oil painting, at landscape and at the figure in
+action. Both groups relatively neglected the important matter of
+composition. Most of the realists sacrificed pictorial effect the better
+to master detail, but they also accumulated that vast body of knowledge
+upon which rests the glory of the High Renaissance, and nobody can
+understand the progress of Florentine painting without following
+sympathetically their great effort.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 93. Paolo Uccello. Battle of Cavalry.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+Of the first generation, the quaintest figure is Paolo Uccello. Born in
+1397, he soon gave himself fanatically to the study of the new science
+of perspective, especially to feats of foreshortening. His pictures are
+so many experiments and have a petrified inertness. Yet at his best he
+commands dignity and a considerable decorative power. About the year
+1435 he painted for the Medici palace several battle scenes, three of
+which are respectively in the Louvre, Figure 93, National Gallery and
+Uffizi. The last, representing the Florentine victory of San Romano,
+shows the style. The forms are squared, in a fashion anticipating modern
+Cubism, in order to simplify the problem of placing and foreshortening.
+Corpses and lances are deliberately pointed at the spectator to offer so
+many problems in perspective. The landscape is minute and topographical.
+The decorative coloring is bold and original with interesting
+dissonances of oranges, russets, and greens. It is quite splendid after
+the unreal fashion of a tapestry.
+
+Paolo’s masterpiece is the equestrian portrait of Sir John Hawkwood,
+Figure 94, the English soldier of fortune and occasional captain of the
+Florentine army, which is in the Cathedral. It is painted in gray-green
+touched with color, and simulates a tomb. The date is 1437. Since Roman
+times no equestrian monument of equal dignity had been created, and one
+is inclined to suspect that Uccello profited by preliminary studies of
+Donatello, his close friend, which later developed into the superb
+Gattamelata statue at Padua. Uccello has a lighter vein illustrated by
+furniture panels at Oxford, (a Hunt), at Paris, and Vienna, (St. George
+and the Dragon), but his most ambitious work is the decoration of the
+lunettes in the great cloister of Santa Maria Novella. The stories are
+drawn from the Old Testament, were started by Paolo, about the year
+1446, and continued by several assistants. The medium was gray-green,
+_terra verde_, and the place accordingly is called the Green Cloister.
+Uccello’s manner may be best sensed in the fresco of the Deluge, in
+which the endeavor to set problems in perspective clashes unhappily with
+the desire to present a scene of terror. The figures are felt one at a
+time, there is little relation between them, and the picture has small
+merit apart from its probity in the rendering of details and a sort of
+abstract earnestness.
+
+Uccello lived on till 1475, an indulged eccentric, ignored by the public
+and ridiculed by his greater friends. His zeal for perspective was
+unabated with age, and many a night his much-tried wife lost sleep as he
+murmured in the small hours—“O! thou dear perspective!”
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 94. Paolo Uccello. Tomb Portrait of Sir John
+    Hawkwood.—_Cathedral._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 96. Andrea del Castagno. Portrait of a young man.—_J. P. Morgan
+    Coll., N. Y._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 95. Andrea del Castagno. Pippo Spano.—_Sant’ Apollonia._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 97. Andrea del Castagno. Tomb portrait of Niccolò da
+    Tolentino.—_Cathedral._
+]
+
+Far the most powerful of these early realists is Andrea del
+Castagno.[37] His aggressive and truculent forms savor of Donatello
+without Donatello’s fineness. He searches the secrets of anatomy,
+locates and describes the muscles and sinews, depicts a world ruled by
+force of arm. Although he builds in heavy shadows, after Masaccio’s
+fashion, he retains an outline that vibrates with nervous strength. His
+truthful sternness still wins approbation. He was born about 1390. We
+meet him first in full maturity, perhaps about the year 1435, as
+decorator of the Villa of the Pandolfini. To strengthen the ambition of
+that proud race, he painted in their great hall nine figures of heroes
+and heroines noted in war or in the arts. Recently transferred to the
+Convent of Sant’ Apollonia, which already had a Last Supper and a
+Calvary by Andrea, you may see the austere forms of Dante, Petrarch, and
+Boccaccio, of Esther, Queen Thomyris and the Cumean Sibyl, of the
+warrior Farinata degli Uberti, Niccolò Accaiuoli, and Filippo Scolari.
+This potent and melancholy figure of Pippo Spano, Figure 95, whom we
+already know as the patron of Masolino, at Buda, is the most striking
+representation that painting has given us of those masterful Italian
+soldiers of fortune who managed war and government for the less advanced
+nations. Pippo Spano had gone to Buda as a clerk and had quickly become
+a generalissimo, Obergespann of Temesvár. For King Sigismund of Hungary
+he stemmed the Turkish onslaught, did much to save Central Europe for
+Christianity. As he stands thoughtfully confident, holding the scimitar,
+the weapon of his foes, he is the beau ideal of that Italy soon to be
+immortalized by Machiavelli, in which virtue meant successful force, and
+both were on sale. A man’s portrait, Figure 96, in the collection of Mr.
+J. P. Morgan, New York, has an even more sinister intensity. Equally
+remarkable for its heroic aggressiveness in the young David adorning a
+tournament shield in the Widener Collection, Figure 70.
+
+In the fresco of the Crucifixion, now in the Uffizi, Andrea reveals
+great knowledge linked to tragic expressiveness. No tenderness veils the
+appalling theme. An athlete suffers stoically while his mother and
+cousin shudder with grief. Of its ruthless kind it is a great
+masterpiece and quite unforgettable.
+
+In 1456 Andrea painted for the Cathedral the equestrian portrait of the
+partisan leader, Niccolò da Tolentino, Figure 97. It is a companion
+piece to Uccello’s Hawkwood, and like it simulates statuary, in
+monochrome. It is more martial and restless, in the toss of the horse’s
+head and the snap of the rider’s cloak. It suggests not ceremonious
+dignity, but noise and impending action. It may very powerfully have
+influenced Verrocchio twenty years later when he modelled for Venice the
+Colleoni statue.
+
+The truculence of Andrea’s manner led to a false and scandalous
+tradition, promulgated by Vasari, that he slew his rival Domenico
+Veneziano out of jealousy. As a matter of prosaic record, Domenico
+Veneziano survived his alleged assassin’s death, in 1457, by all of four
+years.
+
+Domenico came down from Venice somewhere about 1438 and brought with him
+a new technical method. He finished the pictures, which he began in
+tempera, with veilings or glazes in an oil or varnish medium. He avoided
+the old frank Gothic coloring in favor of pale tonalities which oddly
+forecast our modern open-air school. The new method permitted of bolder
+brushwork and successive over paintings. For the moment it wrought havoc
+with the old conventional beauty, but it offered the painter new
+resources and refinements, and eventually made possible the triumphs of
+Leonardo and Titian.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 98. Domenico Veneziano. Madonna with St. Lucy.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+On the whole, Domenico is merely the shadow of a great name, for we have
+only a handful of works by him, and those perhaps unrepresentative. The
+altar-piece of St. Lucy, in the Uffizi, Figure 98, is novel only in its
+acid and original dissonance of deep rose and pale green. The rugged St.
+John the Baptist shows an attempt to obtain force of modelling without
+exaggerating the shadows. This tendency persists in such disciples of
+Domenico as Baldovinetti and Piero della Francesca, and rules in
+Florence until Leonardo’s definitive application of Masaccio’s methods.
+In the profile portraiture of the period Domenico was a master, as shown
+in an admirable female portrait in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection,
+Figure 99. Many similar heads, which we can hardly ascribe to particular
+masters, seem to derive from Domenico. One of the most beautiful is in
+the Poldi Pezzoli Museum at Milan. All of Domenico’s pupils and
+imitators excel in a minute and topographical style of landscape of
+which he was probably the inventor. It may be studied in Piero della
+Francesca, in the Pollaiuoli, in Baldovinetti, and there is even a trace
+of it in the spacious Alpine background of the Mona Lisa.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 99. Domenico Veneziano. Portrait of a Girl.—_Coll. Mrs. John L.
+    Gardner, Boston._
+]
+
+Domenico died in 1461. By that time Florentine realism was emerging from
+its first phase, and was beginning to investigate with its new resources
+the facts of motion. It was the moment, too, when certain realists
+sought to regain the grace which had largely been sacrificed in the
+struggle for sheer knowledge.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 100. A. Baldovinetti. Madonna.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+Alesso Baldovinetti[38] well represents this moment in a lovely Madonna
+in the Louvre, Figure 100, which shows in perfection the new
+topographical landscape and that juvenile graciousness which was to be
+the staple of the coming generation of artists. Baldovinetti was born in
+1425, and this loveliest of all his pictures may represent him about the
+year 1460. He had been an assistant of Fra Angelico, but in a long
+career, he died in 1499, he fell behind the times. He taught Domenico
+Ghirlandaio his elements, and profoundly influenced Andrea Verrocchio
+and Antonio Pollaiuolo. Thus he keeps a sure if modest place in the
+progress of Florentine art.
+
+In this chapter we have been dealing in a rough way with the Florence of
+Cosimo de’ Medici. Under his astute and delicate rule from behind the
+political scenes, Florence developed in wealth, splendor, and
+worldliness. The old piety was waning or assuming merely æsthetic forms.
+Greek studies were beginning to pave the way for an enlightened and
+sceptical humanism and, withal, a revival of the pagan sense of beauty.
+And when the new beauty came, it was gratefully mindful of those who had
+made it possible. Leonardo de Vinci lauds Masaccio. He expresses the
+immense debt that art owes to the first conscious realists. They did
+good and harm, but to Florence at least they opened the only way of
+progress. For whatever art may be elsewhere, in Florence it was fruitful
+only as it was intellectualized. Good theory, good practice—such was the
+creed imposed by the early realists and later formulated by their great
+scion, Leonardo. I do not offer it as a universal formula, but in these
+days when pure spontaneity—that is no theory—and false theory divide the
+field, the old Florentine credo is at least worthy of consideration by
+all who produce art and by all who love it. Baldovinetti was untouched
+by these new stirrings which are associated with the rule of Lorenzo de’
+Medici, but he dimly forecasts the grace that was soon to come. This new
+spirit and its exponents must be the theme of our next chapter.
+
+
+                     ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER III
+
+
+                           VASARI ON MASACCIO
+
+  Vasari’s general estimate of Masaccio’s importance is still sound.
+
+  “With regard to the good manner of painting, we are indebted above all
+  to Masaccio, seeing that he, as one desirous of acquiring fame,
+  perceived that painting is nothing but the counterfeiting of all the
+  things of nature, vividly and simply, with drawing and with colours,
+  even as she produced them for us.... This truth, I say, being
+  recognized by Masaccio, brought it about that by means of continuous
+  study he learned so much that he can be numbered among the first who
+  cleared away, in a great measure, the hardness, the imperfections, and
+  the difficulties of the art, and that he gave a beginning to beautiful
+  attitudes, movements, liveliness, and vivacity, and to a certain
+  relief truly characteristic and natural; which no painter up to his
+  time had done.... And he painted his works with good unity and
+  softness, harmonizing the flesh-colours of the heads and of the nudes
+  with the colours of the draperies, which he delighted to make with few
+  folds and simple, as they are in life and nature....
+
+  “For this reason that chapel has been frequented continually up to our
+  own day [1554] by innumerable draughtsmen and masters; and there still
+  are therein some heads so life-like and so beautiful, that it may
+  truly be said that no master of that age approached so nearly as this
+  man did to the moderns. His labours, therefore, deserve infinite
+  praise, and above all because he gave form in his art to the beautiful
+  manner of the times.”
+
+  Vasari then names twenty-five artists who studied Masaccio’s frescoes.
+  From De Vere’s translation of the _Lives_, Vol. II, p. 189, 90.
+
+
+                     LEONARDO DA VINCI ON MASACCIO
+
+  Leonardo da Vinci uses Masaccio as the example of a painter who goes
+  to nature rather than to other men’s painting.
+
+
+  =That Painting declines and deteriorates from age to age, when
+  painters have no standard but painting already done.=
+
+
+  “Hence the painter will produce pictures of small merit if he takes
+  for his standard the pictures of others. But if he will study from
+  natural objects he will bear good fruit; as was seen in the painters
+  after the Romans who always imitated each other, and so their art
+  declined from age to age. After these came Giotto the Florentine
+  who—not content with imitating the works of Cimabue; his master—being
+  born in the mountains and in a solitude inhabited only by goats and
+  such beasts, and being guided by nature to his art, began by drawing
+  on the rocks the movements of the goats of which he was keeper. And
+  thus he began to draw all the animals which were to be found in the
+  country, and in such wise that after much study he excelled not only
+  all the masters of his time but all those of many bygone ages.”
+
+  “Afterwards this art declined again, because everyone imitated the
+  pictures that were already done; thus it went on from century to
+  century until Tomaso, of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his
+  perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but
+  nature—the mistress of all masters—weary themselves in vain.”
+
+           J. P. Richter “_Literary Works of L. da V._,” Vol. I. p. 660.
+
+
+  But Leonardo approves also imitation of antiquity (Richter, Vol. II,
+  ¶1445). “The imitation of antique things is better than that of modern
+  things.” He would probably have sanctioned Masaccio’s devout study of
+  Giotto. The warning is against slavish imitation of immediate
+  predecessors.
+
+
+                        VASARI ON PAOLO UCCELLO
+
+  The admirable and self sacrificing ardor of these first realists is
+  best exemplified in the case of Paolo Uccello.
+
+
+  “For the sake of these investigations [in perspective] he kept himself
+  in seclusion and almost a hermit, having little intercourse with
+  anyone, and staying weeks and months in his house without shaving
+  himself. And although those were difficult and beautiful problems, if
+  he had spent that time in the study of figures, he would have brought
+  them to absolute perfection; for even so he made them with passing
+  good draughtsmanship. But, consuming his time in these researches, he
+  remained throughout his whole life more poor than famous; wherefore
+  the sculptor Donatello, who was very much his friend, said to him very
+  often—when Paolo showed him Mazzocchi (facetted head-fillets) with
+  pointed ornaments, and squares drawn in perspective from diverse
+  aspects; spheres with seventy-two diamond-shaped facets, with
+  wood-shavings wound round sticks on each facet; and other fantastic
+  devices on which he spent and wasted his time—‘Ah, Paolo, this
+  perspective of thine makes thee abandon the substance for the shadow;
+  those are things that are only useful to men who work at the inlaying
+  of wood, seeing that they fill their borders with chips and shavings,
+  with spirals both round and square, and with other similar things.’”
+
+
+  Vasari, in Schele de Vere’s translation; Vol. II. p. 132, 3.
+
+
+                AN APPRAISAL OF BALDOVINETTI’S FRESCOES
+
+  Here I may illustrate a common practice of the times in an appraisal
+  of Baldovinetti’s frescoes in the choir of the Trinità by fellow
+  artists including Benozzo Gozzoli, Cosimo Rosselli and Pietro
+  Perugino.
+
+
+  “In the name of God—on the 19 of January 1496 (n. s. ’97)
+
+  We Benozzo di Lese, painter; and Piero di Cristofano da Castel della
+  Pieve, painter; and Cosimo di Lorenzo Rosselli, painter, chosen by
+  Alesso di Baldovinetti, painter, to see and judge and set a price
+  on—empowered by a contract which said Alesso has with M. Bongianni
+  de’Gianfigliazzi and his heirs—a chapel pictured in Santa Trinità of
+  Florence—that is the choir of the said church, having seen, all
+  together and agreeing, having examined all the costs of lime, azure,
+  gold and all other colours, scaffolds and everything else, including
+  his work, we judge from all this that the aforesaid Alesso should have
+  one thousand broad gold florins.
+
+  “And for clearness and truth of the said judgment I Cosimo di Lorenzo
+  aforesaid have made this writing with my own hand this aforesaid day,
+  and so I judge; and here at the foot they will sign with their own
+  hands that they are agreed with what is above written, and so judge.
+
+  Benozzo di Lese &c.
+
+  I Piero Perugino &c.
+
+
+  Translated from Herbert Horne’s edition of Alesso’s _Ricordi_ in
+  _Burlington Magazine_, Vol. II. (1903) p. 383.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 101. Ghirlandaio. Giovanna degli Albizzi.—_J. P. Morgan Coll.,
+    New York._
+]
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+             FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE
+
+  After Masaccio two tendencies,—towards prettiness and vivacious
+      narrative; towards strenuous research—Fra Filippo Lippi celebrant
+      of Gay Florence—Benozzo Gozzoli and Pageantry—Antonio Pollaiuolo
+      and human dynamics—Piero della Francesca and impersonal
+      observation of appearances—Dissolving tendencies in the new
+      panoramic style—illustrated by the early frescoes in the Sistine
+      Chapel—Perugino’s return to simple symmetries—The _Cassone_
+      painters once more—Domenico Ghirlandaio and spectacular
+      narrative—His portraits—The charm of the slighter narrative style.
+
+
+In the last chapter we have dealt chiefly with innovators and reformers.
+Whether in art or life, these are not always the most agreeable
+companions. The charming person is generally a traditionalist, or a
+tactful profiteer by other men’s discoveries. So the popular favor has
+ever gone not to the strenuous artists of Masaccio’s type or Castagno’s,
+but to devotees of the charm of common folk and things, like Fra Filippo
+Lippi; to masters of pageantry and incident, like Benozzo Gozzoli; or to
+chroniclers of the festal richness of Florence in her short prime, like
+Domenico Ghirlandaio. These artists, while by no means giants, are
+highly representative of their times. They one and all aimed to please,
+and amply succeeded. Their importance in the history of art is rather
+slight; in the history of taste, on the contrary, they are very
+important. And it is from that point of view that we shall do well to
+consider them. These three masters cover the last two-thirds of the
+fifteenth century. They exemplify the taste of the new-rich merchants
+who flourished under the benevolent tyranny of the Medici.
+
+Alongside of these gracious and adaptable spirits, struggled the
+continuers of the realistic reform—Antonio Pollaiuolo, who first
+systematically studied the anatomy and dynamics of the human form;
+Andrea Verrocchio, who imbued accuracy and power with grace; Sandro
+Botticelli, who explored solitary roads of sentiment and wrought out of
+the ruggedness of the realists strange forms of recondite beauty. At all
+times we find the endeavor for artistic adaptation running alongside the
+passion for sheer discovery, and producing its own triumphs. It is this
+complicated, dual process which makes the richness and continuity of the
+Early Renaissance. If we compare the seventy-two years between the
+beginnings of Masaccio, say 1422, and the death of Ghirlandaio, in 1494,
+with the century and a half preceding, we shall note an extraordinary
+acceleration both of production and progress. There are no gaps and
+rests; each generation makes its discoveries and cashes them in.
+Architecture, sculpture, classical scholarship develop with a whirling
+rapidity which by no means precludes taste and reflection. In an almost
+reckless expansion of emotion, experience, and creative activity,
+Florence keeps her head though she risks losing her soul. And the true
+harbinger of this intoxicating new life is one who often lost his head
+and whose soul remains enigmatic, the wayward and fascinating
+painter-monk, Fra Filippo Lippi.[39]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 102. Filippo Lippi. Madonna in Adoration.—_Berlin._
+]
+
+He was the first Italian painter to care greatly for the look of
+everyday people. Born about the year 1400, he was early orphaned and
+thrust willy-nilly into the Carmelite Order. As a young man he must have
+seen Masaccio painting those titanic designs in the Brancacci Chapel.
+From Masaccio Fra Filippo learned his trade, rather by observation than
+by direct instruction. But he cared for far different things. He really
+follows the tender narrative vein of Lorenzo Monaco. To the grandeur of
+miracle-working apostles, he preferred the gentle quaintness of the old
+man who kept the shops and practiced the trades of Florence; to the
+matronly dignity of Masaccio’s women, he preferred the shy and alluring
+sweetness of the Florentine girls about him; to the majestic sweeps of
+mountain and valley in Masaccio, the intimate appeal of the cypress
+groves, the little ledges and trickling springs. In technique, too, he
+avoided the bold short-cuts of his master. He hung on to the line, loved
+details, described everything with solicitude. It is an art of
+amiability and curiosity, generally disregardful of that grand style
+towards which in her greater moments Florence ever aspired. The advent
+of Fra Filippo in the Florence of Giotto and Orcagna and Masaccio, was
+like that of an irresistibly attractive youth in a solemn company. He
+loosened everything up. Unconsciously he demoralized the assembly; for
+two generations the art of Florence was to be boyish and girlish. That
+is its charm and its limitation, and the difference between the Early
+Renaissance and the Golden Age will be largely that the latter will
+prefer to depict with the gravity of maturity a world that has grown up.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 103. Fra Fillipo Lippi. Madonna and Child.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+One of the earliest and most exquisite panels by Fra Filippo was painted
+shortly after 1435 for the private chapel of Cosimo de’ Medici’s new
+palace, and is now at Berlin. The theme, young Mary kneeling before her
+Divine Infant, Figure 102, is a favorite with the Florentine artists of
+this century. Perhaps no one has conceived it more delightfully than Fra
+Filippo. The picture gets its peculiar sweetness from the gentle,
+girlish figure of the Maiden Mother, its quality of romance from the
+ledgy background watered by springs and spangled with modest flowers,
+its tang of reality from the chubby and stolid Christchild and the
+boyish St. John the Baptist. You could almost see such a thing today
+along the shaded upper Mensola when a young Florentine mother has taken
+the children for a Sunday picnic. For the old Gothic conventions and the
+bare majesty of Masaccio’s painting, Fra Filippo has substituted the
+everyday joys of a feeling eye, and the charm of closely-observed little
+things.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 104. Fra Filippo Lippi. Coronation of the Virgin.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+In most of his pictures this familiar quality is marked. His saints are
+not types, but people of the Florentine middle class. An early Madonna
+in the Uffizi, Figure 103, shows the Virgin as a slight girl with her
+ash-blond locks elaborately dressed and braided for a holiday. She is
+almost overborne by her sturdy Son, an exacting brute, one may imagine,
+while the attendant angel is a grinning street Arab caught in the
+intervals of mischief. Such pictures with their winsomeness and
+actuality worked powerfully to break down both the old Gothic decorum
+and the new sublimity of Masaccio.
+
+To grasp the novelty of Fra Filippo’s most famous panel picture, The
+Coronation of the Virgin, painted for the nuns of St. Ambrogio in 1441,
+Figure 104, and now in the Uffizi, one has only to recall the devoutly
+formal and simple version of the subject which Fra Angelico painted
+about the same time for the convent of San Marco. The composition of Fra
+Filippo, on the contrary, is radiantly informal. We breathe the air of
+the commencement at a very nice girls’ school, with adoring friends and
+proud relatives moving at the edges of the ceremony. Indeed God the
+Father has merely the air of a benevolent trustee or visiting minor
+celebrity awarding a prize to the best girl. It is all like the crowning
+of a _Rosière_ in a French village. Robert Browning in one of the most
+admirable poems in “Men and Women” makes Fra Filippo promise
+
+                                    “I shall paint
+              God in the midst, Madonna and her Babe.
+              Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood,
+              Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
+              As puff on puff of grated orris-root
+              When ladies crowd to church at Midsummer.”
+
+Our picture is evidence enough that the time has come to Florentine art
+when youth shall be served.
+
+Monastic vows, and in fact duties of any sort, bore lightly on Fra
+Filippo. He tasted the forbidden sweets of life recklessly, and worked
+only when the rare mood urged. He was in and out of the good graces of
+the Medici. Called to Prato to fresco the choir of the Collegiata, in
+1455, he was nine years achieving what a steady workman would have done
+in two. But in the meantime Fra Filippo had run away with the nun,
+Lucrezia Buti, shuffled off his monastic vows (through the indulgence of
+the humanist Pope, Pius II), married and settled down as the father of a
+family. His random joyous course was nearly run, and his last frescoes
+at Prato show a kind of discipline that is foreign to his earlier work.
+In 1464 he completed the Feast of Herod and the Funeral of St. Stephen,
+frescoes which forecast the sort of narrative painting that was to mark
+the close of the century.
+
+About the brutality of the Feast of Herod, Figure 105, Fra Filippo has
+cast a dreamy glamour, as indeed Giotto had before him. The youthful
+guests are absorbed in Salome’s dancing. Following the sculptors of the
+day, Fra Filippo has made her slight and graceful, as she trips a
+careless measure. The air is simply that of a gentle society. The grim
+motive of the delivery of the head of John the Baptist to Herodias is
+gently emphasized by the charming act of two little handmaids who clutch
+each other for fright. The sprightliness of the invention, the
+generalized idyllic charm of the feeling, the rich variety of
+accessories, the youthful timbre of the whole—make this not merely one
+of the best but also one of the most characteristic narrative mural
+paintings of the Early Renaissance. It strikes the note which will be
+echoed by Fra Filippo’s apprentice, Sandro Botticelli; which will be
+exaggerated by Fra Filippo’s son, Filippino, and distantly imitated by
+many another Florentine successor.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 105. Fra Filippo Lippi. Feast of Herod. Salome’s Dance.
+    Fresco.—_Collegiata. Prato._
+]
+
+If the Feast of Herod best exemplifies the element of homely poetry and
+inventive grace in Fra Filippo, the Burial of St. Stephen, Figure 106,
+just opposite in the choir proves that he was not oblivious to the high
+and decorous prose of his master Masaccio. In formality and power of
+construction few painters then living could have equalled it, and those
+few could not have rivalled its spacious architectural setting and its
+suggestion of atmosphere. At first sight it seems nearly equal to the
+Tribute Money or at least to the Tabitha. On more careful survey it is
+less noble, more insistently pathetic, and in every way more loosely
+knit. In particular the portraits at the sides have little but a
+mechanical relation to the theme. Masaccio himself had admitted a
+similar gallery of mere bystanders in The Miracle of the Prince, but had
+he lived to complete the fresco, he would doubtless have brought the
+portrait figures into some relation of interest in the miracle. Fra
+Filippo virtually waives that problem and merely flanks his real subject
+with bordering groups of persons of contemporary importance. As a matter
+of fact, the Florentine donor was no longer humble-minded and content to
+appear among the saints in miniature and unobtrusive guise. He now
+insisted in being painted to the life with his family, friends, and
+dependents,—a complacent, incongruous apparition amid the humility or
+heroism of the saints. Fra Filippo made the sensible adjustment that the
+donors should serve as a sort of human frame for the religious picture
+in the centre. This solution became tiresomely standard and lasted for
+fifty years or so, until the High Renaissance had authority enough to
+impose considerations of taste and self-effacement even upon wealthy
+donors.
+
+In 1465 Fra Filippo was called to Spoleto, and there having started a
+lovely apse decoration, A Coronation, for the cathedral, he died and was
+buried. Quite unconsciously he had temporarily shattered that
+intellectual formalism which is the very essence of Florentine art, and
+had inaugurated that moral and artistic holiday which is made visible in
+the painting of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio and audible in the songs of
+Lorenzo de’ Medici.
+
+This holiday mood is strong in Benozzo Gozzoli, and he spread it through
+Umbria and the Sienese country. Born in 1420, for a time an assistant of
+Fra Angelico, Benozzo’s task was to depict with more vivacity than
+insight the splendors and humors of life. This he does, whether his
+theme be the legend of St. Francis, as at Montefalco in 1462, the
+Cavalcade of the Magi, Florence, 1469, the Life of St. Augustine, San
+Gimignano, 1465, or the doings of the Old Testament Patriarchs and
+Matriarchs, at Pisa, 1468–1484. He is always sunny, profuse, witty in an
+obvious way; and not without his tinge of the poetry of youth. He loves
+gardens, courtyards, forests, and equally well palaces, colonnades,
+crowds and incidents. He is indefatigably panoramic, and his frescoes,
+if hardly good pictures, are at least good pickings, for their abundant
+and often refreshing detail.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 106. Fra Filippo Lippi. Funeral of St. Stephen.
+    Fresco.—_Collegiata. Prato._
+]
+
+Very splendid is that pageant of the Wise Men from the East, Figure 107,
+which he painted about 1469[40] for the private chapel of Cosimo de’
+Medici’s palace. The gorgeous procession winds about the walls, moving
+over the mountain roads and through the forests which you may still see
+up the Arno valley towards Vallombrosa. Their goal was the little panel
+over the altar where Filippo Lippi painted the Madonna reverently
+kneeling before her Son, Figure 102. This little picture was flanked by
+choirs, in fresco, of singing angels. For the oldest of the Three Kings
+Benozzo chose, according to tradition, the unfortunate Emperor John
+Palaeologus, who thirty years earlier had come to Florence on the vain
+mission of uniting the Eastern and Western branches of the Christian
+Church. The youthful kings are said to portray Giuliano and Lorenzo de’
+Medici. What we really have is a pictorial version of those religious
+pageants or representations which were common at the times. Many times
+Florence had seen her patricians in such a cavalcade. Benozzo’s fresco
+in its undiminished loveliness of color and gold—the Medici apparently
+either ordered few masses or burned few candles in their family
+chapel—is a most precious relic of bygone splendors. Indeed they passed
+before Benozzo himself, for he lived on till 1498, four years after
+Lorenzo the Magnificent’s death, and the year of Savonarola’s martyrdom;
+the year, too, when Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was being finished.
+Few artists have had such emphatic intimations that their world and they
+themselves were obsolete. It is in every way to be hoped in Benozzo’s
+case that he was at once too cheerful and too unintelligent to grasp the
+situation. This may be fairly supposed of a man who was content for
+fifty years of a swiftly moving world with what could be learned from
+Fra Angelico.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 107. Benozzo Gozzoli. Detail from Procession of Magi.—_Riccardi
+    Palace._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 108. Antonio Pollaiuolo. Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.—_London._
+]
+
+Of course some painters declined to keep holiday and feverishly pursued
+the lines of realistic investigation laid down by Castagno and his
+contemporaries. The most notable of these is Antonio Pollaiuolo.[41] He
+was trained in sculpture under Ghiberti, and worked most variously, at
+sculpture, painting, engraving, glass designing, and even embroiderers’
+patterns. Everywhere he pursued with an almost ferocious intensity the
+secrets of anatomy and especially of the human body in violent action.
+He conceived the body as a powerful machine and rejoiced to display its
+mechanisms—knotted muscles, straining sinews. He chose his subjects with
+this sort of display in mind: Hercules and his feats, the archers
+setting their bows and crossbows for the slaying of St. Sebastian, nude
+men in deadly combat with dirks and axes, nude men wildly dancing.
+Nearly all these works suffer from their avowed experimentalism, but all
+are alive with a tingling not to say brutal energy. Antonio Pollaiuolo
+is the ancestor of all the strong painters who for over four centuries
+have delighted to appal the mild and sheeplike throng with wolfish
+antics. He is the first artist who is a specialist, pursuing his own
+ends in disregard of the surrounding public. As a matter of fact,
+Antonio’s muscular paganism fitted in fairly well with the notions of a
+Florence that worshipped power. The Medici ordered the twelve feats of
+Hercules for their palace, about the year 1460. The great pictures are
+lost, but little copies by Antonio himself give an idea of their
+truculent force. In the Uffizi are Hercules crushing the breath out of
+the earthborn demigod Antæus, and Hercules slaying the Hydra. The
+tension, ardor, and ferocity of these tiny pictures are extraordinary.
+They seem to enhance our own physical life. At New Haven is the panel of
+Hercules shooting the Centaur Nessus, who races across a ford with
+Deinaira on his back. The background is an exact picture of the Arno
+valley looking from the west towards Florence. The representation of the
+run of the river is extraordinary. Pollaiuolo had adopted Domenico
+Veneziano’s miniature conception of landscape, but has introduced swing
+and motion.
+
+Equally remarkable is the Arno landscape in the Martyrdom of St.
+Sebastian, Figure 108, which was painted in 1475. It has the defects of
+an experimental and academic performance, is a show piece. The
+executioners are even repeated, to show both front and rear aspects. All
+the same, its power is impressive and beyond the range of any artist
+then living, with the possible exception of Piero della Francesca. In
+painting Pollaiuolo’s accomplishment is so even, and in draped figures
+so ugly, that we may well pass the series of Virtues which with his
+brother Piero he did in 1469 for the Mercantile Court, and consider his
+great engraving known as the Ten Nudes, Figure 109, the odd decorative
+disposition of which is imitated by Botticelli in the Allegory of
+Spring; and the fresco of Dancing Men, in which Pollaiuolo successfully
+vies with the convivial and Bacchic themes of the Greek vase painters.
+The group is odd and effective as pattern, and inspired by a joyous
+energy.
+
+Painting only claimed a fraction of Antonio’s effort; often he merely
+made the sketch and left the execution to his rather tame brother,
+Piero. At the end of his life he was called down to Rome to make the
+bronze tomb for Sixtus IV. There he died in the year 1498, being
+sixty-three years old. While his own achievement was somewhat cramped
+and limited, he had made the most valuable contributions to the art, or
+rather to the science of painting. He had inspired a titan like
+Signorelli and a poet like Botticelli, and in certain aspects Leonardo
+da Vinci and Michelangelo only continued and perfected his work. As late
+as Benvenuto Cellini’s day his sketches were passed about the studios
+for the instruction of young painters in anatomy.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 109. Antonio Pollaiuolo. Fighting Men—“The Ten Nudes.” Engraving.
+]
+
+A kindred strenuous spirit, Piero della Francesca,[42] affords an
+interesting contrast to Pollaiuolo. Though an Umbrian, he belongs
+spiritually to Florence. For Piero the world was a frozen thing. He
+investigated with utmost zeal the mathematical basis of perspective,
+producing on that topic a laborious and quite unreadable book. He
+studied anatomy and construction in light and dark, and all the
+atmospheric problems therewith associated. To attain atmospheric
+envelopment, he sacrificed color. His pictures exist in silvery grays,
+suggesting the blondness and tonal unity of modern open-air painting.
+The drama of life never engrossed him. His world is passionless and
+almost motionless, coldly impressive. Although he practiced all
+refinements of modelling, he never made those relaxations of contour
+which suggest movement. His figures are finely constructed and
+beautifully placed but emotionally unrelated. They merely exist rather
+splendidly, as do some of Manet’s figures. Indeed the warning of George
+Moore as regards Manet applies equally to Piero. It is futile to seek
+from him anything but fine painting.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 110. Piero della Francesca. The Resurrection.—_Borgo S.
+    Sepolcro._
+]
+
+Of his origins we know next to nothing. He was born about 1410 in the
+Umbrian town of Borgo San Sepolcro. For several years after 1439 we find
+him at Florence as a paid assistant of Domenico Veneziano, whose pale
+tonalities and topographically minute landscape reappear throughout
+Piero’s work. His austere power is best represented in the bleak
+Resurrection, Figure 110, which he painted in 1460 for his native city.
+The stalwart Conqueror of Death has an apparitional impressiveness. He
+comes with power from beyond the grave. He dominates the world as
+represented by the sleeping athletes of the guard. A most potent effect
+is obtained without sacrifice to sentiment. There is a similar
+detachment in the Baptism of Christ, in the National Gallery, London.
+Its pearly loveliness of color is in odd contrast to its evasions of
+anything like warmth or tenderness. It is less an event than a
+magnificently posed scene. The landscape is a liberating and informal
+feature, a skilful adaptation of the method of Domenico Veneziano and
+Pollaiuolo. It is as crisp and calculated as a Japanese print, yet it
+gives its effect of space and breadth.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 111. Piero della Francesca. Battle of Constantine, detail from
+    fresco.—_S. Francesco, Arezzo._
+]
+
+Piero’s great opportunity came about 1465 when he painted in the choir
+of San Francesco at Arezzo ten stories from the Legend of the Holy
+Cross. For stark impressiveness it is hard to match them in Italy in
+this century. Only Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci will at all bear the
+comparison. On analysis, the power rests mostly on the seriousness with
+which Piero takes his technical problem. There is little real grief or
+pathos in the Last Days of Adam, it is merely impersonally solemn. Even
+of the admirable fresco which represents Constantine in the uneasy dream
+in which he saw the vision of the cross, there is no warmth, no
+unexpected or emotional quality. So it is throughout the series; in the
+Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, even in the splendid battle-piece, the
+Victory over Maxentius, Figure 111, the obvious sentiment of the theme
+is ignored, the figures have a kind of splendid unrelated existence that
+requires no apology or explanation. It is an effect that recalls the
+best archaic Greek sculpture.
+
+Taken all in all, Piero is a formidable and enigmatic figure, an
+exception in an eager and emotional age. His truth to his vision is what
+counts. One feels it in the portrait of the humanist sovereign and
+captain of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro. It was painted about 1472
+and is in the Uffizi, Figure 112. How sternly honest it is, and what a
+presentation of a powerful and beneficent personality. Even the little
+decorative picture on the back of the panel, a Triumph of Fame, has an
+effect beyond its scale and obvious intention. It suggests wide
+dominions and heavy responsibilities manfully met.
+
+Piero della Francesca lived out his life mostly in Umbria and far from
+the artistic centre of things. There is a self-sufficing quality in this
+voluntary isolation. He lived on to great old age, dying in 1492, and
+unless his declining years were perturbed by the faintly rising star of
+Leonardo da Vinci, he might boast himself, in the words of his and
+Leonardo’s friend, Fra Luca Pacioli, “the monarch of his times in the
+science of painting.”
+
+We must leave for the Umbrian chapter such sturdy continuers of Piero
+della Francesca’s experimentalism as Melozzo da Forlì and Luca
+Signorelli. What is more important to note in leaving him is that such
+triumphs as his in fresco painting were highly exceptional in the second
+half of the fifteenth century. The successes of the period are in the
+minor art of panel painting. The fantasies of Botticelli, the best
+portraits of Ghirlandaio, the early panels of Perugino and Signorelli
+and Leonardo da Vinci—these are the outstanding things. In mural
+painting Florence actually retrograded, not merely as compared with the
+days of Masaccio, Fra Filippo and Fra Angelico, but even as compared
+with the earlier days of Andrea Bonaiuti, Agnolo Gaddi and Spinello
+Aretino. The fact has been obscured by the superficial gain in small
+realism, in sprightliness, and mere prettiness, but in all the serious
+qualities of monumental design the decadence is unmistakable. The
+favorite decorators simply executed on a large scale the sort of
+compositions that would have been charming on the front of a
+bride-chest. In the general enthusiasm for the parts of pictures the
+sense of pictures as a whole seemed in danger of being lost. The
+undiscriminating enthusiasm for the primitive painting of the Early
+Renaissance which has ruled for two generations has so clouded critical
+opinion on this point, that I must be at some pains to make my case
+good.
+
+Perhaps I can do no better than to review some of the frescoes which
+Pope Sixtus IV ordered about 1481 for the new chapel of the Vatican
+Palace.[43] He summoned to the Sistine Chapel the best available artists
+from both Tuscany and Umbria. By the measure of their success we may
+estimate the mural painting of the time.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 112. Piero della Francesca. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, despot of
+    Urbino.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+Originally the decorative scheme, later amplified by Michelangelo,
+required sixteen scriptural stories, in which the deeds of Moses were
+parallelled by those of Christ. The two first and two last subjects, on
+the end walls, have been destroyed, but we still see the twelve on the
+side walls. In general they all show the old Gothic coloring, are mostly
+vivacious in a confused and over-rich way, and lack unity of pattern and
+dramatic coherence.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 113. Assistant of Perugino. Baptism. Fresco.—_Sistine Chapel._
+]
+
+One of the most admired is the Baptism of Christ, Figure 113, by
+Pintorricchio, (or, as Venturi suggests, Andrea of Assisi) who here
+works as Perugino’s assistant. The story is told in the centre and
+reinforced by a spacious landscape which is confusingly full of
+attractive features. The theme is mechanically stretched to fill the
+space by adding at both flanks groups which have slight or no connection
+with the subject. These groups are interestingly diversified with fine
+portraits of the Pope’s relatives, the Roveres, and by the alert forms
+of children. The effect is fairly restful and idyllic, but the pattern
+is mechanical, and the emotional effect of the real theme is frittered
+away in the accessories. The method of enlarging a stock composition by
+adding portrait groups is standard for the Sistine Chapel and for the
+period. Masaccio had tried it more effectively in the Miracle of the
+Boy, and Filippo Lippi had made it seem almost organic in The Funeral of
+St. Stephen. Pintorricchio, if it be he, is more superficially alluring
+for his richness and variety, but really stands on a far lower plane of
+design than his predecessors.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 114. Botticelli. Moses in the Land of Midian. Fresco.—_Sistine
+    Chapel, Rome._
+]
+
+If this mechanical symmetry is the standard method, there are
+significant exceptions in the Sistine Chapel. The more sensitive
+spirits, Botticelli and Luca Signorelli, reject so trite a solution.
+Botticelli’s Moses in Midian, Figure 114, offers a delicate evasion, by
+promoting a minor motive to be the central theme. All the incidents that
+are dramatically important—the slaying of the Egyptian taskmaster, and
+the adoration of the Burning Bush from which Jehovah spoke—are done with
+the most energetic feeling, but are relegated to the background and
+edges of the composition. The picture is really the fine grove in which
+Moses gallantly helps the nymph-like daughters of Jethro to draw water.
+A fantastic idyl is foisted off on us as a substitute for one of the
+decisive moments in the Providential order. Botticelli is so winning in
+his evasion, that it seems almost unfeeling to note that no Gothic
+painter would have done anything so shifty. His success is not merely at
+the expense of the expression of his real theme, but also at the expense
+of the order and dignity proper to mural design. Having ordered a canto
+of an epic, the Pope received a delicious madrigal. His contentment is
+characteristic of the æsthetic casualness of the times.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 115. Signorelli, Design only. Last Days of Moses.
+    Fresco.—_Sistine Chapel, Rome._
+]
+
+Signorelli, in the Last Days of Moses, Figure 115, makes a similar but
+less egregious evasion. His centre of interest is the nude youth in the
+foreground, but he does give a certain prominence to the scenes where
+Moses invests Joshua with authority, and where both view the Promised
+Land from Mount Horeb. Though without much emotional accent, the crowds
+are agreeably disposed and diversified by graceful forms of women and
+children. Only the design is by Signorelli, the execution being by an
+assistant, Don Bartolommeo della Gatta. The picture is more delightful
+for such passages as the Apollo-like nude youth and the mother with her
+children in the right foreground than it is as a whole, though it is
+full of idyllic charm, and inadequate only when one considers the
+gravity of its theme.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 116. Ghirlandaio. Christ calling Peter and Andrew.
+    Fresco.—_Sistine Chapel, Rome._
+]
+
+In his Calling of Peter and Andrew, Figure 116, to be fishers of men,
+Domenico Ghirlandaio makes a skilful and impressive use of that approved
+mechanical symmetry which has already been noticed in Pintorricchio’s
+Baptism. Everything is well centralized, the river view is a welcome
+outlet, the stereotyped bystanders on the flanks at least are telling
+portraits and, while not bound into the central motive, have withal a
+gravity that sufficiently accords with it. The arrangement is lucid, and
+the surplus accessories fairly well subordinated. A rather perfunctory
+quality in the central scene of homage and dedication reveals
+Ghirlandaio’s scanty imagination. His impressiveness has a certain
+dullness about it.
+
+Few words need be spent on the picturesque and irresponsible confusion
+which reigns in Cosimo Rosselli’s Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army in the
+Red Sea, Figure 117. Cosimo was one of the older painters in the chapel,
+forty-two years old. Yet a juvenile sensationalism and uncalculated
+restlessness prevail, and his attempts at vivacity and grace are as
+unhappy as his striving for effects of terror. It may well be that his
+eccentric young pupil, Piero di Cosimo, gave this fresco its febrile
+energy and its theatrical landscape. Certain it is that the three other
+frescoes by Cosimo are unmitigatedly dull. Oddly it was he alone who won
+the praise of Pope Sixtus, mostly for his profuse introduction of gold
+ornament.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 117. Cosimo Rosselli. Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army.
+    Fresco.—_Sistine Chapel._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 118. Perugino. Christ giving the Keys to Peter. Fresco.—_Sistine
+    Chapel, Rome._
+]
+
+We have seen in the Sistine Chapel a mechanical and rather perfunctory
+symmetry, various clever evasions of an idyllic sort, and a picturesque
+disorder side by side. The most ambitious decorative scheme of the time
+seems to result in a kind of artistic bankruptcy. But fortunately the
+Sistine Chapel contains its own self-criticism and remedy, in the
+extraordinary fresco by Pietro Perugino, Christ delivering the Keys to
+Peter, Figure 118. Perugino is an Umbrian from Città della Pieve,
+thirty-five years old, and with a certain amount of Florentine training.
+He has, like Masaccio sixty years before, looked at the art of his times
+and found it wanting. He has had the lucidity to see that the malady is
+surplusage and disorder. Hence, he argues, the remedy is simplicity and
+order. To this he adds a sense of vastness. In this picture the temple
+platform, a vastness made by man, is set within the vastness of a river
+valley made by nature. The foreground group is arranged in a formal half
+military order which is cunningly made easy and flexible by differences
+of posture and gesture. Every tilted head and pointed foot has its
+reason. Without undue insistence, all the apostles are interested in the
+rite which ordains their chief. Here is no casual pleasure ground in
+which you may delightfully look about, here is a definite vision of a
+momentous act which you must see swiftly, completely, and precisely as
+the artist intends you shall see. It is the only well-considered design
+among these frescoes. It points the simplest and surest way by which the
+exuberance of the Early Renaissance might be disciplined into a noble
+order, and within twenty years the lesson was to be reread for all Italy
+by young Raphael of Urbino. Meanwhile the somewhat irresponsible
+exuberance of the new narrative painting has after all its winning
+aspect, is a sign of an energy and enthusiasm that need not so much to
+be tamed as to be intellectualized.
+
+In discussing the last twenty years of the fifteenth century in Florence
+I am embarrassed by the richness of the field. Beside such typical
+figures as Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, we have to do with such sensitive
+and morbid spirits as Filippino Lippo and Piero di Cosimo; with Andrea
+Verrocchio and a group of imitators of his fastidious manner, notable
+among them young Leonardo da Vinci; with a host of secondary painters,
+particularly of furniture panels, and small altar-pieces, while if we
+consider rather artistic training than accident of birth, we must reckon
+with the Florentine achievement the rugged triumphs of Luca Signorelli.
+But since the more distinctive and progressive of these artists are
+really precursors of the Golden Age, or symptomatic of the unrest that
+was its prelude, they may best be treated later. That will leave us only
+the painters who are fully representative of the festal moment of
+Lorenzo the Magnificent’s greatness—the furniture painters and
+Ghirlandaio.
+
+Those excesses of vivacity, those extravagances of invention, those
+juvenile graces which were a weakness in mural painting, were admirably
+in place in the decoration of chests and wainscots. The greater artists
+gladly accepted this little work, and some painters painted exclusively
+trousseau chests (_cassoni_) for young brides—an enviable occupation,
+for surely these fair young creatures had to be personally consulted.
+The subjects glorify love, magnify valor, celebrate the festal life of
+the day, its pageants, feasts, and dances. Of professional _cassoni_
+painters Francesco Pesellino[44] (1422–1457) is the most famous. He is
+bewitching in variety and sensitiveness of invention, in refinement of
+story telling, and in glamour of color. Two admirable _cassone_ fronts
+by him are owned by Mrs. John L. Gardner, Figure 119. They represent the
+six triumphs described by Petrarch in so many _Canzoni_. Love, Chastity,
+Death, Time, Fame, and Eternity are figured forth much as these themes
+were embodied in contemporary pageants, about the year 1450. The
+subjects were favorites for _cassoni_ less because of their grave moral
+import than because Petrarch was Love’s accredited Poet Laureate.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 119. Francesco Pesellino. Cassone Front. Triumphs of Love,
+    Chastity, and Death.—_Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston._
+]
+
+We have in the New York Historical Society the superb salver, Figure
+119a, which was prepared against the birth of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
+Appropriately it shows knights acclaiming fame. The date is 1448, the
+painter of the school of Domenico Veneziano.
+
+We often see the Queen of Sheba reverently approaching Solomon. It is
+the admonition that a young bride should seek wisdom. Battles and Roman
+triumphs are tediously common. They set a mark of valor for the
+bridegroom. Wedding Feasts are almost tautological on a bride-chest, but
+they afford charming pictures of the Florence that amused itself.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 119_a._> Follower of Domenico Veneziano, perhaps Baldovinetti.
+    Triumph of Fame. Birth Salver for Lorenzo de’ Medici.—_N. Y.
+    Historical Society._
+]
+
+Mythology often dignifies these painted stories, the reference being
+generally to that beauty which is institutional in brides. Thus we have
+in a _spalliera_ panel in the Fogg Museum the Judgment of Paris, with
+the competing goddesses more modestly clothed than Ovid’s record
+justifies. The work is possibly an exceptionally amiable product of
+Cosimo Rosselli, and the date may be about 1475. The Rape of Helen,
+which was of course due to her fatal beauty, is a common if unedifying
+subject for bride-chests. So is Actæon torn by the hounds of the Divine
+Huntress for his temerity in surprising Diana at her bath. A delightful
+panel in the possession of Mr. Martin Ryerson at Chicago recounts in
+many episodes the adventures of Ulysses from his escape from Polyphemus
+to his home-coming at Ithaca. The dalliances of the much-experienced
+wanderer are by no means concealed, but at least the scene opens with
+prominent display of the episode most creditable to him as a married
+man, the baffling of the Sirens, and closes with the exemplary figure of
+constant Penelope weaving her interminable web.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 120. Bartolommeo di Giovanni under Botticelli’s direction.
+    Nastagio degli Onesti’s Feast. Spalliera panel.—_Spiridon Coll.,
+    Paris._
+]
+
+In furniture painting we are generally in the realm of comedy. But we
+touch pathos in Boccaccio’s story of patient Griselda, at Bergamo,
+Modena, and elsewhere; while we approach tragedy in the many versions of
+chaste Susanna assailed and traduced by the elders, and attain to
+notable melodrama in Boccaccio’s grim vision of the spirit lover
+eternally harrying the miserable ghost of his merciless lady through the
+pine wood of Ravenna. The best of these panels is in the Spiridon
+Collection, Paris. The ghostly scene of the chase takes place before the
+picnic party, Figure 120, artfully arranged by Nastagio degli Onesti to
+prove to his unfeeling lady that there is a penalty in the next world
+for being too cruel to a lover in this. The lesson Boccaccio tells us
+was effective, and they lived happily together ever afterwards. The
+panel was designed by Botticelli and painted by his assistant,
+Bartolommeo di Giovanni, for the wedding of a Bini groom and a Pucci
+bride in the year 1487.
+
+With it we take leave of Florentine furniture painting, an art too
+unpretentious to be considered at length in a general survey, yet too
+charming in itself and too representative of the heyday of Florentine
+wealth and gayety to be wholly neglected.
+
+Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio mark in very different
+fashions the culmination and the close of the Early Renaissance in
+Florence. Botticelli is the poet of its nostalgia. He expresses not its
+joyous average, but the erotic and mystical subtilities of Lorenzo de’
+Medici’s Platonic Academy, and later the Apocalyptic hopes and despairs
+that gathered around Savonarola. He utters a discontent and ideality
+which in part are completely contained in his work and in part were only
+fulfilled in the rapidly approaching Golden Age. He is aristocratic and
+individual, hence we shall consider him in connection with his fellow
+_intellectuel_, Leonardo da Vinci. Domenico Ghirlandaio,[45] on the
+contrary, is the most completely contented creature, imaginable. He
+never even dreamt of anything desirable beyond his Florence. He loved
+the local spectacle too dearly to represent it literally. He generally
+prettified it, more rarely he glorified it. Its mundane ideals were his.
+Towards its people, its young men and maidens and grave merchants and
+magistrates he brought, without Fra Filippo Lippi’s sensitiveness, an
+equal curiosity and admiration. And Florence fairly deserved the
+adoration of such a man as was he. Wisely and generously ruled by
+Lorenzo de’ Medici, who exemplified not merely the practical virtues of
+the city but also her more engaging vices, author of wise policy and of
+wittily dissolute songs; combining the self-respecting appearances of
+liberty with the advantages of benevolent despotism, abounding in new
+wealth, lavish in pleasure and spectacle, unrestrained by a religion
+which was becoming merely a social decency and a form of fire-insurance
+against a not impossible hell—Florence had reached a pitch of
+complacency and worldly well-being the like of which the world has
+perhaps never seen before or since. The menacing sword of the spirit was
+already swaying over it in the eloquence of a young Dominican monk at
+Ferrara. But Florence trod the primrose path unconscious of the doom at
+hand for her. And Ghirlandaio was present to immortalize everything that
+was pleasant in her short prime.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 121. Domenico Ghirlandaio. St. Jerome. Fresco.—_Ognissanti._
+]
+
+He was born in 1449, his father appropriately being a garland-maker for
+gay Florence. He was trained under Alesso Baldovinetti, but prudently
+declined to compromise his own bright coloring with the new technic of
+oil painting. He studied with profit the ornate narratives of Benozzo
+Gozzoli. One of his earliest frescoes, painted about 1470 in Ognissanti,
+already reveals the grounds of his later popularity. The vivid portraits
+of the Vespucci family so crowd about a Madonna of Pity as to make her
+seem quite secondary.
+
+Somewhat later he painted the legend of Santa Fina at San Gimignano.
+Here Gozzoli’s simpler vein is imitated, and the effect has a rusticity
+befitting the theme. Soon the _bottega_ at Florence flourished mightily.
+There were two younger brothers to help, and all commissions were
+executed with businesslike dispatch. About 1480 we find him once more
+painting for the Church of Ognissanti. His St. Jerome there, Figure 121,
+is a beautifully groomed old prelate in a wonderfully kept study. The
+Saint is caught in an interval of work, searching perhaps for the right
+Latin word to render the Hebrew text before him. He is grave and not too
+stern. The colors are vivid without much regard for harmony. Very little
+of the fire of the missionary who declined to subject the mysteries of
+God to the rules of the grammarian Donatus is suggested. One has only to
+look at Botticelli’s St. Augustine, opposite in the church, agonized by
+the burden of thought, to realize that Ghirlandaio has cared nothing for
+the psychology of his theme, but has given us any comfortable old
+Florentine scholar placidly occupied in his _scriptorium_.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 122. Ghirlandaio. The Last Supper. Fresco.—_Refectory,
+    Ognissanti._
+]
+
+A similar lack of emotional content mars the otherwise delightful Last
+Supper, Figure 122, which was painted that same year for the refectory
+of Ognissanti. Pathos, not to say tragedy, is carefully kept out of the
+most solemn of scenes. The eye is likely to go first to the tree-tops
+and flying birds seen above the screen, then it becomes vaguely aware of
+a gentle company quietly feasting. Except for a faint trace of
+classicism in the costumes, it could be any governing board of any
+religious confraternity of the day, decorously enjoying its annual
+dinner. The qualities and defects of Ghirlandaio are fully apparent in
+this fresco—his lucidity and sweetness, his emotional nullity.
+
+The next year, 1481, Ghirlandaio painted in the Sistine Chapel at Rome
+Christ Calling Peter and Andrew. We have already considered this his
+nearest approach to monumental design. Shortly before the Roman trip he
+married, and when his wife Costanza died, after a decent interval, he
+repeated the adventure. The two wedlocks were blessed by nine children
+of whom one, Ridolfo, was to become in turn a notable painter. Such
+fecundity was worthy of the man who once sighed for a commission to
+fresco the seven-mile circuit of the walls of Florence. On his return
+from Rome Ghirlandaio decorated the great hall of the Palace of the
+Priors, and from now on merely a list of his commissions and patrons
+would be a blue book of the old aristocracy and new wealth of Florence.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 123. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Miracle of the Spini Boy.
+    Fresco.—_Trinità._
+]
+
+Thus in 1485 he contracted with Francesco Sassetti to do a chapel in the
+Trinità with Stories of St. Francis. Sassetti was confidential treasurer
+for Lorenzo the Magnificent, about the most important financial position
+in the world at the moment; a selfmade and ambitious man. He had tried
+in vain to get a finer chapel in a bigger church, but the patrician
+vested interests prevented. Still the chapel to the right of the Choir
+of the Trinità was no mean place, this Vallombrosan foundation being one
+of the oldest in Florence. Ghirlandaio took special pains with the
+frescoes, studying with intelligence Giotto’s famous versions of the
+stories at Santa Croce. He is most nearly monumental where he follows
+Giotto, as in the Death of St. Francis, but he also shows surprising
+felicities of his own. The scene where Pope Honorius III constitutes St.
+Francis and his fellows a monastic order, is remarkable for not only
+fine incidental portraiture, but for a nobility of space composition
+faintly anticipating Raphael. One scarcely realizes the subject as such.
+All the dramatic features with which Giotto emphasized the eagerness of
+the saint, the humility of his companions, the professional dignity of
+the Pope and the half-veiled hostility of the papal court are absent.
+One’s eyes go over the group to the familiar grandiose prospect of the
+Piazza della Signoria at Florence, and one feels that never till now has
+he rightly apprehended its amplitude and splendor. Then there are sharp
+pleasant surprises. At the left is the ugly and fascinating figure of
+Lorenzo de’ Medici and behind him the gross apparition of Francesco
+Sassetti himself. And in front there are people coming up from a lower
+level, only their heads and shoulders emerging. The swarthy man who
+leads is Angelo Poliziano, greatest of humanistic poets, tutor of
+Lorenzo’s sons. And the boys are these gifted children destined to be
+popes, and granddukes. The combination of great spaciousness and
+centrality with casual unexpected graces is so piquant and original,
+that I suppose Ghirlandaio may have hit upon it almost accidentally,
+owing to the inevitable relations of his Gothic lunette to the
+architectural forms in the fresco. In any case Ghirlandaio never again
+did anything as impressive. It is his greatest hymn of praise to the
+Florence that he so dearly loved.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 124. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Adoration of the Magi.—_Innocenti._
+]
+
+In the same chapel is a remarkable picture representing the Piazza of
+the Trinità with St. Francis resuscitating a boy of the Spini family,
+Figure 123. It has extraordinary bits of invention, but lacks the
+organization of the fresco just discussed. The altar-piece for the
+chapel, an Adoration of the Shepherds, now in the Uffizi, represents the
+graciousness of Ghirlandaio in familiar narrative his willing acceptance
+of the panoramic richness of the age, and his exceptional power of
+portraiture in these rustics painted from himself and from members of
+the Sassetti family. The ruggedness of the characterization suggests
+Flemish painting. Ghirlandaio may well have been influenced by the great
+Nativity with Portraits which Hugo van der Goes sent down from Ghent, in
+1476, to the Hospital Church of Santa Maria Nuova.
+
+Ghirlandaio’s altar-pieces are many. They are brilliant without real
+harmony of color; pretty, without much insight, in the types of the
+Virgin and youthful saints. The most elaborate of these panels, An
+Adoration of the Magi, Figure 124, was finished in 1488 for the
+Foundling Hospital dedicated to the Massacred Innocents of Bethlehem. It
+still stands on its original altar in the chapel of the Innocenti, and
+is a radiant thing. The crowded group of adorers in the foreground is
+well knit together. Ghirlandaio had taken a shrewd look at Botticelli’s
+Epiphany (now at Petrograd), or at Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished
+masterpiece. By a touching and appropriate invention, Ghirlandaio has
+set two of the martyred Innocents kneeling in white robes and crowned
+with a saint’s nimbus among the Wise Men. There are, as usual, many
+portraits, including Ghirlandaio’s own, by the pillar at the right. The
+deep river valley, suggested by northern paintings or engravings,
+relieves the somewhat congested character of the figure arrangement. The
+girlish Madonna would do no discredit to the front cover of a
+nation-wide periodical today. So gracious and ingenious is this picture
+that one regrets to note that it is rather cleverly staged than deeply
+felt, its manifold prettiness and picturesqueness, of a quite obvious
+character.
+
+As Ghirlandaio had moved from success to success, so he was destined to
+end in his day of highest glory. In 1485 he signed a contract with
+Giovanni Tornabuoni, of the old nobility, to decorate the choir of the
+most aristocratic church in Florence, Santa Maria Novella. The subjects,
+the Life of the Virgin and St. John the Baptist, were already on the
+wall in the guise of water-soaked and ruined frescoes by Andrea Orcagna.
+Ghirlandaio provided pastoral scenes with wide landscapes, city
+prospects with charming girls plentiful in foreground, rich patrician
+interiors with graceful women and their attendants making visits of
+ceremony, rare religious events with heavy magistrates and dignitaries
+standing inattentively by—everything in short that a prosperous and
+well-bred Florentine of the moment was accustomed to think desirable in
+beauty, gentleness, or worldly estate. Characteristic are the Salutation
+of Mary and Elizabeth, a picture in which the solemnity of the scene, so
+magnificently asserted by Giotto at Padua, slips away into mere
+spectacle and civility; the Birth of Saint John, Figure 125, with a
+young girl of the Tornabuoni family making her visit with her maids, and
+all manner of graceful and rich accessories; or again, the Presentation
+in The Temple, with a whole tribe of Tornabuonis and Ghirlandaios in
+negligent attendance on the sacred rite. These may stand for the whole.
+For their casual and mundane richness John Ruskin has poured upon these
+frescoes his double-distilled vials of wrath. What he says as to their
+superficiality and emptiness of religious feeling is true enough, yet
+his denunciatory rhetoric serves but as a trip-hammer to demolish an
+eggshell which has after all its iridescent frail beauty. Gentler
+methods are better with so gently mundane a creature as Ghirlandaio. The
+Lord’s people, as he saw them about him, were good enough for him and
+for his art. Criticism should rather insist that, being worldly, he was
+not worldly enough to be strong and lucid, but too readily had recourse
+to promiscuous richness and perfunctory ideals of prettiness. Still, it
+does not befit the age or race whose characteristic art product is the
+smiling or pensive girl on the cover of the popular magazine to throw
+the first stone at Domenico Ghirlandaio.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 125. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Birth of St. John.—_Santa Maria
+    Novella._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 126. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Old Man and Boy.—_Paris._
+]
+
+Whatever the verdict as to his nominally religious painting, in
+portraiture Ghirlandaio is one of the greatest figures of his time.
+Portraits of the finest qualities abound in his frescoes, and he has
+left a few incomparable things on panel. Few Renaissance portraits have
+the authority of the amazing old man, Figure 126, in the Louvre, who
+fondles an adoring boy. In this picture, deformity becomes a grace, and
+the spiritual and material interpretation are of equal incisiveness and
+beauty. As fine in another vein is the profile of Giovanna degli Albizzi
+in the J. P. Morgan Collection, Figure 101. It is dated in 1488. It is
+the supreme portrait of a Florentine beauty of a passing and lovely
+moment. An instant of time, when the old simplicity had enriched itself
+with new learning; when with the new humanism the tournament and court
+of love persisted; when courtly manners had become an ideal without
+freezing into an official code—all this is for a sensitive and informed
+observer in this placid well-poised head of an ill-starred Florentine
+bride. She died in 1488, a little before the overthrow of the Florence
+she typifies. Her accomplished young husband, Lorenzo Tornabuoni,
+equally adequate in the tilt yard, the study, or the council hall, lived
+on for nine years and shared the death agony of the society of which he
+was a chief ornament. When his head fell under Savonarola’s orders, a
+splendid chapter of early Florentine humanism closed. Thus these young
+people died with their Florence, leaving no descendants, but a memory
+eternally fragrant.
+
+The year of Giovanna’s death, 1488, Ghirlandaio, being thirty-nine years
+old, took a new wife, and continued diligently at the frescoes of Santa
+Maria Novella. Not being overburdened with imagination, he probably
+never guessed he was occupied with a memorial of a society already
+doomed. Doubtless he followed the fashionable throng to San Marco where
+for a year Fra Girolamo Savonarola had been preaching against the
+current vanities. Ghirlandaio presumably approved the oratory, with a
+comfortable sense that while unworldliness might very properly be
+preached, no sensible city could ever be induced to practice it. Perhaps
+he never woke up to the appalling fact that Savonarola literally meant
+business both evangelically and politically.
+
+So Ghirlandaio’s Florence moved swiftly to its doom, and the while he
+saved much of its look and grace on the walls of his choir. For a year a
+touchy and ugly little boy who carried the disproportionately great name
+of Michelangelo Buonarotti scrambled discontentedly about the
+scaffolding of the choir, lending a hand here and there, and learning
+the old art of fresco painting. Ghirlandaio of course never knew that in
+the restless apprentice he was training a titan. He probably thought him
+a nuisance. By the end of 1493 the frescoes of the Virgin and St. John
+the patron of Florence were nearly finished, and the altar-piece, an
+Assumption, was already planned. At forty-four Ghirlandaio had at once
+reached his climax and painted himself down an anachronism. Of course he
+didn’t know it; such self-knowledge is mercifully spared us. The luck of
+Ghirlandaio was extraordinarily constant. Nowhere is it more signally
+shown than in the date of his death. Some inkling that things were going
+ill under Piero de’ Medici’s fitful rule must have come to him, but he
+died in January 1494, a good ten months before the Medici were expelled,
+their palaces sacked, and Savonarola in charge of a Florence terrified
+into sobriety.
+
+To those painters from Fra Filippo to Ghirlandaio who caught the look
+and unpretentious poetry of Medicean Florence we owe an especial
+gratitude. They are not in the direct line of progress and they none of
+them reached the heights of art. But for centuries they have never
+failed to give delightful information, while infallibly touching average
+human sympathies. We do ill to idolize them, for they were after all
+rather small men, but we do well also to honor them according to their
+accomplishment. They did their particular task of enlivening decoration
+with illustrative episodes, with tact, refinement and knowledge; with
+all the sympathy of the modestly observant eye. Most of their work had
+to be undone before the Grand Style was possible, but it all evinces the
+vitality and variety without which as preliminary training the Grand
+Style itself could hardly have attained its elaborate and strictly
+ordered composure. We do well to take Vasari’s general view of these
+artists of the human spectacle—not considering them so much as weak
+links in a mighty chain, but as complete in themselves, as a youth may
+be complete even though the young man dies in the glory of his
+unfolding. Why expect prematurely the sedate splendors of middle age?
+Take then this art for what it offers—an unsystematic fairy land which
+is yet half real, and keep your higher standards in reserve for artists
+who better deserve them. For austere standards are held by a truly
+civilized person for purposes of discriminate praise and not as a ready
+means of promiscuous blame.
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER I
+
+
+                       PAGEANTRY IN OLD FLORENCE
+
+  The art of Gozzoli and the _cassone_ painters, and, in part, that of
+  Filippo Lippi and Ghirlandaio implies the background of public
+  pageantry at Florence. There is a precious piece of old doggerel which
+  describes the festivities, in May 1459, for the reception of Pope Pius
+  II and Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan. The palaces and churches
+  were completely hung with rich stuffs, the sumptuary laws were
+  suspended in favor of the fair sex; besides many processions and
+  feasts, there was bear baiting in the Piazza della Signoria, an all
+  night open-air ball in the Mercato Nuovo, and a tournament in the
+  Piazza di Santa Croce. I paraphrase the verses which describe the
+  pageant of a Triumph of Love which was conducted by ten year old
+  Lorenzo de’ Medici. The subject is common in _cassoni_ and _deschi da
+  parto_. The boy Lorenzo mounted on a marvellously caparisoned horse
+  headed the pageant, and while all the people whispered their
+  admiration—
+
+  “As prudent and wise lad he conducted the Triumph of the God of
+  Love.... In all triumph he made Cupid come, who so gently smites the
+  gentle heart. Upon a car I saw him, and so I tell, most marvellously
+  adorned and wrought, how it was made I dare not say. On four wheels it
+  was finely adorned with a raised stand and fixed on every corner
+  thereof as a column the form and fashion of an angel. And I who saw it
+  thought of a castle. Upon the four columns was a great ball and above
+  it another ornamented piece. This was gilded everywhere ... so that it
+  sparkled like the sun. I cannot tell of such beauties, but I can tell
+  about the top part which was most delightful. Above all ... I saw
+  stand a youth, with two great wings of many colors on his shoulders
+  and all the rest nude, holding that bow with which he wounds all
+  hearts, and playfully puts venom therein, so that while burning
+  within, nothing shows without. This Triumph so marvellous and so
+  invested with colors, its adornment very glorious—with so many pearls,
+  carbuncles and sapphires—I couldn’t reckon how many florins that
+  Triumph was worth I say.”
+
+  The whole poem is a real treasure of such lore and should be
+  translated. It is found in the new edition of Muratori, _Rerum
+  Italicarum Scriptores_, Tom. XXVII. The quotation is from page 31,
+  lines 1330–1363.
+
+
+                       THE PROCESSION OF THE MAGI
+
+  On St. John’s Day, 1354, Matteo Palmieri tells us in his _Annals_,
+  there were many religious representations of which the most
+  interesting to us, as a probable inspirer of Gozzoli’s frescoes, is
+  that of the Three Kings from the East. There was—
+
+  “A magnificent and triumphant temple for the habitation [stage
+  setting] of the Magi, in which was inclosed an octagonal temple
+  adorned with the seven Virtues, and on the east side the Virgin with
+  the New Born Christ. [Probably figures in a tableau vivant]
+
+  “The three Magi with a cavalcade of more than 200 horse adorned with
+  many splendors came to make offerings to the New Born Christ.”
+
+  New ed. of Muratori, Tom. XXII, p. 173.
+
+  Probably all the artists mentioned in this chapter saw these two
+  splendid pageants and many more. Such sights count for much in the
+  alert and profusely ornamented painting of the fifteenth century.
+
+
+                            PAGEANTS IN 1466
+
+  Piero de’ Medici “in order to give men something to think about which
+  should take their thoughts from the state, and a year having passed
+  since Cosimo had died, seized the occasion to enliven the city and
+  ordered two elaborate celebrations, following the others that are
+  customary in that city. One which represented, when the three Kings,
+  the Magi, came from the East behind the star which showed the birth of
+  Christ; the which was of such pomp and so magnificent, that in
+  arranging and holding it the entire city was occupied for several
+  months.”
+
+  Machiavelli, _Istorie fiorentine_, Lib. VII, cap. xii.
+
+  “The other [festival, Machiavelli continues] was a tournament (for so
+  they used to call a spectacle, which represented a cavalry skirmish)
+  where the first youths of the city exercised themselves against the
+  most famous knights of Italy; and among the young men of Florence the
+  most in repute was Lorenzo, first-born son of Piero, who not by favor,
+  but by his own valor carried off the first honours.”
+
+  Lorenzo was then a likely lad of seventeen.
+
+
+                 A SIDE-LIGHT ON GHIRLANDAIO’S PATRONS
+
+             _A Trick for getting a Family Chapel in 1488_
+
+  The choir of Santa Maria Novella was under the patronage of the Ricci
+  family, but they were poor and had been unable to repair the
+  waterstained frescoes of Orcagna, which had been painted a century and
+  a quarter earlier. So Giovanni Tornabuoni got permission to redecorate
+  the chapel on condition of setting the Ricci arms “in the most
+  conspicuous and honourable place in that chapel.” And so the contract
+  was drawn. Domenico Ghirlandaio actually set the Tornabuoni arms in
+  huge scale on the side pilasters, whereas he painted the Ricci arms
+  half a foot high on the door of the ciborium in the centre of the base
+  of his altar-piece. The rest in Vasari’s words (de Vere’s translation,
+  Vol. III, p. 224):
+
+  “And a fine jest it was at the opening of the chapel, for these Ricci
+  looked for their arms with much ado, and finally, not being able to
+  find them, went off to the Tribunal of Eight, contract in hand.
+  Whereupon the Tornabuoni showed that these arms had been placed in the
+  most conspicuous and honourable part of the work; and although the
+  others exclaimed that they were invisible, they were told that they
+  were in the wrong, and that they must be content, since the Tornabuoni
+  had caused them to be placed in so honourable a position as the
+  neighborhood of the most Holy Sacrament. And so it was decided by that
+  tribunal that they should be left untouched, as they may be seen
+  today. Now, if this should appear to anyone to be outside the scope of
+  the Life that I have to write, let him not be vexed, for it all flowed
+  naturally from the tip of my pen. And it should serve, if for nothing
+  else, at least to show how easily poverty falls a prey to riches, and
+  how riches, if accompanied by discretion, achieve without censure
+  anything that a man desires.”
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 127. Leonardo da Vinci. Cartoon of Madonna and St.
+    Ann.—_Burlington House, London._
+]
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+        DAWN OF THE GOLDEN AGE: BOTTICELLI AND LEONARDO DA VINCI
+
+  Leonardo da Vinci as assimilator of the Realistic reforms—Botticelli
+      as reactionary—His beginnings under Fra Filippo and
+      Pollaiuolo—Height of his realistic achievement in Adoration of the
+      Magi—Assertion of his fantastic vein in the Primavera—The Dante
+      drawings and the distraught style of the later works, its æsthetic
+      value—Minor Eccentrics: Filippino Lippi—Piero di Cosimo—Leonardo
+      da Vinci, his gradual advance towards Chiaroscuro method, his
+      ideals—His work with Verrocchio—The Adoration of the Kings, its
+      disciplined richness—Cartoon of St. Ann—First Madonna of the
+      Rocks—Leonardo at Milan. The Last Supper—At Florence again. The
+      Battle Cartoon. Mona Lisa—Second Sojourn at Milan. The St. Ann,
+      his influence—At Rome, in France and the end—Leonardo’s successors
+      at Florence; Fra Bartolommeo— Andrea del Sarto—Agnolo
+      Bronzino—Pontormo—Decline of Florentine independence and of the
+      School.
+
+
+The task before an ambitious young Florentine artist about 1475 was one
+of assimilation. Pretty much all the knowledge essential for the new
+painting existed, but in scattered shape. Masaccio had modernized
+Giotto’s monumental patterns, and had found for himself the new
+structural values of light and shade. Domenico Veneziano had introduced
+the handier method of oil painting, and, with Piero della Francesca, had
+attempted novel refinements in paler tonalities. He and Paolo Uccello
+had worked out the mysteries of linear perspective. Andrea del Castagno
+had achieved a systematic and learned anatomy. Antonio Pollaiuolo had
+added to this an extraordinary knowledge of the human body in violent
+action. Andrea Verrocchio had demonstrated that these realistic
+strivings were compatible with grace. It had occurred to no one to
+combine all these discoveries until Leonardo da Vinci reached his early
+maturity. The synthesis worked out by him between 1480 and 1498, the
+dates of his unfinished Adoration of the Kings and Last Supper
+respectively, is the foundation on which Raphael built. Leonardo da
+Vinci is the pioneer of the Golden Age.
+
+It will help us to realize the greatness of his accomplishment to study
+first the career of a contemporary and friend, the exquisite artist,
+Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli, like Leonardo, came under the spell of
+Verrocchio’s fastidiousness, and went some distance in the direction of
+the new monumental beauty. Then abruptly he turned aside along solitary
+lines quite unprecedented, but akin to the mystic past of Siena. His
+great refusal of progress, his broken and eccentric career, give point
+to the humanistic centrality and social authority of Leonardo’s
+painting. The two men represent opposite escapes from the superficial
+brilliance of the art dominated by Ghirlandaio. Leonardo moved out
+towards the future, and has lived on as a fine inspiration of academic
+painting ever since. Botticelli withdrew into himself, and has survived
+flickeringly in the occasional admiration of kindred spirits. Both
+express, if in very different fashion, the profound discontent that
+preluded a new era of art. It will help us to perceive how great
+Botticelli is in his solitary poetry, to consider two younger
+contemporaries, Filippino Lippi, his pupil, and Piero di Cosimo, an
+intelligent imitator of Leonardo, both of whom, sharing Botticelli’s
+discontent, also sought escape in self-assertiveness of an eccentric
+sort. As the modern age begins to dawn, the modern temperamental artist
+appears. The _bottega_ begins to be a studio. Thus Sandro Botticelli[46]
+has a double importance for us—as an exquisite artist, and even more as
+the first individualist who strained sorely at the bounds imposed by the
+collective taste, required a select public, and painted to please
+himself.
+
+There is nothing of this romantic isolation in his origins. He was born
+a tanner’s son, in 1444, and brought up in the smiling country towards
+Careggi. At thirteen he was still at school, hence was better educated
+than the average painter. Soon he was put with a goldsmith, very likely
+his brother Antonio, whose nickname—Il Botticello, the cask,
+paradoxically attached itself to the creator of the Primavera. Before
+his fifteenth year, 1459, young Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra
+Filippo Lippi, the most sensitive eye of the time. Young Botticelli
+presumably painted on the later frescoes at Prato, and I believe may
+have been permitted to design certain of the figures in The Feast of
+Herod. Two early pictures of the Adoration of the Kings, both in the
+National Gallery, London, show us how whole-heartedly Botticelli adopted
+his master’s discursive style, how sedulously he sought variety and
+richness of gesture and facial expression. But these crowded
+compositions lack Fra Filippo’s direct geniality. They are already
+imagined before they are observed. Fra Filippo went to Spoleto some time
+before 1468 and soon died there. So Botticelli was perhaps on his own
+resources from his twenty-fourth year, though he was not inscribed in
+the Company of St. Luke till 1472. What is certain is that he was
+fortifying himself by imitation of far more strenuous artists than his
+master. The delicate incisiveness of Verrocchio appears as an occasional
+inspiration, the rugged power of Antonio Pollaiuolo dominates his
+pictorial expression for many years.
+
+A group of early pictures shows strikingly the interplay of realistic
+influences with the assertion of his own originality. The delicately
+expressive Madonna, Figure 128, in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection, is
+based on Filippo Lippi’s Madonna in the Uffizi, Figure 103. The general
+arrangement is the same. But what a change in feeling! All the overt
+picturesque relations which Fra Filippo loved—the girlish Virgin praying
+to her child, the chubby baby clutching at its mother, the impish angel
+grinning out of the picture—all that is eliminated. The Virgin wistfully
+reaches for the ear of wheat signifying her Son’s body that must be
+broken. A well-grown, reverent angel, enigmatically smiling, offers the
+grapes and wheat, symbols of the sacrament. The relation is between the
+Madonna and this mysterious acolyte. Their consciousness of a prophetic
+rite gains emphasis and pathos from the only unconscious thing in the
+picture, the graceful babyish action of the Divine Child. The forms of
+mother and Child are those of Filippo Lippi, but with elimination of
+superfluous ornament and commonplace action. The reserved,
+half-concealed smile of the angel and his strange beauty derive from
+Andrea Verrocchio. You may trace it from his youthful David to his
+disciple’s Mona Lisa. The date of the picture is merely a good guess,
+but since it is free from the influence of Pollaiuolo, it may be before
+1469.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 128. Botticelli. Chigi Madonna.—_Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 130. Botticelli. Judith.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+In that year the brothers Pollaiuolo undertook the painting of seven
+figures of the Virtues to decorate the wainscot behind the magistrates’
+bench in the Mercanzia, the mercantile court. Evidently they were
+pressed for time, for they assigned one panel representing Fortitude,
+Figure 129, to Botticelli. John Ruskin has celebrated in eloquent phrase
+this frail embodiment of the courage of the mind. “Worn, somewhat, and
+not a little weary; instead of standing ready for all comers, she is
+sitting—apparently in revery; her fingers playing restlessly and
+idly—nay, I think, even nervously about the hilt of her sword. For her
+battle is not to begin today, nor did it begin yesterday. Many a morn
+and even have passed since it began, and now—is this to be the ending of
+it? And if this—by what manner of end?”
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 129. Botticelli. Fortitude.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+The passage beautifully illustrates the odd blend of purest insight and
+casual chatter in Ruskin’s criticism. Forget that the sword is a
+mace—Ruskin is never right in such trifles. Fortitude sits merely
+because her sister Virtues do so in the imposed decorative scheme. The
+nervous action of the hands is chiefly an elegance. Yet the whole
+characterization expresses with singular felicity the alert and
+thoughtful charm of this Fortitude amid the stolid effigies of Antonio
+and Piero Pollaiuolo. Ruskin, as often, is most wrong where it least
+matters. We have more prosaic business with the Fortitude—to note the
+pouting snub-nosed type, and the elaborate ornaments, which are Fra
+Filippo’s, the solidly drawn but ill-shapen foot, which is Pollaiuolo’s,
+and the sensitiveness, which is Botticelli’s own.
+
+A still more complete assimilation of Pollaiuolo’s energetic mode is
+revealed in the admirable little Judith, Figure 130, which must have
+been painted towards 1475. The faces are still Fra Filippo’s, and he
+could have invented the eager doglike obsequiousness of the maid. But
+the springy action and the fine, lean ankles and feet, the bony,
+expressive wrists and hands, the minutely featured landscape, are
+completely in Pollaiuolo’s vein. Botticelli’s specific invention is the
+sublimation of the theme—Judith’s sense of walking in a dream after the
+unspeakable ordeal of the night. And the flutter of the robes in the
+clean morning wind has a stylistic grace that amounts to Sandro’s
+signature.
+
+As he came into his thirty-fifth year, 1478, Botticelli painted two
+pictures so different that without conclusive evidence we should hardly
+believe them the work of a single mind and hand. The Adoration of the
+Kings, Figure 131, with the sturdy Medici portraits, sums up all
+Botticelli’s realistic achievement, shows him the greatest and most
+typical Florentine master of the moment, and proves that his way was
+easy to such triumphs of popularity as Ghirlandaio was soon to enjoy
+uncontested. The other picture, The Allegory of Spring, evinces a
+strange and to many repellant originality, indulges dreams not of this
+earth, appeals to experiences inaccessible save to the æsthetically
+elect. It was an earnest of neglect and unpopularity, the opening of a
+solitary road that no artist would travel save under inner imperious
+impulsion.
+
+The Adoration of the Kings is composed after the fashion of Fra Filippo
+and rendered with all the improvements of Pollaiuolo. The group of the
+Mother, Child and Joseph is set high and well back, the minutely drawn
+ruin, with its grace of wall-flowers, and the peacock on the ruined edge
+of the masonry are again pure Fra Filippo, as are the juvenile charm of
+Our Lady and the alertness of the Bambino. In Fra Filippo’s best style,
+too, are the flanking groups of portraits which swing back towards the
+central motive, leaving the centre free. Here are great personnages set
+forth with dignity and force. Masaccio also has counted for much in
+these portraits, and Antonio Pollaiuolo for more. The Mage kneeling by
+the Child is Piero de’ Medici, the one in front with his back turned is
+Cosimo. The beautiful young king addressing him is probably Giuliano,
+lately slain by the Pazzi conspirators. Lorenzo is unmistakable at the
+left with his proud military pose, his hands resting on a great sword.
+At the right, robed in yellow, is the fine manly figure of Botticelli
+himself. There are many other portraits of the most authoritative
+accent, but we have no means of identifying them.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 131. Botticelli. Adoration of the Magi.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+Artistically this magnificent little picture suffers from two centres of
+interest. It is an ambiguity, however, that would have troubled no
+contemporary Florentine. He was willing to take the sacred group for
+granted and to gaze delightedly at the figures of his rulers and
+benefactors. In technical expression the picture is established through
+light, shade, and color, its linear quality counting for rather little
+in the effect. It is a logical and attractive combination of all the
+realistic experiments of fifty years past, no single feature being
+over-emphasized. It is prose of a most convincing and eloquent cadence.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 132. Botticelli. Primavera—Allegory of Spring.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+Before turning to a picture which is all poetry, the Primavera, we may
+profitably consider Botticelli’s portrait, the robust body, the moody
+sensual face. He was a celibate. One need not espouse the vagaries of a
+Freud to know that such men, when gifted with imagination, dream strange
+dreams. The Primavera, Figure 132, was painted for the Medici Villa of
+Castello, where later Botticelli placed his Birth of Venus and
+Signorelli his Pan as God of Music. All these pictures represent that
+sudden homesickness for the idyllic scenes of classical antiquity which
+fell upon the Italian world about this time. The _cassone_ painters,
+working for work-a-day people, had represented the mythologies as so
+many jolly stories. For the deeply cultured circle of the Medici, these
+retrospections were fraught with sadness. The life where the gods moved
+among alluring nymphs and amusing fauns seemed infinitely far off and
+infinitely desirable. Through Horace and Virgil and Theocritus one could
+glimpse it tantalizingly. Modern poets, like Angelo Poliziano, could
+recover it faintly in Greek and Latin, or more rarely in Italian verse.
+But the Italian loves to see, and here was the difficulty. The brown
+soil had not yet yielded up the great store of old marbles. The actual
+look of the bygone Golden Age, which within half a century was to become
+matter of archæological certainty, was now matter of hesitant intuition.
+One could brood over the old poets, arrange masques in which lightly
+robed Tuscan girls played the nymph or goddess—whatever expedient was
+used to live oneself back, the visual ingredients of the dream were
+inevitably local and Tuscan. Such pictures as the Primavera represent
+this transient and appealing mood. They tremble with unfulfilled
+aspirations, breathe exquisite nostalgias, perpetuate as no other
+records do the very soul of the humanists that surrounded Lorenzo the
+Magnificent.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 133. Botticelli. Primavera. Detail. Venus, Flora, Spring,
+    Zephyr.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+For the fundamental decorative arrangement of the picture, white forms
+swaying before a vertical paling, Botticelli skilfully borrowed the
+motive of Pollaiuolo’s engraving, the Ten Nudes. Figure 109. From
+Pollaiuolo, too, come the nervous contours, the wiry ankles, and slender
+feet, and the curiously sprung knees. The old poets Lucretius and Horace
+give just the hint for the persons of the idyl. Lucretius tells of the
+coming of Spring blown in by the West wind, of Flora strewing flowers
+before, Figure 133, with Venus and her son as witnesses. And Horace
+tells how the three graces with ungirt robes dance before Mercury. But
+Botticelli has contributed what gives the work its penetrating, sad
+charm. His is the gloomy screen of orange trees and olives, the carpet
+of spring flowers, the billowing lines that sweep across the panel. It
+is conceived in two great rhythms of motion. The wave that is suave in
+playful Spring becomes crisp and sharp in the robe of Flora, and is
+nearly arrested in the heavy drapery of Venus, it passes with her raised
+hand to the shimmering veil of the dancing Graces, and dies in the
+firmly set form of Mercury, whose uplifted arm carries the movement into
+the steady background, which stabilizes it all. Even to mention the
+particular finesses and beauties of this fantastically lovely scene
+would require an essay. I have made a fuller if very imperfect analysis
+in my book, “Estimates in Art.” Now it is best to note merely that the
+only joyous forms are Zephyrus, Spring and Cupid, the rest are sad or
+enigmatically grave, as is Flora. Though they celebrate the renewal of
+life through love in springtime, those whose immortality has witnessed
+many springs carry in their faces and bearing the old knowledge that
+life and love are constantly reborn under death sentence, and that what
+is renewed spring after spring has but
+
+                   “The frail duration of a flower.”
+
+Again and again the poets have told this to unregarding man. Nobody has
+made it visible save Botticelli.
+
+I suppose only a score of people at the time knew how fine the Primavera
+was, and a few hundred in the world today may know it. The thing was
+hidden from the public, and Botticelli was painting himself into the
+most obscure sort of glory. In his remaining thirty-two years, there are
+a few reversions to his realistic vein, but his most characteristic
+works merely carry on the recondite charm, the acute and personal
+rhythms of the Primavera.
+
+In 1480 was painted the Faust-like figure of St. Augustine. Figure 134.
+One feels in the gnarled features and hand clutching the breast the
+burden of lifelong meditation on the terrible mysteries of free will and
+God’s eternal decrees. It is the effigy of one who has agonized in
+thought, and is still seeking by that Calvary of the mind a tense and
+hazardous peace.
+
+The next year Botticelli went to Rome to take charge of the decoration
+of the Sistine Chapel. We have already considered his best fresco there,
+Moses in Midian. Figure 114. Of the two others—the Temptation of Christ,
+and the Destruction of Korah—we need only add that they are immensely
+rich in details, effective as narratives, and as decorative arrangements
+surpassed on the Sistine walls only by Signorelli and Perugino.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 134. Botticelli. St. Augustine. Fresco.—_Ognissanti._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 135. Botticelli. Madonna with six Angels.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+There are rare moments of something like serenity in Botticelli’s
+troubled career. One was when he painted the Pallas and the Centaur, and
+another when he designed the loveliest of his round panels, the Madonna
+with Six Angels, in the Uffizi, Figure 135. Unlike the more famous and
+popular Magnificat, it is in immaculate preservation. The composition is
+subtler and less obvious, the worn and burdened look of the Madonna
+oppressed by her tragic fate, more specific and appealing. The late
+Herbert P. Horne, Botticelli’s best biographer, sets the picture about
+1487. About the same time were done those nuptial frescoes for Lorenzo
+Tornabuoni and his bride, Giovanna degli Albizzi. Torn from the villa
+walls at Careggi, they are now among the treasures of the Louvre.
+Lorenzo is represented as received by the seven liberal arts, Giovanna
+as presented to Venus by the Graces. We have seen in the last chapter
+how these young people shared and illustrated the doom impending over
+Medicean Florence. Botticelli captures, if not their look, at least a
+fine symbol for their as yet unchallenged beauty and discretion.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 136. Botticelli. Birth of Venus.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+A little earlier perhaps he added to the Primavera at Castello the Birth
+of Venus, Figure 136. It is conceived in the same bold rhythms, which
+this time converge on the slight, smooth form of Venus and are steadied
+by the horizon and the trees. Compared with the Primavera, the whole
+thing is less rich, varied and naturalistic. Everything is more
+schematic and conventional; gold is freely used without realistic
+pretext. The wistful mood is still that of the Primavera. Venus comes to
+earth with no joyous expectation. She glimpses unfulfilled desires, the
+eternally deferred goal of earthly love. She obeys a destiny with
+resignation and a pensive humility—almost asks pardon for the confusion
+she is fated to produce among mortals. These involutions and refinements
+have nothing to do with the whole-souled sensuousness of classical
+antiquity, they have everything to do with that scrupulous balancing of
+divine and earthly love which was the standing problem of the
+Neo-Platonists surrounding Lorenzo the Magnificent.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 137. Botticelli. Dante and Beatrice in Paradise.—_Print Room,
+    Berlin._
+]
+
+During the ’80s Botticelli was much occupied with the illustration of a
+great manuscript of the “Divine Comedy.” Figure 137. These outlines in
+silverpoint retouched with the pen find their equals only in the best
+Far Eastern art. The line whips and dances and swirls across the
+parchment, halting and turning to define a detail, then speeding anew on
+its task of suggesting motion. Figures that float, groups that march or
+dance as one, trailing smoke of incense—these volatile features are
+rendered with the most energetic delicacy. And the most incredible
+episodes of Dante’s poem gain credence with the eye through the deftest
+use of the pure line. It hardens to suggest bone and sinew, tightens to
+express joints that bear weight and preserve balance, loosens and
+gallops to give the flutter of drapery over twinkling limbs. And all
+this is done with a thin pen line that hardly changes thickness or
+blackness—done with a touch as light as a feather and yet as firm as the
+swing of a draughtsman’s compass. The study of such drawings is a
+liberal education in the æsthetics of pure line.
+
+These drawings freely distort the actual forms for the sake of greater
+expressiveness. Such distortion is the characteristic mark of
+Botticelli’s latest style. One may note it in the furniture panels which
+tell the story of St. Zenobius and the tragic lot of the Roman heroines,
+Lucretia and Virginia; in the Annunciation of the Uffizi and the Last
+Communion of St. Jerome, in the Metropolitan Museum. The new manner is
+characterized by habitually vehement expression. Intensity becomes
+morbid, effective withal. We have to do with tortured but very fine
+nerves. What personal history is involved we can merely surmise. We
+know, however, that Botticelli followed eagerly the theocratic
+revolution of Savonarola and suffered deep chagrin when the attempt to
+make Florence a city of God collapsed amid sordid political jealousies.
+His art becomes that of a _Piagnone_, a Savonarolist, a contemner of the
+careless world. His method changes. The figures are unmodelled and flat,
+they hurtle wildly and glisten metallically before airless landscapes.
+Most of the hard-won Florentine realisms drop out, and the linear
+rhythms recall the Gothic poignancy of Simone Martini.
+
+Perhaps the finest picture of this sort is the Calumny of Apelles,
+Figure 138, painted about 1490, and now in the Uffizi. It recreates
+after an anecdote of Lucian, made current by Leonbattista Alberti, a
+lost masterpiece by Apelles, which was painted to convince Alexander the
+Great of the evil of calumny. An innocent prisoner is haled before an
+ignorant judge. Calumny bearing a torch drags him by the hair. Treachery
+and Deceit act as her tiring maids. The sordid figure of Envy is her
+guide to a judge into whose asses’ ears Ignorance and Suspicion whisper
+their counsels. Naked Truth pleads in vain for the victim as Remorse
+turns to her with sullen helplessness. By a pictorial irony, the
+sinister whirling group is set in a stately court adorned with statues
+of magnanimous heroes of old, and one glimpses through the rich arches a
+cloudless sky and an untroubled sea. Very rich in imaginative content,
+ornate in its use of color and gold, sharp and definite in its rhythms,
+discreet in its expressive distortions, this is perhaps the masterpiece
+of Botticelli’s late style.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 138. Botticelli. The Calumny of Apelles.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+But one regards with surely almost pleasure and with more lively
+sympathy the little Nativity in the National Gallery, Figure 139, a
+celestial idyl in sentiment, and of greatest beauty of muted coloring.
+Above the shed where the Virgin Mother worships her Divine Child, a
+dancing ring of angels hovers. They hold olive branches from which
+depend martyrs’ crowns. Wreathed shepherds, figures from some Theocritan
+idyl, kneel outside the shed. Below, angels eagerly embrace three
+youthful crowned figures, while impish baffled fiends lurk in crevices
+of the rocks. The three figures may well typify Savonarola and his two
+fellow-martyrs. A Greek inscription gives the date of 1500 and hints at
+the fall of Savonarola and the shame of the French invasion. There is a
+tenderness about the picture that recalls the Primavera, but it is more
+elusive and unearthly, more implicit in every bit of the workmanship
+itself than dependent on explicit symbolism.
+
+What Botticelli could achieve in stark tragedy at this time is shown in
+the Piet of the Munich gallery, a masterpiece which many critics have
+quite unaccountably ascribed to an inferior imitator. It is of
+tremendous effect. The compressing rocks seem to confine a grief too
+great to be liberated in space. A shudder concentrates itself upon the
+fair, youthful body of the dead Christ. One assists at a cosmic
+mourning, the intolerable tension of which is mercifully relieved in the
+swooning form of the Mother of Sorrows. The colors are sombre, the whole
+effect fairly sculptural, though mass is attained more by linear accents
+than by systematic light and shade. Balance and pose obey not a law of
+physics but one of feeling.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 139. Botticelli. Mystical Nativity.—_London._
+]
+
+The picture may be one of Botticelli’s latest. He lived on till 1510, a
+lonely and indulged eccentric. He witnessed the youthful triumphs of
+Raphael and Michelangelo at Florence, and saw the superb maturity of his
+friend Leonardo da Vinci. He saw the artistic world move away from
+himself towards ideals of gravity and decorum and disciplined
+monumentality. He could have followed that high road himself. Instead he
+had sought a romantic self-expression leading to an _impasse_. At least
+he had made the _impasse_ singularly thrilling. Being a wag as well as a
+poet, he had his compensations for neglect and doubtless he never
+regretted his impolitic choice. Among artists of febrile and romantic
+fibre he is one of the greatest. To know him thoroughly is an
+incomparable exercise in exquisite feeling.
+
+Taken in its social aspect, Botticelli’s later style is a protest
+against the current, superficial, narrative and decorative modes.
+Against prevailing successful commonplace, he opposes a highly refined
+idiosyncracy. While the more stolid artists of the end of the century
+were content to rework Ghirlandaio’s glittering vein, the more sensitive
+spirits sought distinction in eccentricity. Eccentricity appears
+whenever an old style has gone stale and a new one is imminent. It is
+the natural expression of souls too independent to conform and too weak
+to reconstruct. The grotesque was in the air. Luigi Pulci in the
+“Morgante Maggiore” burlesques the ideal romances of chivalry, and mixes
+the old clear categories of good and evil. Lorenzo de’ Medici at once
+mimics and caricatures the simplicity of the peasant pastorals. Cynicism
+runs riot in the short-story writers and in the new comedy. There is a
+confusion of standards, a new complexity of appreciation, that at once
+bewilders and allures delicate spirits. Thus they really express such a
+moment of hesitation better than stronger or more ordinary artists. So a
+Post-Impressionist of today may have a high symptomatic importance even
+though his art be null, and a Filippino Lippi and Piero di Cosimo really
+tell us more about the time-spirit than a Leonardo da Vinci.
+
+Filippino[47] was born in 1457, at Prato, and presumably received his
+first instruction from his father, Fra Filippo. At fifteen we find him
+an orphan and studying with Botticelli, whom he probably assisted at
+Rome in 1482. At twenty-seven, in 1484, he had the extraordinary honor
+of completing Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Doubtless he
+had his great predecessor’s sketches to aid him. With a somewhat lighter
+accent, he imitated as he might Masaccio’s simple and massive
+construction in light and shade. Filippino’s Peter before the Proconsul,
+Figure 140, and Crucifixion of St. Peter are of a gravity and weight to
+have passed for Masaccio’s with good critics. But the fine portraits are
+distinctive for the later date, as are the portraits and the graceful
+kneeling boy painted opposite in the fresco left unfinished by Masaccio.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 140. Filippino Lippi. St. Peter before Nero. Detail of
+    Fresco.—_Brancacci Chapel._
+]
+
+As a work of pious assimilation, Filippino’s frescoes are amazing; all
+his more original work is so much falling-off from his beginnings. His
+characteristic sensitive prettiness may be best observed in the
+altar-piece in the Badia representing St. Bernard’s Vision of the
+Virgin. Figure 141. As he writes her praises, she approaches his desk
+escorted by eager angels. The scenic picturesqueness of the landscape,
+the accentuated prettiness of the faces are characteristic.
+Superficially like Botticelli, Filippino is less selective and always
+more sentimental. He is rudely shaken out of a mode in which he is
+attractive by the advent of the new giants of painting, Leonardo and
+Signorelli. In his last work, painted about 1502 for the Strozzi Chapel
+of Santa Maria Novella, he spends himself in superfluous and ineffective
+inventions,—trophies, archæological ornaments. To lend impressiveness
+and tragedy to the martyrdom of St. Philip and St. James, or to the
+miracle of Drusiana, Figure 142, he has recourse to hideous contortions
+of mouth and brows, to creaking joints and bursting muscles, to clamor
+and sensationalism of all sorts. It is the bankruptcy of the gentle
+spirit who only twenty years earlier had shown himself almost a great
+artist in the Carmine, and only ten years earlier had proved himself an
+accomplished decorator, at the Minerva, Rome. And the pity of this
+plunge into competitive and hopeless exhibitionism is that Filippino was
+a man of taste and character, a collector of classical antiques, an
+obliging and generous spirit. He died in 1504 at the moment when
+Leonardo da Vinci was planning a real and successful sensation for
+Florence, in The Fight for the Standard.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 141. Filippino Lippi. St. Bernard’s Vision.—_Badia._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 143. Piero di Cosimo. Primitive Man. Spalliera
+    panel.—_Metropolitan Museum, N. Y._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 142. Filippino Lippi. Raising of Drusiana by St. John.—_S. M.
+    Novella, Florence._
+]
+
+If Filippino became an eccentric through pressure of circumstances,
+Piero di Cosimo[48] was one by nature. Born in 1462, he soon came under
+the dullest of masters, Cosimo Rosselli. To Cosimo’s four hopeless
+frescoes in the Sistine Chapel he added certain vivacious features, and
+there he learned to know some of the ablest artists of his day. Always a
+bachelor and recluse, he pursued serious studies in imitation of such
+stern realists as Antonio Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli. He lived
+sordidly in his _bottega_, literally from hand to mouth, on the eggs
+which he boiled in his glue pot, in weekly batches. Alone he planned
+strange mythologies, bestially pungent, and there he thought out odd
+terrible pageants which shocked and enthralled his Florence. And as he
+made these bizarre inventions, he mocked them and himself. His
+admirations were shifting—now Signorelli, again the Flemish realists and
+Leonardo: incompatible attractions.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 144. Piero di Cosimo. Cleopatra.—_Chantilly._
+]
+
+You may sense his quality in two wall panels, now in the Metropolitan
+Museum,[49] made for some palace. Piero had read over the legend of
+primitive man as told by Ovid, and quickly his mind bred phantoms. First
+he conceived a state where dominion trembled between man and the brute
+creation. Savage men with the unfair advantage of fire are exterminating
+the beasts, among whom fight those half-men, the centaurs, Figure 143.
+In the companion panel the mood changes abruptly from strife and tumult
+to the quaintly pastoral strains of a stone-age minuet. We assist at a
+troglodyte water-party. Lovely woman dominates the new scene. The now
+domesticated centaur proudly bears her. In courtly fashion skin-clad
+warriors hand her into a rude pleasure raft which may perhaps waft the
+picnickers to the joys of a cannibal feast. These inventions have
+immense fantastic power, and their real originality by no means
+precludes the suspicion that the artist is smiling at his own ingenuity
+and at our complaisance.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 145. Piero di Cosimo. Death of Procris.—_London._
+]
+
+Take again his Cleopatra, Figure 144, at Chantilly. The snub-nosed
+Florentine beauty airs her abundant charms in a romantic landscape,
+while the asp does his by no means disagreeable duty. What a travesty of
+the dignity of Plutarch, and how fetching it is as distinguished
+burlesque!
+
+Cautiously and perhaps grudgingly, in the early years of the new
+century, Piero follows the improvements of Leonardo. This influence is
+palpable in the Rescue of Andromeda, in the Uffizi. The chained princess
+carelessly displays her appetizing attractions, while the leering and
+hungry dragon lurches on the beach and surveys his prey. High up in the
+sky is hope, in the brisk, knightly figure of Perseus. A musical party
+lolls deliciously on the strand, equally prepared to enjoy a heroic
+rescue or a monster at feeding time. We are in the superbly
+irresponsible world of the fairy tale, and the thrilling _raconteur_ has
+his clever tongue in his cheek.
+
+Exceptionally, as in that wistful poesy, The Death of Procris, Figure
+145, at London, Piero is serious enough. The girlish body lies very
+quiet amid meadow flowers. A puzzled faun and a more comprehending hound
+are very touching mourners amid the unregarding beasts and birds of a
+tranquil lake-side afternoon. Such refinements of sentiment are often
+the compensation for an unstable spirit. The vein is rare in Piero, who,
+aside from his mythological ironies and quite conventional religious
+pieces, is also a vivacious portraitist as the galleries of New Haven,
+Conn., the Hague, and London attest.
+
+Piero lived on till 1521, surviving both Leonardo and Raphael. The
+greatest artistic effort of modern times had spent itself before his
+eyes, and he had mostly been content to be witty. He represents at least
+a fine scorn of his flimsy training, and remains a consummate type of
+the artist who lives, like a bear in winter, on his own fat.
+
+After a long detour, we are once more on the high road. Perugino, with
+his simple and gracious symmetries, had shown the painting of the end of
+the century what ailed it. But his cure was too obvious to be acceptable
+until a youngster of Raphael’s entirely modest intelligence should come
+along. The reform, as often in other than artistic affairs, had to be
+made from within, and was conducted by one who had much sympathy with
+the random richness of the Early Renaissance style, Leonardo da
+Vinci.[50]
+
+Leonardo’s discoveries, pursued with the most patient and gradual care,
+shocked no one and were quickly taken up. He was nearly thirty before he
+reached consciousness of his mission, and having attained his artistic
+end, he dropped painting, with a kind of scorn, for mathematical and
+scientific investigation. In his admirable “Tractate on Painting” he has
+left the fullest and most eloquent records of his ideals. The first is
+that the painter must know clearly what he is about. “Without good
+theory no good practice is possible.” Next the artist should be in a
+filial relation to nature, admiring and imitating her directly, and not
+through the eyes of other artists. As to the main object of painting,
+Leonardo wavers between two definitions. Repeatedly he insists that that
+painting is greatest which through the postures of the body shows the
+emotions of the soul. As often, he uses a more technical definition—the
+chief business of painting is to create a sense of relief or projection
+where there is none. This relief is effected by delicate and accurate
+distribution of light and shade. Light and dark are conceived in a
+double fashion, as factors in relief and as offering intrinsic beauties
+in their gradations. We have a refinement on the method of Masaccio,
+which is merely structural and dramatic and without much intrinsic
+charm. But the new beauty of chiaroscuro soon turns out to be
+incompatible with the old beauty of frank color. Pictures become dusky
+and mysterious, tending to black and white values. Ever since Leonardo,
+academic painting has had the sore limitation of regarding shadow as
+negation of color. It is the defect of his teaching and practice.
+
+On broader matters, however, Leonardo is profoundly right. Seeing is a
+mental process and should be selective. Represent all the muscles
+emphatically, and your nude will look like a sack full of nuts. Accuracy
+is necessary, but is of no value without accompanying dignity and grace.
+Choose the most gracious aspects of reality, the pervasive moderate
+light of evening rather than the sharp glare of the overhead sun.
+Observe deaf-mutes so that you may learn the possibilities of expression
+through gestures. Seek equilibrium and an active and vital balance
+whether in the pose of the single figure or in the relations of the
+figures to each other. Get the action right, and afterwards add the
+details. These are some of the precepts which Leonardo scribbled off
+about the year 1500 when he was nearing fifty and his work as a painter
+was almost over. He is really describing the principles under which,
+while accepting the richness and variety of the early Renaissance style,
+he had once for all put it in order.
+
+Of course this was a very gradual process. To the end Leonardo retained
+something of a primitive quality, and he was by no means precocious. He
+was born in 1452, the lovechild of a peasant girl of Vinci and a young
+Florentine notary, Piero da Vinci. His earliest recollections must have
+been of the hills and distant mountain prospects of his native hamlet of
+Vinci, between Florence and Pisa. But he was soon taken into his
+father’s home at Florence, and given an education which hardly exceeded
+the proverbial “Three R’s”. Just when he was put with the painter and
+sculptor, Andrea Verrocchio, is uncertain, but it can hardly have been
+later than Leonardo’s thirteenth year, 1465. As a painter, Verrocchio
+exists for us chiefly in the work of his pupils. As a sculptor, however,
+he is a definite enough figure. His aim was plainly to infuse the new
+realism with an aristocratic elegance. What a young patrician is his
+David composing himself for the ordeal with a restrained well-bred
+smile! There is a splendid dandyism in his valor. Or consider the
+Madonna in terra-cotta, with her ornate head-dress, rich brooch, and
+carefully arranged robe, her almost too sweet self-possession. She is a
+clue to the fastidiousness of Verrocchio. Again consider the proud hard
+face and the marvelously firm and delicate hands of the unknown lady
+Verrocchio cut in marble. These things are dominant for the early
+development of Leonardo, as the alert, powerful and aggressive Colleoni
+monument is for his later heroic creations. Something of Verrocchio’s
+scrupulous and eminently dilatory character also passed over to his
+brilliant pupil. Verrocchio remained a bachelor and wholly devoted to
+his art, yet he took eighteen years to give to his famous bronze group
+of Christ and St. Thomas its dignity and sensitive feeling. Leonardo
+remained some ten years or more with Verrocchio, painting many works
+that are lost to us, and a few, I believe, that we may identify. In this
+most contested matter I follow in the main the views of Dr. Sirén.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 146. Leonardo da Vinci, Head at Left; Verrocchio, Head at Right.
+    Details from Verrocchio’s Baptism.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 146_a._> Verrocchio and Leonardo. Baptism of Christ.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 147. Leonardo da Vinci under Verrocchio’s Direction.
+    Annunciation.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+For many years Leonardo ventured little on his own account, following
+with docility the directions of his master. The single painting which we
+may with certainty ascribe to Verrocchio, the Baptism of Christ, Figure
+146a, in the Uffizi, already bears traces of Leonardo’s hand. The
+general composition is borrowed from an insignificant panel of
+Baldovinetti’s. The stalwart ugly forms derive from Pollaiuolo.
+Delightful features added in oils by Leonardo are the exquisite angel at
+the left, Figure 146, and the vaporous distance and mountain skyline. We
+may surmise that these improvements were added about 1470 to a picture
+started several years earlier. One other picture was designed by
+Verrocchio and finished after his death in 1488 by his assistant,
+Lorenzo di Credi. This Madonna, in the cathedral of Pistoia, affords an
+excellent contrast between the puffy forms of Lorenzo and the firm and
+living contours of Leonardo. The famous Annunciation in the Uffizi,
+Figure 147, seems a kind of joint product, the actual painting being by
+Leonardo, the badly balanced composition and intrusive heavy lectern, as
+well as the rather cheap attitude of surprise of the Virgin,
+representing a perfunctory mood of Verrocchio. The vista of remote
+mountains hanging pale in the blue sky is such as only Leonardo could
+have created. The delightful Gabriel also seems wholly his invention.
+The composition again rests on one of Baldovinetti’s, at S. Miniato, and
+the date of the picture may be about 1475. Of about the same date is a
+Madonna with an Angel in the National Gallery, which may well be a
+composition of Verrocchio interpreted by Leonardo. The note of sweetness
+is a little forced, as in most work of this kind. We meet Leonardo in
+his own right a little earlier, in a pen sketch of a broad landscape
+dated in midsummer summer of 1473, Figure 148. Its spaciousness and
+schematic handling of horizontals ally it to the landscape backgrounds
+we have been considering. The last work of this Verrocchian character is
+the Portrait of a Girl, in the Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna. Here we
+are in a field where Leonardo and his master are almost
+indistinguishable, but the picturesquely broken background, the bit of
+landscape, and the ease of the contours, speak for the younger man. As
+late as 1476, his twenty-fifth year, Leonardo was still with Verrocchio.
+He probably set up his own _bottega_ a year or so afterwards.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 148. Leonardo da Vinci. Landscape. Pen Drawing.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 149. Leonardo da Vinci. Annunciation.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+There followed four or five years of eager experiment, much being
+planned and rather little carried to completion. Relieved from the
+pressure of a master, actual painting seems to have become irksome. He
+loves to sketch, to turn his designs over until they reach perfection,
+leaving them in the condition of the swiftest and most accurate
+notations. Lack of system and paralysis of will are already apparent.
+For about two years of this joyous and irresponsible creation he
+remained a primitive. Such he is in the idyllic little Annunciation of
+the Louvre,[51] Figure 149, which should be for its fluent technic no
+earlier than 1476. He takes the motive which he had previously done
+under restrictions, reduces it to a symmetrical order, rejects
+distracting details, floods it with warm light breaking through ragged
+apertures of the trees, and invests it with a penetrating humility and
+grace. The little picture, which many critics set too early, is really
+Leonardo’s declaration of independence. It shows features which
+anticipate his mature style—a combination of a severe geometrical
+symmetry in figure composition with a romantically strange setting and
+lighting.
+
+Of less import is the unpretentious little Madonna of the Flower,
+recently discovered, and in the Hermitage, at Petrograd. It is
+authenticated by numerous composition sketches. Its vivacity and
+youthful lightness of effect are entirely in Verrocchio’s manner,
+nothing is new but heavier shadows and more emphatic modelling.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 150. Leonardo da Vinci. Pen Sketches for the Madonna of the
+    Cat.—_British Museum._
+]
+
+On a sheet of drawings in the Uffizi, which characteristically combines
+with sketches of men’s heads studies of machinery, we read “This day I
+began the two Virgin Marys.” The day is effaced, but it is a month in
+1478, ending in _-bre_—September, October or November. One of these
+Madonnas is, no doubt, the Madonna of the Flower.[52] As to the other we
+have no certainty, but the sketches of this time show at least five
+madonnas in process of invention. A Madonna holding a mischievous Child
+who hugs a writhing cat, a Madonna with a Dish of Fruit, a Madonna
+kneeling before the Child, a theme later developed into the Madonna of
+the Rocks; a Madonna seated on the Ground, and a Madonna seated in the
+open with the Christchild and St. John. Dr. Jens Thys thinks the last
+composition may be the one actually begun as a picture, since such early
+Raphaels as the Belle Jardinière seem to imply such a picture as their
+model. We do well to turn from such speculations to the marvelous
+sketches for these Madonnas, Figure 150. Nothing firmer, lighter or more
+charming can be imagined. Of the line, thinned to a hair or widened to a
+blot, there is the completest control. These little figures, a couple of
+inches high at the most and often of thumb-nail minuteness, may be
+enlarged to life size without losing in structure or character. Nothing
+shows better the sheer fecund genius of Leonardo than these sheets,
+crowded with figures, scribbled with his right-to-left handwriting, and
+slantingly shaded from upper left downwards, after the fashion of a
+lefthanded draughtsman. They show how Leonardo worked in spurts of
+inspiration, creating a dozen lovely compositions and contented with
+none. They represent so many tensely joyous half-hours, with doubtless
+long intervals of other activities and withal of sheer brooding and
+unrecorded observation. They help one grasp the spasmodic and
+discontinuous quality of Leonardo’s genius—why the actual execution of
+pictures was ever a matter of pain and drudgery to him. Up to his
+twenty-ninth year he apparently made no prolonged effort of any sort,
+but spent himself furiously in separate investigations. Then he pulled
+himself together for a great picture, and though it too never got beyond
+the underpainting, it broke the new path to the Golden Age.
+
+For several years Leonardo had turned over the theme of an Adoration of
+the Child in his sketch books. These desultory inventions were brought
+abruptly to a focus in March 1481, when he agreed to do an altar-piece
+for the monks of S. Donato at Scopeto. We have the best circumstantial
+evidence for identifying this piece with the unfinished Adoration of the
+Kings, now in the Uffizi. When we live ourselves into this dusky and
+mysterious sketch we step out of the early Renaissance into a new,
+ardent, rich and ordered region of invention such as the world had not
+witnessed since the glory of Greece faded. The composition went through
+at least three main stages. At first, as we see from a pen study in the
+Bonnat Museum, at Bayonne, an Adoration of the Shepherds was considered,
+the Madonna kneeling over the Christ between flanking groups of
+worshippers. The scheme was rejected as too thin and obvious. A picture
+of Lorenzi di Credi’s shows us its limited possibilities. Then the
+picture became an Adoration of the Kings, with the thatched shed, much
+action in the foreground group and a ruined amphitheatre in the
+background. This sketch in the Louvre, Figure 151, contains all the
+elements of the picture, but an extraordinary work of clarification and
+refinement remained to be done. The figures were studied and restudied
+till they reached both highest expressiveness and individuality,[53] and
+an exact relation to the dense and intricate articulation of the
+foreground group. Often there are half a dozen separate studies for each
+motive. The central group was more closely massed till it became a rose
+of eager faces and flickering hands and kneeling forms pressing inward
+towards the Child. To increase this concentration, a mound is erected
+behind the group shutting it off from the wide background. To steady the
+group, the Madonna is no longer swung athwart the motion, but her nearly
+straight position becomes a sort of axis carried up by the trees above.
+In the richness, variety and animation of the compact group of adorers,
+Leonardo has met the Early Renaissance on its own ground and outdone it.
+In the wider setting he still observes the old precepts, but in a
+profounder and more significant sense. He has swept the traditional shed
+aside and opened up a world, a world furtive and active and combatant in
+its own wilfulness—playing, hiding, and fighting amid the crumbling
+ruins of old civilizations, and before distant towering crags which were
+there before civilization or man himself was; a world oblivious of the
+sublime mystery accomplishing itself in the kings who pay homage to a
+Babe. What an ironic substitute for the joyous pastoralism with which
+contemporary artists invested their pictures of the Epiphany!
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 151. Leonardo. Sketch for Adoration.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 152. Leonardo da Vinci. Adoration of the Magi.
+    Underpainting.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+The Adoration of the Kings, Figure 152, is the richest, most
+complicated, most beautifully ordered picture of its century; even
+Leonardo was not to surpass it simply as a composition. Like all rich
+things it will bear many analyses. You may consider it as a triangle,
+with the reciprocal forms enriched, or, with Dr. Thys, as the
+combination of two radiating motives, one centred on the Madonna’s face,
+the other on the soft alert body of the Child. Such analyses are only
+important as temporary aids to understanding of the main fact that in
+the making of such a masterpiece a clear and subtile geometry is
+involved. Later Leonardo was to declare that there is no science which
+cannot undergo mathematical demonstration, and he probably would have
+added—no art. Of his own art at least the saying is true. It may have
+been not so much his native indolence that arrested a work which had
+claimed months of passionate preparation at the moment when creation was
+at its height, as the conviction that it would lose something if fully
+realized. One can see how he loved the summary touches of dark and
+light, the swift, sufficient evocation of body and soul which he had
+learned from Masaccio. He may have hated to cover up such work, and a
+critic today may well be in doubt whether the gain in finishing it would
+have atoned for the loss. Or Leonardo da Vinci may already have been
+called to Milan and a new artistic life. However that be, the monks of
+Secopto, after a long wait, turned to Filippino Lippi, who had already
+undertaken one lapsed commission for Leonardo, and he promptly achieved
+an Adoration of the Kings which only shows how inimitable Leonardo was,
+and how little mere richness counts in any picture.
+
+For two years between 1481 and 1483, there is silence. It seems to me
+that in this time we may set the crowning of his early work in the
+Madonna of the Rocks at the Louvre and the Cartoon of St. Ann at London.
+The Madonna of the Rocks, Figure 153, is the logical outcome of a half
+dozen Adorations which we may trace through the drawings of 1478. A
+sheet of sketches in the Metropolitan Museum shows him turning the theme
+over, rejecting the established profile arrangement of Fra Filippo, and
+hitting on the formal pyramidal pattern which appears in the picture
+itself. There the pyramid is felt not merely in plane, but also in
+depth. The forms and faces are superbly tense without either rigidity or
+the fluency of Leonardo’s later work. The setting is primitive, with
+minutely studied textures of rock and crisp shapes of wall-flowers.
+Everything derives from Fra Filippo and Botticelli, but with new
+meaning. The romantic strangeness of the setting, the glimpses of sky
+and opening in the rock, the sifting in of light from the heart of the
+picture itself, the broad contrast of the formality of the figure
+arrangement with the picturesque wildness of the setting—all this is
+purest Leonardo and represents the culmination of many experiments. One
+can trace this idea of irregularly broken light and an informal screen
+as foil for a geometrical pattern, from the little Annunciation of the
+Louvre, through the unfinished St. Jerome of the Vatican. The Early
+Renaissance steps into the background, where it belongs. Leonardo never
+rejects it; he fulfils it with an exquisite sense of proportion.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 153. Leonardo. Madonna of the Rocks.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+If the first Madonna of the Rocks was painted before 1482, in Florence,
+so probably was the cartoon of the Madonna with St. Ann, Figure 127,
+perhaps the most precious single work that Leonardo has left us. The
+inwardness of the relation between the two women is in the mood of the
+Adoration of the Kings, single motives suggest the drawings for the
+Madonna of the Cat. Later Leonardo was to lend to the motive greater
+complication and formal elegance, somewhat at the cost of emotional
+insight. Pictures of intense and natural feeling Leonardo does not
+produce after his thirtieth year. Instead we have dramatic objectivity
+in one phase, and in another, exquisite subtilities, a calculated
+graciousness sweet to morbidity.
+
+What drew Leonardo from Florence to Milan we do not surely know.
+Probably he was called directly by the Duke Lodovico Sforza to undertake
+the colossal equestrian statue of his father Francesco. Moreover,
+Leonardo seems to have achieved notoriety at Florence without gaining
+much confidence or achieving much success. After all, he had rather
+little to show for his genius—just his sketch books and his good
+intentions in unfinished masterpieces. He seems, too, never to have
+mastered the practice which ever brought the best commissions, fresco
+painting. Thus he had every reason to seek new fortunes.
+
+He heralded his coming to Milan with the most truthfully boastful of
+letters in which he arrogated to himself all ability as an inventor,
+civil and military engineer, painter, sculptor, and architect; and he
+entered the presence of Lodovico bearing a silver lute wrought in the
+form of a horse’s skull. This dramatic entrance was the forecast of
+arduous duties as an entertainer. He sang, told anecdotes and fables,
+arranged pageants and masques, conducted debates on his art—in short,
+accepted the thousand and one duties and distractions of a courtier.
+
+He painted the portraits of the Duke’s mistresses, and it is possible
+that we have the girlish figure of Cecilia Gallierani in the lady with
+an Ermine[54] at Cracow. The forms and feeling are entirely like
+Leonardo’s work in the early eighties. He agreed to do an altar-piece
+for the Church of San Francesco, and delivered it only after a delay of
+twenty-three years. This most postponed of pictures is the version of
+the Madonna of the Rocks now at London. Meanwhile Leonardo’s constant
+concern was “the horse,” as he calls it. For seven years he worked at a
+rearing horse with a fallen foe trodden beneath. It is shown in many
+drawings. It was too sensational a theme to please him in the long run.
+So in 1490, spurred by the risk of losing the job, he restudied the
+horse, using the walking motive, which had come down from classical
+antiquity. Eventually the clay model was set up before the Sforza
+castle, just in time for the invading French archers to make a target of
+it. The rider was never even definitely planned. The whole project
+remained a chagrin to Leonardo even after the horse itself had
+disappeared. One day in Florence he civilly accosted Michelangelo who
+turned on him with the taunt—“Thou who did’st model a horse and could’st
+not cast it in bronze.”
+
+Amidst the distractions of the court, the irksomeness of the rashly
+undertaken Sforza monument, and the increasing passion for scientific
+research, Leonardo managed to carry through his single monumental work,
+the Last Supper, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
+
+For three years Leonardo worked spasmodically on the Last Supper, and it
+was finished in 1498. The design had been most carefully elaborated. He
+started with the customary arrangement of the apostles in pairs, John in
+Jesus’ bosom—a refractory motive, and Judas in sinister isolation on the
+near side of the table. Almost by accident he fell upon the effective
+grouping of the apostles by threes. Then he set himself to giving in
+expression and gesture the maximum emotion that could be contained
+within a monumental design. He eliminated the old casual accessories and
+made all the lines of perspective converge on the face of Christ. He
+gave to all the figures a classical gravity, though admitting many
+varieties of age and character.
+
+Thus even in its ruined estate The Last Supper, Figure 154, is perhaps
+the most impressive picture in the world. The moment is that when Christ
+says “One of you shall betray me.” The arrangement is in five great
+balancing waves. From the Christ there is an outgoing gesture of
+resignation and love, from the apostles converging, incoming waves of
+horror, amazement, curiosity and indignation. Each undulation is double.
+Extended arms or pointed hands check the motion where it is excessive or
+connect the separate groups. Only Judas is out of the converging rhythm.
+He swings back defiantly pondering his part. Highly agitated in details,
+the whole is held within a noble and pathetic decorum. It is the very
+ideal of a Renaissance composition—dense, rich, energetic, varied, yet
+unified by a severe and calculated pattern which subordinates to its
+purpose the most diverse components. Raphael can only imitate it in the
+lower part of the Disputa, and monumental design ever since has gone to
+school with it.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 154. Leonardo da Vinci. Last supper.—_S. Maria delle Grazie,
+    Milan._
+]
+
+It was unhappily painted in tempera, not in oils as older accounts
+say,[55] on the dry wall, and it soon began to deteriorate. What we see
+today is merely the wraith of it, yet a wraith that imposes itself and
+moves us as few better preserved masterpieces do.
+
+In the year 1500 the French overran Lombardy, and, Leonardo, after
+wandering in Northern Italy and a martial episode as engineer for
+conquering Cæsar Borgia, returned, in 1503, to his native Florence. He
+is fifty and already in spirit an old man. His always limited will power
+has given out, he broods incessantly over mathematical and physical
+lore, wastes himself over fantastic inventions. His exhibit is only a
+cartoon, now lost, for a St. Ann. He makes portraits by proxy, but
+paints, himself, only under peculiar incentives. Such he found in the
+commission for a great battle-piece for the Priors’ Palace and in the
+personality of Mona Lisa.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 155. Leonardo da Vinci. Sketches for the Battle of
+    Anghiari.—_Windsor Castle._
+]
+
+Early in the year 1504 he began to work on the cartoon for the Battle of
+Anghiari. He chose the incident of a cavalry fight for the standard. He
+composed a whirl of horses and infuriated riders, hacking and slashing
+about a flag—a literal picture of bloodlust at its height. The ability
+he expended on this atrocious theme may be sensed in a dozen preparatory
+sketches, Figure 155. The portion which he actually painted on the wall
+is represented only by inferior copies. The original soon faded from
+deficient technical methods. The old copies tell us that this great
+piece, while the marvel of its day, was sensational and highly
+exhibitionistic. We need not too much mourn its loss. The admiration it
+evoked was that of an age eager for novelty and responsive to display.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 156. Leonardo. Mona Lisa.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+While working on the battle-piece, Leonardo met the young Neapolitan
+wife of Francesco del Giocondo and began her portrait, Figure 156. She
+had lost children and was habitually sad. He employed musicians to charm
+the inscrutable fascinating smile to her face. He set her demure and
+watchful before a romantic expanse of river plain rimmed by blue alps.
+Against this wild charm of nature, he made Mona Lisa a symbol for all
+that is cultured, self-contained, sophisticated, civilized. Simple
+people instinctively dislike her, and are right. Subtle people adore
+her, and are also right. Such as wish poetic commentary on her
+mysterious beauty may find it for themselves in Walter Pater’s admirable
+essay. They will do well to temper his eloquence with Kenyon Cox’s[56]
+just if prosaic observation that this portrait is simply the finest,
+most accurate, and subtle bit of modelling in the world. Its mystery is
+perhaps merely one of amazing vision and impeccable workmanship. The
+truth may well lie between two interpretations, each of which is valid
+in its own field. Had there not been some extraordinary spell in the
+woman herself, Leonardo, now well weary of painting, would hardly have
+studied either her soul or her modelling with such tenacity.
+
+During his brief sojourn in Florence, Leonardo did cartoons for two
+designs of Leda and the Swan, his only mythological picture. One
+represents her standing, the other crouching. If we may trust the
+inferior imitations, in which alone we know these subjects, their
+calculated sensuousness was almost cloying. Their mood is that of his
+least agreeable imitator, Sodoma.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 157. Leonardo. Madonna with St. Ann.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+In May 1506 Florence lent Leonardo to Charles d’Amboise, the French
+viceroy at Milan, and there he spent the most of the next five years.
+The Franciscans had been biding their time, and under legal duress made
+him finish the Madonna which he had promised twenty-three years earlier.
+Thus the second Madonna of the Rocks, at London, was painted somewhat
+against the grain. It has more simplicity and breadth than the earlier
+version and shows improvements in the position of the angel. It also
+lacks the minute and painstaking delicacy of its original, reveals a
+tired hand and mind. Otherwise Leonardo achieved in painting only the
+third version of the Madonna and St. Ann, Figure 157, now in the Louvre.
+The interweaving of the figures is compact and masterly, the solution of
+the difficult problems of the two heads consummately clever. It has
+passages of the utmost loveliness, like the foot of the Madonna, but
+there is some suspicion of oversophistication, and Leonardo never
+summoned the energy to finish it. Painting little himself,—for he was
+busy with canals, architecture, and the never finished equestrian
+monument of Trivulzio,—Leonardo gave his stamp to the entire Milanese
+school. Such pupils as Boltraffio, Cesare da Sesto, Andrea Solario, his
+old partner, Ambrogio de Predis, and his intimate, Francesco Melzi,
+readily grasped his mannerisms, and filled Italy with Leonardesque
+pictures of inferior inspiration. More robust and independent spirits,
+like Bernardino Luini, adapted his manner intelligently to the needs of
+mural painting. Lombardy under his influence for a moment seemed to vie
+with Florence and Rome.
+
+In 1513 Leonardo was called to Rome by the new Pope Leo X, Lorenzo de’
+Medici’s son, Giovanni. It was the moment for artistic ambition to flame
+in one who felt himself a great painter. Michelangelo had recently
+unveiled the Sistine ceiling, and Raphael had completed the Camera della
+Segnatura. Leonardo was sixty-one, when a painter should be at his best.
+Yet he plunged himself into scientific experiments, perpetrated strange
+practical jokes on his patrons, produced nothing but disorderly notes,
+and after two wasted years left the repute of one rather an amateur
+magician than an artist.
+
+Having lived a wanderer, it was appropriate that Leonardo should die an
+exile. Francis I, an enthusiastic patron of Italian art, called him to
+France and settled him honorably in the Château of Cloux, near Amboise.
+We hear of him as immensely learned and venerable, but palsied, and
+dependent on the affectionate care of his pupil Melzi. He died on the
+morrow of Mayday 1519 at peace with the church, leaving money to sixty
+poor persons who should follow his body with candles to the tomb.
+Doubtless you could have marked in that pitiful procession many of those
+gnarled, toothless and haggard faces which Leonardo formerly loved to
+sketch in the intervals of his endless quest of beauty. As we study the
+marvelous drawing of himself in old age, Figure 158, we may surmise that
+he was glad to go. It is hard to see in it the courtier who bore the
+fantastic silver lute to Lodovico, the artist who charmed a smile from
+the weary and cautious face of Mona Lisa. One sees a man immensely old,
+though at an age generally robust and cheery—one who has tried to crowd
+many lives into one and has paid the inevitable penalty.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 158. Leonardo da Vinci. His own portrait.—_Turin._
+]
+
+Broken and intermittent as it had been, Leonardo’s painting had sufficed
+to show the way. He had substituted mystery of light and shade for
+allurement of frank color, study of the subtler and finer shades of
+emotion for obvious characterization, had founded modern portraiture. He
+had shown how to express power and passion with delicacy, had combined
+the richest animation and variety with monumental severity of design.
+After him the art of painting was never to be the same again. Its
+standards became ampler and more classic. Stolid men like Fra
+Bartolommeo immediately accepted his principles of composition and so
+did miraculously alert intelligences like Raphael’s. His mere passing
+contact and tradition inspired that admirable language of light and dark
+that became poetry in Giorgione and Correggio. The good and the harm he
+did is active today in thousands of academies and art schools. His is
+assuredly the finest intelligence that ever applied itself to the
+painter’s art, and if he failed in will and in fecundity, he has
+impressed himself upon posterity as no other Italian painter save
+Titian. His art had its limitations, but its capacity for influence, to
+which he added the thoughtful eloquence of his written word, seems
+limitless; and his glory is imperishable.
+
+Nowhere does the superiority of Florence show more clearly than in the
+attitude of her artists to Leonardo. Where his Milanese followers aped
+his superficial mannerisms, his Florentine admirers studied and
+assimilated his construction in light and shade and his principles of
+geometrical composition. Unhappily the early years of the sixteenth
+century were a slack time in Florence. Such transitional painters as
+Piero di Cosimo, Granacci, Franciabigio, Il Bacchiacca, and Ridolfo
+Ghirlandaio were not men to carry forward Leonardo’s discoveries, but
+they and others, at least paid him an intelligent homage and sensibly
+clarified their practice under his influence. Greater intelligences like
+Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto not merely adopted Leonardo’s
+canons, but even at certain points criticized them. Both saw the
+drawback of Leonardo’s passionate concern with chiaroscuro—that it
+flooded the canvas with colorless shadow, tending to reduce the palette
+to black and white. Both men then therefore kept their rich shadows
+colorful. Both worked for a more compact and intricate composition as
+well as for graceful, abstract poses. In these latter endeavors they
+simplified and sharpened principles which Leonardo himself only rarely
+carried to their logical extreme.
+
+Leonardo retained certain primitive qualities. He seldom reduced his
+compositions to dense arrangements of the figures, loving to allow elbow
+room and delighting to open up landscape backgrounds. And while in the
+“Treatise on Painting” he advocated elaborately balanced and
+counterpoised poses, in practice he usually sought an excuse for them in
+action. A consummate stylist, he achieved style on a basis of function.
+The pose, in his own words, must express “the emotions of the soul.”
+Right here his ablest followers took issue with him. Posture with them
+no longer expressed specific or individual emotion, but abstract
+beauties of grace, dignity or grandeur. The figures no longer do or feel
+anything, they are arranged as the general composition and mood of the
+picture require. Such gradual advance towards pure style heralds the
+advent of the High Renaissance.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 159. Fra Bartolommeo. God appearing to two Saints.—_Lucca._
+]
+
+Of the somewhat stolid and occasionally sentimental sublimity of Fra
+Bartolommeo[57] nothing much need be said except that it was a formative
+influence on young Raphael. The Dominican monk is an impressive and
+amiable figure personally. Working solely for the glory of God and the
+profit of the Convent of San Marco, perturbed by the tragic fate of his
+cloister mate, Savonarola, he strove incessantly for a fuller color and
+a greater dignity. In his numerous Holy Families he is stately in a
+conventional way, nowhere more so than in the unfinished design for a
+Madonna with St. Ann, in the Uffizi. Occasionally, in such pictures as
+the Deposition of the Uffizi, and the Madonna of Pity at Lucca he
+achieves poignant, one is tempted to say operatic effects, forecasting
+the mood of the Baroque. Lucca also affords in the great picture God
+Adored by Two Saints, Figure 159, a fine example of this painter’s
+simple and massive compositions. In the fresco of The Last Judgment,
+which, being ruined, is better represented by Copies, Figure 160, we
+find an elaboration, in Leonardo’s sense, of the simple symmetries of
+Perugino. It is the precedent for Raphael’s monumental frescoes at Rome.
+His short career, from about 1495 to 1517, fell on evil times for
+Florence. In happier days he might have harmonized more perfectly the
+stylist and the lyrical dramatist that, as it was, never quite came to
+terms in his grave and noble personality. Yet to have mediated between
+Leonardo and Raphael would seem glory enough for any painter, and it was
+also no slight service to borrow for Florentine painting, rapidly
+becoming starved of color, something of the colorful richness of
+Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 160. Fra Bartolommeo. Copy of Lost Fresco of Last
+    Judgment.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+“The Perfect Painter” was what the Florentines called Andrea del
+Sarto,[58] and he merited the title. He produced no masterpiece of the
+first order, but his Work is singularly uniform on a high level. Its
+chief qualities are dignity and grace with a great richness of color.
+The deep shadows are warm and full of dusky light, the stylistic poses
+of the figures always easy, and the weaving of the complicated groupings
+ever tasteful and harmonious. To the refractory art of fresco painting
+Andrea brought a richness, depth and variety of color that others hardly
+attained in oil painting. Only Luini in the north came near him in this
+regard. In short he is a consummate technician, carrying his art as far
+as skill and taste unillumined by sheer genius will reach.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 161. Andrea del Sarto. Birth.—_Annunziata._
+]
+
+Little of his excellence can be laid to his early training. Before 1500
+he was working with Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea’s youthful frescoes of
+the miracles of S. Filippo Benizzi, in the fore-court of the Annunziata,
+show the loose and animated arrangements and the exaggeration of
+picturesque landscape features characteristic of his master. But Andrea
+learned rather of the time-spirit than of any other master. By 1514 his
+art is complete and one may see its flowering in the frescoes of the
+Birth of the Virgin, Figure 161, and the Madonna of the Sack, Figure
+162, respectively in the fore-court and in the cloister of the
+Annunziata. It is a sumptuous and grave kind of design redeemed from
+heaviness by its exquisite balance of color masses, and from
+conventionality by the hint of portraiture in the artfully disposed
+figures.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 162. Andrea del Sarto. Madonna of the Sack.—_Annunziata._
+]
+
+Scores of times Andrea repeats these perfections in the great
+altar-backs required for the new Renaissance chapels. The Four Saints in
+the Pitti, the Madonna of the Harpies in the Uffizi, Figure 162a, the
+Enthroned Madonna at Berlin may serve among many to illustrate his
+accomplishment in this new vein. Somewhat reminiscent of the heavier
+monumentality of Fra Bartolommeo, these great pictures add a personal
+and disquieting note from the presence of the moody, handsome wife,
+Lucrezia whose caprices and infidelities are the tragic element in an
+otherwise even life.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 162_a._ Andrea del Sarto. Madonna of the Harpies.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+Andrea in his later years won new glories but added no new note to his
+art. The monochrome frescoes in the Cloister of the Scalzo representing
+the Life of St. John Baptist merely show the old gravity somewhat
+exaggerated. The series which extended over many years (1515–1526) is
+uneven, and many of these perhaps overestimated compositions are plainly
+of student execution. Without his color, Andrea seems somewhat coldly
+academic. It was precisely this quality of stylistic grandeur, however,
+that appealed paradoxically to the romantic monarch, Francis I. He
+called Andrea to France in 1518 and kept him there in honor for a year.
+Had Andrea possessed any of the capacities of a teacher and theorist, he
+might have inaugurated the Renaissance in France. As it was he remained
+merely a harbinger of such inferior but more influential spirits as Il
+Rosso and Primaticcio who a few years later were to found the School of
+Fontainebleau.
+
+Often the portfolios of a great technician are more thrilling than his
+major works. This is the case with Andrea del Sarto. His numerous
+sketches in red chalk, have an athletic charm which his painting lacks.
+Others have drawn differently in this medium, but no one has drawn
+better.
+
+When Andrea died in 1531, “full of glory and domestic trials,” as Vasari
+recounts, the normal development of Florentine painting ended, and
+Florence had already seen her artistic star dimmed by the rising
+splendors of Venice and Rome. Artistically she became a city of wit and
+ingenuity, chronicling and criticizing art rather than producing it.
+Moreover the obsession of Michelangelo’s sublimity worked havoc with his
+dilettante imitators. Some of these have the grace of lucidity, like
+Agnolo Bronzino, who (1502–1572)[59] practiced a reactionary sort of
+portraiture based on the old tradition of tempera painting. In sheer
+beauty of surface, enamel one is tempted to call it, he is little
+inferior to his great German contemporary, Hans Holbein, and his sense
+of character is only less keen because less individual. In the haughty
+patricians surrounding the person of Cosimo, the first grandduke, he
+found congenial sitters, Figure 163. In the narrow field of portraiture
+he is nearly in the first rank, while in his rare mythologies and
+religious pictures his limitations appear painfully. He was a vicious
+person, a cold æsthete, with few of the generous virtues that nourish
+the soul. Yet in his flinty way he was quite perfect, and as one of the
+first professionally unmoral artists he cannot be neglected by the
+psychological critic.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 164. Pontormo. The Deposition.—_S. Felice._
+]
+
+A more appealing figure is his master, Jacopo Carrucci, called from his
+birthplace Il Pontormo.[60] His was a tender and deeply religious spirit
+with the poet’s capacity for elation and melancholy. In his
+altar-pieces, such as the Deposition, Figure 164, at San Felice he seeks
+and achieves a positive pathos. Influenced by Michelangelo’s sublimity,
+he converts it to more specific and psychological ends. Often he is
+restless and over-emphatic as in the frescoes of the Passion in the
+cloister of the Florentine Certosa, or in the strangely complicated and
+contorted little picture of the Martyrdom of St. Mauritius and his
+Legionaries, in the Uffizi. In such work he moves towards the absolute
+expressionism of an El Greco, preluding also the more conventional
+emotionalism of the Baroque. As a portraitist he had no equal at
+Florence except his pupil Bronzino. Often the sensitiveness and
+moodiness of his characterizations recall his Venetic contemporary,
+Lorenzo Lotto. Even when he is robust he is sensitively psychological,
+as in the superb portrait of a Halberdier, Figure 165. Above all he was
+a powerful and subtle draughtsman whether with pen or chalk. His line
+writhes in a fashion at times sinister, at times singularly blithe, and
+his figure sketches have something of the imaginative thrill of the
+figure studies of Blake. For the grandducal palace of Poggio a Cajano,
+Figure 166, he did in a huge lunette pierced by a great round window a
+most original decoration for the odd triangles at the base. The
+unconventional fields are filled each by a rather small figure
+energetically posed and surrounded by greenery. The thing is at once
+monumental and pastoral and its freedom and tonality almost as modern as
+a Besnard. I would willingly dwell longer on so sympathetic an artist,
+but can only refer the interested reader to Dr. F. M. Clapp’s two
+authoritative volumes.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 163. Bronzino. Eleonora of Toledo and her son.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 165. Pontormo. The Halberdier.—_C. C. Stillman, N. Y._
+]
+
+For a century and more after Pontormo’s death in 1556 there are still
+occasional artists of talent at Florence, but there is no longer a
+Florentine school. The masterpieces of Michelangelo were at Rome, those
+of Raphael widely scattered. Conscious of her decline, Florence begins
+to import artists—the Flemish portraitist, Sustermans; the Venetian
+decorator, Luca Giordano. One of her own abler painters, Francesco
+Salviati, attaches himself to the Venetian manner. Being an academic
+city, Florence eschews the rugged naturalism of Caravaggio, but has no
+longer vitality enough to find a substitute of her own. In the late
+sixteenth century her fresco painting sinks to the pompous emptiness
+represented by Giorgio Vasari, or by the hardly better mythologies of
+the brothers Federigo and Taddeo Zuccaro. In the seventeenth century she
+still can produce an idyllist of great romantic and sensuous charm in a
+Francesco Furini and a genial illustrator in a Giovanni di San Giovanni.
+But such names only suggest the incoherence of the times. Florence is no
+longer a main current but an eddy, and what small flood-tide still runs
+courses in the more resolute academism of Bologna, which is to be
+capable of inspiring a Poussin; and in the raw naturalism of Naples,
+which is about to give lessons to a Velasquez.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 166. Pontormo. Frescoed Lunette.—_Poggio a Cajano._
+]
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER V
+
+
+                 POETRY AND PAINTING IN THE RENAISSANCE
+
+  Reversing the maxim _ut pictura poesis_, the Renaissance believed that
+  painting should be poetical. Indeed the term _poesia_ is commonly
+  applied to all painting of a mythological or idyllic sort. Angelo
+  Poliziano’s unfinished but very popular poem on the joust of 1468 is
+  lavish in descriptions, of which the painters made use. Botticelli
+  surely got more than a hint for the Birth of Venus from stanzas
+  xcix-ci of _La Giostra_, though the mood of the picture is wholly
+  Sandro’s own and unlike the pagan joyousness of Poliziano.
+
+                              “One saw
+  Born in the sea, free and joyous in her acts,
+  A damsel with divine visage
+  Driven ashore by the ardent zephyrs
+  Balancing on a shell; and it seemed the heavens rejoiced thereat.”
+
+  “True the foam and true the sea you would have said
+  True the shell, and the blowing of the winds true.
+  You would have seen the gleam of the Goddess’ eye
+  And the heavens laugh about her, and the elements.
+  And the Hours in white garments on the strand,
+  And the winds toss their spreading soft locks.”
+
+         ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+  “You could swear that you could see the goddess coming from the waves
+  Wringing out her hair with her right hand
+  And with the left covering the sweet mount of desire,
+  And the sand, once trodden by her feet,
+  Clothing itself with grass and flowers.
+  Then with joyous and expectant glance
+  You would have seen her clasped by the three nymphs
+  And wrapped in a starry robe.”
+
+  Botticelli’s charming and even slyly humorous picture of Venus with
+  sleeping Mars, at London, follows afar and discreetly _La Giostra_, I.
+  stanzas cxxii-iii, but Botticelli has taken the motive out of doors
+  and otherwise considerably subtilized it. Venus is
+
+                 “Seated in bed outside the covers
+                 Just released from the arms of Mars
+                 Who, lies backward on her lap
+
+                        ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+                 “Above them and around the tiny loves
+                 Played naked, flying now here now there
+
+                        ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+                 “One fills the quiver with fresh flowers
+                 Then comes and empties it on the bed.”
+
+  Poliziano also supplied to Raphael the theme of the Galatea, in the
+  Farnesina, _Giostra_, I. cxviii (Fig. 192a)
+
+          “Two shapely dolphins draw a car;
+          On it is Galatea who holds the reins,
+          And they swimming breathe with equal breath.
+          Around circle the more amorous throng.
+          One spits out the salt wave, the others circle round;
+          One seems to play at love and dallies.
+          The fair nymph with her trusted sisters
+          Laughs charmingly at their hoarse singing.”
+
+  Titian, too, may have had in mind the _Giostra_, I. cxi, when he
+  composed his Bacchus and Ariadne. (Fig. 260)
+
+           “Comes upon a car covered with ivy and rushes
+           Drawn by two tigers—Bacchus
+           And with him it seems that fauns and mænads
+           Tread the deep sand and shout with raised voices.
+           One we see staggering; others seem to stumble,
+           One clashes the cymbal; others seem to laugh.
+           One drinks from a horn, one from his hand.
+           One has grabbed a nymph, and one turns handsprings.”
+
+
+               LEONARDO AND THE ACADEMIC IDEA OF PAINTING
+
+  The extraordinary mixture of liberality and dogmatism, of naturalism
+  and taste in Leonardo is best illustrated from his own _Trattato della
+  Pittura_. I quote from the standard edition of H. Ludwig, Vienna,
+  1882, using his paragraph numbers:
+
+
+         MODELLING IN CHIAROSCURO AS THE PAINTER’S FIRST OBJECT
+
+  ¶ 412. “The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear
+  as a body in relief and projecting from that plane, and he who in such
+  art excels the others, deserves the greater praise, and such research,
+  or rather crown of such science, is born from light and shade, or I
+  mean chiaroscuro. Then he who flees from shadows, flees also from the
+  glory of our art among noble spirits and gains it with the ignorant
+  herd, which desires nothing in painting but beauty of colors,
+  forgetting entirely the beauty and wonder of showing a flat thing as
+  if it were in relief.”
+
+
+                      ON JUDGING A PAINTER’S WORK
+
+  ¶ 483. “The first thing is that you consider the figures, if they have
+  the relief which the place and light demand....
+
+  “The second is that the scattering, or rather distribution of the
+  figures be made according to the way in which you wish the story to
+  be.
+
+  “The third is that the figures be alert and intent on their particular
+  purpose.”
+
+
+                ON THE MOVEMENTS THAT MARK THE EMOTIONS
+
+  ¶ 122. “The most important thing which can be found in the theory of
+  painting are the movements appropriate to the mental state of each
+  being,—as desire, scorn, wrath, pity and the like.”
+
+
+                   THE STEPS IN A PAINTER’S EDUCATION
+
+  ¶ 82. “Draw first designs of a good master made in the fashion of
+  nature and not mannered; then from a relief, in the presence of a
+  drawing made from that relief; then from a good natural object.”
+
+
+                       JUDGMENT VERSUS DEXTERITY
+
+  ¶ 62. “That painter who does not doubt learns little. When the work
+  surpasses the judgment of the worker, that worker acquires little, and
+  when the judgment surpasses the work, that work never ceases to grow
+  better, unless avarice prevents it.”
+
+
+                 ON USE OF MEMORY IN THE NIGHT WATCHES
+
+  ¶ 67. “Also I have proved it to be of no little use to me, when you
+  find yourself in bed in the dark, to repeat in the imagination the
+  things studied earlier, or other things of notable sort comprised in
+  subtle thought, and this is truly a laudable act and useful in fixing
+  things in memory.”
+
+
+                         ON SELECTIVE IMITATION
+
+  ¶ 58a. “The painter should be solitary and think over what he sees and
+  discuss with himself, selecting the most excellent parts of the
+  species of whatever he sees, acting after the fashion of a mirror
+  which transmutes into as many colors as there are things what is set
+  before it. And so doing he will seem to be himself a second nature.”
+
+  ¶ 98. “Winter evenings should be used by young painters in the study
+  of things prepared in summer, that is bring together all the nudes
+  which you have made in the summer, and make a choice of the better
+  limbs and bodies and practice from them and fix them in mind.”
+
+
+                           ON HIGH STANDARDS
+
+  ¶ 59. “If you painter will seek to please the first painters, you will
+  make your pictures well, because they alone can guide you truthfully,
+  but if you wish to please those who are not masters, your pictures
+  will have few foreshortenings and little relief or alert movement, and
+  thereby you will fail in that part in which painting is held to be an
+  excellent art, that is in giving an effect of relief where there is
+  nothing in relief.”
+
+
+             ON AVOIDING HARSH SHADOWS AND SUNLIGHT EFFECTS
+
+  ¶ 87. “The light cut off from the shade too clearly is greatly blamed
+  by painters. Hence to avoid such a fault, if you paint bodies in the
+  open country, you will not make the figures as lighted by the sun, but
+  imagine some sort of mist or transparent clouds to be interposed
+  between the object and the sun, whence, since the figure is not
+  emphasized by the sunlight, the demarcations of light and shade will
+  not be emphasized.”
+
+
+                       ON THE MOST PLEASING LIGHT
+
+  ¶ 138. “If you have a court yard that can be covered as you wish with
+  a linen awning, that will be a good light; or when you wish to draw
+  anyone, draw him in bad weather, towards nightfall, and make the
+  sitter stand with his back to one of the walls of this court. In the
+  streets set your mind towards nightfall on the faces of the men and
+  women, in bad weather, how much grace and sweetness appears in them.”
+
+
+                     ON COUNTERPOISE OF THE FIGURE
+
+  ¶ 88. “Do not have the head turned the way the breast is, nor the arm
+  the way the leg is; and if the head is turned over the right shoulder
+  make the parts lower on the left than on the right” [and vice versa].
+
+  At first blush this stylistic counsel flatly contradicts Leonardo’s
+  principle that poses and emotions should express state of mind, but as
+  a matter of fact many expressive movements obey this law of
+  counterpoise or active equilibrium. Leonardo himself generally finds
+  motives for such poses. Such successors as Raphael and Andrea del
+  Sarto habitually used such poses without other excuse than that of
+  their own inherent gracefulness.
+
+
+                   ON FREEDOM IN MAKING A COMPOSITION
+
+  ¶ 189. “Have you never considered the poets composing their verses?
+  They take no trouble to make fine letters, nor do they mind cancelling
+  some of the verses and making them better. Do you, then, painter, make
+  the limbs of your figures roughly and attend first to the movements
+  appropriate to the mental state of the beings composing your story,
+  rather than to the beauty and rightness of their members, because you
+  must understand that if such a composition in the rough will meet the
+  needs of the invention, it will please all the more after it has been
+  adorned with the perfection appropriate to all its parts. I have seen
+  in the clouds and spots on the wall what has aroused me to fine
+  inventions of various things, since these spots though entirely
+  without perfection in any part, did not lack perfection in their
+  movements and other actions.”
+
+
+                   PAINTING THE GRANDCHILD OF NATURE
+
+  ¶ 12. “If you shall despise painting, which is the only imitator of
+  all the apparent works of nature, assuredly you will despise also that
+  careful investigation which with philosophical and careful speculation
+  considers all the qualities of forms: the sea, place, plants, animals,
+  herbage, flowers, which are enveloped in light and shade. And truly
+  this speculation is science and the legitimate child of Nature, since
+  painting is born of this nature. But, to speak more correctly, we will
+  say grandchild of nature, since all apparent things are born of
+  Nature, of which things painting is born. Hence rightly we shall call
+  it the grandchild of this nature and the kinsman of God.”
+
+
+                  THAT THE PAINTER SHOULD BE SOLITARY
+
+  ¶ 50. “The painter, or rather designer, should be solitary, and
+  especially when he is intent on speculations and considerations which
+  continually appearing before the eyes give matter to be well kept in
+  memory. And if you are alone, you will be entirely yours. And if you
+  shall be accompanied by a single companion you will be half yours, and
+  so much the less as the indiscretion of your companionship shall be
+  the greater ... And if you would say ‘I will do in my fashion, I will
+  hold myself apart’ ... one cannot serve two masters. You will fulfil
+  badly the duty of a companion, and worse the aim of reasoning on the
+  art ... And if you say ‘I will withdraw myself entirely,’ ... I tell
+  you you will be held a madman, but, lo, thus doing you will at least
+  be alone.”
+
+  Here Leonardo takes sharpest issue with the easy-going sociable
+  methods which for generations had held in the painter’s bottega, and
+  shows himself an individualist of modern type.
+
+
+                       RUBENS’ PRAISE OF LEONARDO
+
+  Peter Paul Rubens, who had copied Leonardo’s battle-piece, has left
+  the following perceptive tribute to the genius of his predecessor:
+
+  “Nothing escaped him that related to the expression of his subject:
+  and by the heat of his fancy, as well as by the solidity of his
+  judgment, he raised divine things by human, and understood how to give
+  men those different degrees, that elevate them to the character of
+  heroes.
+
+  “The best of the examples which he has left us is our Lord’s Supper,
+  which he painted at Milan, wherein he has represented the apostles in
+  places that suit with them, and our Saviour in the most honourable,
+  the midst of all, having nobody near enough to press or incommode him.
+  His attitude is grand, his arms are in a loose and free posture, to
+  show the greater grandeur, while the apostles appear agitated one side
+  to the other by the vehemence of their inquietude, and in which there
+  is, however, no meanness, nor any indecent action to be seen. In short
+  by his profound speculations he arrived to such a degree of
+  perfection, that it seems to me impossible to speak so well of him as
+  he deserves, and much more to imitate him.”
+
+  _The Art of Painting ... Translated from the French of Monsieur De
+  Piles_, London about 1725. p. 107 f.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 167. Raphael. Count Baldassare Castiglione, author of “the
+    Courtier.”—_Louvre._
+]
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER VI
+                             THE GOLDEN AGE
+                        RAPHAEL AND MICHELANGELO
+
+  On pride and humility in Art—The new Grand Style defined—Umbrian
+      humility in the Early Painters—Gentile da Fabriano—The Fifteenth
+      Century—Luca Signorelli—Perugino—Raphael; Early development—Roman
+      triumph—Michelangelesque aberrations—Michelangelo.
+
+
+Whether the greatest art is grounded in pride or in humility has divided
+the critics. To most it will seem evident that the artist’s assertion of
+his own powers is an act of pride—a pride of person which is often
+reinforced by that of nation and race. As fine a critic as John Ruskin,
+on the contrary, has insisted that the greatest art springs from
+humility—reverence for God, admiration of His works in nature, homage
+also to one’s earthly master in art and withal to the great tradition of
+one’s craft. The difference is world-wide. According to one
+interpretation or the other, the work of art becomes an act of display
+or of worship. Such opposites in the realm of analysis often meet
+comfortably enough in the realm of practice. A haughty individualist
+like Leonardo da Vinci insists that his investigations of appearance and
+reality lead to that knowledge of God without which love is impossible.
+And the Golden Age of painting itself, though mostly based on corporate
+and individual pride, has also its infusion of humility. If Michelangelo
+represents the flowering of three generations of research, of that pride
+of intellect which ever ruled Florence, so equally does Raphael
+represent many generations of humility and teachableness in his native
+Umbria. For about ten years pride and humility worked side by side, and
+that was the Golden Age. Pride prevailed over humility, and the
+classical style of Central Italy sunk to a pretentious exhibitionism.
+
+Our theme is that brief moment of accomplishment which witnessed the
+rise of Rome as centre of art, and the greatest painting of Raphael and
+Michelangelo. We need not hesitate to apply to it the oldfashioned term,
+the Golden Age. But we shall not use it with quite the oldfashioned
+unction, knowing as we do the heavy sacrifice involved in attaining the
+so-called Grand Style, and the still heavier penalty it imposed upon the
+art that succeeded it.
+
+The Florentines believed that painting had reached its height in the
+years 1504 and 1505, when Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were
+designing the great competitive battle-pieces for the Priors’ Palace at
+Florence, and Raphael was painting his loveliest Madonnas. Modern
+critics might rather be inclined to date the grand climacteric from a
+pathetic incident of a few years later. In 1508, when Pope Julius II
+wished to decorate the new ante-rooms of the Vatican, the famous
+_Stanze_ he called the best of the older painters—Sodoma, Perugino,
+Signorelli, among others. No sooner had they begun to decorate the
+vaults than their work seemed inadequate. They were turned off
+incontinently and the young man Raphael called down from Florence to
+take their place. The incident shows how suddenly the new beauty dawned
+upon the world of art patronage. Vividly conscious of its advent, the
+Italians were less conscious of the equally sudden waning of the great
+style. With the wisdom of hindsight we can now see that the whole
+development was a marvelous spurt, lasting a bare dozen years, from the
+battle cartoons of 1505 to Raphael’s tapestry cartoons of 1516. Raphael
+and Michelangelo, who created the lasting glory of the Renaissance, also
+dug its grave. Before considering the creative and destructive energies
+of these two giants, we may profitably note the characteristics of what
+whether for praise or mockery has ever since been called the Grand
+Style. And here I have little to do beyond condensing Professor
+Wölfflin’s excellent book.
+
+In the Grand Style the accent was on maturity, decorum, and measured
+power. Vivacious and picturesque incidents are eschewed. The new art
+demands simplicity and centrality. The human figure dominates the
+compositions. The frame is filled densely with a complicated group. The
+figures themselves are ample and mature. The Madonna is no longer a
+girl, but a gracious woman of thirty years. The Christ Child is no
+longer an infant, but a well-grown lad, whose supple curves harmonize
+with those of grown folks. As to pose, the figures no longer are
+casually arranged or in some posture required by a specific action. They
+are cast in conventional poses which bring out the active beauty of the
+body. Heads swing across shoulders, the upper body turns against the
+thrust of the lower, the arms counter the action of the legs. Such
+counterpoise is always active, implying motion. Straight lines give way
+to weavings of S curves—so many springs whose tension is kept equal.
+Violent motion or torsion of the body is frequent, but one motion or
+torsion must be immediately taken up and balanced by some equivalent.
+Following the general principle of centrality, colors are fewer and more
+studied. In portraiture, for example, we no longer have landscape or
+elaborate interiors, but plain dark backgrounds. At all points we have
+left spontaneity and happy accident behind and have entered a world of
+exquisite calculation. Society had moved with art towards ideals of
+simplicity and decorum. You no longer find the braided, beribboned and
+jewelled coiffures of Botticelli’s women, but serene brows with the hair
+drawn back evenly from its part and disposed as a mass in a net. Young
+gallants wear their abundant locks much the same way and sport
+seignorial spade beards. Old men are even more magnificently provided
+with beards of monumental scale. Such men are clothed no longer in
+parti-colored raiment, but in richly sober black. The ideal is dignity,
+composure, and magnanimity. You may trace it through all its intricacies
+of casuistry in what is still one of the best pictures of what a
+gentleman and lady should be, the _Cortegiano_ of Baldassare
+Castiglione. It was finished in 1516 while his friend Raphael was
+designing the tapestry cartoons. And you may read much of this high
+teaching in Count Castiglione’s own sensitive and comprehending face,
+Figure 167, as Raphael then painted it. It breathes that fine interplay
+of pride and humility which was the mainspring of the Renaissance, and
+it brings us back to the double origin of the Grand Style in the pride
+of Florence and the humility of Umbria.
+
+Umbria in the narrow sense includes only the lovely stretches of the
+upper Tiber, and the rolling banks of Lakes Trasimene and Bolsena. But
+all the way over the mountains to the Adriatic the civilization was of a
+similar type, and so the art. Thus we may reckon the Adriatic Marches
+from Ancona to Ravenna as Umbrian from the point of view of the
+historian of painting. There were no great cities and little commerce.
+It is a region of small hill-top communes within the walls of which the
+peasants huddled for protection at night, going down to the fields in
+the day. It was a country of hot passions and violent feuds, and equally
+of religious enthusiasm and mystical piety. Great heresies had swept the
+land and so had the joyous and practical Christianity of St. Francis,
+greatest of Umbria’s sons. We have much of the volatility that we noted
+in Siena, without, however, a capital city to centralize it, and we also
+have what Siena lacked—an abiding and beautiful humility. Umbria knew
+her provincial estate and accepted its limitations.
+
+Nowhere is this more plainly shown than in her art. For two centuries
+she was in the position of inducing foreign artists to come in, ever in
+an attitude of admiration and docility. Thus Giunta of Pisa, Cimabue and
+his Roman contemporaries; Giotto and his Florentine pupils; Simone
+Martini and other Sienese painters decorated the chief monument of
+Umbria, the Basilica of St. Francis at Assisi. Their work extended over
+a century to say 1330. Later still Sienese artists were employed at
+Perugia, among others, Taddeo Bartoli, and the region promised to become
+an artistic dependency of Siena. But with the dawning of the Renaissance
+and the extension of Florentine power beyond Arezzo, Florentine artists
+are preferred. We find Domenico Veneziano at Perugia, in 1438, in the
+pay of the ruling Baglioni. A little earlier Fra Angelico had painted
+for several years at Cortona. In the early fifties Benozzo Gozzoli
+painted his Franciscan frescoes at Montefalco, and was otherwise active
+in the Tiber valley. In 1468 Fra Filippo Lippi was called to Spoleto.
+Soon after, Umbria learned to depend on her own artists. In the Adriatic
+Marches there had been a limited penetration of Giotto’s style, chiefly
+by way of Padua and Rimini. By the end of the century the Lorenzettian
+manner dominated. It was succeeded by the influence of the Venetian
+Renaissance as exemplified by such rather backward artists as the
+Vivarini and Carlo Crivelli. Still later the diffused influence of
+Giovanni Bellini meets harmoniously that of Perugino.
+
+Thus in humility and teachableness Umbria very slowly, and through most
+various stages of discipleship, worked out her own originality. And when
+it came one felt deeply in it the teaching of her spacious intervals and
+blue mountains.
+
+It is so with the first notable painter that Umbria produced, Gentile da
+Fabriano.[61] He felt landscape as no artist before him. Born about
+1360, he was trained by his fellow townsman, Alegretto Nuzi. Alegretto
+had made sound studies at Florence and had also observed with admiration
+the pictures of the Lorenzetti. His own altar-pieces have the Sienese
+splendor with a touch of sweetness that is wholly Umbrian. His pupil
+Gentile prefers more ornate and florid compositions such as we see in
+his early Coronation of the Virgin at Milan. Soon Gentile gave himself
+to the panoramic narrative style, outdoing the Lorenzetti in
+elaboration, vivacity, and gracefulness. Superficially he resembles such
+Florentine contemporaries as Lorenzo Monaco and Masolino, but his mood
+is broader and more genial, and his decorative accent more splendid.
+Before 1410 he was called to Venice to paint in the new Ducal Palace.
+His animated historical frescoes were soon destroyed by fire, but his
+sojourn was long enough to impress his manner, through his pupil Jacopo,
+Bellini, and numerous imitators, on the Venetian narrative school.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 168. Gentile da Fabriano. Adoration of the Magi.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 169. Gentile da Fabriano. The Nativity. Predella piece from
+    Adoration of Magi.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+Passing to Florence, he left there the fullest expression of his
+gracious talent in the resplendent Adoration of the Kings, Figure 168,
+now in the Uffizi, which was painted for Palla Strozzi’s chapel in the
+Trinità. It was signed in May 1423, and perhaps because it was the
+season of flowers, Gentile painted in the rich pilasters growing sprays
+of morning glory, iris, anemone, and cornflower. Within its fantastic
+Gothic frame we witness a pageant such as Italy often saw on holy
+days—the procession of the Wise man moving through her streets. Around
+the Mother and her Child devotion reigns, but soon the scene passes off
+into the tumult of waiting men-at-arms, of chafing steeds, and snarling
+animals of the chase. The color is a radiance of scarlet, crimson, azure
+and gold, after the Gothic fashion. But the picture is more than Gothic
+in the tender and almost atmospheric shading of the rolling hills in the
+background. Skilfully blending Sienese idealism with narrative breadth
+and vivacity, the picture is the last and most magnificent memorial to a
+chivalry now merely an afterglow, but dying with all the iridescence of
+the sunset hour.
+
+As is usually the case, the modern contribution of the picture is
+modestly made in the _predella_ panels. The Nativity, Figure 169, with
+the light radiating tenderly from the Christ Child and golden stars
+glimmering above the hill-top pastures is perhaps the first nocturne in
+art, and still one of the loveliest. The Flight into Egypt, shows a
+joyous sunrise creeping over the glad hills. The means are conventional,
+the highlights are touched in with gold, but the mood and effect are
+there. Young Masaccio surely considered these little panels before he
+undertook his more naturalistic adventure in structural light and shade.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 170. Andrea da Bologna. Madonna of Humility.—_Cleveland._
+]
+
+Soon Pope Martin V, returning from exile at Avignon and planning to
+restore the splendors of Christian Rome, called Gentile and set him to
+decorating the nave of St. John Lateran. Again fire has deprived us of
+the monumental works which constituted Gentile’s contemporary fame. We
+know that they won the praise of the greatest Flemish painter who
+visited Renaissance Italy, Rogier de la Pasture of Tournai. And two
+generations later crabbed Michelangelo declared almost sentimentally
+that Gentile was gentle both by name and by nature. For us it is
+important to note that Gentile forecast precisely the future triumphs of
+Raphael, carrying the glory of Umbrian painting widely through Italy
+before asserting it at Rome.
+
+Of course such work as Gentile’s was highly exceptional in the Umbrian
+Marches. The average state of things is represented by the shy and
+humble Madonnas which Francescuccio Ghisi repeated indefinitely. This
+type of Madonna of Humility is nowhere more delightfully represented
+than in the lovely panel at the Cleveland Museum, Figure 170, for which
+I have elsewhere suggested the attribution of Andrea da Bologna.[62] She
+is most unlike the majestic Madonnas of Florence and Siena. To assure us
+that this gentle Mother is after all Queen of Heaven and the Second Eve
+come for our salvation, the artist has given her a resplendent aureole
+with tiny miniatures of her champions, the apostles, and has stretched
+at her feet that First Eve in whom we all sinned. The picture will have
+been painted before 1380, and, with its Byzantine reminiscences, it well
+exemplifies the mediævalism that held its own in the Adriatic Marches
+long after Tuscany had set her face towards the Renaissance.
+
+It would add little to our survey of Umbria to dwell on Ottaviano Nelli
+at Urbino, a gently vivacious story-teller; nor yet on those early
+painters at Camerino and San Severino who tinged the softer native style
+with the splendid severity of the early Venetian manner. I pass their
+works with regret, for they are often lovely in their frank dependence
+on greater spirits. In a general survey the middle years of the
+fifteenth century in Umbria show rather little to attract us until the
+rise of Pietro Perugino. He emerges in an artistic world dominated in
+the Tiber Valley by the Florentine, Gozzoli, and beyond the mountains by
+Carlo Crivelli and the Vivarini. Such predecessor of Perugino as
+Benedetto Bonfigli of Perugia need not detain us. He had learned a
+little, a very little, from the Florentine, Domenico Veneziano, paints
+Madonnas with a modest ideality; and narratives, the life of St.
+Ercolano in the Communal Palace of Perugia, with abundant and muddled
+detail, after the fashion of Gozzoli and Domenico di Bartolo. His
+_bottega_ was a factory of those quaint and often terrible religious
+banners, Figure 171, which the devout Umbrians carried processionally to
+avert the recurrent plague. We need not dwell upon Perugino’s alleged
+master, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, whose ugly and emphatic draughtsmanship
+derives from Verrocchio and the Pollaiuoli. We may best appreciate
+Perugino’s extraordinary originality by considering contemporaries who
+came up with equal advantages. Lorenzo di San Severino exemplifies the
+usual Umbrian blend of Gozzoli and Venetian influences. And in such a
+picture as the Enthroned Madonna, Figure 172, in the Holden Collection,
+at Cleveland, he attains an ideality of feeling and a beauty of
+workmanship of the most refreshing sort. This picture must have been
+painted about 1490. It may represent the high mark reached in the
+Marches towards the end of the century—may thus dispense us from
+considering such inherently charming painters as Girolamo da Camerino
+and his fellow townsman Giovanni Boccatis.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 171. Bontigli Plague Banner. The Virgin protecting her Devotees
+    from plague Shafts hurled by Christ.—_Chiesa del Gonfalone,
+    Perugia._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 172. Lorenzo di San Severino. Madonna and Saints.—_Cleveland, O._
+]
+
+A very similar training produces more ambitious but hardly more pleasing
+results in Niccolò Liberatore of Foligno, (1430 to 1502). Early
+influenced by Gozzoli, he later aped the intensity of the Venetian,
+Carlo Crivelli. Niccolò thus chafes within the modest bounds proper to
+art in Umbria. He essays tragedy and too often achieves burlesque. He
+paints, like most of the Umbrians, processional banners, and also the
+most complicated altar-pieces, in which cusps, carving and pinnacles
+almost efface the Madonna and saints, who show a peasantlike uneasiness
+amid so much splendor. Such is the character of the triptych in the
+Vatican, which is dated 1466. It represents rather favorably Niccolò’s
+at once slender and ambitious talent.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 173. Melozzo da Forlì. Pope Sixtus IV and his Court.
+    Fresco.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+Such obscure artists as we have been considering[63] could maintain the
+idealism out of which a Perugino should grow, could provide his
+spiritual background. They could do little to nurture him on the
+positive side. That task fell to men of greater power, who had saturated
+themselves with Florentine realism—Melozzo da Forlì[64] and Luca
+Signorelli. Both were pupils of that giant among Umbro-Florentines,
+Piero della Francesca. Melozzo was born in 1438 and early employed by
+the Dukes of Urbino. He practices an energetic draughtsmanship both in
+decoration and portraiture, indulges the boldest foreshortening, adds a
+positive athleticism to that pride of life which we have noted in more
+static form in his master. Thus his frescoes for the domes of the
+sacristy of the Santa Casa at Loreto, and the justly famous fragments of
+playing angels from the demolished sacristy of old St. Peter’s at Rome
+reveal a strength and measured audacity which at once rival the
+contemporary effort of Mantegna at Mantua and forecast the more pagan
+exuberance of Mantegna’s greatest pupil, Correggio. This robust and
+masculine manner appears in a more restrained and traditional form in
+the superb fresco portraits of Pope Sixtus IV and his Court, Figure 173,
+in the Vatican. Such work transcends Umbrian standards.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 174. Luca Signorelli. Pan, God of Music.—_Berlin._
+]
+
+Even more does the intense and rugged art of Melozzo’s fellow disciple,
+Luca Signorelli.[65] Born at Cortona in 1441, we know little of his
+early career except that he studied with Piero della Francesca, passed
+to Florence and was permanently swayed by the anatomical and passionate
+realism of Antonio Pollaiuolo. Signorelli’s early work is obscure to us.
+We may well study him first in the pastoral mythology, Pan, God of
+Harmony, Figure 174, now at Berlin. It was painted about 1490 for the
+Medici, for the villa for which Botticelli designed the Primavera and
+Birth of Venus. It is inferior to its companion pieces in imagination
+and delicacy, and particularly in color, but in its own measured way it
+echoes delightfully the poetic wistfulness of early Florentine humanism.
+Similar qualities of imagination are in the great fresco The Last Days
+of Moses, in the Sistine Chapel, painted in 1482 after his design. But
+the vein is exceptional in Signorelli. Soon he gave himself to a rugged
+realism, unpleasing in his religious themes. Meeting little favor in the
+great cities, he painted many altar-pieces for the Umbrian towns. These
+pictures are stern in spirit and leaden in color. There is no attempt to
+please. Relentlessly Signorelli pursued his personal quest of expressive
+anatomy. Legend tells us that, dry-eyed, he sketched the fair body of
+his own murdered son for the picture of the Entombment at Cortona. We
+see him introducing nude figures into the background of the round
+Madonna at the Uffizi, Figure 175. The experimentalist dominates the
+artist.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 175. Signorelli. Madonna.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+In the year 1500, being nearly sixty, he found the real use for his
+truculent art. He was called to paint in the Chapel of S. Brixio, in the
+Cathedral of Orvieto. The subject was the Last Judgment. More than fifty
+years earlier Fra Angelico had begun the work with angel choirs in the
+vaults. With a far different temper Signorelli continued the task. At
+the entrance and back of the Chapel he showed mankind scourged by the
+final plagues. In the four arched spaces at the sides he set The
+Preaching of Antichrist, a sinister scene detailed with all the
+circumstantiality of the Early Renaissance. For the three remaining
+scenes, the Resurrection of the Dead, Figure 176, the Condemnation of
+the Sinful, Figure 177, and the Reward of the Just, he invented new
+modes both of interpretation and of composition. How far we are from the
+solemn assizes of Giotto or the garden and labyrinth motives of Fra
+Angelico! In every case we have in the lunette celestial figures, or at
+least supernal, while below we have swarming masses of nude folk,
+bewildered at the forgotten light, aspiring heavenwards or shrinking
+from the clutches of the fiends.
+
+What distinguishes these frescoes is a magnificently just
+matter-of-factness. Only one question is raised by the artist. Given the
+literal truth of the Book of Revelations, how would the last judgment
+look, and how would one feel if he were indeed there? So he reasons it
+out—the struggle of the skeletons to push up to the light, their
+reinvestiture successively with sinews, muscles and skin, the
+embarrassment as a half assembled body vainly seeks recognition. And all
+this he contrasts with the confident, strong bearing of the archangels
+above. Again in the Ascent of the Just to Heaven, the aspiration is
+chiefly physical, magnificently so. These clean strong bodies chiefly
+wish to escape the corruption from which the last trump has summoned
+them. And even the guardian angels are less tender than jubilant at the
+thought of fit recruits to replenish St. Michael’s celestial militia.
+Equally the damned wince, not from conscience, but from physical dread
+of the chains and claws and the imminence of the eternal fires.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 176. Luca Signorelli. The General Resurrection.—_Cathedral,
+    Orvieto._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 177. Luca Signorelli. The Souls of the Damned.—_Cathedral,
+    Orvieto._
+]
+
+This sturdy, upright art seems hardly Italian. The spirit of it is
+ruthless and Northern. It mitigates nothing, tells pretty much
+everything, presents the body in its ugliness, disregards obvious
+considerations of style. Yet as a successful blend of a vast technical
+experiment in anatomy with an honest and powerful effort of imagination,
+this is one of the most remarkable achievements of the Italian
+Renaissance. It has little of the Italian nobility, but it powerfully
+influenced those who had. Perugino and Raphael imitated Signorelli’s
+orderly arrangement of his scenes in a double, vertical order, and
+Michelangelo fed his dream of a heroic world of splendid nudity from the
+drastic visions of Signorelli. Over-rich and over-emphatic as Signorelli
+is, he is also an elemental, tonic power. No one is quite the same after
+a visit to the Chapel of S. Brixio.
+
+If Signorelli was the greatest character in Umbria before Raphael,
+Pietro Perugino was the finest intelligence and taste. He was born in
+1446 at Città della Pieve and at nine years old was put with a poor
+Perugian painter. His early activity is matter only of ingenious
+conjecture.[66] There is an ambiguous range of pictures variously
+ascribed to him and to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, a difficult and rather
+unimportant problem which I willingly let alone. What is certain is that
+in his early twenties Perugino was studying with Verrocchio at Florence
+alongside of Leonardo da Vinci. By 1481 and 1482 Perugino emerges
+artistically full-grown in the Sistine Chapel.
+
+His superiority, as shown in the fresco of the Giving of the Keys to
+Peter, Figure 118, and in numerous works of his forty-two remaining
+years, is so uniform and almost monotonous that its greatness has until
+recently passed unnoticed. Only such critics as Mr. Berenson and
+Professor Wölfflin have done him full justice. He worked upon perfectly
+clear and conscious ideals of simplicity, symmetry, and spaciousness; in
+all of which he took issue with his times. Rejecting the picturesque
+richness and confusion of the Early Renaissance, he took counsel of the
+Byzantine painters and of Fra Angelico at San Marco. They taught him the
+worth of simple geometrical forms of figure composition, and how to
+sacrifice details to broad effects. That his groups disposed in simple
+pyramids, oblongs, or ovals should not seem too bare, he cunningly
+varied the positions of the figures, thus relieving the severity of the
+underlying symmetry. Every tilted head, pointed foot and swaying thigh
+has its precise compositional value. As for the figures, there is no
+strenuousness of draughtsmanship, they are simply good enough. A
+principle of artistic economy, alien to the spirit of the moment, rules
+here as elsewhere.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 178. Perugino. Mystical Crucifixion. Fresco.—_Santa Maria
+    Maddalena de’ Pazzi. Florence._
+]
+
+So far he appears as a critic and amender of the Early Renaissance
+style. His positive contribution was a particularly spacious and lovely
+sort of landscape, an immensity of light and air to set behind the
+restricted patterns of his figures. This landscape is a beautiful
+generalization of the scenery of the upper Tiber valley. The forms are
+few. Feathery trees mark the middle distance; a river valley opens
+gently with interlocking banks toward distant blue mountains. Above a
+silvery horizon, the heavens gradually deepen to an intense blue,
+accentuated by sparse floating clouds. There are few colors, a warm
+brown, a fresh green, a paler and a deeper blue, a variety of grays.
+With these simple means is attained a sense of infinite space and of
+encompassing peace.
+
+All these perfections are in the great frescoed Crucifixion Figure 178,
+in the convent of Santa Maria Maddelena dei Pazzi, at Florence. The date
+is 1495, Perugino’s fifty-second year. The lyrical quietism of the
+effect rests on delicate evasions of the very formal symmetry. Such
+features as the tilted head of the Saint John and the three trees at the
+left balancing the Magdalen at the right of the cross are essential.
+Indeed any slight change either in the position of the figures or the
+lines of the landscape would produce a discord.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 179. Perugina. Enthroned Madonna.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+We have a very similar effect with the addition of a stately and simple
+architecture in the enthroned Madonna of the Vatican. Figure 179. Again
+the formality of the pyramidal pattern is relieved by varied
+dispositions of the figures which individually considered may seem
+affected, but which are essential to the composition. More overtly
+emotional but still restrained is the Deposition, Figure 180a, of the
+Uffizi Gallery. It is arranged as an oval with catenary internal curves,
+anticipating much more complicated patterns of Raphael. At this moment,
+1494, no living artist but Leonardo could have woven this group together
+with such certainty of taste, and he could have hardly equalled its
+broad and serene landscape.
+
+In the first years of the new century Perugino decorated the merchants’
+exchange of Perugia, the Cambio, with frescoes partly religious, partly
+moral and symbolical. The most famous represent the Virtues, Figure 180,
+in pairs, hovering in the heavens with their representatives below. For
+example, Prudence and Justice with the great law-givers. So Fortitude
+and Temperance are represented respectively by the venerable forms of
+brave Horatius, and Leonidas; of Cato and Cincinnatus. It seems that
+Perugino executed most of this latter decoration through assistants, and
+it has been suggested that Raphael is responsible both for the design
+and painting of the beautiful Sibyls.[67]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 180. Perugino. Prudence and Justice with their Representatives.
+    Fresco.—_Cambio, Perugia._
+]
+
+Like most of his contemporaries Perugino outlived his fame. He was
+insulted by Michelangelo, criticized for repeating his figures, thrust
+out of the Vatican in 1508 and superseded by his former helper, Raphael.
+And his exquisite art in his later years shows a certain relaxation. He
+died of the plague in 1524 and was denied Christian burial, although in
+his day he had painted plague banners to protect the faithful.
+
+The known atheism of Perugino affords a curious problem. How reconcile
+it with the mild and gentle religiosity of his art? Were he a modern
+artist, one might hold that he entered by æsthetic sympathy into
+experiences of religion which his rational self denied. For an atheist
+of the Renaissance the explanation seems too subtle. They were of tough
+fibre and kept their sympathy logically in hand. Mr. Berenson has
+offered the ingenious explanation that in his noble composition in space
+Perugino appealed to emotions which are so nearly akin to religion as to
+be readily substituted therefor. In the great spaces of Perugino the
+spirit finds liberation and a sense of the infinite. Such intuition of
+infinity one finds also in personal religion, and the two experiences
+are in a degree interchangeable. Æsthetically satisfactory, this
+explanation may fail to convince a devout person. He will want to know
+how the art of an avowed atheist enthralled the pious folk inhabiting
+the valley sanctified by the memory of St. Francis. Whatever be the
+explanation, the space composition of Perugino later sufficed to express
+Raphael’s vision of the central mystery of Christianity, of the nobility
+of pagan intellect and of the serene splendor of the Grecian Olympians.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 180_a._> Perugino. The Deposition.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+Raphael Sanzio[68] is the finest example of the Umbrian virtue of
+teachableness. His course is a series of exquisitely felt admirations.
+His readiness to assimilate any sort of excellence was his strength, and
+at times his weakness, for he was not always self-critical enough to
+reject merits alien to his own personality. His admitted primacy rests
+on perfection of composition, and that perfection represented a
+beautiful synthesis of the methods of Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, and
+Leonardo da Vinci. In dramatic power, force of draughtsmanship, and
+charm of color many of his contemporaries surpassed him. His, indeed, is
+a triumph of tact and judgment, and not of any single achievement. He
+seems one of the young men of the Platonic dialogues come back to
+earth—graciously prudent, gently effective, superior yet companionable.
+He approached art as his fellow Umbrian, St. Francis, approached life,
+with friendly confidence. He was equally at home with noble and artisan,
+with austere prelate and libertine humanist. Men readily gave him their
+loyalty and women their love.
+
+Raphael Sanzio was born at Urbino in 1483. His father, Giovanni, a
+mediocre poet and painter, left him an orphan at eleven. Raphael’s first
+steps in painting were probably guided by Timoteo Viti, who practiced,
+partly under Perugino’s influence, the timidly idyllic style of the
+Northern Marches—Bologna and Ferrara. Such boyish efforts of Raphael as
+the Orleans Madonna, the Three Graces, and the Dream of a Knight, in the
+National Gallery show Raphael’s complete assimilation of this idyllic
+manner. The little picture at London in which a stripling Hercules
+slumbers between an attractive girlish Wisdom and a most innocent effigy
+of Vice—holding the flower that signifies the primrose path—shows us
+Raphael at seventeen and by no means precocious.
+
+In the year 1500 he was called from Urbino to work in Perugino’s home
+shop at Perugia, soon rising to the position of foreman. In four years
+he made the most devout and complete assimilation of his master’s style.
+Such pictures as the Coronation of Mary, in the Vatican, and the
+Marriage of the Virgin, Figure 181, at Milan, would surely be reckoned
+as consummate Perugino’s were it not for signatures and old tradition.
+The Marriage of the Virgin in particular is merely a rearrangement of
+Perugino’s composition for the Giving of the Keys to Peter. But Raphael
+has eliminated unnecessary incidents and has outdone Perugino himself in
+sweetness and calm. The picture was finished in 1504, and that year
+Raphael took letters of recommendation from his first patroness, the
+Duchess of Urbino, to the Magistracy of Florence.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 181. Raphael. Marriage of the Virgin.—_Milan._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 182. Raphael. Maddalena Doni.—_Pitti._
+]
+
+Imagine a youngster of twenty-one who has diligently mastered a
+pictorial style only to learn that it is already obsolete. That is
+Raphael taking the manner of Perugino to a Florence agog over the battle
+cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo. The coolness with which young
+Raphael faced this emergency is characteristic. In four years he made
+himself over into a realistic draughtsman. Abandoning the readymade
+faces and figures of Perugino, he wisely held to Perugino’s sweetness
+and spacious compositional patterns. Young Raphael achieves an
+extraordinary act of criticism. He takes from the reformers just what he
+needs and no more—from Leonardo his incisiveness and psychology as a
+draughtsman and his dense and rich compositional patterns, from Fra
+Bartolommeo his dignity and monumentality, from Michelangelo very little
+as yet; and, withal, he retains whatever still seemed valuable from his
+Umbrian experience. Thus with resolute and unperturbed intelligence
+within four years he completely reconstructed his style, and put himself
+on a parity with older contemporaries who had been experimenting for a
+score of years.
+
+The steps of this re-education are most interesting. In 1505 he did the
+portraits of Agnolo Doni and his wife Maddalena, Figure 182. The posture
+of the woman is that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The draughtsmanship and
+characterization are severe, the hint of Umbrian landscape is a
+survival. In later portraits we shall see the elimination of
+accessories, the line yielding to the most refined modelling in light
+and dark, the effect concentrated without insistency. A comparison of
+the Doni portraits with those of ten years later, the Julius II and the
+Fornarina, will tell better than words of the tendency of Raphael’s
+portraiture towards its ultimate mastery.
+
+In 1505 Raphael returned for a time to Perugino to paint the fresco of
+the Trinity at the Convent of San Severo. In the splendid geometrical
+pattern he has already improved on the flat groupings of Perugino. The
+consistory of Saints bends back in depth after the fashion of a
+semi-dome. Raphael borrows the new motive from Fra Bartolommeo’s fresco
+of the Last Judgment painted in 1499 for the Florentine Hospital of
+Santa Maria Nuova. Sixteen years later Perugino added the languid saints
+at the base of the Trinity, a touching reversal of the natural relations
+of master and pupil. As for Raphael, in a single experiment he has
+mastered the sort of symmetrical composition in depth which should
+suffice within five years for his masterpiece, the Disputa.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 183. Raphael. Madonna del Granduca.—_Pitti._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 184. Raphael. La Belle Jardinière.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+The matronly sweetness of Raphael’s early madonnas has won them
+affection from the first. With increasing dignity, they retain a hint of
+the girlish refinement of their predecessors of the Early Renaissance.
+But they are less assertively fastidious, more normal and natural. All
+these obvious reasons for liking them are sound, and these pictures
+afford as well an insight into Raphael’s consciously directed studies.
+The effect is ever towards richer and more complicated composition, and
+towards more interesting and stylistic dispositions of the figures. The
+naturalness is that of taste and calculation. Near the beginning of the
+series we have the lovely Madonna of the Grand Duke, 1505, Figure 183.
+The upright, frontal position and form and serene oval of the face
+recall Perugino. But reality has supervened,—Perugino never painted such
+a Bambino,—and for the sake of concentration the background is kept
+plain. We see in the Madonna of the Tempi Family, at Munich, the Madonna
+turned in three-quarters position, the pose energized, the body swaying
+in a slight counterpoise. Then he tries seated poses which offer the
+triangular pattern of Leonardo. Perhaps the earliest of this series is
+the lovely Cowper Madonna, now in the Widener Collection. Soon he adds
+figures, constructs the pyramids more ornately and restores the
+background of landscape. At the head of this line is the Madonna of the
+Finch in the Pitti. It illustrates that gracious formality which
+Leonardo established in the Madonna of the Rocks. Finding the balance of
+the two standing nude children a little too obvious, Raphael carries the
+motive to its perfection in the Belle Jardinière of the Louvre. Figure
+184. Here, to break the rigid symmetry, the St. John kneels, and
+superfluous trees have been cleared away from the background. He seeks
+further to enrich the pyramid, and in the Madonna of the Canigiani
+family, at Munich, Figure 185, finished in 1507, we have at once the
+densest of symmetries and the stylistic handling of all the figures in
+active and counterpoised attitudes. In two years the process is
+complete. Later, in the Madonna of the Fish and of the Pearl, executed
+by students, Raphael will adopt diagonal arrangements, he will take up
+the old Circular form in the Madonna of the Chair, and will amplify the
+simple patterns of Perugino in the Sistine Madonna and the Madonna of
+Foligno. The forms and faces will become graver, nobler, more mature,
+but the whole course is fully anticipated in the joyous and lucid years
+of experiment from 1505 to 1507.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 185. Raphael. Canigiani Holy Family.—_Munich._
+]
+
+In that year Raphael pulled himself together to produce a masterpiece
+and signally failed. So far he must have seemed only a charming painter,
+a more gracious Fra Bartolommeo or a more learned Albertinelli, he will
+now surpass Leonardo and equal Michelangelo—a perilous competition for a
+man of twenty-five. In 1507 Atalanta Baglioni of Perugia ordered a
+Deposition to be set over the tomb of her murdered son, the tyrant
+Astorre. Raphael, in a theme properly lyrical and pathetic, tries to add
+tumult and drama—tries too hard. At first he adopted a scheme very
+similar to that of Perugino’s masterpiece, with the dead Christ on the
+ground, a quietly mourning group and a spacious landscape. The design is
+shown in a pen sketch at Oxford. He rejects this motive as too quiet and
+familiar. By successive efforts and exaggerations he arrives at the
+picture which we now see in the Borghese Gallery. Figure 186. It has
+become a disagreeable tangle of legs, a display of over-muscular arms
+which support nothing—a welter of histrionic gestures. The clew to the
+trouble is in the effective but meaningless pose of the woman at the
+right, which is borrowed directly from Michelangelo’s Madonna of the
+Doni Family. Figure 195. The landscape no longer liberates the spirit,
+but almost crowds the figures out of the frame. Doubtless so
+self-critical an artist as Raphael learned much from this failure. It
+must have shown him that the rich density and measured dramatic effect
+of Leonardo were not as accessible as he had thought, and he accordingly
+restudied the whole problem of energetic monumental design. Moreover it
+showed him, at least for some years, that Michelangelo was the worst of
+models for him and threw him back upon his proper exemplars, Perugino
+and Fra Bartolommeo—in short, upon that native humility which was at
+once his charm as a man and his strength as an artist.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 186. Raphael. The Entombment.—_Borghese, Rome._
+]
+
+In 1508 Raphael was called to Rome through the influence of a former
+Urbino friend, Bramante, now the architect of new St. Peter’s. The task
+set by Pope Julius II was the decoration of the four new antechambers
+called the _Stanze_. About the same time Michelangelo began on the
+ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Thus the two artists worked within two
+hundred feet of each other, but held apart partly by a natural rivalry,
+and even more by the irascible and suspicious nature of Michelangelo.
+And two masterpieces were produced as from two different
+worlds—Michelangelo’s all tragic and perturbed, Raphael’s all hopeful
+and serene. Between 1509 and 1511 Raphael frescoes the Camera della
+Segnatura, mostly with his own hand. The scheme comprised the finest
+leading ideals of contemporary humanism, and the little room is the most
+important of documents for the student of the Renaissance. Religious
+authority, legal justice, secular philosophy and science, the arts—such
+are the four great themes impersonated on the side walls, and echoed in
+symbol and human illustration on the beautiful ceiling; these are the
+props of a perfect society.
+
+Religious authority and theology are represented by the famous fresco
+called erroneously the Dispute concerning the Sacrament, Figure 187.
+Christ, as the fully revealed member of the Trinity, sits in a heaven
+rayed and studded with gold; beside him sit the prophets and
+apostles—the actual witnesses of his passion. The seated group sweeps
+grandly back describing a sort of semi-dome in space. Below and
+precisely in the centre, on an altar, glitters the wafer which in the
+recurrent miracle of the Mass becomes Christ’s body. To right and left
+of the altar are closely compacted and agitated groups insisting on the
+truth of the miracle of transubstantiation. These are the martyrs and
+church doctors, those who after the apostolic age either in experience
+or divine intuition certified to the central mystery of the Church. The
+upper group is composed after the fashion of Fra Bartolommeo and
+Perugino, is a mere expansion of Raphael’s fresco at San Severo; the
+lower group is held together after the fashion of Leonardo da Vinci’s
+Last Supper, the vehemence of the particular gestures being assimilated
+in a running balance of thrust against thrust, so that the whole effect
+is of a rich and energetic harmony. The figures themselves are
+established adequately, but in draughtsmanship are inferior either to
+Leonardo’s or Michelangelo’s. With the thriftiness of a born decorator,
+Raphael makes the figure count in its place and beyond that takes no
+unnecessary pains. It might indeed be argued that the decoration would
+be worse as a whole if the parts were more perfect. Finally, note how
+essentially classical, Roman, juridical the motive is; how concrete and
+material. Raphael seeks to express nothing more mystical than the
+obvious equation of Christ and the host, and he merely cites a multitude
+of witnesses to prove that the equation is true. This very simplicity of
+motive has thoroughly humanized what might have been a tenuous theme.
+The picture is a magnificent conclave out of many ages, a symbol of the
+cumulative splendor of the Catholic tradition.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 187. Raphael. La Disputa—The Truth of the Eucharist.
+    Fresco.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 188. Raphael. The School of Athens. Fresco.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+On the opposite wall, in the School of Athens, Figure 188, Raphael
+pictures a similar continuity of human thought on the secular plane. The
+arched space opens into a vast basilica whose gods, represented as
+colossal statues at the sides, are Apollo and Minerva. Raphael has
+studied the Basilica of Constantine and has modestly scanned Bramante’s
+plans for new St. Peter’s. He invents a vaulted interior more impressive
+than any that man has ever built. Within finite bounds he suggests the
+infinity of Umbrian space. Without the figures, or with quite other
+figures, we should still have a great picture. But the group is as nobly
+disposed as the architecture. You may imagine a foreshortened ring of
+which the reverend forms of Plato and Aristotle are the twin jewels.
+Aristotle at the right is in the vigor of middle age as a scientist
+should be. His disciples crowd towards him or gather in secondary groups
+about some leader. Science is social and co-operative. Raphael puts
+himself in this group. Plato at the left is immensely old and feeble.
+Speculative philosophy requires only strength of spirit. His disciples
+are generally isolated in personal meditation. Philosophical truth is
+arrived at not in society but in solitude. Certain ardent young faces
+recall Leonardo da Vinci, and the construction of the group is his. We
+have linking motives, like that of sprawling Diogenes on the steps,
+curves that repeat or counter the vault above, turns and thrusts of
+bodies in active balance, an energetic variety within a serene harmony.
+The mood is less agitated than that of the Disputa, while the
+composition is freer. Human science and philosophy are at once less
+bound than is theology, and move more equably because they strive for
+more readily attainable ends. Like its companion piece, the School of
+Athens is both a citation of witnesses and a profession of faith, of
+faith in the capacity of the human mind.
+
+The fresco of Parnassus repeats approximately the grouping of the School
+of Athens, but changes the mood to one of lyrism, and shifts the scene
+to a hill top. About Apollo and the Muses wander the forms of the elder
+and recent poets. Often the faces are a bit insipid, but no one thinks
+of that, so easy are the postures, so gracious the whole effect, so
+instinct with the quiet good breeding of an academic pastoral. All the
+Umbrian reticence and discretion and humility of Raphael are in this
+beautifully calculated work. It betrays, too, certain ominous symptoms
+of display, in the way, for example, in which the figures at the window
+protrude beyond the wall. Primarily this is only a way of softening two
+ugly angles of the window opening, but it is also a concession to
+Michelangelo’s dangerous habit of painting away the architecture. All
+the forms have an amplitude and dignity akin to that of classical
+sculpture. Hellas is for Raphael no longer a far-away, inaccessible
+world, as it was, for example, to Botticelli. Raphael has effectively
+reconstructed it, in part by a gracious act of intuition, in part by
+study of the wall paintings and statues of old Rome.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 189. Raphael. Prudence, Temperance, Force—generally called
+    Jurisprudence. Fresco.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+The decoration of the Camera della Segnatura was completed triumphantly
+with the fresco symbolizing Jurisprudence, Figure 189, in which Raphael
+invents a new and beautiful compositional formula. Having to deal with a
+lunette awkwardly shortened by the window, he used three seated figures
+signifying the judging, restraining and rewarding aspects of justice.
+There is no strict centrality and no exact symmetry. The large curves of
+the figures play off from each other in a continuous rhythm melting into
+the bounding curve. One may conceive it in terms of the growth of
+plants, as so many sprays meeting, diverging, opposing each other, and
+all managing to conform to the line of an arch. It is a type of
+composition that Raphael will develop with still greater subtlety in the
+Sibyls of the Madonna della Pace.
+
+When Raphael finished the Camera della Segnatura he was about
+twenty-eight years old. His remaining nine years added certain
+remarkable portraits, the Castiglione, the Leo X, Figure 190, the
+Fornarina and the young Cardinal at Madrid, one sublime altar-piece, in
+the Sistine Madonna; a dramatic masterpiece in the Transfiguration, and
+a few frescoes. But in the main these are years of retrogression. His
+popularity had got beyond his power to utilize it. Michelangelo in 1512
+had unveiled the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Raphael, with all Rome,
+felt qualities of energy and grandeur which he himself lacked, and, with
+less than his usual intelligence, began a fruitless emulation. The last
+three _Stanze_ show in their very look that Raphael is no longer his
+unperturbed self. The figures no longer hold up their place on the wall,
+they crowd out toward the spectator appallingly. The compositions no
+longer show restful patterns which conform to the flatness of the wall.
+There are disturbing flashes of light and obscure gaps. The figures
+themselves are contorted and vehement; straining sinews and knotted
+muscles are advertised for their own sake. Emulating the sublimity of
+Michelangelo, Raphael only achieves sensationalism. Then he is no longer
+a painter but a director of painting. Nothing but the designs are now
+his own. The working sketches and cartoons are by his pupils, who work
+under the sway of a young Mantuan of facile and brutal talent, Giulio
+Romano. One passes through the last three Stanze with mixed feelings.
+The high pleasures of art are left behind; remains the spell of great
+power and intelligence now almost untouched by taste.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 190. Raphael. Pope Leo X.—_Pitti._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 191. Raphael. Heliodorus driven from the Temple by a Celestial
+    Horseman. Fresco.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+The Stanza of Heliodorus finished in 1514 contains a superbly dramatic
+fresco of Heliodorus, Figure 191, thrust by a celestial horseman from
+the temple he would profane. The execution is mostly by Giulio Romano.
+Raphael himself appears in one of his most massive designs, the Mass of
+Bolsena. The theme is a sceptical priest persuaded of the truth of the
+sacramental miracle through the bleeding of the wafer. The miracle takes
+place in the presence of Pope Julius II. There is a weight of character
+in the picture which is unique in Raphael’s mural painting. The
+adjustment of masses is in an impeccable symmetry all the more difficult
+that the space is irregular and refractory. The fine figures that carry
+the theme down into the narrow rectangles alongside the window are in
+part repainted by a young rival of Raphael, Michelangelo’s protegé,
+Sebastiano del Piombo.
+
+The Chamber of the _Incendio_, finished in 1517, shows even more plainly
+the devastating influence of Michelangelo. The subject is a fire
+arrested miraculously by Pope Leo IV, Figure 192. It is a magnificent
+display of poses and anatomy, an artistic show window rather than a
+decoration. The eye wanders in bewilderment to find the picture and
+finds nothing but isolated, splendid forms posing superbly or simulating
+unfelt emotions. From the point of view of decoration, the space has
+been systematically violated. Again the remorseless hand of Giulio
+Romano is everywhere felt. This is the last anteroom of the Vatican
+which Raphael saw finished, though he left to his helpers many sketches
+for the two remaining _Stanze_.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 192. Raphael’s Design executed by Giulio Romano. Il Borgo. The
+    Fire at Rome.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+In 1516 and 1517 Raphael is superintending half a dozen great tasks at
+once. From the early months of 1515 he had been Bramante’s successor as
+architect of new St. Peter’s, the same year he became superintendent of
+all archæological excavations at Rome. To these heavy administrative
+charges he adds the decoration of the Farnesina, the continuation of the
+_Stanze_, designs for mosaics in Santa Maria del Popolo, plans for two
+private palaces, sixteen cartoons for the Vatican tapestries, and the
+preliminary studies for the Loggia of the Vatican. He designs half a
+dozen great altar-pieces and paints with his own hand the Portrait of
+Leo X, the marvelous St. Cecilia at Bologna, the Sibyls of the Pace, and
+the Sistine Madonna. He was rich and beloved, great nobles pressed him
+with social attentions, and a cardinal vainly sought to ally him with
+his family by marriage.
+
+We can consider these multiform activities of the later years only in
+general terms. The tapestry cartoons at South Kensington representing
+the miracles of St. Peter and St. Paul complete that magnificent line of
+narrative painting that begins with Giotto. Raphael works for simplicity
+and concentration and dignity in an eminently classic spirit. One feels
+the influence of Masaccio. Though rudely executed to guide the Flemish
+weavers and executed by the assistant, Penni, the mind of Raphael
+controls the form throughout. Such designs as the Miraculous Draught of
+Fishes, Paul Preaching at Athens, the Death of Ananias, the Blinding of
+the Sorcerer Elymas are among the marvels of our art. Yet many of these
+designs are over-studied, and few I feel fully bear the comparison with
+the best of Giotto and Masaccio. A little over-emphasis of style recalls
+the bitter word of Michelangelo concerning Raphael—that he succeeded not
+by grace of nature but by study.
+
+The frescoes of the Life of Psyche, in the Farnesina, are beautiful in
+arrangement and full of a robust paganism. But the wall is overcharged
+with the weight of figures which too often show Giulio Romano’s heavy
+and insolent hand. All the same, the whole effect is gracious and the
+garlanded borders of the coves and spandrels by Giovanni da Udine are
+delightful. To realize how much these frescoes lost from student
+execution one has only to consider the Galatea, Figure 192a, in the same
+Palace, which Raphael painted himself in 1514. It is on the verge of
+over-ripeness, but keeps its saving element of restraint. In answer to
+an inquiry from that great diplomat and gentleman, Count Baldassare
+Castiglione, Raphael wrote that though beautiful models were not rare,
+for the Galatea as for other figures, he had followed only an idea; and
+indeed the mind’s eye is what ever counts with Raphael.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 192_a._> Raphael. Galatea. Fresco.—_Farnesina, Rome._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 193. Raphael. The Sistine Madonna.—_Dresden._
+]
+
+Raphael’s final work for the Vatican was the decoration of an open,
+vaulted Loggia. He invented fifty-two little Bible stories, leaving most
+of the painting to his assistant, Penni, and he drew about the arches,
+pilasters and window frames the most delicious arabesques. From study of
+similar decoration in the Baths of Titus he worked out a style, crisp,
+formal and sophisticated, and as various as Gothic ornament itself.
+Geometrical, animal, and plant forms meet and blend audaciously. There
+is interplay of spiral and angular motives, the whole effect is highly
+playful and ingenious. The style has had vogue to our own day and still
+speaks to us charmingly of the unserious side of Raphael.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 194. Raphael. The Transfiguration.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+Perhaps in the harassed, competitive years we have been describing,
+Raphael turned occasionally upon his own ingenuity, and refreshed
+himself by renewing these simple and gracious modes in which he had been
+bred. Such a theory would account for the Sistine Madonna, Figure 193,
+and in part for his last picture, the Transfiguration. The most
+memorable of Raphael’s Madonnas is based on the lucid symmetry of
+Perugino. Although, for greater concentration, the background is merely
+a sky, the hovering figures are easily spaced in the usual triangle. The
+effect is ineffably grand and gentle. A quiet silvery cloudland is
+created and filled by the devotion of the attendant saints and the
+inspired glance of the Virgin and her Son. With all the resources of the
+Renaissance, Raphael has expressed an emotion as intense and reverent as
+that of Fra Angelico. It is an amazing act of the sympathetic
+intelligence, for there is no reason to suppose that the painter was
+ever a deeply religious spirit.
+
+Almost as traditional was the unfinished picture before which in
+springtime of 1520 Raphael’s body lay in state. The Transfiguration,
+Figure 194, repeats the method of the Disputa. The celestial group of
+Christ and Moses and Elijah is disposed as Perugino would have
+counselled, in a swaying triangular group set before the gulf of the
+firmament. Raphael painted this part with his own hand. The lower part,
+which was left to Giulio Romano to finish, rests on the maxims and
+practice of Leonardo. An energetic variety compelled into a close
+balance is the ideal, a formal order which contains and softens
+otherwise extravagant expressions and gestures. There is perhaps
+intended not merely an illustration of the Gospel text, but also the
+contrast between that life of contemplation towards which the soul
+aspires, and that world of suffering of mind and body which presses
+closely upon our rare moments of spiritual escape.
+
+Even that world of facts had been very kind to Raphael. It was fitting
+then that in his last days he should forget the haunting spectre of
+Michelangelo’s sublimity, and should use his last forces in an imitation
+which was a sort of gratitude to those two great masters who had set him
+on the right way. One would like to believe that the Sistine Madonna and
+the Transfiguration are the sign that Raphael when overtaken by an
+untimely death was purging himself of an unfruitful rivalry, and
+becoming once more master of his own soul. Yet since even Michelangelo
+shipwrecked on the Michelangelesque, it is an open question whether
+Raphael could ever have permanently recovered his natural equipoise.
+However that be, Raphael in the glorious years from 1500 to 1512 resumes
+and perfects every gentle, orderly, and reasonable strain in Italian
+painting. Whether in portraiture or narrative, in mythology or
+symbolism, in pictures of the Madonna or in pure decoration, he gave to
+Italian painting its final stamp. He achieved a grandeur of space
+composition akin to the movement of a symphony, a hidden structure more
+appealing than any separate hue or form. His best work rests on a great
+humility, and his later pride went far towards undoing him as an artist.
+Such pride was the breath of life and the source of strength to his
+rival Michelangelo, the fulfiller and perfector of everything that had
+been insurgent, unbounded and not quite reasonable in the art of
+Florence.
+
+By a peculiar irony all that was valuable in such truculent and
+self-sufficing predecessors as Donatello and Bertoldo, Andrea del
+Castagno, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli was finally
+concentrated in the small and ill-favored body of a neurasthenic. There
+is the tragedy of Michelangelo[69] in its simplest terms. A Titan in
+capacity to feel and work, he lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and
+fear. Thrice he ran away from physical danger, once was virtually a
+military deserter. To unworthy dependent relatives he gave lavishly,
+scolding and fretting as he gave. He deliberately affronted two of the
+most courteous and accomplished colleagues, Leonardo da Vinci and
+Perugino. He suspected the worst of his gracious and generous rival,
+Raphael. From a Roman studio as unkempt and filthy as its owner, he
+snarled at the world and himself like a dog from a kennel.
+
+Yet, note the paradox, this snarling is embodied in fine poetry, and
+this haggard and more than untidy artist is the friend of such elect
+spirits as Tommaso Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. Transient solaces.
+Near the end of his long life he writes:—
+
+             “Alas! Alas! again and once again
+             I see my past and there I find not one—
+             In all, not one whole day that has been mine.”
+
+These were the words of a man who was admired like a god and had
+achieved a lifework of unexampled copiousness and athleticism.
+
+The great enigma, how Michelangelo converted what are usually weaknesses
+into sources of artistic strength, may best be faced in his life and
+works. He was born at Caprese in 1475, soon taken back to Florence and
+put to nurse with a stonecutter’s wife, with whose milk he later used to
+say he sucked in the mallets and chisels he wielded so powerfully. At
+thirteen he was articled to Ghirlandaio as a paid assistant and
+doubtless did some minor work on those prettiest of frescoes in the
+choir of Santa Maria Novella. Extricating himself from an uncongenial
+task, he became one of the protegés of Lorenzo de’ Medici, studying the
+antique marbles of the Medici Gardens under the kindly guidance of old
+Bertoldo. There he mingled freely for three years in the most learned
+and gentle society of the time. He mastered anatomy and modelling,
+searched the compositional secrets of Masaccio. Soon Savonarola’s
+revolution dismantled that artistic paradise which had been the Medici
+Gardens, and Michelangelo became what he frequently was afterwards, a
+fugitive and a solitary man, without either fixed friendships or abiding
+place.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 195. Michelangelo. Holy Family of the Doni.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+How he made himself great in sculpture is not our theme. He was thirty
+and already the master of the David and the Pietà before he began to be
+a painter. His first commission, in 1505, was for a Holy Family, Figure
+195, in medallion form for Agnolo Doni, who at the same time was having
+his portrait painted by Raphael. The picture as we see it in the Uffizi
+shows a master who thinks in fresco. The brown flesh, the dull yellows
+and blues of the draperies could have come from the Brancacci chapel.
+Remarkable is the complete waiver of charm and sweetness. The superb
+figures are skilfully contorted into interesting poses, the circle is
+densely filled and the few interstices left by the main figures are
+filled with athletic nudes. The aim, which is successfully attained, is
+an austere grandeur. There is to be no ordinary human appeal in our
+youthful Lord and his parents.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 196. Michelangelo. Detail from Cartoon of the Bathers, by the
+    contemporary engraver, Marcantonio.
+]
+
+At this moment Leonardo was already well advanced on the cartoon for the
+Battle of the Standard, treating it in terms of literal narrative. In
+1505 Michelangelo received a signal honor in the commission for the
+companion fresco, the Battle of Pisa. Both were for the Hall of the
+Great Council. We can imagine Michelangelo casting about for a reason to
+abandon a narrative treatment and to find one that could be expressed by
+the nude. He found it in an incident in Leonardo Aretino’s Chronicle. It
+seemed that the trumpet found the Florentine men-at-arms bathing in the
+Arno. Here was the theme of what was properly called The Bathers. Great
+muscular forms are drawing themselves up the bank, and are hurrying into
+clothes and armor. We have not a fight, but its alarm and imminence, a
+fine imaginative substitute for the obvious event. The picture was never
+executed, and the cartoon, which was the marvel of its day, was soon
+destroyed, but Michelangelo’s sketches tells us something of the
+composition, and the contemporary engraver, Marcantonio, Figure 196, has
+left us a masterly print of the central group. It is plain that
+Michelangelo made a display of minute anatomy that put his
+contemporaries to shame, plain also that he subordinated this feature to
+monumental effect. The failure to execute the fresco and the destruction
+of the cartoon must count among the capital losses in the history of
+art.
+
+Burdened already with the impossible task of the tomb of Julius II,
+Michelangelo was called to Rome to fresco the vault of the Sistine
+Chapel. Contemporary gossip believed that he was proposed by the jealous
+and shifty Bramante, architect of St. Peter’s, in the hope of
+discrediting him. If so, Bramante reckoned ill. At first Michelangelo
+planned a very modest scheme of colossal figures of Apostles in the
+twelve spandrels. Soon, dismissing his incompetent helpers, he attacked
+single-handed the present great scheme. He worked at it four bitter
+years, and came out of it temporarily crippled and with eyes distorted
+from the constant strain of looking upwards. The ceiling was unveiled on
+All Saint’s Day of 1512 and has been a portent ever since.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 197. Michelangelo. The two Western Compartments of the Ceiling of
+    the Sistine Chapel: God parting Light from Darkness; God creating
+    the Sea and Plants. Example of the Decorative Scheme.
+]
+
+Enter the Sistine Chapel, turn your back to the overwhelming apparition
+of the Last Judgment, and your eye will naturally seek the lightest part
+of the rich decoration. In a long strip, down the centre of the ceiling,
+made up of nine oblongs alternately large and small, colossal figures
+stand out against the sky. We see the drama of the Creation and Fall of
+man. Nude titans play the minor parts in so many simultaneous scenes.
+The gigantic, draped form of the Eternal dominates the first five. We
+see him an aged athlete, an expression of utmost physical force, rending
+chaos asunder into light and darkness; by his touch illumining the sun
+and moon; Figure 197, drawing out the plants from the earth. I know no
+more sublime conception in painting than the figure of God assigning the
+oceans their place, Figure 198. Here is a form that would weigh tons
+hovering with the lightness of an eagle in space, with extended
+beneficent arms as solid as reality but coaxed out of the wet plaster
+with touch and hues as delicate as those of a Whistler symphony. A
+miracle of conception and of workmanship.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 198. Michelangelo. God hovering over the Waters. Shows the
+    decorative use of the so-called “Slaves.”—_Vatican._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 199. Michelangelo. Creation of Adam.
+]
+
+The eye will dwell longest on the great fresco of the Creation of Adam,
+Figure 199. It is all noble energy in the figure of God giving life by
+His touch, all noble languor in the relaxed form of Adam only dimly
+conscious of himself and wistful. There could be no truer or more
+striking illustration of the pessimistic view that life was imposed upon
+the earth and brought sadness with it. The titan form of Adam has a
+singular and enigmatic relaxation. He undergoes a gift he has never
+besought and faces it with something between confusion, mistrust and
+resignation. Perhaps the splendid body would have been more at ease, had
+the soul not been added. So in a spirit of Christian pessimism
+Michelangelo represents Deity sharing its divine powers with the first
+man.
+
+At the centre of the ceiling is the creation of Eve, again an
+extraordinary study in lassitude, but with a significant difference in
+the figure of Eve. The woman, the chosen receptacle and transmitter of
+life, accepts the gift eagerly. She presses up to God in thankful
+adoration. No doubts or ambiguities here. And what a figure—fit to be
+the mother of a race, exulting already in a fecundity that is to be most
+grievous. Compare her action with the languid and almost disdainful
+gesture of Adam in the last fresco, and learn that if the world is still
+peopled it is due to the unreflective and unshaken fealty to life of all
+Eve’s true daughters.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 200. Michelangelo. The Temptation and Expulsion from Eden.
+]
+
+Perhaps the most decorative subject, if one may use the word of themes
+so morally impressive, is that which represents the sin of the forbidden
+fruit and the expulsion from Eden, Figure 200. The elements of pathos
+which are strong in the story of Genesis are absent. Michelangelo has
+not deigned to show us a habitable or desirable Eden. We see instead the
+swiftly changing episodes of a great doom, which culminates in this
+scene. Marvelous are the paired groups, superb the contrast between
+careless appetite under the tree of knowledge and utter shame in the
+exiled pair. One feels that Eve, who shrinks most, will soonest recover.
+Her mission is still valid in the world of sin and shame. The
+composition is the first one made up entirely of nudes.
+
+We may pass quickly over the three compartments devoted to the story of
+Noah. The scale of the figures, especially in the Deluge, is too small
+to count at the distance from the eye. These three frescoes were the
+beginning of the work, the proper scale being arrived at through trial
+and error. Inherently the two small oblongs are among the most beautiful
+in the ceiling, having a stylistic grace that is less marked in the
+earlier more august themes. With the charm of Greek intaglios these
+stories of Noah combine monumentality.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 201. Michelangelo. The Prophet Jeremiah.
+]
+
+I have tried to put myself in the position of a visitor to the Sistine
+Chapel following the instincts of his eye. At this point, having glanced
+over the ceiling, his mind might well come in and ask the meaning of a
+whole of which he is becoming dimly aware. The nine scenes above are
+simply the historic axioms upon which the Christian scheme of redemption
+is based. The abstract sparseness of the nine episodes from Genesis is
+justified by the fact that they are less human events than terms in a
+great argument, which runs as follows: We were created innocent, sinned
+in our first parents, were spared in the world-flood and promised
+eventual redemption.
+
+This prolonged drama of redemption is witnessed by a solemn chorus of
+draped male and female figures enthroned impressively in the spandrels.
+Here, representing respectively the pagan and Hebrew world, are seven
+sibyls and five prophets who had the dim but certain vision of a coming
+Redeemer. These figures as Hawthorne has well said are “necessarily so
+gigantic because the weight of thought within them is so massive.” They
+brood quietly or sway with the burden of yearning. They are
+magnificently draped and contrast most decoratively with the many nudes
+of the ceiling. They vary in age and disposition. Contrast the actively
+inspired and youthful Daniel, or the fiery Ezechiel with the ponderous
+gravity of Jeremiah, Figure 201. What shades of delicate
+characterization are in the athletic loveliness of the Delphic Sibyl,
+Figure 202, the powerfully concentrated senility of The Cumean Sibyl,
+she who predicted to Virgil the new era of salvation, and the
+aristocratic aloofness of the Libyan seeress, Figure 203, most daintily
+preparing her day’s work in divination.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 202. Michelangelo. The Delphic Sibyl.
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 203. Michelangelo. The Libyan Sibyl.
+]
+
+Magnificent is the indignant sprawling form of the unwilling prophet
+Jonah, remanded by the sea to an ungrateful mission. He is the active
+counterpart of the passive Adam on the ceiling. He obeys under protest.
+The form itself, foreshortened against the curve of the spandrel, is a
+masterpiece of draughtsmanship. Decoratively it is the link between the
+nudes of the ceiling and the draped prophets and sibyls.
+
+Below the prophetic figures, in the older frescoes of the side walls,
+are set the foreshadowing of the work of salvation in the life of Moses
+and its accomplishment in the life of Christ, and the drama closes with
+Michelangelo’s Last Judgment on the altar wall. There Christ separates
+eternally the saved from the damned, echoing the definitive gesture with
+which God in the adjoining ceiling separates light from darkness. So the
+scheme closes with the inexorable logic with which it began.
+
+The decorative task of Michelangelo was to mediate between the prophets
+and sibyls and the ceiling frescoes above, and likewise to link the
+great figures with the side walls below. Above, he set a multitude of
+nude forms. On the massive sides of the twelve thrones are four
+caryatids in two pairs. At the top of these piers are seated the lithe
+forms of nude youths, Figure 198, forty in all, supporting medallions
+and bent into every conceivable attitude that might set off the
+flexibility and power of these superb young bodies. But however
+extravagant any single pose may be, it is immediately balanced by an
+opposing thrust from some other body, so that the whole composition is
+locked together into an active and thrilling equilibrium. Even the
+triangles over the coves are filled with huddled nudes most adroitly
+disposed in the narrow and refractory spaces.
+
+Below the prophets and sibyls, the linking motives are made up of draped
+figures. Weakest are the caryatid geniuses below each throne. The
+triangular splays at the corners contain those four bloody and
+sensational acts which assured the perpetuity of God’s Chosen People—the
+Raising of the Brazen Serpent, the Slaying of Goliath and of
+Holophernes, the Hanging of Haaman.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 204. Michelangelo. Decoration of Cove over Window.
+]
+
+In the triangles roofing the coves and in the lunettes about the arched
+window heads are family groups of the ancestors and precursors of
+Christ. Figure 204. The mood of anticipation which has been calm and
+official in the prophets becomes agitated, passionate, personal in these
+half hidden groups. So many pilgrims of eternity yearn for the
+fulfillment that shall give meaning to their wanderings—a promised goal
+and rest. Very subtle and beautiful is the contrast between the groups
+sundered by the window heads, individually meditative, and those which
+blend their longing in the close relations forced by the triangular
+coves. What has begun as noble abstraction finishes in terms of almost
+inexpressible tenderness. In color the whole gigantic composition is
+unified by a sonorous chord of yellow and violet which is moderately
+asserted in the ceiling and pushed to the utmost in the spandrels. Of
+the color John La Farge has written: “The unity is so great, the balance
+of effects so harmonious, that it is only by study that we see expressed
+in the methods of the painting the ancient rules, handed down by
+practice, which unite with the latest teaching of modern scientific
+coloring.” What a mind it took to hold the tumultuous and pathetic
+details of this great work within an enveloping order and calm!
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 205. Michelangelo. The Last Judgment.
+]
+
+In framing his great work out of nudes relieved by draped figures,
+Michelangelo renewed the Grecian practice. Precisely the difference
+between the Sistine ceiling and the metopes of the Parthenon, or the
+frieze of Pergamon, raises the question—What does the nude of
+Michelangelo express? I do not find in it, at least in the Sistine
+ceiling, much of that terribleness, _terribiltà_, which has been
+remarked by critics from Vasari to Henri Beyle. It seems to me rather an
+art of lassitude and relaxation, the reluctantly awaking Adam being the
+clue to the mood. Except for the gestures of God and Eve, the gestures
+and poses are unspecific. The lithe bodies of the slaves are twisted
+only that they may attain consciousness of powers which have no use. The
+relaxation which marks nearly all the nudes, whether in the stories or
+in the incidental ornament, is not that of fatigue after action, nor yet
+that of preparation for an ordeal. In barren lassitude we have expressed
+powers which do not imply action or use, but breathe a great melancholy.
+We are far from the splendors of passion and achievement, we see
+humanity confused at a fate that calls itself God, a passive factor in
+an arbitrary process that makes the glory of the flesh a vain thing. As
+a humanist, Michelangelo asserts that failing glory, as a Christian he
+accepts the nothingness of mankind and the rightness of God’s
+inscrutable and apparently cruel designs. Perhaps the spell of
+Michelangelo, his æsthetic, to put it pedantically, is simply the noble
+resignation with which the humanist accepts the Christian pessimism as
+regards this world. And here I may note that Rodin has significantly
+shown that even the forms of Michelangelo are not uprising and resilient
+like the antique, but compressed and yielding like those of the
+Christian Gothic sculptors.
+
+Twenty-one years after the Sistine ceiling was unveiled, Michelangelo
+began reluctantly the great fresco of the Last Judgment, Figure 205. He
+worked on it for seven years, and it was unveiled on Christmas Day of
+1541. How the choristers had the heart to chant the angelic message of
+peace and good will before it, I cannot imagine. Michelangelo was
+sixty-six years old, a disillusioned and embittered man, an alien in the
+corrupt and pleasure loving Rome of Paul III. He has put into the Christ
+all his contempt for mankind. The Christ who earlier wrathfully hurled
+the darts in the Umbrian plague banners has become a far darting Apollo,
+Figure 206, rejoicing in his dire task. Behind him the murky air is full
+of hurtling contorted angels, in aspect quite indistinguishable from
+fiends, who bear the implements of the Passion. Below, the just and
+unjust rise or fall in knots and festoons of writhing nude bodies all
+equally sinister. The conception is violently corporeal, and never
+elsewhere in painting has the human body been used with such ingenuity
+and power. But it is a power that defeats itself. I believe the
+spectator is not so much appalled as confused before the Last Judgment.
+Its vehemence seems so unrelieved and insensate. If this be indeed the
+goal of mankind, no wonder moody Adam in the ceiling above faces his
+Creator with doubt and a hint of distrust.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 206. Michelangelo. Christ with the Virgin and the Apostles. From
+    the Last Judgment.
+]
+
+Its sheer display of force won all contemporaries, and the French critic
+and superman, Stendhal, has highly praised the work for its burning
+energy. While not sharing his enthusiasm, I gladly refer the reader to
+his admirable pages. In my own opinion the creative ardor of
+Michelangelo had waned by this time. He offers, instead, his spleen,
+which is more valuable than most men’s genius, and his amazing technical
+skill. Michelangelo has become Michelangelesque. That is deplorably true
+in the frescoes for the Pauline Chapel which were finished in 1547, his
+seventy-second year. Nothing is left but sensationalism, and the Pope
+does well not to exhibit these works. As regards humanity,
+Michelangelo’s vein is completely exhausted. He still is capable of
+exquisite calculation, as in the design for the dome of St. Peter’s,
+still retains a dæmonic capacity for work and emotion, but the sculptor
+in him is nearly dead and the painter completely so. The poet of the
+rugged sonnets has superseded them both. When he died at 89, in 1564,
+the little ill-favored body was honored like that of a king. His sheer
+power had swept the whole rising generation of artists under his sway.
+To their own hurt and to the bankruptcy of the Golden Age.
+
+Such forms as Michelangelo’s are tolerable only when possessed by that
+melancholy poetry of his which gives them meaning. If the serene
+intelligence of a Raphael had not found emotions to fill such forms, if
+Michelangelo himself in his later years falls back on a monotonous
+formula of terribleness, what hope was there for such uninspired
+imitators as the Venustis, Volterras, and Vasaris? One and all, they
+entertained monstrous delusions of effortless attainment—cleverly
+contorted their nudes, shrewdly calculated their terrors. And the Roman
+art of the Golden Age, forgetting both the wise humility of Umbria and
+the reasonable pride of Florence, suddenly collapsed in the ugliest and
+most irrational ostentation. Michelangelo had passed—to fulfill and to
+destroy.
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VI
+
+
+           A CONTEMPORARY LIST OF GREAT ARTISTS, BEFORE 1510
+
+  In an offhand mention in _The Courtier_ Baldasarre Castiglione tells
+  us who seemed to be great artists to a cultured and well-informed
+  gentleman about the year 1508. Titian had not yet emerged and of the
+  older men only Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna are remembered. As
+  seniors, they are the first mentioned.
+
+
+  “Again various things give equal pleasure to the eyes, so that we can
+  with difficulty decide what are more pleasing to them. You know that
+  in painting Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo,
+  Giorgio da Castelfranco are very excellent, yet they are all unlike in
+  their work; so that no one of them seems to lack anything in his own
+  manner, since each is known as the most perfect in his style.”
+
+
+  _The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldesar Castiglione_, translated
+  by Leonard Ekstein Opdycke, New York, 1903, p. 50.
+
+
+                MICHELANGELO ON RENAISSANCE COUNTERPOISE
+
+  It is said then that Michelangelo once gave his advice to Marcoda
+  Siena, his pupil, that “one should make the figure pyramidal, spiral,
+  (_serpentinata_) and multiplied by one, two, and three.” Lomazzo
+  _Trattato_, Milan, 1484, p. 23. The pose, that is, should be contained
+  geometrically, should display opposing thrusts, and should be
+  mathematically proportioned within the inclosing geometrical form.
+
+
+                      VASARI ON THE “MODERN STYLE”
+
+  Vasari’s account of the Grand Style or “Third Manner,” in the Preface
+  to Part III (De Vere’s translation, Vol. IV, pp. 79–85) is still
+  authoritative. He praises the artists before Leonardo, but finds in
+  them a certain hardness, lack of finish and uncertainty of
+  proportions. The change to the perfect manner was caused by the
+  discovery of ancient marbles.
+
+  “After them [the predecessors of Leonardo], their successors were able
+  to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain
+  antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the
+  Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise
+  the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others,
+  which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy
+  roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with
+  certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure but
+  only a movement of certain parts, which are revealed with a most
+  perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness,
+  hardness, and sharpness of manner....
+
+  [He mentions the contemporary admiration of such precursors as Francia
+  and Perugino.]
+
+  “But their error was afterwards clearly proved by the works of
+  Leonardo da Vinci, who, giving a beginning to that third manner which
+  we propose to call the modern—besides the force and boldness of his
+  drawing, and the extreme subtlety wherewith he counterfeited all the
+  minutenesses of nature exactly as they are—with good rule, better
+  order, right proportion, perfect drawing, and divine grace, abounding
+  in resources and having a most profound knowledge of art, may be truly
+  said to have endowed his figures with motion and breath.
+
+  “There followed after him, although at some distance, Giorgione da
+  Castelfranco, who obtained a beautiful gradation of colour in his
+  pictures ...; and not inferior to him in giving force, relief,
+  sweetness, and grace to his pictures, with his colouring, was Fra
+  Bartolommeo di San Marco. But more than all did the most gracious
+  Rafaello da Urbino, who, studying the labours of the old masters and
+  those of the Moderns, took the best from them, and, having gathered it
+  together, enriched the art of painting with that complete perfection
+  which was shown in ancient times by the figures of Apelles and Zeuxis,
+  nay, even more, if we may make bold to say it, as might be proved if
+  we could compare their works with his. Wherefore nature was left
+  vanquished by his colours....
+
+  “In the same manner, but sweeter in colouring and not so bold, there
+  followed Andrea del Sarto, who may be called a rare painter, for his
+  works are free from errors.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+  “But he who bears the palm from both the living and the dead,
+  transcending and eclipsing all others, is the divine Michelangelo
+  Buonarotti, who holds the sovereignty not merely of one of these arts,
+  but of all three together. This master surpasses and excels not only
+  all those moderns who have almost vanquished nature, but even those
+  most famous ancients who without a doubt did so gloriously surpass
+  her; and in his own self he triumphs over moderns, ancients, and
+  nature, who could scarcely conceive anything so strange and so
+  difficult that he would not be able, by the force of his most divine
+  intellect and by means of his industry, draughtsmanship, art, judgment
+  and grace, to excel it by a great measure; and that not only in
+  painting and in the use of colours under which title are comprised all
+  forms, and all bodies upright or not upright, palpable or impalpable,
+  visible or invisible, but also in the highest perfection of bodies in
+  the round, with the point of his chisel.”
+
+
+                   UNITY OF DESIGN IN THE RENAISSANCE
+
+  The humanist Benedetto Varchi, renewing the debate which Leonardo da
+  Vinci had started concerning the relative rank of sculpture and
+  painting, sent the text of his lecture to Michelangelo and asked for
+  his opinion. The sculptor writes in 1549:
+
+
+  “In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion
+  as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be
+  considered bad as it approaches the effect of painting. I used to
+  consider that sculpture was the lantern of painting and that between
+  the two things there was the same difference as that between the sun
+  and the moon. But now that I have read your book, in which, speaking
+  as a philosopher, you say that things which have the same end are
+  themselves the same, I have changed my opinion; and I now consider
+  that painting and sculpture are one and the same thing, unless greater
+  nobility be imparted by the necessity for a keener judgment, greater
+  difficulties of execution, stricter limitations and harder work. And
+  if this be the case, no painter ought to think less of sculpture than
+  of painting and no sculptor less of painting than of sculpture. By
+  sculpture I mean the sort that is executed by cutting away from the
+  block: the sort that is executed by building up resembles painting.
+  That is enough, for as one and the other, that is to say, both
+  painting and sculpture proceed from the same faculty, it would be an
+  easy matter to establish harmony between them and to let such disputes
+  alone, for they occupy more time than the execution of the figures
+  themselves. As to that man [Leonardo da Vinci] who wrote saying that
+  painting was more noble than sculpture, as though he knew as much
+  about it as he did of the other subjects on which he has written, why
+  my serving-maid would have written better!”
+
+
+  From Robert W. Carden, _Michelangelo, a Record of his Life_, Boston
+  and New York, 1913, a book which from Michelangelo’s letters gives a
+  very intimate view of the sculptor’s character.
+
+
+                 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS ON THE GRAND STYLE
+
+  No critic of art has better expressed the ideal of the Grand Style
+  than Sir Joshua Reynolds. I quote from the third of his _Discourses_,
+  in the admirable edition of Roger E. Fry, New York, 1906. pp. 51 ff.
+
+  “Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The
+  _gusto grande_ of the Italians, the _beau idéal_ of the French and the
+  _great style_, _genius_ and _taste_ among the English, are but
+  different appellations of the same thing. It is this intellectual
+  dignity, they say, that ennobles the Painter’s Art; that lays the line
+  between him and the mere mechanic: and produces those great effects in
+  an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts,
+  are scarcely able to retain....” [The grand style is seen to rest upon
+  a sort of generalizing tendency.] “The whole beauty and grandeur of
+  the Art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all
+  singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every
+  kind.” [The artist] “being enabled to distinguish the accidental
+  deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their
+  general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more
+  perfect than any one original; and, what may seem a paradox, he learns
+  to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object.”
+  [Sir Joshua advocates the study of the antique, not to imitate any
+  single work, but to master the principle that underlies them all.]
+  “Beauty and simplicity have so great a share in the composition of the
+  great style, that he who has acquired them has little else to learn.
+  It must not, indeed, be forgotten that there is a nobleness of
+  conception, which goes beyond any thing in the mere exhibition of
+  perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures
+  with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of
+  philosophic wisdom, or heroic virtue. This can only be acquired by him
+  that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of
+  knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of
+  ancient and modern poetry.”
+
+
+                    KENYON COX ON THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
+
+  The ideals of the High Renaissance are eloquently, if incidentally,
+  defined by the late Kenyon Cox in _The Classic Point of View_, New
+  York, 1911. pp. 3–5.
+
+  “The Classic spirit is the disinterested search for perfection; it is
+  the love of clearness and reasonableness and self-control; it is,
+  above all, the love of permanence and of continuity. It asks of a work
+  of art, not that it shall be novel or effective, but that it shall be
+  fine and noble. It seeks not merely to express individuality or
+  emotion, but to express disciplined emotion and individuality
+  restrained by law. It strives for the essential rather than the
+  accidental, the eternal rather than the momentary—loves impersonality
+  more than personality, and feels more power in the orderly succession
+  of the hours and the seasons than in the violence of earthquake or of
+  storm. And it loves to steep itself in tradition. It would have each
+  new work connect itself in the mind of him who sees it with all the
+  noble and lively works of the past, bringing them to his memory and
+  making their beauty and charm a part of the beauty and charm of the
+  work before him. It does not deny originality and individuality—they
+  are as welcome as inevitable. It does not consider tradition as
+  immutable or set rigid bounds to invention. But it desires that each
+  new presentation of truth and beauty shall show us the old truth and
+  the old beauty, seen only from a different angle and colored by a
+  different medium. It wishes to add link by link to the chain of
+  tradition, but it does not wish to break the chain.”
+
+
+           THE END OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE COMING OF FEAR
+
+  An artistic collapse whether in an artist or a nation is usually due
+  to a prior collapse in morale. Florence suffered such loss of face
+  when the Imperialists stormed the city and crushed the Republic. We
+  may study the disaster in Michelangelo’s personal case and in its
+  effect on the citizenry at large. Michelangelo was military engineer.
+  Writing from Venice, Sept. 25, 1529, he describes his desertion with
+  singular objectivity:
+
+  “I had intended to remain in Florence to the end of the war, having no
+  fears for my own safety. But on Tuesday morning, the 21st of
+  September, a certain person came out by the Porta a San Nicolò while I
+  was engaged in inspecting the bastions, and whispered in my ear that I
+  must remain there no longer if I valued my life. He accompanied me to
+  my house, dined there, brought me horses, and never left my side until
+  he had carried me out of Florence, declaring that it was for my good
+  that he so acted. Whether it were God or the devil I cannot say.”
+
+  From Robert W. Carden, _Michelangelo, a Record of his Life_, Boston
+  and New York, 1913, p. 168.
+
+  Florence suffered not from hallucinations, as this seems to have been,
+  but from the humiliation and confusion incident upon defeat and
+  foreign occupation. I translate from Benedetto Varchi’s _Storia_, the
+  extract in Ancona and Bacci’s _Manuele della Letteratura Italiana_,
+  Vol. II, p. 506.
+
+
+  “The city of Florence when her liberty was lost was full of such
+  sorrow, of such terror, of such confusion, that it can hardly be
+  described or even imagined.... The nobles were indignant among
+  themselves and inwardly resented being scorned and vilified by the
+  lowest classes; the plebeians in extreme need, would not refrain at
+  least from relieving their minds about the nobility; the rich, how
+  they could manage not to lose their property; the poor, day and night,
+  what they should do not to die utterly and of famine; the citizens
+  were dismayed and desperate, because they had spent and lost a lot:
+  the peasants, much more, because there remained for them nothing at
+  all; the priests were ashamed of having deceived the laity; the laity
+  grieved at having believed the priests; men had become extraordinarily
+  suspicious and covetous; women immeasurably incredulous and
+  distrustful: finally, every one with lowered face and staring eyes,
+  seemed beside himself, and all without exception pallid and bewildered
+  feared at all times every sort of ill.”
+
+
+  From such a shell-shocked community as this, no serene or noble art
+  was to be expected. It was much that Florence in bondage still could
+  nurture the exquisitely morbid art of a Pontormo and the aristocratic
+  detachment and _finesse_ of a Bronzino.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 207. Giovanni Bellini. St. Francis receiving the Stigmata.—_H. C.
+    Frick Coll., New York._
+]
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+                    VENETIAN PAINTING BEFORE TITIAN
+
+  On the splendor of Venice—Italo-Byzantine painters of the 14th
+      Century—Paduan, Veronese, and Umbrian Painters at Venice—Jacopo
+      Bellini—Squarcione’s school at Padua, Carlo Crivelli—Andrea
+      Mantegna, mentor for Northern Italy—Antonello da Messina’s
+      Realism—The flowering of the old Narrative School in Gentile
+      Bellino—Giovanni Bellini—The backward Vivarini—Carpaccio and the
+      end of the old Narrative Style—Literary background of Giorgione’s
+      Art—Giorgione of Castelfranco.
+
+
+When, about the middle of the fifth century, a pitiful throng of
+refugees sought safety from Attila and his Huns in the fens at the head
+of the Adriatic, they took with them what was left of the constructive
+genius of the Roman Empire. They raised amid the lagoons a healthful and
+convenient city, which in the course of centuries became the most
+beautiful in Europe. They developed a strong and wise oligarchy, under
+forms sufficiently democratic to satisfy the people. They attained an
+extraordinary capacity for diplomacy and overseas trade—a brilliant
+commercialized civilization. Secure in their isolation and wealth, the
+Venetians mediated the long strife between the popes and the Teutonic
+emperors, making favorable terms with both. Venice enjoyed a wholly
+exceptional political stability. No other commune of Europe could have
+fittingly assumed the title, Serenissima. Her galleys and sailing craft
+plied to Candia, Rhodes, Smyrna, Alexandretta, Constantinople. Down the
+Adriatic to Malta, her trading stations shone white under the yellow
+cliffs. Her incoming ships brought back the splendid rugs and silks and
+embroideries from the Levant, the beautiful potteries of Asia Minor,
+Persia and distant China, the veined marbles and porphyries of Egypt and
+of Istria to build into her churches and palaces. She was astute and
+powerful enough to divert a crusade into a plundering expedition against
+her rival, Constantinople. And thus she got the four antique bronze
+horses still chafing above the portico of St. Mark’s and many a relic of
+the later Byzantine splendor. Her doors ever opened to the Orient. Her
+quays swarmed with turbaned traders. The Greeks had their churches and
+confraternities at Venice, and so had the Slavonians. For articles of
+luxury the northern caravans came to Venice over the Brenner to load
+from the German warehouses on the Grand Canal.
+
+So stable, rich and proud a city was singularly slow in producing its
+own art. Venice was never primarily a manufacturing community, and from
+the first she expected to import most articles of luxury and display.
+Thus when the manydomed Basilica rose over the body of her patron, St.
+Mark, Venice called masters from Constantinople to enrich the surfaces
+with mosaics, and when, towards the end of the fourteenth century, she
+wished to picture the new Palace of the Doges, she called not her own
+artists to the task, but those of Padua, Verona and distant Fabriano.
+Her originality and greatness in painting do not clearly assert
+themselves until about 1475 in the work of the brothers Bellini, and by
+1577, the year of Titian’s death, the period of her artistic supremacy
+has passed. The whole development is comprised within a century; its
+acceleration is even more remarkable than the tardiness of its
+appearance. In three generations Venetian painting made the progress
+that had required six in Tuscany, and the whole preparatory period,
+which in Florence stretched over a century and three-quarters, is
+included in the single life of such a master as Giovanni Bellini.
+
+This means that Venetian painting followed simpler and more unperturbed
+ideals than that of Florence. The composure, complacency, and
+self-centered quality of the Venetians was a source of strength to their
+artists and as well a limitation. The city stuck closely to its chief
+business of gaining greatly in order to live magnificently. And unlike
+Florence, Venice interprets magnificence in the most material terms, in
+terms of velvet and veined marbles, fair skins and lustrous hair, in
+feasting and measured revelry, grave and gentle manners, colorful
+pageantry in honor of God, his saints and the Serenissima Republica. You
+will not find poets, scholars, scientists a-plenty at Venice. Her
+painters have no tendency to be also architects, sculptors,
+mathematicians, theorists in æsthetics; they stick placidly to the main
+business of painting. And perhaps just because the Venetian painter
+refused to be diverted from the problems proper to his craft, his
+progress was so rapid and assured, and the Venetian school, simply as
+painting, the most beautiful school of painting the world has ever seen.
+
+It was written in the lagoon itself that Venetian painting should be a
+school of color. Long before the marble and porphyry palaces and the
+shining bridges of Renaissance Venice spanned the canals, the brown
+water gave its satiny reflections of rude hut, coppered galley, tawny
+sail, and, in days of complete calm, of the serrated ivory of the Julian
+Alps or the velvety azure of the Euganean Hills. As the city grew
+palatially, the marble and gold of the palace fronts, and spires and
+domes, with the buff and red of soaring bell towers, further enriched
+the shimmering of the lagoon. Its waters were ruffled not merely by
+winds blending and effacing the weaving of borrowed colors, but also by
+the passing of gilded processional barges with rhythmical oars
+celebrating the Assumption of the Virgin or the marriage of Venice to
+the Adriatic.
+
+Ashore the splendor was hardly less. Along the balustrades of
+innumerable little bridges, the rose or yellow marble got an ineffable
+finish from the touch of countless hands. Dusky archways gave upon
+courts encrusted with variegated marbles, porphyry and mosaics. In the
+gloomy streets, gay pictorial frescoes enlivened the fronts of the less
+pretentious houses. In the great Piazza of St. Mark and other open
+spaces, often passed in solemn procession the religious confraternities
+called Schools, the members garbed with a splendor rare even in the
+Renaissance. There were clubs of young fops, not yet broken to the
+paternal commerce, who gave themselves to the invention and display of
+the finest tailoring and haberdashery. And the unorganized kindred
+activities of the women of all ages were as effective from the point of
+view of social display. Such was the spectacle that Venice offered the
+painter for record and even more for inspiration. And the greatness of
+the Venetian painters lay in their capacity to lend to this chiefly
+material splendor their own kind of ideality.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 208. Presentation; Flight to Egypt; Miracle at Cana; Temptation.
+    From an Italo-Byzantine Altar-front of about 1350.—_Trieste._
+]
+
+When Venetian painting about the year 1350 made its first timid
+assertions of originality, the leading influence was that of the late
+Byzantine artists of the Slavonian coast and the Ionian Islands. We see
+their narrative painting assuming a very slightly Italian guise in the
+composite altar-front preserved in the museum of Trieste. Figure 208.
+Its date cannot be very late in the fourteenth century, and the
+stereotyped religious compositions represent models vividly before the
+Venetian painter up to the Renaissance. Such Venetian masters as Paolo,
+active from 1332 to 1358, and Lorenzo, whose work falls a generation
+later, make slight and external improvements on the Byzantine
+manner.[70] They reject its more rigid formulas—the gold web over
+drapery, the multiplied small folds, the painfully schematized muscles.
+They add on their own account radiant blond coloring, splendid brocades,
+more gorgeous fashions of gilding, and a new type of architectural
+arrangement. The elaborate altar-backs with perforated pilasters, and
+flamboyant arches and cresting; with full-length figures below and
+half-length of like scale above, become the standard form of Venetic
+_ancona_ about 1350 and remains so for nearly a century and a half. We
+may see the form, with the upper central panel modernized, in Lorenzo’s
+Annunciation of 1357, in the Venetian Academy. The effect depends
+largely on the frame-maker. Such altar-pieces are made more thoughtfully
+by Caterino and Donato and indeed persist in all Northern Italy until
+after 1450. Figure 211. We may study a similar type of _ancona_ with
+narratives instead of single figures in the very accomplished and
+colorful work doubtfully ascribed to Nicolo Semitecolo, towards the
+beginning of the new century. Though the narratives follow pretty
+closely the old Byzantine requirements, the whole surface shows the
+flower-bed variety and harmony of color which is proper to Venice. Such
+work, as a blend of Byzantine and Gothic features, repeats what Siena
+had effected with far greater originality and _finesse_ about seventy
+years earlier under Duccio and Simone Martini. Modena and Bologna and
+Padua through the latter half of the fourteenth century share this
+development, but again on a basis of rather marked inferiority to Siena.
+
+The Venetian authorities were fully conscious of the backwardness of
+their own artists. When the Ducal Palace was finished in 1365, they
+called to fresco its great hall not any of the various local followers
+of Paolo and Lorenzo, but Guariento from neighboring Padua. He executed
+the great Coronation of the Virgin which was later damaged by fire and
+covered by Tintoretto’s Paradise. The temporary removal of Tintoretto’s
+canvas showed for a time the crumbling remains of Guariento’s fresco. It
+is in an elaborate Gothic-Byzantine style and abounds in incidental
+architectural ornament. Below the ceremony of the Coronation there is a
+screen of pierced marble niches occupied by graceful angels. It is a
+motive that will often recur in the new century. On the whole Guariento
+brings little new to Venice, but he does demonstrate the decorative
+possibilities of the local style. His influence was restricted because
+the Venetians soon ceased to work in fresco.
+
+The impetus necessary to lift Venetian painting out of its routine
+condition was supplied in the fifteenth century by Gentile da Fabriano
+and Pisanello. Gentile, who worked in the Ducal Palace about 1410,
+commanded both the exquisiteness of the Sienese style and its narrative
+breadth. Unhappily his Venetian frescoes which are lauded in
+contemporary accounts have perished. His sweetness and ideality are
+attested by various Madonnas. We may infer his raciness and vivacity as
+a narrative painter from the predella of his master work, the Adoration
+of the Kings (1423). The little panel of the Presentation in the Temple
+is admirable for its architectural inscenation and for the actuality of
+its incidental figures. We have a man whose eye takes in the look of
+things. This is even more the case with Pisanello (1397–1455), who
+worked a little later in the same hall. He has severe notions of
+draughtsmanship, as befitted the greatest of all medallists. He brought
+from Verona, where his artistic ideas were formed, the ideal of
+elaborate and credible setting, especially as regards the relations of
+figures to architecture. In his ruined fresco of St. George of Verona,
+Figure 209, we may catch his quality. But the Veronese style is really
+better represented by such immediate predecessors as Avanzo and
+Altichiero. Jointly about 1385 they frescoed the great Oratorio of St.
+George at Padua. Especially remarkable are the legends of the titular
+saint, Figure 210. Through repainting one may still discern the dignity
+and discretion of the arrangement, and in particular the just and
+tasteful elaboration of contemporary architectural features. Florentine
+and Sienese frescoes of the time are hardly as accomplished. The festal
+value of the architecture persists as a leading ideal of the school of
+Verona down to her greatest master, Paolo Veronese, and the ideal was
+taken up with conviction at Venice—became indeed the distinctive feature
+of her narrative school.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 210. Altichiero of Verona. St. George baptizes the Family of the
+    Princess. Fresco.—_Oratory of St. George, Padua._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 209. Pisanello. St. George meets the Princess. Fresco.—_Sant’
+    Anastasia. Verona._
+]
+
+Jacopo Bellini,[71] the first great painter whom Venice herself
+developed, was the pupil of Gentile da Fabriano and also profoundly
+influenced by the Veronese. Thus he combines in himself the two main
+strains of early Venetian painting—its desire for sweetness and its
+desire for vivacity and elaborate truthfulness in narrative. Alongside
+of Jacopo Bellini worked the faithful imitators of Paolo, Lorenzo, and
+Guariento. Such artists as Jacobello del Fiore and Michele Giambono,
+while often inherently attractive, are of small importance. Their
+contemporary, Antonio Vivarini, though in most ways less sensitively the
+artist, prepared the way for the conservative school of Murano.
+Antonio’s quality is somewhat obscured by his habit of working with a
+German partner, Giovanni. Yet the part of Antonio, as represented by his
+altar-piece in the Vatican, dated 1464, Figure 211, seems to have been
+merely to build cautiously on the work of Guariento and Lorenzo. His
+nephew, Alvise, and his younger brother, Bartolommeo, become influential
+figures towards the end of the century.
+
+The hope of the future rested with that far more searching spirit,
+Jacopo Bellini. He gave to art not merely his own indefatigable
+curiosity but two sons of genius, Gentile and Giovanni. All the leading
+tendencies of the Early Renaissance in Venice originate with this
+remarkable family. We first meet Jacopo Bellini in 1424 as an assistant
+of Gentile da Fabriano and he worked on till 1470. The great decorative
+canvases which he made for the Ducal Palace, and for the Schools of St.
+Mark and St. John the Evangelist have perished, while the few pictures
+remaining from his brush are mostly of late date and inadequately
+express his ambitions. His Madonnas at the Uffizi, Venice, Paris, and
+Milan retain the exquisite sweetness of his master’s vein. Their modest
+grace may be felt in the little Madonna, Figure 212, at Venice. Of
+admirable gentleness and spirit is the ornate Annunciation painted in
+1444, in Sant’ Alessandro at Brescia. Its predella panels, although
+probably of student execution, show how definitely his narrative
+compositions derive from Altichiero and the Veronese.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 211. Antonio Vivarini. St. Antony (polychromed wood statue) and
+    Saints. 1464.—_Vatican Gallery, Rome._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 212. Jacopo Bellini. Madonna.—_Venice._
+]
+
+But we get the full stature of the man, not from the minor paintings
+which chance has spared, but from the two extraordinary sketch books
+respectively in the Louvre and the National Gallery. Here we trace his
+day by day exercises. Perspective is his constant concern. He piles up
+elaborate architecture with an extravagance which even his Veronese
+exemplars never ventured. The subject matter gets lost in the setting.
+The Annunciation becomes a mere episode in an architectural
+extravaganza. So does the Feast of Herod, Figure 213. The buildings
+generally are of ornate Early Renaissance type. He loves to adorn them
+with swags and statues and low reliefs. Sometimes he sketches actual
+Roman sculptures and coins, medallions, and inscriptions. He makes
+strange, stern backgrounds for his outdoor scenes, with twisted
+stratified mountains and stately distant cities. He loves wild beasts;
+draws capital horses for St. George or for Perseus. He is a bit of a
+humanist, doing bacchanals, with mischievous satyrs. There are a few
+fine portraits and designs for Madonnas. Thus these sketches with the
+silver point and quill pen anticipate every mode of the next
+generation—the narrative style, the altar-piece, the pastoral mythology.
+One feels in the sketch books a nature rather alert and curious than
+thorough—a certain lack of concentration and real seriousness. But the
+sketches evince an inexhaustible fancy, and if they are ever published
+cheaply, they should rival in popularity the most loved picture-books of
+fairyland. Jacopo was not only a versatile but a travelled artist.
+Active for a time at the brilliant court of Lionello d’Este at Ferrara,
+he had also visited Florence and probably Rome. But his most important
+move as regards the history of art, was to Padua, about 1453. There the
+whole course of Venetian painting was shaped by the apparently casual
+fact that an austere young painter named Andrea Mantegna fell in love
+with Jacopo’s daughter, Niccolosia, and married her. Through that
+alliance, the most formidable of brothers-in-law became the artistic
+mentor of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 213. Jacopo Bellini. The Feast of Herod (in upper right
+    loggia).—_From the Paris Sketch Book._
+]
+
+For a moment, indeed, Padua and Mantegna quite efface Venice in
+interest. For ten years before this lucky marriage, Padua had been the
+scene of intense artistic activity. Donatello, the most powerful realist
+sculptor of Florence, was at work on the bronze reliefs for the altar of
+Sant’ Antonio, and on the Gattamelata statue. He gave young Mantegna a
+strong impulse in the direction of constructive realism. Such Florentine
+realists as Paolo Uccello and Fra Filippo Lippi were also transient
+visitors at this time. And Padua, ever an academic city, saw the first
+systematic art school started by a shrewd and able master, Francesco
+Squarcione. Squarcione collected Roman marbles and bronzes, concerned
+himself with the new mysteries of perspective, foreshortening and
+precise anatomy. He made his students acquire a line with the resiliency
+of bronze. He made them copy minutely veined marbles and sculptured
+reliefs. He insisted that every picture should have garlands of laurel
+mixed with vegetables and fruits. The whole surface had to be brought to
+the lustrous surface of an enamel. Severe teaching usually attracts good
+pupils. So it was in Squarcione’s case; he had scores of pupils from all
+of the Venetic region and even from Dalmatia beyond the Adriatic. He was
+too sensible to paint much himself; it didn’t pay so successful a
+teacher. So the few pictures ascribed to him are either of small
+importance or of dubious authenticity. But his stamp is on all his
+pupils. What his teaching meant may be grasped in early Mantegna and
+even better in a painter who never emancipated himself—Carlo Crivelli,
+of Venice, “Eques Aureatus.”
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 214. Carlo Crivelli. Madonna. Angels bearing Symbols of the
+    Passion.—_Verona._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 215. Carlo Crivelli. Pietà.—_Boston._
+]
+
+Crivelli’s[72] fame was great but provincial. Originally most of his
+altar-pieces adorned churches of the Adriatic Marches. Dozens have
+passed thence to the museums of Europe and America. One and all they
+seem less painted things than the most splendid of mineral productions.
+It is incredible that mere brush and paint can achieve so tense a line
+and such jewel-like surfaces. Entirely typical is an early Madonna, at
+Verona, Figure 214. The great ancona of 1476 in the National Gallery
+shows him faithful to the arrangements of the early Venetians. The
+Annunciation, in the same gallery, painted ten years later, reveals him
+affected by the narrative tradition of Jacopo Bellini. In America fine
+Pietàs at Boston, Figure 215, New York, and in the Johnson Collection,
+Philadelphia, exemplify his rectitude and energy. While Mrs. Gardner’s
+St. George and the Dragon, as the most fastidious of fairy tales,
+consoles us for the absence of this subject among the few pictures of
+Jacopo Bellini. From his beginnings about 1460 to his death in 1493,
+Carlo Crivelli remained true to his early teaching. Whoever understands
+his works has little need to consult further the entirely similar
+achievement of such great Ferrarese painters as Marco Zoppo (1440
+ca.–1498) and Cosimo Tura (1430 ca.–1495). The influence of Squarcione
+passed to the conservative painters at Venice, and influenced the entire
+Murano school. We have a resplendent masterpiece of this sort in the
+single known work of Antonio da Negroponte, Figure 216, in San Francesco
+della Vigna, at Venice. It combines with its evident Squarcionesque
+features, the magnificence of the old Gothic-Byzantine style, and much
+of the sweetness of Jacopo Bellini. Its date is about 1450, and the
+picture is an excellent point of departure for our understanding of the
+radical reform that came into Venice and all Lombardy with the activity
+of Andrea Mantegna.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 216. Fra Antonio da Negroponte. Madonna.—_S. Francesco della
+    Vigna._
+]
+
+Born in 1431 at Vicenza, we find Mantegna[73] enrolled at the tender age
+of thirteen in the painters’ guild at Padua. He is described as an
+adoptive son of Squarcione. Mantegna was scarcely twenty-four when he
+engaged with other fellow pupils to decorate a chapel in the Church of
+the Eremitani, the subject being the legends of St. James and St.
+Christopher. In the six panels assigned to Mantegna, his quality and
+superiority are already manifest. His style is severely archæological
+and Roman. He endeavors honestly to reconstruct the times of the
+apostles. But his method is more severe than that of the Romans
+themselves. The line moves with the slow authority of an engraved
+contour. The relief is dry and harsh. There is little sense of
+difference between living forms and sculptured figures. The landscape is
+built in spiral strata as if worked out of metal. Here transpires
+clearly the influence of Jacopo Bellini, which is as evident also in the
+ornate architectural settings. The colors are at once dull and garish,
+the textures scrupulously studied after Squarcione’s precepts. A most
+strenuous art this, and with all its pedantry full of power and dignity.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 217. Mantegna. St. James led to Execution. Fresco.—_Eremitani,
+    Padua._
+]
+
+Certain innovations in perspective should be noted. In the fresco, St.
+James led to Execution, Figure 217, Mantegna avoids the usual
+conventional perspective, which tilts the picture towards the spectator;
+and treats the group as if it were on an actual stage set at the height
+of the fresco. Thus no ground is seen; the projecting floor cuts off the
+feet of the figures; and all vanishing points are precisely set at the
+level of the spectator’s eye below. The aim is to create illusion.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 218. Andrea Mantegna. Madonna with Saints.—_San Zeno, Verona._
+]
+
+Before the completion of the Eremitani frescoes, Mantegna had married
+Niccolosia Bellini, had profited largely by her father’s advice, and had
+influenced strongly her two brothers, Gentile and Giovanni. They seem to
+have been the first eager pupils of the man who was soon to be the
+artistic schoolmaster for all Northern Italy. Two years after his
+marriage, in 1455, Mantegna liberated himself from legal bondage to
+Squarcione, and soon after began the masterpiece of his developed
+Renaissance style, the altar-back for San Zeno Maggiore at Verona,
+Figure 218. It was finished in 1459, the artist being twenty-eight years
+old. It is a little over-rich, finished throughout like a miniature, and
+very stately. In arrangement it obeys the artist’s new law of illusion.
+The base of the picture is precisely at the level of the eye, so no
+floor is seen. The carved classical frame is regarded as the front of an
+actual pavillion which is continued in paint. Without the frame, the
+architectural perspective of the picture would not explain itself, and
+if the picture were set higher or lower all the perspective relations
+would be wrong. At Siena, a century and more earlier, the Lorenzetti had
+devised this motive of an open box of which the frame is the plastic
+front. Mantegna made this sort of illusionism standard for Venice and
+all Northern Italy. Its value is open to question, but I believe that
+the monumental altar-pieces of Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini gain
+something in gravity and stability from this careful adjustment of the
+perspective to the actual position of the spectator. At any rate it was
+the rigid logic and probity of Mantegna that gave to Venetian art
+precisely the tonic stimulus it needed.
+
+By thirty he was famous, and yielding to repeated persuasion, he left
+Padua for Mantua and the court of the most generous art patrons of the
+moment, the Gonzagas. His most notable work for them was the decoration
+of the Camera degli Sposi, 1474, in their great palace, and the canvases
+of the triumphs of Cæsar, 1481 to 1494, which, sadly damaged and
+repainted, are now seen at Hampton Court. The two series represent
+strikingly the dual and never completely harmonized strains in
+Mantegna’s genius—realism and archaism. He was never more the realist
+than in the room decorated in honor of the marriage of Lodovico Gonzaga
+and Barbara of Brandenburg, the Camera degli Sposi. The motives are
+wholly novel—no religious subjects, nothing mythological, just the
+Gonzaga family and their courtiers, sitting in conversation, meeting
+ceremoniously, or preparing for the hunt. Nowhere before had such a
+consistent use of the principle of illusionism been made, not even in
+Roman mural painting of the Antonine age. Mantegna has completely
+painted away the real walls of the room, and has replaced the real
+architecture by a simulated classical pavillion, with arcades looking
+out to the country side and a round opening above. All the figures are
+out of doors. To see the scheme properly you must stand precisely in the
+centre of the room and turn on your heel. The arrangement in short is
+periscopic. As you look up you will see a balcony with cupids, Figure
+219, standing on the outside ledge and maids of honor and peacocks
+looking down over the balustrade. You see everything feet foremost as if
+it were actually there. Then you look out through the arcades where the
+view of outside doings is sometimes interrupted by a curtain. Generally
+it is drawn aside that you may see these great folk at ease outside
+their pleasure house, Figure 220. The portraits are of utmost dignity
+and authority. In dealing with real people Mantegna’s style is less
+pinched than in his classical decorations. If I have insisted on the
+point of illusionism, it is only because the audacious logic of
+Correggio and a host of baroque followers for a century and more really
+grows out of this scheme at Mantua. You will see the open well with
+figures outside the parapet in Correggio’s dome at Parma, and the
+figures outside the painted roof in the Convent of St. Paolo. Indeed,
+you have only to let the clouds come down through such open roofs and
+seat decorative figures on the clouds to arrive at the fully developed
+baroque style. And it is odd enough that its most romantic extravagances
+are clearly deducible from this rather sober and pedantic illusionism of
+Andrea Mantegna.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 219. Mantegna. Detail of Ceiling.—_Camera degli Sposi, Mantua._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 220. Mantegna. Portraits of the Gonzaga Family. Fresco.—_Camera
+    degli Sposi, Mantua._
+]
+
+Of the painted cloths representing the Triumphs of Cæsar, Figure 221,
+(1484–1492), nine remain in debased condition at Hampton Court, England.
+Here the classicism of Mantegna finds its most legitimate expression.
+The designs are better seen in the engravings of his school and in the
+later woodcut copies by Andreini.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 221. Mantegna. Triumph of Cæsar.—_Hampton Court, England._
+]
+
+Despite such great commissions, Mantegna lived in something near
+poverty. He could never resist a beautiful antique, and he was proud and
+difficult in his relations to exacting patrons. His style after his
+Roman visit of 1488 to 1490 loses something of its tension and develops
+breadth. Perhaps the most impressive picture of this time is the Madonna
+of Victory, Figure 222, in the Louvre, which was painted in 1495 to
+celebrate Gianfrancesco Gonzaga’s drawn battle with the French at
+Fornovo. Its severity is mollified by the graciousness of the evergreen
+bower in which the group is set and by the contrasting seriousness of
+St. Elizabeth and the kneeling donor. These figures forecast a mystical
+and tender quality in certain of the later Madonnas.
+
+In his last years Mantegna undertook an attractive but difficult task in
+decorating the study of the famous bluestocking, Isabella d’Este, wife
+of Gianfrancesco. With the pertinacity of a suffragette born out of due
+time, this great lady framed the most elaborate written programmes, upon
+the literal accomplishment of which she insisted. Her correspondence
+with such unfortunate protegés as Perugino and Lorenzo Costa is among
+the delightful eccentricities of Renaissance annals. The resultant
+decorations reflect the sophisticated and somewhat brittle grace of
+Isabella’s own personality. None are better than those of Mantegna which
+were done about the year 1500. His Parnassus, Figure 223, with its
+romantically picturesque gods and godesses, and its admirable round of
+dancing muses, is the best that Northern Italy can show in comparison
+with Botticelli’s mythologies, unless it be the companion piece, Minerva
+expelling the Vices, Figure 224, which is wonderful alike in energy,
+inventiveness and grotesque humor, anticipating in its mood similar
+refinements in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and Milton’s “Comus.” Mantegna
+in these works becomes the true precursor of that poetic pastoralism
+which in Giorgione soon dominates the Venetian scene.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 222. Mantegna. Madonna of Victory.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 223. Mantegna. Parnassus.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 224. Mantegna. Minerva Expelling the Vices.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+Mantegna lived on, none too well treated by the younger Gonzagas, until
+1506. To relieve his poverty he offered for sale his most treasured
+marble, an Agrippina. He left in his studio his most rigid and painful
+piece,—the Foreshortened Christ he called it. All his probity is in the
+picture. For Giovanni Bellini and others it served as the highest model
+of the tragic style, and it refutes the shallow views of such as find
+Mantegna merely academic and cold. He left many engravings and
+marvellous drawings in which perhaps better than in the paintings we may
+feel the exquisiteness of his austerely fastidious taste. Such a drawing
+as the Judith in the Uffizi, Figure 225, is an epitome of all that
+Mantegna had to bequeath to the Renaissance.
+
+Well his contemporaries knew the value of his example. It rebuked the
+slackness of their own practice. Alongside the exquisitely modelled foot
+of his St. Sebastian in the Louvre, stands the severed marble foot from
+a Greek statue. As he ever measured his work against the antique, so the
+painters of Milan, Vicenza, Ferrara, Verona and Venice had to measure
+their work against his. And that simple act of honest comparison in a
+single generation furthered the art of Northern Italy to a degree that
+in Tuscany it had taken a century to attain.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 225. Andrea Mantegna. Judith. Wash Drawing.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 226.—Antonello da Messina. The Condottiere.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 227. Antonello da Messina. St. Jerome in his Study.—_London._
+]
+
+At the moment when Mantegna’s influence was at its height, it was
+happily modified in a realistic direction by the advent of Antonello da
+Messina.[74] Despite recent discoveries, the career of this great
+Sicilian realist remains obscure. Vasari imagined him a traveler in
+Flanders and a direct pupil of Jan van Eyck, whose invention of oil
+painting he was believed to have adopted. The legend is thoroughly
+discredited by newly discovered documents. Antonello came up in Sicily
+under the influence of visiting Spanish masters. From them he caught at
+second hand the point of view of Northern realism, from them he learned
+the advantages of the more fluid and lustrous oil vehicle. But he must
+also have seen and carefully studied fine paintings of the Flemish
+school. There were such in Sicily and at Naples. Antonello emerges about
+1470 as the most energetic and truthful draughtsman of his time, and a
+portraitist of powerful character equipped with a new and better
+technique. In 1475 he was in Venice and Lombardy. Such portraits as the
+captain of mercenaries, Il Condottiere, Figure 226, at the Louvre,
+immediately set the standard for the entire region. We no longer find
+flat profiles, but heads perfectly drawn in three-quarters aspect,
+modelled minutely, but with no loss of character and effect. No such eye
+as Antonello’s, unless it were that of Piero della Francesca, had as yet
+applied itself to the problems of painting. Whether in the nude, in his
+St. Sebastians and Crucifixions, or in his rare interiors, such as the
+St. Jerome in his Study, Figure 227, in the National Gallery, he
+announced new perfections in lighting, modelling and perspective. He
+painted for the Church of San Cassiano at Venice a stately and massive
+Madonna which led the local painters in the direction of mass and
+monumentality. Recent criticism has recognised the mutilated central
+panel in the Vienna gallery. Antonello’s work imposes itself primarily
+by its mere intensity of existence. It has no charm, and no especial
+emotion. Precisely this impersonality makes it an admirable and safe
+model. Before his coming the Venetians had experimented with oil
+mediums, but they gladly adopted his lustrous enamels, and strong
+shadows. He returned soon to his native Sicily, where he died in 1479,
+but his brief sojourn in the North had left its stamp. Montagna of
+Vicenza, Cima of Conegliano, Buonsignori of Verona, Alvise Vivarini of
+Venice are among his conscious emulators, and all the figure painting of
+Venice assumes new gravity and authority. And we may mark his influence
+even in the leading masters of the new school, Gentile and Giovanni
+Bellini.
+
+The tardy emergence of these two brothers of genius is one of the
+puzzles of the Venetian school. Neither makes any impression till he is
+in his forties, and their work has no directive influence till after
+1480. The simplest explanation is that of Mr. Berenson. He suggests that
+the brothers loyally contented themselves with the position of partners
+in their father’s _bottega_ until his death in 1470. From that moment
+their progress is swift. Giovanni enlarges the style of the altar-piece
+in a Renaissance and monumental sense, and later moves gradually in a
+pastoral direction. Gentile brings to its perfection the complicated
+narrative style of his father. Both paint admirable portraits. Since
+Gentile is less an innovator than a perfector of an established mode, we
+may well begin with him.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 228. Gentile Bellini. Sultan Mahomet II.—_London._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 229. Gentile Bellini. A Turkish Youth. Miniature.—_Mrs. John L.
+    Gardner, Boston._
+]
+
+Such early works as the organ shutters of St. Mark’s and the
+processional banner with the portrait of the Blessed Lorenzo
+Giustiniani, 1465, show that he based himself on Mantegna. His career,
+however, is associated with narrative mural paintings for the schools,
+in which work he developes a real originality. Whatever he painted in
+1466 for the Great School of St. Mark was soon destroyed in a fire. It
+was presumably the fame of these canvases that got him in 1469 the
+titles of knight and count palatine. In 1479, being fifty years old, he
+was called to Constantinople to serve that cruel voluptuary, Sultan
+Mahomet II. Gentile’s portrait of him, now in the National Gallery,
+Figure 228, is an appalling piece of exact characterization. One feels
+the malignity of a character softened by vices, but retaining all mental
+lucidity and capacities for both cruelty and calculated self-indulgence.
+A more amiable souvenir of this trip is the exquisite miniature portrait
+of a young Moslem prince, Figure 229, which is at Fenway Court. Gentile
+brought back to Venice the new title of Pasha. We do not find him about
+his proper work until 1492, when he agrees to do “not for money but by
+superhuman inspiration” the new canvases necessitated by the fire in the
+Great School of St. Mark.
+
+The greatest of these is the view of the Piazza of St. Mark’s with the
+procession made by the School itself on Corpus Christi day, Figure 230.
+In the centre is their venerated relic of the True Cross. About it
+attention is fixed and almost military, relaxing gradually at the sides.
+There are hundreds of figures and scores of portraits in the picture,
+yet there is no smallness of presentation. Such eighteenth century town
+painters as Canale and his followers could hardly improve upon the
+truthfulness of the scene as regards light and air even. Its value as
+record is immense. And, barring a certain stiffness, its value as art is
+hardly less.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 230. Gentile Bellini. Corpus Christi Procession in Piazza of S.
+    Marco.—_Venice._
+]
+
+Another panel from this series shows Gentile’s really great capacity as
+an out-of-doors painter. It represents the miraculous recovery of the
+reliquary of the cross which had fallen into the canal. How perfectly
+the play of light over the encrusted and plastered palaces is felt, its
+shimmer upon the smooth water and through the moving crowds! In the
+essentials of _plein-airisme_ we moderns have not so much surpassed this
+work. And if Gentile seems after all not quite a great artist, it is due
+to that impassivity which is proper to a luminist. With equal realism,
+Gentile’s imitator, Carpaccio, added sentiment, hence he is beloved and
+Gentile ignored. Yet early Venetian narrative painting is complete with
+Gentile, and from every consideration of naturalism it is immensely
+superior to anything produced at Florence in this period. It gains all
+the smaller points of representation with the most amazing ease, perhaps
+because it waives the greater issue of monumentality. It is well put
+together, but shows little selection, is even at its best rather
+casually full of persons and things. This produces, as compared with
+Florence, an odd reversal of conditions. The altar-piece, which in
+Florence is rather intimate, is in Venice far the most monumental type
+of painting. We study the development of monumental design better in
+Giovanni Bellini’s altar-backs than in his brother’s narratives. To
+Gentile, at once a searching spirit in details and a conservative on the
+whole, it must have been a great satisfaction to have perfected the
+narrative mode that his father had so brilliantly inaugurated.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 231. Giovanni Bellini. Pietà.—_Milan._
+]
+
+After 1500, being in the seventies and ailing, old Gentile acquired the
+ominous habit of frequently making and unmaking wills. His last one,
+which became effective in 1507, left to his vigorous brother, Giovanni,
+the precious paternal sketch books and the heavy duty of finishing for
+St. Mark’s School the vast Canvas of St. Mark Preaching at Alexandria,
+which is now at Milan. Giovanni was nearly eighty himself, but he put
+the great work through handsomely.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 232. Giovanni Bellini. Christ at Gethsemane.—_London._
+]
+
+Giovanni Bellini[75] was a natural son, but as was the humane Italian
+custom, taken into his father’s family. He was born about 1430, and his
+early efforts were completely dominated by Mantegna. Indeed he hardly
+finds himself artistically until he is fifty, and then he develops a
+most gracious capacity for growth which ceases only with his death at
+eighty-five. Of the score of pictures which are Mantegnesque in quality
+the earliest and most remarkable is the Pietà at Milan, Figure 231. In
+the tragic power it outdoes Mantegna himself, and with all its hardness,
+it is more painter-like. The distribution of light and dark is broader,
+the expression more homely and genuine. Only a little later, perhaps
+towards 1470, is the Christ on the Mount of Olives, at London, Figure
+232. With a very similar picture by Mantegna in the same gallery, it is
+based on a sketch of Jacopo Bellini’s. Although Giovanni frankly
+imitates the rigid folds of drapery and landscape from Mantegna, it is
+with a distinct difference. The mood is gentler, details are less
+obtrusive, there is an exquisite sense of evening sky, and of hills in
+gloom, and of the coming of twilight over a river plain. It is the first
+greatly felt landscape in Venetian painting, and though Giovanni was far
+to surpass it in fineness and accuracy, even he never excelled it in
+depth and truthfulness of feeling. The serenity of the eventide is the
+fitting foil to Our Lord’s single moment of human weakness and despair.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 233. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna.—_Estate Theodore Davis._
+]
+
+Giovanni’s early Madonnas are singularly various. We have one very
+stately and tender in the estate of Theodore M. Davis, Figure 233. The
+Madonna in the John G. Johnson collection, Philadelphia, is wistful and
+emaciated. One belonging to Mr. Philip Lehman, New York, is of sensuous,
+peasant type, while the painting, unlike the soberness of the two
+earlier ones, shows the utmost resplendence of Mantegnesque enamels. Its
+date may be about 1470. So we see Giovanni wholly flexible and
+experimental at forty, and developing chiefly under Mantegna’s
+influence.
+
+Giovanni’s emancipation from Mantegna takes place very gradually. It is
+virtually complete in the Transfiguration, Figure 234, at Naples which
+may be dated towards 1480. Bellini asserts himself fully in the gracious
+monumentality of the chief group, while his Arcadian mood is forecast in
+the ample landscape softly invested with a colorful light and shade.
+There is a more specific emotion and a more romantic richness of setting
+in St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, Figure 207, Frick Collection,
+which may be a year or two later. These are both Wordsworthian pictures,
+imbued with a mystical tenderness for natural appearances. Such are the
+sources from which Giorgione will soon draw his pagan pastoralism.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 234. Giovanni Bellini. The Transfiguration.—_Naples._
+]
+
+Towards 1480 Giovanni Bellini’s work assumes monumental breadth, and
+withal a new sweetness. His Madonnas settle into what was to be the
+Venetian type—superb, mature forms at once queenly and maternal. Earlier
+there had been no Madonna type in his work but a singular variety of
+forms and faces. In generalizing the stately charm of Venetian
+motherhood, Giovanni moves towards the grand style, and does so nearly
+twenty years sooner than the Florentines. His characteristic works are
+now great altar-pieces, with monumental distribution of the figures
+within fine architectural spaces. Generally the frame is a part of the
+pictorial organism, the plastic front of a pavillion. It is about the
+only survival of Mantegna’s practice in these solemn and gracious
+pictures. Unluckily the first of the series perished in 1867 in the
+disastrous fire which robbed us also of Titian’s Death of St. Peter
+Martyr. But surviving copies of this altar-back for the Church of S.
+Giovanni e Paolo confirm the tradition that it was painted well before
+1480. In its arrangement and details, especially in the tendency to
+crowd the many figures forward, it reveals to me the influence of
+Antonello da Messina’s great altar-piece for San Cassiano. It had
+apparently a somewhat rigid formality like that of the slightly earlier
+piece at Pesaro. Bellini is not yet quite at ease in his new and broader
+style, but he has at least glimpsed the ideal of monumentality and
+acquired a new technique, that of oil painting, in which to express it.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 235. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with Saints.—_Frari, Venice._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 235_a._> Giovanni Bellini. Madonna of St. Job.—_Venice._
+]
+
+We find him full-grown in the noble Madonna of St. Job, Figure 235a,
+made for the church of that name about 1484 and now in the Venice
+Academy. In this picture the new Venetian ideals of ardor and gravity
+unite harmoniously with the old ideal of material splendor. What
+playings of light and half-lights there are over mosaics, polished
+marbles and carvings! How admirably the strict symmetry of the group is
+relieved by varying the postures of the six saints and by contrasting
+the sober garb of the monkish saints with the superb nudity of Saints
+Job and Sebastian and the shimmering silks of the playing angels below.
+And the great picture, with all its monumentality, retains much of that
+old lyrical fire, which is gradually yielding to more sedate and
+reflective aims.
+
+We shall find the two great Madonnas of 1488, for the Frari, Figure 235,
+and for St. Peter’s at Murano, conceived more impassively. For the city
+church, Bellini insisted on hieratic effect and incidental splendors,
+reverting to the form of the triptych and arranging it after Mantegna’s
+fashion with the frame and picture in one perspective. It is perhaps the
+grandest as it is the most formal of his altar-backs, consciously regal
+in the attitude of the Virgin, with saints as magisterial as so many
+Venetian senators. For the suburban church at Murano he set the Madonna
+low amid her paladins and opened up delicious landscape vistas at the
+sides. The thing, with all its dignity, is lyrical, and almost intimate.
+It anticipates the mood of the later open-air Sacred Conversations.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 236.—Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with St. Paul and St.
+    George.—_Venice._
+]
+
+In the nineties and the early years of the new century, masterpiece
+follows masterpiece, and we must proceed by selection. Giovanni invents
+a charming form of altar-piece for private chapels. These Madonnas and
+saints at half-length have already the mood of the later conversation
+pieces, and need only the less symmetrical scheme which Bellini’s pupil,
+Titian, will soon give them. For harmony one might prefer the Madonna
+with two female saints, or for robust contrast and vitality the Madonna
+with two burly military champions, Figure 236. Both are in the Venetian
+Academy.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 237. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna of the Trees.—_Venice._
+]
+
+The single, half-length Madonnas, Figure 237, of this period are counted
+by scores, and are in many public and private collections in Europe and
+America. They are singularly uniform in inspiration, and yet the mood is
+so rich and noble that an apparent monotony is never cloying. Bellini’s
+gift in these pictures is to combine a kind of serene obviousness with
+great delicacy. There are hints of wistfulness and sadness through the
+series, but such sentiments are never much insisted on. The real
+mysticism of these pictures is nothing but the notation of the most
+natural and mysterious thing in the world—the bond between mother and
+babe, the pride of it, the exclusiveness of it, the joyous burden of it.
+Art could hardly be less theological or more genuinely religious than in
+these Madonnas. I think no human being could miss either their
+naturalness or their sacredness.
+
+As Giovanni Bellini approached the scriptural term of years, and the
+century drew to its close, he cultivates by way of recreation certain
+old leads which become new and powerful influences on his successors.
+The element of tact in the man is miraculous. He does nothing till the
+time has come when the doing will be most useful. Thus such pastoral
+recreations as the Religious Allegory in the Uffizi, Figure 238, and the
+little symbolical panels in the Venice Academy lead directly to the
+fantastic Arcadianism of Giorgione. The Religious Allegory is vaguely an
+illustration for the old French poem “Man’s Pilgrimage.” We have a
+Paradise, with the new souls in infant form. The apostles Peter and Paul
+stand guard outside the celestial barrier, while the Madonna presides
+within. Beyond a dark stream is the hazardous world, a place of caverns
+and crags, and hermits and centaurs; of mystery and uncertainty. Perhaps
+Giovanni Bellini cared rather more for the darkling shadows over water
+and river bank, for the broken light under a veiled sky than for the
+formal allegory. Certainly the element of strangeness and glamour is
+evident enough in the five little panels depicting virtues and vices.
+Again the faery quality, our earth grown strange to us, is the basis of
+the charm. We have noted similar fantastic inventions at Florence,
+notably in the work of Piero di Cosimo. Bellini evokes a more normal
+poetry which is based on a more intimate study of nature. Such
+landscapes as his, even when unpeopled, suggest nymphs and shepherds.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 238. Giovanni Bellini. Religious Allegory, Souls in
+    Paradise.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 240. Giovanni Bellini. Doge Loredano.—_London._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 239. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with Saints.—_S. Zaccaria._
+]
+
+At seventy, at the opening of the new century, Giovanni Bellini’s mind
+was still flexible, so much so that we hardly know whether he leads or
+follows such pupils of genius as Titian and Giorgione. His color
+acquires a deeper glow, his warm shadows are heavier and more carefully
+graduated; he drops his few remaining Mantegnesque habits. In the
+Madonna for San Zaccaria, Figure 239, dated 1505, we have no longer the
+illusionistic perspective of the altar-pieces of the ’80s. The group is
+set well back, the suffusion of the niche with air is more dense, the
+saintly figures have exchanged the old resolute, hieratic attitudes for
+a gentle dreaminess; the mood is that of Giorgione’s contemporary
+altar-piece at Castelfranco. In the portrait of Doge Loredano, Figure
+240, of the same year resolution and wistfulness blend fascinatingly.
+The delineation has the force and certainty of Antonello da Messina with
+a refinement Antonello never even glimpsed.
+
+In these later years Giovanni Bellini multiplied, largely through
+student aid, conversation pieces with gracious gatherings of saints in
+the open air. The mood is that of courtly revery. Titian and Palma will
+later repeat the theme indefinitely. One of the best is at S. Francesco
+della Vigna, and bears the date 1507. It is an idyl borrowing religious
+forms. In the altar-piece painted in 1513, Figure 241, for the church of
+S. Giovanni Crisostomo, Giambellino anticipates the new and
+compositional forms of the rising generation. The rich architecture
+opens upon a contemplative old man reading on a crag, with majestic
+mountain lines behind him athwart a serene sky. Everything above is off
+centre and diagonal, stability being preserved by the great vertical
+figures of the saints in the foreground, and by the formality of the
+parapet behind them. We have almost a picture within a picture, the
+maximum of formality and informality, of nature and artifice—all those
+elaborate and calculated beauties which we associate with Titian’s
+maturity. There is withal a mystical earnestness of which Titian himself
+lacked the secret.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 241. Giovanni Bellini. St. John Crisostom.—_S. Giov. Crisostomo._
+]
+
+In his remaining two years Bellini designed the lovely and modest nude
+Lady at her Toilet, at Vienna, and the Feast of the Gods, Figure 242,
+now in Mr. Joseph Widener’s collection at Philadelphia. His career ends
+in a rather skeptical acceptance of the sensuous graces of the new
+humanism, for the gods are merely Venetian picnickers on an excursion.
+The penetrating poetry of the picture is of a homely sort without
+pretensions to grandeur. The landscape is partly by Titian.
+
+Giovanni died in 1515, being more than eighty-five years old. As late as
+1506, Albrecht Dürer found him the greatest artist at Venice. He had
+begun with the faint dawn of the Renaissance and ended in its midday
+glow. He had raised Venetian painting to monumental estate, had mastered
+the secrets of landscape and its illumination, had initiated a
+delightful pastoralism, had conveyed religious emotion in forms humanly
+sweet and grave, had made the best of every world. Scores of his pupils
+extended his manner to Brescia, Bergamo, Vicenza, and Treviso. His
+genius knew neither haste nor hesitation, he was almost never below his
+best. The Renaissance produced a few painters of greater scope and
+powers, but none more consistently great as an artist or more venerable
+as a personality.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 242. Giovanni Bellini. Feast of the Gods.—_Widener Coll., Elkins
+    Park, Pa._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 243. Bartolommeo Vivarini. Madonna with Saints.—_Naples._
+]
+
+To appreciate his value a glance at less progressive contemporaries will
+suffice. We find Bartolommeo Vivarini normally continuing the routine of
+the Murano School. In the polyptych at Bologna, done with his elder
+brother Antonio in 1450, we have with slight Squarcionesque improvements
+the old attenuated Venetian forms. In the highly decorated Madonna at
+Naples, dated 1465, we have an intelligent use of both the
+Squarcionesque realisms, and the refinements of Jacopo Bellini. Figure
+243. Later pieces such as the triptych of 1487 at the Frari reveal a
+heavy-handed imitation of Mantegna, and any little originality of the
+master soon gets lost in the voluminous output of the shop. Bartolommeo
+died in the last year of his century, whose fair average he had well
+represented. His nephew Alvise Vivarini deserves notice as the
+transmitter of the realism of Antonello da Messina to such artists as
+Montagna, Cima, and Lorenzo Lotto. As a portraitist he has real power.
+His great altar-pieces have their bleak and unattractive nobility.
+Venice greatly honored him in confiding several of the new panels for
+the Ducal Palace to his care. But since these works of the eighties were
+soon burned, our view of Alvise remains imperfect. I suspect modern
+criticism has somewhat exaggerated his importance. He was active from
+about 1460 to 1503, and his altar-pieces afford the best foils for
+Giovanni Bellini, as revealing a lesser capacity for growth.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 244. Carpaccio. Prince Hero Taking Leave of his Father (L) and
+    Greeting Ursula (R).—_Venice._
+]
+
+We have now to trace the old narrative style to its climax and end in
+Vittore Carpaccio.[76] He inherited all the panoramic and luministic
+accomplishments of Gentile Bellini, but applied them with far greater
+imagination. He deals with legend, giving it contemporary color, and in
+his sensitive hands it becomes the most veridical and charming of fairy
+lands. Carpaccio’s training is obscure to us. It may be that the very
+mediocre narrative painter, Lazzaro Bastiani, first taught him. In any
+case he drew more from Gentile Bellini’s resolute handling of light,
+textures and costume. We first meet Carpaccio as an artist in the
+decoration of the Great School of St. Ursula from 1492 to 1495. He was
+probably all of fifty years old. The childlike legend, with its numerous
+embassies, meetings and partings, settings out and arrivings, gave him
+spectacular opportunities of which he made the most winning use. In the
+nine canvases now in the Academy we find an epitome of the courtesy,
+circumstance and adventure that accompanied travel in those days, and
+the mere spectacle is underlaid with a pensive ideality; for these are
+no ordinary journeys, but the quest of martyrdom by a princely youth and
+maiden. Nothing is insisted on, however, but the gayety of the events,
+and the picturesqueness of their settings. As in all good story-telling,
+the persuasiveness depends on veracious minor episodes. There are the
+most attentive scribes and secretaries, as if to carry off the unlikely
+matter they are inditing. The heavy ease of men-at-arms and
+self-conscious elegance of young Venetian fops make them credible
+witnesses to else incredible legend. To adorn his tales Carpaccio
+borrowed from the woodcut illustrations to Breydenbach’s “Itinerary to
+Jerusalem.” It is remarkable how he invests these mere skeletons of
+cities with color, sunlight, the glamour of the orient. About all he
+draws a veil of air saturated with sunlight, concentrated into rising
+clouds whose shadows darken the lustrous blue of the tranquil lagoon.
+There never was a more ravishing raconteur in the art of making
+incidentals count for essentials. Such a picture as Prince Hero taking
+leave of his father and greeting St. Ursula, Figure 244, is the
+fulfilment of all that old Jacopo Bellini and his Veronese precursors
+had dreamed of. It is typical of a series which has its more intimate
+phases only by way of exception. The virginal beauty of the legend gets
+a real expression only in the Vision of St. Ursula. Figure 245. The
+character of the earnest, slumbering face and the sweet slight body
+carries through the exquisitely indicated space, and we hardly need to
+be told that the wistful boyish angel is offering a martyr’s palm.
+Possibly it takes a mundane person like Carpaccio to realize the beauty
+of the more fantastic religious ardors. A completely devout person takes
+them as in the day’s work.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 245. Carpaccio. Dream of St. Ursula.—_Venice_.
+]
+
+Before the end of the century, Carpaccio painted for the School of S.
+Giovanni Evangelista the Miracle of the healing of a Demoniac. The
+picture is now in the Academy. It is a marvellous panorama of
+contemporary Venice, with the bustle of eager crowds, the slipping of
+gondolas over the canal, and light flickering over and caressing the
+manifold colors of the gay scene. It has the fidelity of Gentile Bellini
+without his dryness.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 246. Carpaccio. St. George and the Dragon.—_School of St. George
+    of the Slavonians._
+]
+
+The most delightful if not the most important monument of Renaissance
+Venice is unquestionably the School of St. George of the Slavonians. It
+is the only school that retains its primitive paintings still set in the
+original carved and golded wainscoting. There one sees in the ground
+floor the legends of St. Jerome, an odd mixture of gravity, richness,
+and humor. Nothing more sumptuous than the Saint in his exquisitely
+appointed study, or more archly comic than the scene of consternation
+when the Saint brings home his lion from the desert. The series was
+painted about 1502. Upstairs we have the chivalric legend of St. George
+of Cappadocia, painted some eight years later. Nothing could be more
+romantically entrancing than the boyish champion charging intrepidly
+over the sun-dried shreds and tatters of his predecessors into the very
+jaws of the most confidently virulent of dragons, Figure 246, unless it
+be the scene where he leads his tame dragon into the astounded court, or
+that in which he proudly baptizes his future bride and her parents while
+a Turkish band plays a fanfare. About the blowing of these horns of
+elfland there is no faintness whatever. We are in the realm of most
+palpable adventure and romance, and the emphasis depends on splendid
+color and on drawing of a magical alertness.
+
+Carpaccio’s merit as the liveliest and most persuasive of _raconteurs_
+seems so definite that it is almost a shock to meet him in other
+capacities. Also a disappointment to find in the New Testament subjects
+from the School of the Albanians, 1504, that in such stereotyped
+subjects he can be almost mediocre. Certainly in the great altar-piece
+of the Presentation in the Temple, Figure 247, at the Academy, he shows
+that he fully understands the new monumentality of Giovanni Bellini. The
+date is 1510. The picture is of the most reverent composure, and as
+tender as it is grand. In the portrait of Two Courtesans on a Balcony,
+in the Correr, Carpaccio shows a force of character wholly modern. With
+a kind of irony he has taken the moral emptiness of his sitters out of
+doors, flooded it with sunlight and air, given it harshness and
+ugliness, lavishing upon the rich costumes and fair skins the most
+delicate pains. John Ruskin will tell you that these are honest women.
+Such faith is more worthy of reverence than of imitation. The greatness
+of Carpaccio lies in the impartiality with which he renders a certain
+kind of life on its own terms. The romancer is capable of appalling
+truthfulness.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 247. Carpaccio. The Presentation.—_Venice._
+]
+
+That he was also a mystic of the most intense sort is hard to believe.
+Yet if the marvellous Meditation on the Passion, Figure 248, in the
+Metropolitan Museum, be really by him, such is the case. In a desert the
+Dead Christ sits in a crumbling throne, while two grim sages, St. Job
+and St. Onophrius, sit in rapt contemplation. Their mood has evoked the
+bodily vision of their Lord. Art has produced few such symbols for the
+hallucinative intensity of the life contemplative. These weather-beaten
+forms seem an emanation from the sands and blistering sunlight. They
+have few relations to our world. Their souls move in vast uninhabited
+spaces. That Carpaccio can have produced this masterpiece as late as
+1520, and cast it deliberately in a style learned forty years earlier
+seems to me a fantastic hypothesis, even if it has enlisted grave
+authority. The abundant similarities of the landscape with that of the
+St. Francis of the Frick Collection make me feel that the invention of
+this picture is Giovanni Bellini’s, at his moment of highest emotional
+power, about 1480. Since the actual painting is evidently in large part
+Carpaccio’s, I am driven to the by no means satisfactory hypothesis that
+Carpaccio may have executed this masterpiece, and the group to which it
+belongs, while serving as studio assistant to Giovanni Bellini. Such a
+view at least expresses my conviction that the picture transcends
+Carpaccio’s powers.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 248.—Ascribed to Carpaccio, perhaps Giovanni Bellini’s Design.
+    Desert Hermits Meditating the Passion.—_New York._
+]
+
+As for his later years, his work goes off, he loses most of his Venetian
+patronage, and paints for the obscure Istrian and Dalmatian seaports,
+the critics mock him, he dies some time after 1523, leaving no deep
+impression. Vasari dispatches him with a few condescending lines, and
+nobody cares for him till young Burne-Jones came to Venice some sixty
+years ago. He plainly stands out of the main line of progress. He was
+too romantically traditional in his themes, and too minutely
+naturalistic in his vision to fit into the monumental development of the
+Renaissance. In a sense he merely brings the old narrative tradition to
+a splendid close. But in so doing he preserves the look of an exquisite
+moment—of Venice still in her mediæval gayety and splendor, not yet
+reduced to her ultimate magnificent decorum. In him we glimpse the eager
+comeliness of patrician youth, self-sufficient in love of living. And
+this we see between the glistening waters of the lagoon and the lambent
+blue heavens, with pearly domes and bell towers rising as lightly as the
+drifting summer clouds above. All this may or may not be apart from what
+the wise esteem artistic greatness. In any case it is charm of the most
+persuasive and durable kind.
+
+Whether Giorgione of Castelfranco is to be regarded as the last of the
+Venetian primitives or as the first of the men of the Renaissance is no
+simple problem. It is further complicated by the fact that we do not
+surely know what pictures he painted. According to the austerity or
+geniality of the critics, the lists vary from eight, Lionello Venturi’s,
+to over seventy, Herbert Cook’s. Naturally I also have my own list,
+which, with old copies, runs to twenty-four, but I am unwilling to claim
+demonstrative weight for what are merely strong subjective convictions.
+Walter Pater daintily evaded the issue by writing the most subtle of
+essays not on the person, but on the School of Giorgione. I shall in
+part imitate him in defining first the Giorgionesque mood before
+considering the canon of his works.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 249. Giorgione. Portrait of a Youth.—_Berlin._
+]
+
+On the side of minor technique Giorgione marks a great advance. He early
+abandons the old frank coloring of Giovanni Bellini for a mysterious
+method which abolishes line, builds in mass, invests the picture with
+deep shadows that are marvellously warm and colorful. What
+contemporaries loved to call the Venetian fire originates with him about
+1505. Vasari may well be right in saying that he learned the method
+directly from Leonardo da Vinci, who was a fugitive in Venice in the
+year 1500. Only Leonardo never taught him that shadow is color. That was
+Giorgione’s own beautiful discovery, one immensely important for all
+decorative painting ever since.
+
+In his early phase, if I am right in thinking that Sir Martin Conway’s
+two stories of Paris, Figure 250, and the Ordeal of the Infant Moses and
+Judgment of Solomon in the Uffizi, are his, Giorgione was merely a
+graceful continuer of the slighter narrative mood of Giovanni Bellini
+and Carpaccio,—that is, distinctly a primitive artist. In his fully
+developed Arcadian vein he is neither a primitive nor fully of the
+Renaissance, but midway between, and his work constitutes not so much a
+pioneer effort as a delectable episode quite complete in itself.
+Unhappily we are almost without biographical details. Giorgione was born
+in 1478, in Castelfranco, a long day’s ride towards the Friulian Alps.
+The country abounds in streams, meadows, and immemorial trees—is a
+subalpine Arcadia. He came pretty young to Venice and worked with
+Giovanni Bellini. Legend tells us that he was big and handsome, amorous,
+and a musician. We know that he died of the plague of 1510, in his
+thirty-third year. The rest is conjecture from pictures some of which
+are his, and all of which are inspired by him.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 250. Giorgione. The Infant Paris found by Shepherds.—Sir Martin
+    Conway. _Maidstone, England._
+]
+
+These breathe a single mood, that of Arcadian revery. It is a world of
+desire indulged for its own sweetness, of day dreaming apart from will,
+action, and results. More blithely it had pre-existed in the Idyls of
+Theocritus; more pensively, in the Eclogues of Virgil. This world
+revives a far-away pastoral golden age, of lovers and their lasses, of
+nymphs and fauns, of vague ardors at once tempered and reinforced by a
+sympathetic nature. We are dealing with one of the oldest resources of
+poetry, and we can only understand this most beautiful visualization of
+the old theme by associating it with the tradition of literary
+pastoralism.
+
+Of course the Eclogues of Virgil were read generation by generation, if
+not very understandingly, through the Middle Ages. Still the more
+sensitive felt the appeal of mountain shadows lengthening over the
+evening meadows and the pathos of love-lorn shepherds sighing musically
+for hard-hearted shepherdesses. By the middle of the fourteenth century,
+the pastoral mode becomes once more contemporary, incidentally in the
+interludes of Bocaccio’s _Decameron_, explicitly in his idyl of
+alternate prose and verse, the _Ameto_. These are pale lights before the
+dawn. Pastoralism becomes widely current in the _Arcadia_ of Jacopo
+Sannazaro, the bulk of which was ready by 1489. It is the parent of
+those slow-moving, sentimental, and ever lengthy romances in verse and
+prose of which Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ is the most familiar to the
+modern reader. Dante had once longed for a magic boat in which congenial
+souls should drift forever and do nothing but discourse of love.
+Transfer these discourses to a leafy nook beside a running stream, with
+the herds in view below the branches, and nymphs and satyrs overhearing
+the debate—and you have Sannazaro’s _Arcadia_. We have the eternal
+poetry and perhaps eternal fallacy of a bygone golden age where duty and
+effort are absent, where love and poesy reign.
+
+In his most famous song, _Alma beata_, Sannazaro, celebrating a dead
+beauty, makes heaven itself merely an Arcadia—
+
+         “Other mountains, other plains,
+         Other groves and streamlets
+         In heaven I see, and withal new blossoms.
+         Other fauns and sylvans, through sweet summer places,
+         Pursue their nymphs in happier loves than ours.”
+
+You find the mood clear cut in the Venetian nobleman and prelate, Pietro
+Bembo, both in his _Asolani_ and in the separate poems. These were being
+handed about in Giorgione’s time, from 1500 on. Thus Bembo sings of the
+shepherd’s life:
+
+           “Tryphon, who in place of ministrants and lackeys,
+           Loggias and marbles, woven gold and purple,
+           Lovest about thee willows leafy, cloister
+           Of joyous hillocks, plants and rivulets—
+           Well may the world admire thee.”
+
+Naturally the denizens of such paradises live and dress in a state of
+nature. The nymphs are lightly clothed and readily discard their slight
+draperies for the joys of the bath, which they considerately take within
+the range of their shepherd swains. Bembo warmly praises those
+“courteous garments” which do not too much hide the fair throat and
+bosom, and roundly curses more churlish concealing fashions.
+
+Sannazaro describes with a confusing mixture of metaphors what may be
+called a fortunate bath fall.
+
+        “Leading one day my herds beside a stream,
+        I saw a light amid those waters fair,
+        Which bound me fast straightway with two blond tresses,
+        And stamped a face all milk and roses
+        Forever on my heart.”
+
+Earlier painters than Giorgione[77] had essayed these pastoral themes.
+Botticelli, Signorelli; in a sardonic way, Piero di Cosimo; Giovanni
+Bellini and even Andrea Mantegna had variously attempted this sort of
+painted poesy. But the flavor of the Giorgionesque poesy is fuller and
+richer. His beauty is that of languor, revery, dream. Whatever the
+ostensible theme may be, his painting is Arcadian. His people have not
+merely no relation to our world, but slight and ambiguous relations to
+each other within the picture. They are isolated in their own musings,
+rarely look at each other, never suggest an action, but only a mood.
+Even the portraits suggest rather temperament than character or will.
+The proud youth, at Berlin, Figure 249, withdraws himself from purpose
+and deed. It is an early Giorgione. The Shepherd with a Flute, at
+Hampton Court, is bemused with his own fancy. It is of the later years.
+The fastidious patrician, at New York, reveals an almost worried and
+sickly detachment. If indeed a Giorgione, which I cannot doubt, it is of
+his latest manner.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 251. Giorgione. Fire Ordeal of Infant Moses.—_Uffizi._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 252. Giorgione. “Soldier and Gipsy.”—_Giovanelli Palace._
+]
+
+Take the little Carpaccian idyls at Florence which cannot be much later
+than 1500. How far we are from real narrative! In the Ordeal of Moses,
+Figure 251, a child is thrusting his tender fingers among live coals.
+Ladies and gentlemen stand languidly about and bask in the pleasantness
+of their own thoughts. There is a similar nonchalance in the Judgment of
+Solomon where a newborn babe is threatened with the sword. The horror is
+treated as a negligible incident of an _al fresco_ party.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 253. Giorgione. The Three Philosophers.—_Vienna._
+]
+
+Again what is the meaning of the mysterious idyl in Prince Giovanelli’s
+gallery? Figure 252. In view of the picturesque walls and moat of
+Castelfranco, a half nude mother, oblivious of a coming thunder shower,
+nurses her child. Equally oblivious of her and the weather, a
+fashionably dressed youth turns away. Ruins reflect the ominous
+lightning flashes. Old records call this (one of the few certain
+Giorgiones) The Soldier and the Gipsy—evidently a bad guess. A learned
+Viennese professor chooses to think that this is Prince Adrastus finding
+the forsaken Princess Hypsiphile. Nobody can prevent such conjectures or
+disprove them. It is safer to imagine that coming rain and thunder at
+Venice recalls some old memory of similar weather and state of mind at
+Castelfranco, evokes some old desire of which this richly fanciful
+masterpiece is the enigmatic symbol. Some story of loving and parting
+surely underlies the poesy, it would be foolish to be more specific than
+Giorgione himself has chosen to be. The Three Philosophers, at Vienna,
+Figure 253, again has been explained as Aeneas surveying the future site
+of Rome. What we actually have is a glowing nook at eventide in which
+three grave men of different ages go separately about some task
+requiring thought and mathematical calculation. And even this duty is
+yielding to the spell and mystery of the evening hour. These pictures
+are probably a little earlier than the altar-piece of 1504 at
+Castelfranco.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 254. Giorgione. Madonna with St. George and St.
+    Francis.—_Castelfranco._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 255. Giorgione. Landscape by Titian. Sleeping Venus.—_Dresden._
+]
+
+That lovely work, Figure 254, has much of the intimacy of Bellini’s
+altar-piece at S. Zaccaria, in formal arrangement it is rather
+monumental. The mood, however, is one of revery. St. Francis of Assisi
+makes his gesture only for himself, and St. George, exponent of the
+active life, broods moodily beneath his slackly held pennon. The
+Arcadian landscape quietly reinforces the idyllic feeling. Externally
+the thing is splendid in color, and as saturated with atmosphere as it
+is with mood.
+
+From now on the question of chronology becomes at once difficult, and,
+since we are dealing only with five years or so, relatively unimportant.
+The sleeping Venus at Dresden, Figure 255, may have been designed about
+1505. A Cupid slumbering at the Goddess’s feet has been painted out, and
+the landscape was finished by Titian. The noble sleeping body, to use a
+word of Lucretius which Montaigne commends, seems “poured out” on the
+receptive earth—so grandly and easily it lies. The gestures are
+unconscious caresses. The Goddess dreams of old joys. What faun or
+sylvan even would not respect that dream? Not with passion, then, though
+himself knowing all its sting, does Giorgione deal, but with ardors
+sublimated in memory. The marvellous lines of this Venus, as sweeping as
+the curves of hills or river currents, were imitated again and again,
+but neither Titian, Palma Vecchio, nor the rest ever recaptured the
+evasive poetry of their model.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 256. Giorgione. Judith.—_Petrograd._
+]
+
+In 1508, working with Titian, Giorgione finished certain frescoes for
+the outside of the German Warehouse. The remaining red blurs, and
+Zanetti’s fragmentary copies, tell us that the postures begin to have
+the breadth and conscious counterpoise of the advancing Renaissance, but
+that the mood is still that of languor. Very like one of these figures
+is the fascinating Judith, at Petrograd, Figure 256. After the horrors
+of the night, she stands dreamily. Her lovely left leg escapes from the
+courteous draperies, and the foot touches lightly the brow of the
+peaceful, severed head of Holophernes. The touch of the foot is almost
+careless, as if merely to assure herself that the portent is really
+true. Her head bends gently, her nerveless beautiful fingers barely feel
+her girdle or support her great sword. Behind her, morning forests and
+fields stretch towards a tranquil sea and sky. The gestures are those of
+one between sleeping and waking, irresolutely feeling for some basis in
+reality. We are in a realm where the most awful deeds and experiences
+count only as raw material for delicate imaginings.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 257. Giorgione. Pastoral Symphony.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+In the later works problems multiply, and a critic is pretty well
+reduced to personal intuitions. No doubt, however, should attach to the
+pathetic and nearly effaced Christ of St. Roch. The Christ is nobler
+than the earlier example at Fenway Court, the feeling more expansive.
+Still nobody, not even the executioner, seems to will the atrocity of
+the deed. The thing is not an act but a vision, pervaded by a dreamy
+tenderness.
+
+The completely repainted Pastoral Concert, Figure 257, at the Louvre is
+never the less fraught with Giorgione’s peculiar poetry. A courtly lover
+has struck a chord on the lute, and gazes intently, perhaps sadly, at a
+shepherd sitting close to him. A rustic, nude nymph whose back only is
+seen takes the pipe from her lips to listen. A proud beauty turns toward
+a fountain, light draperies slip away from her superb form, and with a
+graceful gesture of idleness she pours back into the fountain a tinkling
+jet from a crystal pitcher, while she bends to note the ripple and catch
+the pleasant, idle sound. This strange scene takes place on the edge of
+a vale that winds down to a glittering sea, affording a path to a
+shepherd and his flocks. The meaning? Modern criticism is loath to look
+beyond contrasts of nude and clothed forms, swing of tree-tops and of
+sky, subtle interplay of light and shade. My own reading is merely based
+on the contrast between the rustic and urban lovers, and an intuition
+that the courtier in peering so wistfully at the shepherd is merely
+seeing himself in a former guise. In lassitude, perhaps in satiety,
+beside a courtly mistress who is absent from him in spirit, there rises
+the vision of earlier simpler love and of a devoted shepherdess who once
+piped for him in the shade. The vision rises as his listless hand sweeps
+the lute strings in a chord unmarked by the far lovelier mistress at the
+fountain. The golden age of love, like Arcady itself, is ever in the
+past. Such may be the reading of this poesy. Indeed all Giorgione’s
+pictures are less facts than apparitions born of roving thought in
+idleness,—such stuff as dreams are made of.
+
+The famous Concert, Figure 258, of the Pitti since Morelli’s time has
+been generally classed as an early Titian, I think erroneously. The
+precise and powerful execution of the Monk’s head is certainly his, but
+I question if the motive itself lay within the scope of his lucid and
+uncomplicated imagination. An Augustinian monk holds the initial harmony
+on the clavichord and turns towards the ’cellist while the singer waits
+impassively. And this simple theme becomes a universal symbol for
+thwarted desire. The player asks a kind of sympathy which this world
+rarely affords, which certainly these companions cannot give. As in the
+Pastoral Symphony, the music awakens impossible longings, is the
+accompaniment of inadequacy. Titian was too robust ever to have imagined
+such a thing, and I feel we need only modify the old tradition to the
+extent of giving Titian a hand in an unfinished Giorgione to account for
+this poignant and most characteristic masterpiece.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 258. Giorgione _cum_ Titian. The Concert.—_Pitti._
+]
+
+There remains old and good tradition for crediting Giorgione with the
+design of the altar-piece in San Giovanni Crisostomo. The execution is
+unquestionably by Sebastiano del Piombo. If this view be correct,
+Giorgione attained the external features of the coming Renaissance
+style, missing its athleticism. Certainly the abstraction of the saint
+and the unmotivated appearance of the three virtues, and their unrelated
+gracefulness, is entirely in Giorgione’s manner, while the whole
+invention is alien to Sebastiano’s heavy and forthright talent.
+
+For the view I have tried to give of this poet picture-maker I may claim
+at least the merit of consistency. There is only one theme—languor of
+love and of remembered happiness; and there is only one setting—the
+Arcadia of the pastoral poets. Giorgione is the first painter who
+realized Leonardo’s definition of painting as “mute poetry,” yet not
+quite mute for there is generally a suggestion of music. And the music
+is less heard than contemplated, as is the case in one of his latest
+pictures, the Shepherd Boy, Figure 259, who hesitates to set the flute
+to his lips lest the melody fall short of that which the imagination has
+already heard.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 259. Giorgione. Shepherd with a Flute.—_Hampton Court._
+]
+
+For ten years after Giorgione’s death his mood dominated Titian with
+most of the rising artists. It seemed likely to replace the sturdy and
+objective art of Venice with a quite alien subjectivism. Meanwhile the
+normal effort of old Giovanni, Bellini and of young Titian continued.
+The Renaissance offered to the outer eye new dignities and splendors.
+The inner eye went bankrupt in the numerous imitators of Giorgione, in
+trivial symbolism and merely playful mythology. After her brief pause in
+Arcadia, Venice once more took account of her own proud charms. The
+nymphs paled before the comparison, Arcadia vanished. But it never was
+wholly forgotten, and, ever since, those who have craved actually to see
+the golden age of poesy have had to consult Giorgione of Castelfranco.
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER VII
+
+
+                 PRAISE OF MANTEGNA IN THE RENAISSANCE
+
+The immense authority of Mantegna kept his name on all honor lists of
+painters long after his death.
+
+Lorenzo of Pavia, writing in 1504 to Isabella d’Este, says of a Madonna
+by Giovanni Bellini:
+
+“The Painter has made a great effort to do himself honour, chiefly out
+of respect to M. Andrea Mantegna, and although it is true that in point
+of invention it cannot compare with the work of Messer Andrea, that most
+excellent master, I pray Your Excellency to take the picture, both for
+your own honour and also because of the merit of the work.”
+
+Julia Cartwright, _Isabella d’Este_, New York, 1903, Vol. I, p. 351.
+
+A little later Lorenzo writes:
+
+“And, as I have said before, in point of invention no one can rival
+Andrea Mantegna, who is indeed a most excellent painter, the foremost of
+our age. But Zuan Bellini excels in colouring.” l. c. 352.
+
+On Oct. 16, 1506, Lorenzo writes, on learning of Mantegna’s death:
+
+“I am much grieved to hear of the death of our Messer Andrea Mantegna.
+For indeed we have lost a most excellent man and a second Apelles, but I
+believe that the Lord God will employ him to make some beautiful work.
+As for me, I can never hope to see again a finer draughtsman and more
+original artist.”
+
+Isabella replied:
+
+“Lorenzo,—We were sure that you would grieve over the death of M. Andrea
+Mantegna, for, as you say, a great light has gone out.”
+
+                                                           l. c. I. 369.
+
+
+                       TITIAN’S VIEW OF MANTEGNA
+
+As late as 1519, Titian admired the Mantegnas at Mantua. Girolamo da
+Sestola, Isabella’s music master, writes to her:
+
+“M. Dosso and M. Tiziano, another good master who is making a fine
+picture here [The Bacchanal, at Madrid] for the Lord Duke, went to
+Mantua. He saw all Mantegna’s works, and praised them greatly to our
+signor, and he also praised your studies. But above all, he admired your
+_Tondo_ [the frescoed ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi, Fig. 219]
+exceedingly, and calls it the finest thing he has ever seen. Our Signor
+has one here, but Titian says yours is incomparably the finest.”
+
+                                                       l. c. II. 171, 2.
+
+
+                    ARIOSTO’S HONOR LIST OF PAINTERS
+
+Ariosto as late as 1515 still includes Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini
+among the best artists. The list is instructive as to the fallibility of
+contemporary judgments. The two Dossi and Sebastiano del Piombo today
+have lost their place in the roll.
+
+        “And those who were and still are in our days—
+        Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Giambellino,
+        The Dossis, he who chiselled and colored equally
+        Michel, more than mortal, Angel divine,
+        Sebastian, Raphael, Titian who honors
+        No more Cadore, than they Venice and Urbino.”
+                            _Orlando Furioso_, Canto XXXIII, 2.
+
+
+        LOMAZZO’S LIST OF GREAT PAINTERS AND THEIR KINDRED POETS
+
+  “Each painter has naturally had a genus more conformable to one poet
+  rather than another, and has followed that poet in his work, as it is
+  easy to see in the modern painters. For one sees that Leonardo has
+  expressed the movement and decorum of Homer, Polidoro the grandeur and
+  sweep of Virgil, Michelangelo the profound obscurity of Dante, Raphael
+  the pure majesty of Petrarch, Andrea Mantegna the keen judgment of
+  Sannazaro, Titian the variety of Ariosto, and Gaudenzio Ferrari the
+  devotion which one finds expressed in the books of the saints.”
+
+  Paolo Lomazzo, _Trattato dell’ Arte delle Pittura_, Milan, 1584, p.
+  283.
+
+  See also Castiglione’s list in Illustrations to Chapter VI, p. 313.
+
+
+           GIORGIONE—LEONARDO ON RURAL AND PASTORAL DELIGHTS
+
+  “What moves thee, O man, to quit thy city habitations and leave thy
+  friends and kin, and go in places wild by reason of mountains and
+  valleys, if not the natural beauty of the world, the which, if thou
+  well considerest, thou enjoyest only through the sense of sight? And
+  if the poet wishes to call himself also a painter in such matters, why
+  do you not take such sites as described by the poet and stay at home
+  without feeling the excessive heat of the sun? And would not this be
+  more useful and less wearisome since it is done in coolness and
+  without moving about and risk of illness?
+
+  “But the mind cannot enjoy the benefit of the eyes, windows of its
+  habitation, and cannot receive the varieties of delightful spots,
+  cannot see the shady valleys furrowed by the play of winding streams,
+  cannot see the various flowers which with their colors make a harmony
+  for the eye—and so with all the things which can be represented to
+  that eye.”
+
+  “But if the painter in the cold and harsh winter time sets before thee
+  those same places painted, and others, in which thou mayest have
+  experienced thy pleasures beside some fountain, thou canst see again
+  thyself as a lover, with thy loved one in blossoming meadows, under
+  the sweet shadow of verdurous trees—wilt thou not receive quite an
+  other pleasure than from hearing such an effect described by the
+  poet?”
+
+                                Leonardo, _Trattato_, Wien, 1882, p. 44.
+
+This is so fully in the mood of Giorgione’s idyllism that one likes to
+think that he may have talked over such themes with Leonardo when they
+met in Venice in 1500.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 260. Titian. Bacchus and Ariadne.—_London._
+]
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+                  VENETIAN PAINTING OF THE RENAISSANCE
+
+  Titian before 1545—Some contemporaries, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma
+      Vecchio—The advent of Modern Sensitiveness in Lorenzo
+      Lotto—Moretto of Brescia—Correggio—Titian’s last Manner, its
+      subjectivism and impressionism—The Portraitist Moroni—Tintoretto
+      and the new dramatic emotionalism—Paolo Veronese, his spectacular
+      mastery and impressionism, his characteristic works—Eighteenth
+      Century Venetians: Tiepolo, Canaletto and Guardi—Longhi.
+
+
+The glory of Venetian painting is to an unusual degree that of a single
+individual, Titian[78] of Cadore. He lived nearly a hundred years, from
+1477 to 1576, and we can trace his painting for more than seventy years
+of serene and unbroken progress. He had great contemporaries—Sebastiano
+del Piombo, Palma Vecchio, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Lorenzo Lotto,
+Moroni, Moretto of Brescia—but so various and comprehensive is his
+achievement that their work seems merely so many extensions of the paths
+first explored by him. In his noble and measured sensuousness, he seems
+nearer the Greeks than any other Italian painter.
+
+If he is something less than admirable as a character, it is because of
+an unpleasantly calculating side. He schemed ruthlessly for preferment
+and lucrative sinecures, had the repute of envying young artists of
+talent, flattered to the limit his Hapsburg patrons, bargained and
+begged concerning prices, let himself be puffed egregiously by his
+blackguard friend, Pietro Aretino, first and most formidable of yellow
+journalists. Yet this element of craft in the man was eminently
+Venetian. They schemed for splendor and pleasure, and measured even
+their indulgences. Thus we should not expect lyrical raptures or
+extremes of any sort in Titian. His art is one of judgment and
+moderation. Indeed that calculating spirit which makes him unamiable as
+a man was a source of strength to him as an artist. One of his pupils,
+Palma Giovine, has described his manner of working. First he laid in his
+pictures heavily in neutral tones. Then he turned them to the wall for
+months to dry. Then he would pass from one to the other, scrutinizing
+each “as if it were his worst enemy.” He would add color, amend drawing
+and composition, thus systematically carrying many pictures forward at a
+time, and subjecting each to repeated criticism and correction. He never
+painted a figure at one go, saying that “he who improvises his song
+never achieves learned verses or well turned.” Precisely the greatness
+of Titian lay in his capacity to put ardor into these prolonged critical
+processes. Thus if certain raptures are denied him, he is never below
+himself, but always as noble in sentiment as he is resplendent in color.
+
+Tiziano Vecellio was born at Cadore, in the Dolomites, in 1477.[79] Its
+shadowy oaks and blue alps live in his backgrounds. At eleven he was put
+with a mosaic worker, Zuccati, at Venice. He may have worked for a time
+with Gentile Bellini, but attained his real development in the studio of
+Giovanni Bellini, under the stimulus of his fellow pupil, Giorgione.
+This intimate and poetical phase of Titian’s genius lasts from before
+1505 to 1516 and the Assumption.
+
+His second period is that of fullest color and vitality. It runs from
+1517 to say 1536, Titian’s fortieth to fifty-ninth year, and the
+characteristic works are the monumental altar-pieces at Venice and the
+Mythologies painted for the Este family at Ferrara.
+
+The third period extends from about 1537 to 1548. It is marked by deeper
+resonances of color that is tending towards tone, and by a more
+objective and static ideal. Energy is no longer squandered, and intimate
+poetry is not sought. Typical works are those mythologies and portraits
+done for the Duke of Urbino, and the early Hapsburg portraits.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 261. Titian. Portrait so-called “Ariosto.”—_London._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 262. Titian. Portrait of a Youth.—_Temple Newsham, England._
+]
+
+The fourth period begins with 1548 or a little earlier, Titian’s
+seventieth year, and lasts nearly thirty years till his death. A looser
+and more synthetic construction, the substitution of broken shades and
+tone for frank color, a more tragic and ardent mood, a more energetic
+grandeur of composition, with lesser formality, are the marks of this
+amazing last phase, in which Titian becomes a precursor of Rembrandt and
+Velasquez. Since he now works chiefly for the Hapsburgs, the great
+examples are at Madrid and Vienna.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 263. Titian. The Tribute Money.—_Dresden._
+]
+
+The earliest Titians show the sultry shadows of Giorgione, and are
+distinguishable from his work only by a more linear quality, and by a
+greater explicitness of mood. Titian’s poetry is direct and rarely
+ambiguous. What ardors of flesh and spirit are suggested in his early
+portraits of men! The portrait of a bearded man in London, Figure 261,
+is conceived entirely in Giorgione’s fashion, as a short bust showing
+the hands, and the mysterious envelopment in warm shadow is Giorgione’s
+as is the sensitiveness of touch and characterization. But with all his
+gentle beauty, the man is formidable. His aloofness is no revery, but
+some preparation of will for action. Again Giorgione would hardly have
+labored to suggest the material splendor of the silvery satin sleeve.
+Even more perfect is the half-length of a young patrician at Temple
+Newsham, Figure 262, England. It is full of a reserved poetry, yet the
+effect is as well almost shrewd and diplomatic. This youth has the
+Venetian capacity for both passion and affairs. Both these portraits
+should be a little earlier than 1510. Such masterpieces of smouldering
+ardor as the Knight of Malta, erroneously ascribed to Giorgione and the
+Man with a Glove, at Paris, must be a little later. In concentration
+these are as fine as Giorgione’s portraits, but quite a different spirit
+transpires from the investing shadows. These men of Titian are no
+day-dreamers, but resolute and purposeful. They live little in memory
+and much in prospect. Their imagination implies action and possession.
+Even the drawing is more resolute. Study the eye sockets, temples, and
+cheek bones of these early Titians. Nowhere in Giorgione do you get such
+a sense of inner bony structure, of thicker and thinner cushions of
+flesh, of tenser or slacker skin. The method finds its most admirable
+expression in the two marvellous heads of the Tribute Money (1514–5), at
+Dresden, Figure 263. Yet how little mystery or pathos is invoked. With a
+gesture and an expression of exquisite consideration and breeding, the
+Saviour baffles the most eager and fanatical of inquisitors. Nothing
+could be more unlike the abstracted and almost morose Christs of
+Giorgione. As usual, Titian stands on the ground of the finest
+worldliness, as the Greeks had done. With the supernal, whether in
+heaven or Arcadia, he has little concern.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 264. Titian. The Three Ages.—_Bridgewater House, London._
+]
+
+In the early poesies Titian at once manifests his adoration of Giorgione
+and his own independence. In the Three Ages, Figure 264, at Bridgewater
+House we may grasp at its highest beauty his robust Arcadianism. In a
+meadow landscape an ardent nymph woos her bronzed swain. Complacently he
+accepts her unreserved advances. Nothing could be more explicit than the
+relation between the lovers, and with equal plainness an old man and
+sleeping child serve to teach us that youth and its sweetest ardors are
+but a brief pause between childhood and old age. Let us then seize the
+moments when nature and love are kind to us. Such is the forthright
+poetry of Titian. It is the poetry of every boy and every girl—simple,
+classic, unchangeable. Think of the overtones and personal
+interpretations with which Giorgione would have overlaid such a theme.
+Such twilight mysteries are alien to Titian’s fervent and lucid spirit.
+He loves the morning hour with work and love ahead, as Giorgione loves
+the veiling glamour and brooding memories of eventide.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 265. Titian. “Sacred and Profane Love.”—_Borghese, Rome._
+]
+
+The Three Ages was probably painted about 1512, the far more famous
+poesy, misnamed Sacred and Profane Love, Figure 265, is two or three
+years later. The sumptuous variety and richness of Titian are here at
+their height. Luminous marbles, pearly nude forms, lustrous stuffs, dark
+shimmer of foliage and sun-swept slopes of grass seem created merely to
+set off their respective beauties of hue and texture. Purples, azure,
+rose, saturated greens form a sonorous chord of colors which is so
+satisfying that one scarcely asks why a Cupid stirs the waters of a
+magic fountain, and why a splendidly clothed figure sits tranquilly at
+the side while a superb nude figure turns impulsively and holds aloft a
+burning lamp.
+
+Explanations of the fable abound. It is Venus persuading Helen to harken
+to Paris, or Medea to aid Jason. So the Germans. I am sure only that if
+we knew the meaning it would be quite as simple as these explanations.
+My friend, the late William P. Andrews, suggested that we have a lovely
+symbolism for the inquietude of maidenhood and the composure of
+matronhood—love in prospect and retrospect. The universality of the
+interpretation is in its favor. Titian’s mind worked socially and
+concretely. Plainly the nude figure is reminiscent of Giorgione’s
+listless beauty by the fountain in the Pastoral Concert, Figure 257.
+Titian’s maiden lacks something of the momentary grace and spontaneity
+of her model, but has in compensation a fuller grandeur.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 266. Titian. Flora.—_Pitti._
+]
+
+Perhaps the ideal portrait of Flora (1515–16), in the Pitti, Figure 266,
+should be reckoned with the poesies rather than with portraits. In
+material beauty few Titians excel it. The curded whites of the drapery
+vie with the flushed ivory of face and bosom. The sweetness of the
+impression is almost awe-inspiring. What a world it is that thrusts
+forth carelessly such beauty as this! Think of Giorgione’s quite similar
+Shepherd with the Pipe, Figure 259, and imagine again the twilight
+mystery with which he would have invested this apparition. Titian on the
+contrary thinks and feels like every man, but with an intensity and
+clearness quite his own. The lyrical and subjective note is incidental
+and superficial in him even when he most seems to resemble his lost
+comrade.
+
+Titian’s progress in composition is best noted in the religious pieces.
+From the first he seeks to break up the old inert symmetries. He invents
+active balances, brings the main thrusts to the sides of the pictures
+rather than to the centre. Thus even his Conversation Pieces gain
+implications of action and energy. In the altar-piece of St. Peter with
+Donors, at Antwerp, perhaps as early as 1502, and still somewhat in
+Bellini’s style, we find the enthroned figure moved to the side and the
+accessory figures arranged in a processional approach. The somewhat
+later altar-piece of St. Mark at the Salute, painted probably in 1504,
+Figure 267, again evades the old central symmetries. The Saint is
+enthroned off centre and his position gains great energy and novelty
+from its elevation and consequent foreshortening. The four plague saints
+keep the old symmetry, their types are partly from Bellini (the St.
+Sebastian), partly from nature. The structure in glowing shadow is that
+of Giorgione. We trace the same evasion of old symmetries and the same
+Giorgionesque fire in the Baptism of Christ, in the Capitoline at Rome,
+and Christ and Mary Magdalen, at London. Such pictures with their
+slightly conscious emphasis prepare the way for the more assured and
+sonorous harmonies of the great altar-backs of the ’20s.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 267. Titian. St. Mark with Plague Saints.—_Salute._
+]
+
+The Madonnas and Conversation pieces again show us most vividly how his
+taste is working. The Gipsy Madonna, Figure 268, at Vienna, painted
+about 1505, is highly Giorgionesque, but Giorgione never painted such
+sculptural forms, nor ever conceived so resolute a Christchild. Even the
+throwing of the outlet to one side reveals Titian. At Madrid and Vienna
+are superb half-length Madonnas arranged symmetrically after Bellini’s
+fashion, but with greater freedom of pose. Titian soon saw that the old
+compositional forms could not express the new energy. He makes repeated
+experiments, shifts the Madonna to one side, as in the unfinished
+Madonna with St. Anthony at Florence. He adds figures and rearranges
+them until the Conversation piece becomes an audience, with the saints
+and donors approaching the Madonna, as in an Adoration of the Magi. We
+find the completed form in the admirable Conversation piece, of about
+1510 with its two versions in the Louvre and at Vienna, Figure 269; and
+considerably later, a further development in those numerous full-length
+Holy Families in landscapes of which the Madonna of the Hare (1530),
+Figure 270, and The Marriage of St. Catherine, at London, are consummate
+types. And with all the conscious experimentalism of this work, the
+sense of character and of beauty is unperturbed. As compared with the
+contemporary Holy Families of Raphael, the accent is more individual and
+local. These superb Madonnas and gracious female saints with attendant
+martyrs and church doctors, are merely the lads and lasses of
+Carpaccio’s legends, grown up to manhood and womanhood, increased in
+dignity and sweetness.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 268. Titian. Gipsy Madonna.—_Vienna._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 269. Titian. Madonna with Saints.—_Vienna._
+]
+
+Until the death of Giovanni Bellini, in 1515, Titian seems a little
+hampered by his example as by that of Giorgione. Then, as if relieved of
+a restraint, Titian pursues his own aims. His design, in such great
+altar-backs as the Assumption and the Madonna of the Pesaro family,
+doubles its breadth and energy. His mythologies, in the bacchanals for
+the Alabaster Chamber of Alphonso d’Este, at Ferrara, are no longer
+pensive lyrics, but dithyrambs; primordial lyrics, for animation and
+power. The religious pictures, such as the noble Entombment in the
+Louvre, are no longer insistently pathetic. Subjective poetry is
+everywhere giving way to masculine assertion of the splendor of love,
+motherhood, comradeship. And these great objective commonplaces, which
+were the very staple in their day of Greek Epic and Sculpture, receive
+in Titian their finest modern embodiment. His new energy requires a
+changed color. All the hues are brighter and more resonant. Their
+harmonies no longer require the bond of deep shadow, but are positive
+and established at the middle of the color scale, where color is most
+itself. If the music of Giorgione was that of vibrating lute strings,
+that of Titian has the clarity and clangor of exquisitely harmonized
+woodwind and brass.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 270. Titian. Holy Family with Rabbit.—_London._
+]
+
+Before sounding this new music, Titian prudently secured the sinecure, a
+Commissionership of the Salt Taxes, which old Giovanni Bellini had
+enjoyed. While scheming for it, he was designing also the most famous of
+his great altar-pieces, the Assumption, Figure 271. It was finished in
+1518, set on the high altar of the Friar’s Church, whither it has lately
+returned. Titian adopts a form of composition which Fra Bartolommeo and
+Raphael had employed. The upper celestial tier is symmetrically
+arranged, almost in a domical way, the lower tier abounds in swinging
+turns and gestures, one carefully balancing the others. The forms are
+large and athletic, such as the Renaissance preferred, for greater
+gravity. Their weight is compensated by the ease with which they hold
+themselves and by the numerous floating and falling cherubs, playfully
+at home in their clouds, like so many celestial rose leaves for the
+crispness and lightness with which Titian’s brush has touched them in.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 271. Titian. The Assumption.—_S. M. dei Frari._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 272. Titian. Pesaro Madonna.—_Frari._
+]
+
+An over-spiritual observer might ask, Why are the Apostles so jubilant
+at losing their beloved Mistress? Only a little earlier, Giovanni
+Bellini, who painted the theme for San Pietro Martire at Murano,
+invested his witnesses with pathos, silence, wonder and awe. In
+comparison Titian is obvious, and barely reverent. He thinks of nothing
+but that this is Mary’s moment of highest glory, so of course her
+friends cheer boisterously as they wave her off heavenwards. Titian’s
+mind does not work in half tones of sensibility, yet he is honestly
+religious in his own way. The Lord’s people are good enough for him, and
+he likes them not in the hush of devotion but in the expansive moments
+of action. The attitude is operatic. Choruses have no business with
+overtones, all voices shall be _robusto_. What infallible taste he shows
+along these simple lines! There is no smallness, no mere floridness of
+utterance, no hint of over-emphasis. Such art is the despair of the
+modern artist. He cannot feel so simply. The great enduring commonplaces
+are denied to his more complicated genius.
+
+Perhaps Titian is even more himself in the Madonna of the Pesaro Family,
+Figure 272, which was in hand from 1519 to 1526. For animation he sets
+the throne of Mary to the right, and carries splendid columns back in
+depth. He gives to every gesture of saint or donor a balancing relation
+to the gracious curve of the body of the Queen of Heaven. He renews the
+Giorgionesque mystery in the portraits of children, adds picturesque
+accessories of armor, velvet, and silken banner. The picture is as rich
+as it is logical and monumental, as varied in character as it is unified
+in mood. It is only by chance that it stands almost over Titian’s tomb,
+and yet it would have been hard to find a picture that better represents
+both his more intimate and his more objective perfections. Even such
+masterpieces as the Madonna with six Saints in the Vatican (1523), and
+the lost Slaying of Saint Peter Martyr (before 1530), which enjoyed
+three centuries of praise, seem a little set and over-reasonable in
+comparison.
+
+Alphonso d’Este’s Alabaster Chamber at Ferrara represented the high
+point of mythological poesy for the Full Renaissance, as Castello with
+its Signorelli and Botticellis marked a similar culmination for the
+Early Renaissance. It is lamentable that we see these essential
+expressions of two great moments torn from their context and relegated
+to the promiscuity of museums. Yet the scattered poesies from the
+Alabaster Chamber remain a delight, at London, Madrid, and Philadelphia,
+and give us the truest impression of the pagan greatness of Titian in
+his maturity. For this series old Giovanni Bellini, in 1514, painted a
+sylvan Feast of the Gods, Figure 242. Titian, succeeding to the work,
+freely repainted the landscape, to harmonize it with his own poesies.
+Two years later Titian set up The Worship of Venus, now in the Prado.
+Before the white image of the goddess the shadowy lawn swarms with
+winged loves. They frolic, dally, pluck apples shaken down by their
+mates from the trees above. The strong little bodies glow delicately
+like the inside of a great shell. A rhythm of joyous life runs through
+the picture. In due course Rubens, Boucher and Fragonard will fill earth
+and air with tumbling Cupids like these, but will hardly recapture the
+spontaneous ecstasy of this scene. It is baffling to learn that its
+origins are academic—from the imaginary gallery of the Alexandrian
+philosopher, Philostratus. Again a two year interval, for Titian ever
+declined to be hurried, and, in 1520, the Bacchanal, or Bacchus among
+the Andrians, was ready. About the lolling figures of two clothed
+nymphs, the sleek brown bodies of nude sylvans bend in grand gestures as
+they pour the wine. At the left Bacchus in professional aloofness goes
+about the serious business of emptying a flagon. At the right is flung
+the relaxed body of a nymph overcome by sleep and wine. Her splendid
+nudity shines forth in competition with a soaring afternoon cloud, while
+behind her a lightly draped shepherd dances with his lass. The orgy is
+swept by the clean breeze and dappled with sunlight—purifying elements.
+We have not intoxication in the gross sense, but the Greek notion of an
+elemental Bacchic inspiration.
+
+The decoration was triumphantly completed in 1523 with the Bacchus and
+Ariadne, Figure 260, now in the National Gallery. The noisy train of the
+god of wine sweeps into the picture oblivious of the heroine. As the
+leopards swing the car along the strand, the God flings himself
+rapturously towards the form of startled Ariadne, who with a grand,
+hesitating gesture turns her head and body away while her legs and feet
+still bear her towards her wooer. The thing sparkles with wine-red and
+azure, tingles electrically with passion, gives forth a clamor which is
+also a harmony. Its exuberance is well contained in noble compositional
+forms. The passionate yet disciplined soul of Titian approaching fifty
+is fully expressed in this marvellous work.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 273. Titian. The Entombment.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+Passing to the religious pictures once more, the Entombment, Figure 273,
+now in the Louvre, which was painted for the Gonzagas about 1525, is
+again a masterpiece of unaffected feeling and of finest disposition of
+masses. The central group looms against the sky with the grandeur of a
+great dome. Whoever has seen strong men caring for the dead or stricken
+will realize the reserve and nobility of acts which are expressions of
+sympathies too deep for words. I saw things like that at the Messina
+earthquake. Equally fine and restrained is the protective attitude of
+the Magdalen towards a Mary stark and mute with grief. Magnificent is
+the contrast of the grand nude forms of the dead Christ, with the rich
+stuffs in which the attendants are clothed. I imagine when Titian
+conceived this simple elegy with such power and pathos he may have had
+scornful reference to Raphael’s distorted and sensational version of the
+same theme, Figure 186. And perhaps the æsthetic lesson of the picture
+is that choice feeling is far more difficult of attainment than fine
+painting.
+
+In 1533, Titian, by command, met the Emperor Charles V at Augsburg, was
+promptly made a knight and later a count palatine. From now on he was
+much employed by the Emperor and his son Philip. With that relationship
+a change begins to come over his art. He becomes less exuberant, more
+official and objective. Titian at sixty has said almost every possible
+thing on his own account, and is content for a space to be observer and
+recorder of the stately world about him. We have descriptions of him at
+this time, maintaining a princely hospitality in his palace, and
+declining to share the dissipations which he willingly provided for such
+loose-living friends as Francesco Sansovino and Pietro Aretino.
+
+He strangely depoetizes himself. The change comes somewhere about 1536,
+and a notable evidence of it is in the portrait of a lady in peacock
+blue velvet, in the Pitti. Posterity has agreed to call her simply La
+Bella, and so impersonal a style well befits her impassive beauty.
+Materially Titian has never painted more exquisitely, but it has become
+a painting of surfaces. The appeal is vague, general, social, there are
+no personal intimations, merely a magnificent statement of entirely
+obvious perfections.
+
+Again Titian is content to be the mere painter in the so-called Venus of
+Urbino, Figure 274. It was painted about 1538, and is in the Uffizi.
+Evidently the sleeping Venus of Giorgione is in Titian’s mind, but what
+a loss in awaking her! Titian sees the gracious forms for what they are
+of nacreous light and rosy shadow, he sees the room for what it is in
+distribution of curtained interior and alcove space irradiated by
+morning light. He studies curiously the delicate nuances of bluer sheet
+and creamier skin, he models out the slender body with faintest
+investment of almost imperceptible shadow. In short, he is just a
+painter, but what a painter he is!
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 274. Titian. Venus of Urbino.—_Pitti._
+]
+
+About the same time he did the official portraits of Eleonora and
+Federigo Gonzaga. He treats them as grandees. They are imposing, almost
+pompous, every inch the prince and princess. He sees with a courtier’s
+eye, and gives to official portraiture that impersonal cast which it has
+since only too faithfully retained. He revives the great traditions of
+Venetian narrative painting. The great wall painting, in the Ducal
+Palace, of the Imperial Victory at Cadore has perished. Old copies and
+engravings tell us of its energy, picturesqueness and panoramic breadth.
+Fortunately the great mural canvas, finished in 1538 and representing
+Mary entering the Temple, is still in its place; for the old School of
+the Carità has become the Academy. In this picture Titian realizes all
+that the Veronese and Venetian painters from Altichiero down had sought
+for. Like his predecessors, he is chiefly spectacular, subordinating
+character, but he attains a monumental breadth which they never remotely
+glimpsed. The scheme is worked out in magnificent oblongs varied by
+triangular forms which repeat the motive of the steps. The chief
+narrative motives, the childish determination of the Virgin, the
+gracious expectancy of the high priest, the admiration of the women
+below, hold their own amazingly in the vast space. The surface sings
+with color. The painting was affixed to the wall in 1538, fully ten
+years before Paolo Veronese had made this sort of pageantry his special
+domain.
+
+Almost as dispassionate is the great canvas, depicting Christ before the
+People (1543), at Vienna. It becomes less an expression of the
+submission of Christ than an exaltation of the Imperial power that has
+him in charge and of the mob spirit that cries for his blood. The
+architectural surroundings are magnificent. There are wonderful details,
+as in the howling boy at the left and the white form of a girl caught in
+the throng. Her sudden apparition as an element of relief and mystery
+anticipates by nearly a century a similar device in Rembrandt’s Night
+Watch.
+
+Very characteristic in its patrician decorum is The Disciples at Emmaus,
+in the Louvre, Figure 275, which was painted about 1545. Here there is
+no intensity in the moment of surprise and revelation. Benignly the
+Christ breaks bread; reverently and without excitement the disciples
+give him his due worship. All the homeliness and surprise that are in
+St. Luke’s narrative, and that Rembrandt later emphasized, have been
+leveled out in the interest of discretion and nobility. The disciples
+show no more enthusiasm than a Venetian dignitary and prelate should.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 275. The Supper at Emmaus.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+Two portraits which were both painted within the year 1545 show Titian
+at the parting of the ways. The Aretino, in the Pitti Palace, the even
+finer sketch being in the Frick Collection, New York, Figure 276,
+reveals the truculent and sensual man of letters in all his formidable
+massiveness. The satin and velvets in which he is clad are painted
+lightly but with fullest regard for their textures and material beauty.
+Titian liked Aretino and had profited by his bitter and venal pen. So
+without emphasizing Aretino’s effrontery and brutality Titian brings out
+his resolute intelligence.
+
+In the portraits of Paul III, Figure 277, especially in that scene where
+the decrepit Pope muses craftily between two smooth flatterers and
+traitors, his own kinsmen, the sinister air seems filled with contesting
+wills. A veil of atmosphere interposes itself before the figures. The
+touch is light, contrasts are evaded, materials count for very little,
+there is no copying of rich surfaces. Even the color is reduced to tones
+of gray merely warmed with reds or cooled with blues.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 276. Titian. Pietro Aretino.—_Frick Coll., N. Y._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 277. Titian. Paul III and his Nephews.—_Naples._
+]
+
+In its tremulous psychology, in its reticence, in its substitute of
+richly broken monochrome for a gamut of real color, this picture is a
+kind of negation of everything Titian had attained. His remaining thirty
+years were given to ideals which are no longer bounded by the Venetian
+lagoon, but are as broad perhaps and indeterminate as the modern
+imagination itself. Before exploring this mystery of Titian’s renovation
+of his art at seventy, and since his Venetian style has closed, we may
+do well to consider some of his contemporaries at Venice and in
+Lombardy.
+
+Sebastiano del Piombo[80] was born at Venice in 1487, and like most of
+his generation emulated the smouldering harmonies of Giorgione. He
+paints such admirable portraits as the so-called Fornarina, at Florence,
+which long passed for a Raphael. He soon passes from the lyrism of
+Giorgione to a dramatic mode quite his own. He was called to Rome, made
+keeper of the Papal Seal, became an executant of Michelangelo’s designs,
+and thus indulged a losing rivalry with Raphael. He commands a heavy
+dignity in his male portraits, and in his various pictures of the Dead
+Christ and Mary, attains a robust and telling pathos. Down to his death,
+in 1547, he maintained a tradition of Giorgionesque color in the alien
+air of Rome, and represented something of the gravity of the Venetian
+Renaissance in a city rapidly giving itself to sensationalism.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 278. Palma Vecchio. Adoration of the Shepherds.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+Palma Vecchio[81] is a more considerable figure. Born at Serinalta amid
+the Bergamesque hills, in 1480, we find him at Venice, by 1505 among the
+pupils of Giovanni Bellini. Like the rest, he is touched by Giogione’s
+poetry, but on the whole he merely intensifies and refines upon simpler
+methods. He follows Titian in the conversation piece, and does many
+Arcadian Holy Families which are beautifully lighted, radiantly colored
+and felt with a warmth and simplicity that just misses sentimentality.
+Among the best is the Adoration of the Shepherds, Figure 278, in the
+Louvre.
+
+With Titian, he loves women of generous build and he sets off their
+impressive charms by careful posing, employing all the new devices of
+counterpoise. One may see him at his grandest in the altar-piece of St.
+Barbara, Figure 279, painted after 1561. The saint is worthy to be the
+patroness of artillerymen. She holds her martyr’s palm like a field
+marshal’s baton, she is imperiously confident and yet gentle—a lovely
+Amazon of the Christian pantheon.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 279. Palma Vecchio.—_S.M. Formosa._
+]
+
+In the Arcadian nude Palma has delicacy and refinement of workmanship,
+but the mood is obvious. For him beauty is literally skin deep, and he
+gives himself to the impossible competition of paint with nature’s
+nacreous shades and ineffable carnations. But he so nearly succeeds that
+just as a painter of lovely surfaces no Venetian painter quite equalled
+him, not even Titian, and with this single talent Palma almost made
+himself a great portraitist. Indeed if painting surfaces were all of
+portraiture, he would be the greatest portraitist of the Renaissance.
+But his big, blond models lose condition in his hands. Charming as is
+such a group as the Three Graces at Dresden, or the dozen or more single
+portraits of men and women, they lack the last quality of distinction.
+He tries to gain it by adopting rather overtly the pathos and
+wistfulness of Giorgione, but it doesn’t suit his exquisitely groomed
+cavaliers nor yet their even more exquisitely groomed and most ample
+light o’loves. Indeed, despite a handful of superb portraits, Palma has
+ever the air rather of a consummate beauty doctor than that of a great
+artist. However that be, his influence was widespread throughout
+Northern Italy, and especially around his native Bergamo. He died in
+1528, leaving a Veronese pupil, Bonifazio, to complete his unfinished
+canvases and to carry on to the middle of the century his brilliant and
+gentle style. Within his narrow range Palma is admirable, never uneasy,
+never below himself. In his unperturbed Arcadianism and even in his
+harmless sentimentalism, in his delicacy and robustness, he seems more
+Venetian than the Venetians themselves.
+
+Composure is the very soul of the grand style whether in fifth century
+Athens or in sixteenth century Florence, Rome, or Venice. It accepts the
+human spectacle as worthy and thrilling, admires without misgivings the
+best things that come before its eye. That is why radicals hate the
+grand style—and rightly, for it is always aristocratic, caring rather
+little for the average man and much for that privileged remnant which
+lives in highest bodily efficiency and mental ease. The grand style is
+on the side of what Matthew Arnold called the barbaric virtues of
+wealth, health, and generous living. The moment the artist begins to
+question the social order, to be curious about the foibles and fates of
+individuals as such, the grand style is in peril. This delicate and
+inquisitive sensibility makes its appearance in Italy not long after the
+death of Raphael. You will find it in Pontormo, at Florence, in Lorenzo
+Lotto, in the Venetic region, in Moretto of Brescia, above all in
+Correggio, more assertively in Tintoretto, and latent in Titian’s last
+phase. It is a tremor on the sea of history that heralds a new dawn.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 280. Lorenzo Lotto. Adoration of the Shepherds.—_Brescia._
+]
+
+Lorenzo Lotto,[82] born at Treviso in 1480, first and most
+characteristically embodies the new intimacy. He worked widely through
+Lombardy and the Marches, enjoying a transitory vogue at Venice. Trained
+in the austere methods of Alvise Vivarini, he soon gave himself to his
+own native melancholy. One may see his qualities and defects in the
+great Enthroned Madonna, in San Bartolommeo at Bergamo. Mr. Berenson has
+well remarked that the saints are no longer demi-gods and objects of
+worship, but “pious souls in whose faces and gestures we discern the
+zeal, the fervor, the yearning, the reverie, or even the sentimental
+ecstacy peculiar to the several temperaments most frequently occurring
+among the children of Holy Mother Church.” Note too how the stately
+architecture derived from Giovanni Bellini and the crowded figure group
+mutually dwarf one another. Intimacy and monumentality do not live well
+together. This picture was finished in 1516, the year that Titian began
+the Assumption. Does not the contrast show Lotto an alien in his time
+and a harbinger of ours? In later pictures of less monumental
+pretensions,—as in a Nativity, Figure 280, at Brescia, which may
+profitably be contrasted with Palma’s more assured version,—he attains a
+penetrating beauty of a morbid kind, and his sensitiveness makes him a
+most appealing portraitist. He has left an extraordinary gallery of shy,
+inadequate, sometimes morose and invalid men, and women, Figure 281.
+They have not the confidence of the Renaissance, but hesitations like
+our own. Which shows perhaps that the Renaissance mood was ever urban
+and the affair of a minority of statesmen, merchants and humanists. In
+the little cities where there was no enlightened court the human spirit
+retained and betrayed its immemorial frailties and misgivings. Lotto
+died in 1556, having widely diffused his sensitive art through the Marca
+and Lombardy.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 281. Lorenzo Lotto. The Marriage Yoke.—_Madrid._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 282. Moretto of Brescia. Madonna with St. Nicholas.—_Brescia._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 283. Correggio. Detail of Ceiling.—_Convent of S. Paolo, Parma._
+]
+
+It is significantly the provincial painters and not the born Venetians
+who indulge these quite feminine refinements of sensibility. Such a one
+is Moretto of Brescia, born in 1498 and active until 1555. Although
+closely in touch with Palma and Titian, he avoids their positive color
+and dreams his pictures in delicate harmonies of silver and blue. There
+is a morning coolness about them which anticipates certain perfections
+of early Velasquez and even of the figure painting of Corot. He is a
+distinguished spirit but an anomaly in the age of Aretino. Milton would
+have understood him. In portraiture, as in the richly clad nobleman of
+the National Gallery, he forces the note of picturesqueness to
+restlessness. In such religious pictures as the Madonna in Glory,
+(1540), in San Giorgio Maggiore, at Verona, or in the Madonna with St.
+Nicholas, at Brescia, (1539), Figure 282, he shows an ecstatic lyrical
+feeling, and finds the free and florid compositional forms to express
+it. It has an informality which Titian would never have permitted
+himself at this moment.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 284. Correggio. St. Augustine. Fresco. Toschi’s Copy.—_Cathedral,
+    Parma._
+]
+
+Of course the greatest of those who in the name of sentiment undermined
+the grand style was Antonio Correggio,[83] a provincial painter, a
+disappointed and unsuccessful man, who lived out his less than fifty
+short years (1489?–1534) in or near Parma. His ideas he took from
+Mantegna, master of all Northern Italy, whose illusionism he carried a
+point further. He made in 1518 for the ceiling of the reception room of
+the Convent of San Paolo, Figure 283, a trellis through the verdurous
+ovals of which one sees pairs of nude boy geniuses at play. He paints
+away the domes of the Church of San Giovanni (1524) and of the Cathedral
+(1530), shows us Christ or His Mother soaring into the clouds with hosts
+of accompanying angels. He brings the clouds down through the painted
+wall and sets them before the pendentives. Church Doctors, Figure 284,
+or Evangelists ride their cloud-thrones easily in the company of the
+fairest nude angels of either sex. The painting fairly annuls the
+architecture. These decorative frescoes are so vital and so richly
+various that they demand admiration and disarm criticism. To walk among
+the demi-gods and goddesses that loll on the parapet painted about the
+Cathedral dome, Figure 285, is to have known the company of Homer’s
+immortals. The impression is over-powering and unforgettable. Cautious
+people have always resented such profusion and such unrestrained
+assertion of life and joy. At the time they called the dome, with its
+confusion of wriggling rosy legs of ascending angels, the “frog pond.”
+They cavilled at Correggio’s price and appealed to Titian, who knowing a
+miracle of fine workmanship, told them that if they turned the dome over
+and filled it with ducats, it would not be too much.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 285. Correggio. Detail of fresco decoration of Dome of the
+    Cathedral. After Toschi’s Copy.—_Parma._
+]
+
+It was Correggio’s distinction to fill an immense decoration with
+lyrical ecstacy. Michelangelo in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel had
+done as much in elegiac vein. Both set a destructive example to smaller
+men who followed. For two centuries after Correggio’s death in 1534 the
+clouds blew into churches, and rosy angelic apparitions cooled their
+nude charms in these clouds and dangled their delicate legs therefrom,
+and painters worked their will upon mere architecture, and the baroque
+style took possession of all Catholic Europe. At its best it is
+captivating even to an unwilling Protestant imagination, but it never
+regained the height of its beginnings in Correggio.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 286. Correggio. “The Day.”—_Parma._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 287. Correggio. Marriage of St. Catherine.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+In his religious pieces and mythologies, Correggio is respectful to the
+grand style. He had in one way or another taken account of his Titian,
+Raphael, and Michelangelo, and he builds his groups in their active
+symmetries. But such an allegiance to the decorous style is merely
+superficial, his affinities are with the following centuries and the
+devotees of sensibility. Even in a grandly composed picture like the
+Holy Family called The Day, Figure 286, the women are disquieting in
+their personal loveliness. There is no relation to the Parthenon
+marbles, as there always seems to be in Titian, no suggestion of a
+larger air. These Maries know love, and raptures and tears. In the
+somewhat earlier Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure 287, at Paris, the
+mood is simply one of great tenderness. In later pictures like the
+Madonna with St. George and the Holy Night, at Dresden, the excitement
+of all the figures becomes almost unpleasant. So, in the mythologies,
+Leda, or Danae, or Antiope, Figure 288, is not goddesslike but
+perturbingly feminine and desirable. A most delicate erotic appeal is in
+all this work. It is like Alexandrian sculpture. It is still noble, but
+less so than Titian or Raphael, less abstract and stylistic. The
+exquisite ambiguity of the mood is not quite compatible with the
+compositional formulas. One feels it is but a step and a legitimate one
+from Correggio to the rare, sentimental nudes of Gainsborough and Sir
+Joshua and Romney.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 288. Correggio. Jupiter and Antiope.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+In every phase Correggio’s work is distinguishable by the most beautiful
+handling of color and light and dark. Like Moretto and Lotto he prefers
+a blonder scale than the Venetian, and makes his surfaces so many
+miracles of ivory, silvery grays and straw yellows, invested with shadow
+tenuously modulated, yet of strongest modelling power. He cares nothing
+about textures or individually rich passages; it is the whole picture
+that counts. The brush sweeps lightly and swiftly, there is no loading
+of color, everywhere an exquisite economy and a subtlety that conceals
+itself. At all points, technically as well as psychologically, Correggio
+deals in overtones. And by that token he is not of the Renaissance, but
+is greater or smaller than it, as you may choose to decide. He is more
+our contemporary than he is Titian’s.
+
+Meanwhile Titian himself is passing into a subjective phase. In 1545 he
+was at Rome. Michelangelo, who offered him unusual courtesies, doubtless
+showed him the Sistine ceiling and the recently finished Last Judgment.
+Titian, as he writes himself, studied with humble amazement the
+“marvellous old stones” that the Roman soil was yielding up to the newly
+founded museums.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 289. Charles V. at Mühlberg.—_Madrid._
+]
+
+Even before the Roman trip, his style begins to show an old man’s
+restless vehemence. The titanic ceiling decorations for the Salute, of
+1543 and 1544, Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, David and Goliath,
+display at once an almost sensational energy and a lesser regard for the
+superficial attractions of color. The rugged designs are hacked out in
+bold splotches of light and dark. The method begins to be luministic.
+The partial foreshortening of the figures to adjust them to being seen
+from below is the decorative compromise which prevails at Venice from
+Tintoretto to Tiepolo. The new point of view is easiest studied in
+Christ crowned with Thorns, in the Louvre. Titian passes swiftly through
+this overtly dramatic stage. The same year, 1548, that saw the Crowning
+with Thorns, saw also the equestrian portrait of Charles V, Conqueror,
+Figure 289, after the battle of Mühlberg. What is odd about the picture
+is the elimination of all military conventions—no battle reek, no
+stricken foes, no busy staff. Instead just the pale, inflexible,
+thoughtful face of a slight old man, physically frail but firmly seated
+on a cantering horse. There is no frank color except the purple scarf
+and the gold of armor and horse trappings. Everything is expressed in
+marvellous grays and browns which contain hints of all the colors. There
+is no linear drawing; edge melts into edge without abrupt contrasts. A
+twilight mystery, a veiled quality, adds immensely to the expression of
+melancholy and might. The mere spectacle of life has become relatively
+uninteresting to Titian. He rather meditates on those creative throes of
+the mind which underlie action. His conqueror is a thinker.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 290. Titian. The Rape of Europa.—_Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston._
+]
+
+In Titian’s own portrait, of 1550, at Berlin, the new method is more
+strongly announced. The form grows out of a silvery gloom by reason of
+hesitating flickers of light which yet have extraordinary modelling
+power. In character the work is remarkable. One senses smouldering under
+the weathered surfaces of this man of seventy-three the most formidable
+capacities for wrath and for passion.
+
+The nudes and mythologies of these final years, the various Danae’s and
+the Nymph and Faun at Vienna, the Calisto and Actæon at Bridgewater
+House, the Venus and Adonis at Madrid, all show a very different temper
+from the early poesies. There is no suggestion of meditative dalliance,
+no shy Arcadianism. These are mortals stung and lashed by desire. Love
+is not sweet on their lips but bitter and fateful. Even Europa, Figure
+290, at Fenway Court, the finest of these later poesies, seems to fill
+the sunlight sky and sea with a spasm of erotic expectancy. Passion
+becomes cosmic. Strange capacities for tenderness also appear. Compare
+the Deposition in the Prado, Figure 291, of 1559, with the masterpiece
+of forty years earlier, Figure 273, at the Louvre. The noble domelike
+arrangement persists, but within the compositional dome what a change!
+The body of the Christ is no longer grandly disposed. It crumples as it
+is turned into the tomb. The thing has the unexpectedness of fact. The
+canvas is soberly incandescent with half-lit faces which gleam through
+the deep grays and browns. Each light is a focus of compassion. Titian
+himself, impersonating St. Joseph of Arimathea, supports the Christ.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 291. Titian. The Entombment.—_Madrid._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 292. Titian. Education of Cupid.—_Borghese, Rome._
+]
+
+In one of the latest poesies, the Education of Cupid, Figure 292, at the
+Borghese, Rome, the new method may be studied. The forms are built up of
+little and apparently indeterminate touches of russets and grays that
+glow from within. The form builds itself out vibratingly. It is no
+longer as palpable to the hand as that of the early Titians, but it is
+more palpable to the eye and to the mind. Tone has driven out color;
+atmospheric envelopment has replaced minute description; the artist
+merely creates gradations of light which afford the illusion of bulk. It
+is what we call today, rather loosely, impressionism, or, more
+accurately, luminism. In the character of these goddesses we have no
+longer wistfulness, that ineffable adolescent quality of Titian’s early
+poesies, but women fully conscious of their power to give or take away.
+
+His later pictures, The Crowning with Thorns at Munich (1570) and the
+Pietà (1576) in the Venice Academy, are nobly tragic in mood. Titian
+faces the last great event not as a humanist, but as a humble believer
+sorrowing in the suffering of his Lord. Carried off by the plague in
+1576, Titian had lived nearly a century, for over seventy years had been
+a famous painter. In that long course there is no sign of failure of
+power. His dominant mood changes according to his age from the ardent
+pastoralism of his early maturity, through the dramatic energy of his
+middle age, and the impersonal splendor of his first old age. And when
+he had passed the scriptural term, he developed new depths of feeling,
+and created to contain them a pulsating realm of light and dark in
+twilight. He had begun with the cool preciseness of Giovanni Bellini and
+closed with a passionate mystery of expression which foretells
+Rembrandt. So far as Venice was concerned, he not merely led its
+Renaissance, but was its Renaissance, both in rise and decay. And it is
+noteworthy that while Raphael and Michelangelo end in ostentation of
+power and decline of feeling, Titian ends in deeper capacities whether
+for passion or sympathy, works away from the daylight realities of
+humanism towards new depths in natural appearance and new depths in his
+own soul.
+
+Around such a man a throng of able painters naturally grew up. The
+poorest imitated him, the better took hints from his marvellous practice
+and went their own way. Among these was Giambattista Moroni of Bergamo,
+born in 1520 and trained under Moretto of Brescia. Mediocre as a
+religious painter, he was a portraitist of acutest vision for character.
+A provincial, he cared little for the idealizations of the time. In such
+a portrait as the Tailor, at London, or the amazing old Abbess in the
+Metropolitan Museum, or the Husband and Wife, at Cleveland, or The
+Widower, at Dublin, Figure 293, he gives us the very look of people,
+even to their uneasiness as they submit to the ordeal of being
+portrayed, and withal their intelligence, diligence, and patience.
+Titian, when overdriven with portrait commissions, habitually referred
+his clients to Moroni, as an abler artist in the specialty. And indeed
+Moroni, while lacking Titian’s style, looked harder at his sitters than
+Titian ever did. He died in 1572, four years before his generous friend.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 293. G-B. Moroni. The Widower.—_Dublin._
+]
+
+The Bassanos, the father Jacopo and his sons Leandro and Francesco, were
+too popular to be omitted. Their style is pretty eclectic with something
+of late Titian and Tintoretto in it. They treat the old religious
+themes, are good portraitists, and carry out on their own initiative a
+bucolic sort of painting, with abundant horses, cattle and dogs. So
+homely a tradition has its place in breaking down the decorum of the
+grand style. The excellent average of the family in their craft may be
+judged from Leandro’s Pietà, at Cleveland.
+
+Sometimes over the velvety calm of Venice and the lagoon will roll up a
+thunder storm. The radiant color becomes more sombrely rich under the
+tossing clouds. Their steely edges break into the lightning flash; domes
+and towers for a moment stagger under the lashing of the rain squall.
+The storm passes, the leaden clouds show saffron backs against the blue,
+the evening is here with double serenity and purity. Such is Jacopo
+Tintoretto amid the reflective tranquility, and confident splendors of
+Venetian painting—a wind of the spirit, a shattering, yet consoling,
+apparition. Tenderness, tragedy, romance, are his realm. Where his
+contemporaries dealt in superb averages, he deals in transcendent
+exceptions. Thus he has ever been a baffling figure to the critics. For
+the febrile Ruskin, he is among the greatest of painters; for the coolly
+analytical Kenyon Cox, he is little better than a reckless
+sensationalist. Every one, friend or foe of his art, must admit its
+Shakespearean richness and variety. He lacks Titian’s Olympian poise,
+but is more universal.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 294. Tintoretto. Tithonus and Aurora. Tempera color
+    sketch.—_British Museum._
+]
+
+Jacopo Robusti,[84] the dyer’s son, was born in Venice in 1518. At
+seventeen he was put with Titian. Once passing through the studio Titian
+saw on the floor a number of Tintoretto’s sketches. Not trusting himself
+to speak, he sent word that the newcomer should never again enter his
+studio. An act which contemporary gossip ascribed to jealousy, is rather
+to be referred to disgust at Tintoretto’s unbridled vehemence. Whoever
+has studied Tintoretto’s tempera sketches, Figure 294, in the British
+Museum may realize how Titian felt. The sketches are superb, but Titian
+in 1535 was in no way to realize their value. Twenty years later he may
+have appreciated them.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 295. Tintoretto. Presentation of Virgin in the Temple.—_S. M.
+    dell’ Orto._
+]
+
+Driven out by the best master in Venice, Tintoretto was reduced to the
+process of self-education, in which he was aided by that brilliant
+decorative colorist and ever luckless artist, Andrea Schiavone.
+Tintoretto’s earliest work of note is the decoration of his own parish
+church of the Orto, which he undertook about the year 1546 for the
+costs. The gigantic canvases of the Deluge and Worship of the Golden
+Calf in the Choir made his fame, but we see his peculiar quality better
+in the Presentation in the Temple, Figure 295. It was finished only a
+few years after Titian’s masterpiece in the Scuola della Carità, hence
+the contrast between the two works on the same theme is enlightening.
+Titian’s picture is fundamentally a spectacle and a ceremony. Everything
+goes as arranged and expected. Tintoretto’s picture is a sudden and
+thrilling event full of unexpected graces. The little Virgin is well
+within the picture, but keeps her prominence through her position
+against the sky and even more by reason of the focusing of intense
+interest on her by all the persons in the composition. It is a charming
+invention that three mothers and their infant daughters on the steps
+should share in the glory of her consecration. At the left a prophetic
+figure suddenly grasps the import of the moment and sways with wide
+stretched arms towards the hope. From him to the head of the steps rises
+a pathetic line of cripples and beggars mercifully veiled in half light.
+These are witnesses to the human misery that the Virgin through her Son
+is to assuage. The unifying principle, apart from the fine linear
+design, is the light which floods out of the picture over the
+beautifully carved steps. Everything is conceived in depth, while
+Titian’s Presentation is relatively on one plane. Golden browns and
+yellows of great luminosity are prevailing colors, the crimsons and
+blues serving merely as relief and accent. With all its richness of
+illustrative content, the thing is a noble decoration.
+
+A little later, perhaps in 1548, Tintoretto did the first of three
+canvases for the Scuola Grande di San Marco. It represents the moment
+when a Christian slave is about to be brained. The liberating figure of
+St. Mark, Figure 296, swoops down, the maul snaps in the executioner’s
+hand. With a singular delicacy the entire interest of the bystanders is
+concentrated on the helpless white body of the martyr. The suspense is
+breathless. Only the old magistrate high at the right has seen the
+miraculous breaking of the executioner’s sledge. His gesture carries the
+eye to the figure of the downward swooping saint, thus the most
+sensational feature is last seen and comes as a climax. Such dramatic
+modulations are of the very essence of Tintoretto’s genius. Again,
+though the sweeping curves of the linear design are splendidly balanced,
+the light is the ultimate harmonizer. It ripples out in an increasing
+wave towards the spectator, kindling as it goes the colors of rich
+stuffs and the bronzed or pearly roundings of brows, shoulders, throats
+and limbs. The carrying of a uniform rhythm of motion through earth and
+sky is again Tintoretto’s invention. He uses it here as elsewhere not as
+a sprightly device—which was later the baroque attitude—but as a
+necessary factor in emotional expression.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 296. Tintoretto. Miracle of the Slave.—_Venice._
+]
+
+In 1561 Tintoretto finished the great Marriage at Cana for the Salute.
+The picture is tremendously developed in depth, and the Christ is set in
+the distance. The foreground figures alone are concerned with the
+miracle. Very effective is the contrast of the quiet feasters with those
+who are stirred by the marvel. The lighting is consummately fine. There
+are passages of extreme loveliness, such as the swaying row of women’s
+faces on the right of the table, but the whole thing is far from clear;
+illustrative and decorative features are imperfectly harmonized. In this
+great scale Tintoretto’s richness and insatiate inventiveness tend to
+work against him.
+
+Before considering his colossal labor in the School of St. Roch, we
+should note his avowed ideal. It might be read on the walls of his
+studio: “The Drawing of Michelangelo and the Coloring of Titian.” In the
+studio were casts of Michelangelo’s sculptures brought up at great
+expense from Florence and Rome. And to Michelangelo we owe the slender
+and alert proportions of Tintoretto’s figures, quite different as they
+are from the gravity, almost ponderosity of Titian, Palma, and Paolo
+Veronese. The color is based on late Titian, but is more sonorous,
+simple, and uncomplicated by minor tones. The brush stroke is unlike
+anything earlier—sketchy, impetuous, definitive, working by first
+intention. Accordingly the surfaces are much broken, and, to a near
+view, lack preciousness. We have neither the fluent enamel of Giorgione
+and early Titian, nor yet the muffled richness of Titian’s later manner.
+But in the best Tintorettos the touch is infallibly crisp, right and
+expressive. To exaggerate these generously avowed influences of the
+master who repudiated him and the master he never saw would be easy. As
+a matter of fact, Tintoretto is always more the illustrator than either
+of his models. If he adopts the grand poses of Michelangelo, he does so
+not for abstract beauty, but ever seeks a motive for them. If he chooses
+Michelangelo’s slender, athletic proportions, he invests them with
+tenderness and enthusiasm. Unlike Titian, he avoids both classical
+draperies and rich contemporary costumes, choosing compromise forms of
+dress which, without ceasing to be classical, should seem familiar, and
+fit for a real world. If he adopts Titian’s coruscating light, he gives
+it a special poetry. It does not glow evenly through the picture, but
+flashes intermittently, as an accent or accompaniment to emotion.
+
+In 1560 the famous charitable confraternity of St. Roch determined to
+decorate their beautiful School. They called Federico Zuccaro, and
+Francesco Salviati, who had Roman honors, Tintoretto, and his friends,
+Schiavone and Paolo Veronese. The subject in competition was to be a
+cartoon of St. Roch in glory for the ceiling of the refectory. When the
+day came, Tintoretto unveiled not a cartoon but the finished oval. That
+was his drawing, he said; he hoped they would not be offended, but he
+knew no other way. The misunderstandings due to this summary procedure
+were soon cleared up. Tintoretto became titular painter to the School,
+later a member, and worked at the two great halls and ante-rooms for
+twenty-eight years.
+
+St. Roch was the Physician Saint who cared for the plague stricken. Thus
+the upper hall was pictured with examples of miraculous mercy and
+deliverance chosen from the Old Testament. The lower hall was devoted to
+the more familiar stories of the life of Christ and of His Mother. Sadly
+darkened and neglected, often in impossible light, these pictures baffle
+all but the enthusiast. One needs all the vicarious enthusiasm that may
+be drawn from a Ruskin to do San Rocco with any thoroughness. Whoever
+persists will be rewarded, for while Tintoretto is by no means at his
+greatest as a painter in this work, it reveals his inexhaustible
+inventiveness, his warmth and tenderness, and power, as no other series
+does, whereas it has in the little moonlit landscapes with St. Mary
+Magdalen and St. Mary of Egypt faery refinements elsewhere lacking in
+the master.
+
+Everybody knows at least the great Calvary, with its sense of cosmic
+disaster. Marvellous is the storm which sweeps towards the cross from
+behind, superb alike the cluster of faithful friends at the foot of the
+cross and the proud riders at the flanks. Hate, love and indifference
+mingle in the scene. It gets its profound tragedy on terms of fact, is
+free from all mystical sentimentality. What was it like on that awful
+evening? is the only question the artist asks himself, and his answer, a
+sheer gift of the imagination, transcends all the lyrical sweetness and
+measured solemnity of the ritual crucifixions. Humanism and religion
+unite for once in this masterpiece.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 297. Tintoretto. Christ Tempted by Satan.—_Scuola di S. Rocco._
+]
+
+Among the scores of narratives in the two halls the eye will rest upon
+Moses Smiting the Rock, for its majesty; upon the meeting of Mary and
+Elizabeth which has the intensity of Giotto’s fresco at neighboring
+Padua, with an abandon all its own; upon the Flight into Egypt, with its
+idyllic landscape; upon the awful tumult and despair of the Massacre of
+the Innocents; upon the pathos of the white-robed Christ, awaiting his
+doom from an indifferent proconsul. These occur among many that are
+equally memorable. Perhaps the subtle humanism of Tintoretto is best
+shown in the Temptation of Christ, Figure 297. Instead of the ignoble
+bat-like Satan of the mediæval painters, we have a magnificent
+starry-eyed youth, a veritable genius of the pride of life. With
+outstretched, generous arms he offers unstinted power and pleasure. The
+Christ regards him with tranquil kindness, as one might a splendid
+animal fawning too eagerly. For so Christian a man as Tintoretto, it
+implies extraordinary sympathy to imagine a Satan in his own way
+gloriously sure of his case. In these compositions the method is most
+various. But where there are many figures Tintoretto generally avoids
+the convention of placing the chief personages on the picture plane. You
+look over heads or between bodies to glimpse the Saints or the Blessed
+Virgin or Christ. And curiously this procedure does not confuse the eye.
+On the contrary these apparently casual but really most thoughtful
+arrangements heighten the sense of reality; one feels like a witness,
+like one himself on the edges of the throng.
+
+Along with the decoration of San Rocco, Tintoretto undertook frequent
+commissions for the Ducal Palace. But the fire of 1577 consumed his
+picture of the naval victory at Lepanto, with much else. In the
+mythologies of the Anticollegio painted in 1578 we have the loveliest
+poesies of the Venetian school. These are the Marriage of Bacchus and
+Ariadne, Mercury and the Graces, Minerva expelling Mars and the Forge of
+Vulcan. From the point of view both of decoration and sentiment these
+are perhaps the finest nudes in painting. They glow with outdoor health,
+the firm wholesome bodies sway from sheer joy in motion, or hover
+lightly in the limpid air. The noble forms are fixed for us in
+transparent shadows, and broad dapplings of light. There is little of
+the sheer dreaminess of Giorgione, who yet counts for something in the
+work, nor yet of the explicit sensuousness of Titian. These noble
+creatures go about our business,—marrying, seeking grace in life,
+composing strife, providing munitions should strife arise. Miss
+Phillipps is probably right in divining here an allegory of the
+greatness of Venice, bride of the Adriatic, protected by her diplomacy,
+admired for her arts, yet ever ready in her arsenals. What is better
+worth noting is the combination of breadth and delicacy in the finest of
+these poesies, The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Figure 298. The
+interlocking of the superb forms in a flowing rhythm or pattern, the
+technical miracle of Venus’s easy turn in the air as she offers the ring
+and the starry crown, the exquisite alternations of light and half light
+others might conceivably have invented. What is proper to Tintoretto and
+to him alone is the hesitating hand of Ariadne and her almost resigned
+and reluctant acceptance of a new love, being mindful of love once
+betrayed. Also the delicacy of Bacchus’s ardent gesture, as knowing
+himself to be not only wooer but consoler, is purest Tintoretto. The
+picture with its companion pieces is the effulgent afterglow of the
+Arcadianism that began with Giorgione. It breathes a charm that has
+never since been fully recoverable.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 298. Tintoretto. Bacchus and Ariadne.—_Ducal Palace._
+]
+
+While these poesies were in progress, about 1575, Tintoretto painted for
+the Church of San Cassiano the most original of his Crucifixions, Figure
+299. One looks over the narrow top of Golgotha to a peaceful expanse of
+marbled evening sky. The heads and serried pikes of the Roman
+legionaries suggest a throng behind the hill. The sharpest note of color
+is a banner, and the purple robe just stripped from the Christ. Between
+John and Mary and the executioners on the ladder and against the sky the
+strangest episode passes. It is the moment when a Pharisee hands up to
+the executioner the mocking placard “Jesus of Nazareth King of the
+Jews.” With a sudden impulse John points out the act to Mary, to console
+her. Christ’s enemies affirm the truth of him. Even in the hour of
+defeat and death he is eternally his people’s king. The level light
+which ripples softly over the nude forms of Christ and the thieves takes
+away all harshness. At San Rocco Tintoretto presented an epic and cosmic
+terror. Here he suggests all the intimate and lyrical hopes that have
+grown out of the sacrifice on Calvary.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 299. Tintoretto. Calvary.—_S. Cassiano._
+]
+
+Like all the Venetians Tintoretto was an admirable portraitist. His
+sober and powerful vein is well shown in the Madonna with Three
+Magistrates, Figure 300.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 300. Tintoretto. Madonna with Three Magistrates.—_Venice._
+]
+
+Among the later altar-pieces none is finer than the Miracle of St. Agnes
+in the Orto. It has all of Tintoretto’s sweetness, power and suddenness,
+and is nearly in its original condition of color. In 1587, being nearly
+seventy years old, he got the commission for his greatest and perhaps
+his last picture, the Paradise, in the Hall of the Great Council in the
+Ducal Palace. Darkened and dried, it is still to the perceptive observer
+a billowing sea of rapturous faces of the blest, obeying in its widening
+circles of cloud-borne angels an oceanic rhythm. During the three years
+that Tintoretto was painting it, his young daughter and comrade,
+Marietta, dressed like a Shakespearean page for greater convenience,
+worked and chattered beside him on the scaffolding. She hardly lived to
+see the great canvas set on its wall. Tintoretto lived on till 1594, and
+then his aged and withered body was carried across the canal from his
+palace to his vault in the Orto. Such friends as Schiavone and Paolo
+Veronese had gone before him, the old merrymakings and impromptu
+concerts in his home had ceased. It was a very tired old man who bid his
+sons continue the honorable trade of painting. He had shared nobly the
+greatest range of human emotions, and his last artistic vision was of an
+ecstatic peace in Paradise.
+
+After Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese[85] seems an anti-climax. His
+imagination is very limited. His greatest pictures treat the sole theme
+of stately feasts. His soul is that of a very high class society editor.
+But no well-advised person looks to Paolo Veronese for soul. One rather
+seeks in him judgment and fine painting. Both are at their maximum.
+
+Paolo Caliari was born at Verona in 1528, trained by a half primitive
+master, Antonio Badile, and influenced by the energetic compositions of
+Brusasorci. Paolo inherited the long Veronese tradition for spectacular
+narrative painting with splendid architectural accessories, and he
+carries the local tradition to its close and height. He came to Venice
+at twenty-seven, a finished and famous artist, bringing with him a novel
+sort of color. He avoids the contrasts and keen resonances of the true
+Venetians, painting rather in luminous half tones based on gray and
+blue. His forms are rich and solid without heavy shadow, and his
+canvases have the generally blond and uniform color quality of the
+modern out-of-door school.
+
+His preference is for feasts and pageants. We have the spectacle of a
+rich and gentle society, dignified in its pleasures and resplendent in
+its costume. Gold brocade sets off the pearly skins of the portly and
+gracious ladies in his pictures, and their cavaliers are as
+magnificently clad in satins, velvets and furs. The feasts are generally
+half out of doors in great colonnades, with the light glinting
+impartially upon fair throats and faces and upon channeled columns and
+sculptured balustrades. Behind, pale cornices and spires swim against a
+blue sky.
+
+It was the habit of the wealthy chapters of monks who maintained the
+great Venetian churches to paint in their refectories some Scriptural
+feast, as a warrant perhaps for their own daily convivialities. Earlier,
+the most solemn of all meals, The Last Supper, would have been chosen.
+Not so with Veronese and his contemporaries. They chose instead the
+Marriage at Cana or the Feast in the House of Simon or of Levi, Figure
+301,—splendid events of small or only incidental religious significance,
+and treated merely as contemporary banquets.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 301. Paolo Veronese. Feast in Levi’s House.—_Venice._
+]
+
+Of the four great feasts painted by Paolo Veronese the Marriage at Cana,
+in the Louvre, painted in 1563, is earliest, and most imposing. It
+builds up indefinitely from the marble pavement, with tier upon tier of
+people, clinging to columns and peering from balconies. One may count no
+less than two hundred and fifty heads. It has all the stir of a public
+banquet and everywhere the greatest richness of table accessories and
+costumes. The theme called for little religious emotion. The miracle
+itself is a convivial one. Yet Veronese has made this different from
+other feasts by a most complicated system of guiding lines which always
+lead the eye to the gentle face of the Christ in the centre. He fairly
+dominates all this animation and splendor. In the trio of musicians in
+the foreground Veronese has given us a precious hint of the part music
+played in the life of all Venetian artists. Paolo himself plays the
+viola, Tintoretto the ’cello, and Titian the bass. What is remarkable
+about the great canvas is its unity. Bathed in equable cool light, the
+eye takes it in at a glance; there is no confusing or distracting
+emphasis; the whole thing is nobly tranquillizing.
+
+In 1569 Veronese was in Rome. We may possibly see some slight influence
+of Michelangelo in the frescoes of the Villa Barbaro, at Maser. These
+contain the only nudes of Veronese that have a real athleticism, and the
+whole decoration has a more positive and sprightly spirit than is usual
+in Veronese’s placid style. Working in a country house for liberal and
+congenial patrons, Daniele Barbaro was himself an architect of merit,
+Veronese sheds something of that professional dignity which is sometimes
+excessive in his official work.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 302. Paolo Veronese. Marriage of St. Catherine.—_Santa Caterina._
+]
+
+Among his numerous altar-pieces, the Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure
+302, in the Venetian Church of that name is perhaps the most gracious.
+The women are adorable—hothouse flowers, incredible for poise, hue and
+delicate surface bloom. They are not very personal, their charm is a
+social one. But they are very gentle, reasonably unconscious of their
+own beauty, and quite unforgettably lovely. It took a wonderful eye to
+see them at once so simple and so regal.
+
+In the last twelve years of his life, Veronese was constantly employed
+in the Ducal Palace and the adjoining public buildings. He employed
+assistants freely, and the work affords difficult critical problems. The
+work is uneven. In mythology he belies the hopes based on the frescoes
+at Maser, where it seemed as if he too might attain the Olympian mood.
+It is sadly lacking in the hoydenish group that enacts Europa and the
+Bull, Figure 303, in the Ducal Palace. Why are these heavy Venetian
+lasses risking their skins and skirts and shins near the seaside and a
+bull? The flat prose of the feeling, or rather the absence of any real
+feeling, makes one forget the splendor of the painting. Such also is the
+effect of the superbly painted Venus and Mars, at New York, and of most
+of the mythologies. We have to do with sheer prose and not very sincere
+prose at that.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 303. Paolo Veronese. Rape of Europa.—_Ducal Palace._
+]
+
+When, however, the theme can be drawn from everyday Venice, Veronese is
+overpoweringly fine. Again and again in looking at the ceilings of the
+Ducal Palace one catches his breath before such visions of magnificence
+as Venice as Justice, Figure 304, Venice as Queen of the World. For all
+its contemporary quality, it attains a strange other-worldliness. It is
+as if some one had looked at superb Venice through a magnifying glass
+that ennobled the forms and greatly enhanced the colors. You feel how
+Veronese loved it all and how little he cared for anything beyond the
+splendor, dignity and prosperity of his adoptive city. He gives us the
+look of Venice at her climax of Renaissance glory, as Carpaccio had
+given the dying radiance of her mediæval estate. From the point of view
+of judgment, style and fine craftsmanship, it is impossible to
+overpraise Veronese. He should be regarded rather as a great painter in
+the narrower sense than a supreme artist. When he died in 1588, only
+fifty years old, he left a very enduring inheritance.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 304. Paolo Veronese. Venice attended by Force and Justice.
+    Ceiling Panel.—_Ducal Palace._
+]
+
+It was on the whole his moderate and judicious sumptuousness that
+inspired the painters of the next century. It was well that they sought
+his imitable merits and not the passion of Titian and Tintoretto. It was
+largely thanks to Veronese that Venetian art suffered no such sharp
+decline as befell that of Florence and Rome. The decorative tradition of
+Veronese sufficed to nourish a Piazetta and a Tiepolo a century and a
+half after his death.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 305. G-B. Tiepolo. Time revealing Truth.—_Villa Biron, Vicenza._
+]
+
+For Giovanni Battista Tiepolo[86] (1695–1770) in sheer force and
+fertility yields to none of his Renaissance predecessors. There never
+was a more valiant draughtsman or a more splendid colorist. Such
+decorations as those of the Scuola del Carmine, and the Labia Palace
+fall little behind Veronese’s pageantry in grandeur while representing
+an audacity of stroke and coloration which Veronese lacked. So the
+tragic scenes of Christ’s Passion at San Luigi have the intensity of
+Tintoretto if lacking something of his nobility. In the ceiling
+decorations of Tiepolo, Figure 305, we see the freest fancies of the
+Baroque, its customary tumult of shimmering clouds and hovering pearly
+figures, repeated with a lightness and audacity and withal measure which
+the Baroque itself never attained save in its great initiator Correggio.
+Such powers as Tiepolo’s soon won him international patronage. He
+painted in Austria and died at Madrid. With him perishes the grandeur of
+the Venetian school. Only a tinge of masquerade and exhibitionism puts
+him lower than his constant exemplar, Paolo Veronese.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 306. Antonio Canale. Island of San Michele.—_Royal Collections,
+    Windsor._
+]
+
+Indeed the simplicity which is the most enduring charm of any art is
+more felt in the minor Venetians of Tiepolo’s time, as in Antonio
+Canale, called Canaletto, Figure 306, who painted the irradiated
+panorama of the Venetian lagoon and canals with the ardent precision of
+a reborn Gentile Bellini. Francesco Guardi[87] (1712–1765), Canaletto’s
+pupil, with a freer brush and fancy paints the spectacle of Venice,
+Figure 307, its balls and promenades and water pageants, with the
+sensitiveness of a Carpaccio. But Carpaccio’s youthful world is no
+longer there to paint. Romance has given way to casual amorous intrigue,
+sentiment to show. But out of the welter of sophisticated gayety still
+rise clean against the heavens the pale domes and bell towers of an
+older and finer Venice. Guardi is perhaps at his best in the numerous
+tiny oil sketches which deal with the remote and solitary groves and
+ruins of the lagoon. Here we have felicities of broken color and
+niceties of observation, accurate notations of evanescent effects of
+light, which can still give lessons to the most modern landscapists.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 307. Francesco Guardi. Scuola di San Marco. Pen and Wash
+    Drawing.—_Lamperti Coll., Milan._
+]
+
+In Pietro Longhi (1702–1762) Venice developed a sympathetic chronicler
+of her social pleasures, Figure 308. The world of his delicate and witty
+little canvases is that of the card party, the formal call, the vanity
+and ceremony of philandering, the shop, the musicale, the masked ball.
+Only Holland has given so true and sympathetic a record of her smaller
+affairs, and at the moment, only Hogarth in England and Chardin in
+France were doing the thing with equal ability.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 308. Pietro Longhi. Maskers at the Zoo.—_London._
+]
+
+Nothing better shows the slightly anachronistic quality of Tiepolo’s
+grandeur than a fine Longhi. The Venetian imagination had moved indoors,
+so to speak, had foregone in favor of individual gratifications the old
+vision of the collective splendor. Venice no longer dines grandly in the
+open with Veronese, she coquettishly sips coffee with Longhi. If she had
+declined in nobility, she had at least kept her sincerity and taste. Her
+affair had ever been rather with appearances than with ideals or
+interpretations. But since the Greeks no other nation had considered
+appearances with such noble candor. She kept to the end the good
+pictorial habit of letting appearances explain themselves. Thus if a
+Titian will stand beside a Pheidian marble, so will a Tiepolo beside an
+Alexandrian masterpiece, while a trim belle of Pietro Longhi need feel
+no confusion before a Tanagra figurine. Time passes gently over a city
+whose artistic aims are as limited as her taste is sure. Venice had ever
+been gracious in her grandeur, and gracious she remained even after she
+had ceased to be grand.
+
+
+                     ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+     TITIAN’S ASSUMPTION THE BEGINNING OF THE VENETIAN GRAND STYLE
+
+Titian’s contemporaries were fully aware that the Assumption (1518)
+marked the beginning of the Grand Style at Venice and that the change
+was revolutionary. The critic Lodovico Dolce writes in his _Dialogo
+della Pittura_, Florence, 1735, p. 286 f. putting the words into the
+mouth of Aretino:
+
+  “After not much time [after the Fondaco frescoes, 1508] he was given
+  to paint a great panel for the high altar of the Friars Minor; where
+  Titian, still young, painted in oils the Virgin, who rises to heaven
+  among many angels who accompany her, and above her he figured a God
+  Father flanked by two angels. It seems really as if she rises with a
+  face full of humility, and her robes fly lightly. At the bottom are
+  the disciples who with various attitudes manifest joy and amazement,
+  and are mostly larger than life, and assuredly in that picture is
+  contained the grandeur and terribleness of Michelangelo, the
+  pleasingness and grace of Raphael, with the coloring proper to nature,
+  and, moreover, this was the first public work which he made in oils;
+  and he made it in very little time, and young.”
+
+  “Thereupon the stupid painters and the vulgar herd who up to then had
+  seen nothing but the cold and dead things of Giovanni Bellini, of
+  Gentile, and of [Alvise] Vivarini (since Giorgione, working in oils,
+  had not yet had any public work; and for the most part made no other
+  works than half figures and portraits) which were without movement and
+  without relief, spake great ill of that picture. Afterwards, as envy
+  cooled, and opening their eyes a little to the truth, the people began
+  to be amazed at the new manner discovered in Venice by Titian: and all
+  the painters from then on strove to imitate it; but being off their
+  own path, became confused. And surely it must seem a miracle that
+  Titian, without having at that time seen the antiquities of Rome,
+  which were the light of all the good painters, solely with that little
+  spark, which he had discovered in the works of Giorgione, saw and
+  perceived the idea of perfect painting.”
+
+The general critical justness of this statement must condone its
+abundant overstatements and errors of fact.
+
+
+                AURELIO LUINI ON TITIAN’S IMPRESSIONISM
+
+“Aurelio Luini has excellently understood this art [of landscape] to
+whom it once happened that visiting Titian, and asking him his opinion
+about the background of trees, besides many reasons which he heard from
+him about making the foliage sparkle against the background, he saw one
+of his [Titian’s] wonderful landscapes which he had at home, which,
+having seen quietly, Aurelio thought a daubed up thing, but afterwards,
+having withdrawn to a distance, it seemed to him that the sun shone
+resplendently in it, making the paths retreat on this side and that; so
+that Aurelio had to say that he had never seen a rarer thing in the
+world in the way of landscapes.”
+
+                            Lomazzo, _Trattato_, Milan, 1584, p. 474, 5.
+
+
+                    ON BELLE NATURE AND THE ANTIQUE
+
+The Renaissance idea that Nature must be ennobled and corrected by the
+Antique is plainly formulated by Dolce, again under the name of Aretino,
+_Dialogo_, p. 190.
+
+  “One should then choose the most perfect form, imitating nature in
+  part.... And partly one should imitate the beautiful marble and bronze
+  figures of the ancient masters. Whereof who so shall taste and possess
+  fully the marvellous perfection, will be able with certainty to
+  correct many defects of nature, and make his pictures noteworthy and
+  grateful to all. Inasmuch as the ancient things contain the entire
+  perfection of art, and can be the exemplars of all beauty.”
+
+This is one of the earliest full statements of the notion of _belle
+nature_, and of the antique as normative. The dogma persists with
+unabated rigor down to Sir Joshua Reynolds (see Illustration to Chapter
+VI, p. 316) and Jacques Louis David.
+
+
+  GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS ON THE GREEK AFFINITIES OF VENETIAN PAINTING
+
+“The revival of the Greek Language and Greek Literature raised the long
+ebb into a wave that swept over civilized Europe. On its glittering
+crest the Venetian painters especially were lifted into the society of
+gods, goddesses, nymphs, and satyrs. They might see sky, sea and earth
+peopled with radiant beings; perhaps with a sort of semi-belief such as
+we accord to the Lorelei and fairies, creations that somehow easily
+worked in with creeds and experience. Anyhow, they might see Pan come
+dallying down the sparkling brook-side, now shouting to the laughing
+brown nymphs rustling through the reeds, and pretending to be afraid,
+now scattering a shower of notes from his pipes that would fall upon the
+ears as the brightness of the iris over a fountain falls upon the
+eye.”...
+
+“It may seem strange if I place the Venetian school and Titian, with his
+liberal line—which, however, is by no means wanting in reticence—in
+closer relationship with Greek art of the great period than the more
+classical schools of Tuscany and Rome. Supposing one were to endeavor to
+paint a restoration of the pediments of the Parthenon, it would be
+possible to interpolate with figures by Titian, never with any by
+Poussin, or, I think, even by Raphael or Michael Angelo.”...
+
+“In spite of extravagant and even absurd defects (for the great artist’s
+eyes no longer served him faithfully), when Titian, towards the end of
+his life painted the ‘Europa’ ... the muse who inspired Pheidias laid
+her hand on the old man’s shoulder, and she inspired the wealth of
+volume, ease of line, and glowing sense of nature’s exuberance.”
+
+_George Frederick Watts, his Life and Writings_, London and New York,
+Vol. III., pp. 251, 253, 254.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 309. Caravaggio. Death of the Virgin.—_Louvre._
+]
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IX
+                       THE REALISTS AND ECLECTICS
+
+  The Confusion following Raphael and Michelangelo—Giulio
+      Romano—Caravaggio and realistic Revolt—Salvator Rosa, romantic
+      Individualism and the Picturesque—The Carracci and the Eclectic
+      Ideal—Later Eclectics; Guido Reni—Domenichino—The Waning of
+      Italian Greatness—Influence of Italy on the Schools of France,
+      Flanders, and Spain.
+
+
+Italian painting suddenly declined for lack of taste. The followers of
+Raphael and Michelangelo possessed astonishing power and knowledge, but,
+save their own cleverness, no longer had anything to express. Thus
+painting became merely an art of self-exploitation and display, a matter
+of difficult foreshortenings, complicated groupings, and novel
+constructions in light and shade. Such at least was the case at Rome,
+and partly at Florence. At Venice, Milan, Cremona, Ferrara, and
+generally in the North the decline was gradual and benign. Sincere art
+of a minor character was still produced. But in the artistic centre the
+collapse was complete, and all the more disastrous that nobody realized
+that a collapse had come.
+
+It is staggering to find that Vasari, in the face of merited ridicule,
+had no doubt that he was a great painter. How he boasts of his own
+powers! “But what matters most for this art, is that they have made it
+so perfect today, and so easy for him who possesses design, that where
+formerly a picture was made by one of our masters in six years, today
+our masters make six in one. And I am the credible witness of this both
+by my observation and by my work. And many more perfect and finished
+pictures are now seen, than formerly were made by the important
+masters.” (Vol. IV, p. 13.) Nothing is more appalling than to find
+Vasari at Florence and Lomazzo at Milan regularly naming Giulio Romano,
+Polidoro and Maturino along with Raphael and Michelangelo. Evidently the
+old sure taste of the Renaissance has yielded to confusion.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 310. Giulio Romano. Battle for Troy. Fresco.—_Palazzo del Tè.
+    Mantua._
+]
+
+Indeed patronage had changed. It is no longer spontaneous but organized.
+We now have academies, art schools, art criticism, exhibitions,
+archæologists, picture dealers. Art no longer rests on generally
+accepted ideas and broad approbations, but is a game between experts.
+
+To enumerate the followers of Michelangelo and Raphael and allot to each
+his due dispraise would be in no way profitable. Giulio Romano may
+represent them all. With extraordinary powers as a draughtsman of the
+figure, and with paradoxical taste in minor decoration, we know him
+already as the vulgarizer of Raphael’s designs in the Stanza of
+Heliodorus and of the Burning City. Later (1524–46) removed from
+Raphael’s influence, at Mantua, he develops a coarse titanism. The old
+Castello of the Gonzagas and the Palazzo del Tè, Figure 310, are
+tediously full of sensational and occasionally obscene mythologies which
+are done with amazing energy and facility, but are as restless and
+undecorative in design as they are hot and foxy in color. And the
+immoderations and indecencies have not even the excuse of naturalness,
+they are coldly calculated and studied. Such talented Florentine
+imitators of Michelangelo as Pontormo and Bronzino we have already
+considered. At Rome, he left at least one disciple of talent, Daniele da
+Volterra, in the composition of whose masterpiece the Deposition in the
+Convent of the Trinità, at Rome, the master himself may have had a hand.
+Rather than delay over these complacent epigones we do well to pass to
+those few more intelligent artists who saw that something was amiss.
+
+Michelangelo Amerighi, (1569–1608), called from his Lombard birthplace
+Caravaggio, and Annibale Carracci of Bologna are here the outstanding
+names. The former bitterly fought the grand style in the name of
+naturalism, the latter attempted to reintegrate it through a critical
+eclectism. Their influence is dominant from the last decade of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+Caravaggio[88] had carefully studied the impressionistic manner of late
+Titian but finally adopts a harsh and resolute chiaroscuro with the
+light restricted and the canvas mostly black. Thus his modelling is both
+brutal and academic. His real fight was with the nobility of Raphael.
+His saints are taken from the streets and often from the gutters. He
+loves character above all, and wants it proletarian. Within his chosen
+limitations he is a powerful and sincere artist. His masterpieces are
+the Entombment in the Vatican, and the Death of the Virgin in the
+Louvre, Figure 309, which created so much disapproval that it had to be
+removed from its altar. Both pictures take the theme out of the realm of
+legend, making it drastic and contemporary. Both, while rejecting all
+grandeur in the figures, preserve the tradition thereof in the
+composition. One gets Caravaggio in epitome in The Peter denying his
+Lord of the Vatican. Figure 311. It is a powerful character study from
+low life. Indeed character is his watchword. One finds it extravagantly
+over-emphasized in his famous pothouse and gambling scenes, a
+revolutionary innovation. The most famous and one of the best is The
+Card Players, at Dresden, Figure 312. It is the symbol of the painter’s
+love of low life. He killed his man in a duel, and died himself when
+turned out of prison into the August sun.
+
+Before that fitting end he had fled to Naples where amid the corruption
+of the Spanish overlordship his proletarian ideals became generally
+contagious. They were taken up eagerly by the Valencian, José Ribera,
+who with an equal sense for character and a more genuine religious
+feeling transmitted the manner to Seville and eventually to Velasquez.
+So Caravaggio became the founder of the modern realistic and
+impressionistic schools, a precursor of Courbet and Manet. Except for a
+surplusage of too emphatic character studies, smiling and weeping
+philosophers, Ribera was a true and most skilful artist. Having no
+quarrel with an earlier grand style, he had the grace of simplicity.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 311. Caravaggio. St. Peter denying his Lord.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 312. Caravaggio. The Card Players.—_Dresden._
+]
+
+Both at Rome and Naples swaggering Caravaggio had enormous success. His
+heads, we read, brought more than other men’s compositions. He boasted
+himself the greatest painter of all time, and was often believed. From
+his swarthy tones his entire school took the name, the Tenebrists. His
+experiments in interior and artificial lighting were widely imitated,
+and again ultimately passed into recent Impressionism. His rejection of
+noble form in favor of what one sees, and of decorative color in favor
+of natural, was the sharpest possible challenge of the Renaissance
+style, and outside of Italy where the noble tradition was only incipient
+did much to arrest its diffusion. From the point of view of modern art
+there are few more important figures. From the point of view of art
+broadly he has his serious limitations. Most damaging is his waiver of
+civilization, he looks at low life not with the eyes of a detached
+artist but with those of a ruffian. He did not have the intelligence to
+live up to his own formula. Annibale Carracci was once looking at
+Caravaggio’s Judith, and, being pressed for an opinion, remarked that it
+was “too natural.” He spoke as an admirer of the grand style. A modern
+realist would make the far more radical criticism that Caravaggio is
+never natural enough. He really makes no close study of the subtleties
+of natural appearance or of the actual refinements of illumination, but
+rather substitutes for the old stately formulas a new, more ugly, and
+less studied formula of his own. Logically he should have gone forward
+with Ribera and Velasquez to a real investigation of appearances. But
+his logic was only that of scorn, and it would doubtless have somewhat
+compensated him for a sordid and premature end, could he have forseen
+that his biographers would credit him with the ruin of Italian painting.
+
+Through Ribera, Caravaggio’s influence passes to the Neapolitan,
+Salvator[89] Rosa (1615–1673). With greater vivacity and better color
+Salvator repeats the character studies and tavern scenes, also bringing
+the proletarian mood into mythology. He painted battle pieces of real
+ferocity. He was an irascible, vain and capricious person, proud of
+being so; a scorner of his own patrons and of the bourgeois generally; a
+maker of epigrams, and a writer of satires. His specialty is the
+sinister and picturesque, and he practices it with gusto and ability,
+Figure 313. Salvator is the real discoverer of the picturesque, the
+first enthusiast for the savage aspects of nature. Likewise he was one
+of the first artists to study effects—sunsets, storms, mists, and
+whirling clouds. He excursioned in the Abruzzo, equally savoring its
+crags, torrents, and forests, and its ferocious banditti. His letters on
+these wanderings are among the first and most important documents of the
+modern cult of nature. He writes: “You have saddened me by giving me the
+news of your having been in Garfagna, and having rejoiced in the
+savagery of that country so congenial to my nature.... To be merely
+reminded of it brings the tears to my eyes.” Again he writes from the
+Adriatic Apennines: “I have been two weeks in continual travel and the
+trip is much more strange and picturesque than that of Florence, beyond
+comparison so, since there is such an extravagant mixture of the rough
+and cultivated, of the level and precipitous that nothing more could be
+desired for the satisfaction of the eye.”... “At Terni, four miles off
+the road I saw the famous falls of the Velino, a thing to haunt and
+possess the most insatiable mind because of its horrid beauty. To see a
+river that plunges straight down a mountain for half a mile, and sends
+up its foam as high!” Much of the stormy and energetic character of such
+scenes is transcribed in the best landscapes of Salvator, Figure 314. In
+their age they evoked little following. But these forests, cascades,
+evening seaports, and ruined sites were freely bought by the English,
+greatly admired and had their part in producing the literary enthusiasm
+for wild nature in the eighteenth century.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 313. Salvator Rosa. Landscape with figures.—_Pitti._
+]
+
+Salvator avows his “extravagant genius,” is driven by the lust for
+novelty, is a modern and romantic spirit. Withal he was a man of
+capacity and taste with an open-minded understanding of quite alien
+merit. “Here, we esteem M. Poussin,” he writes in October, 1665, “more
+than any one else in the world.”
+
+Poussin could never have returned the compliment. His approbation was
+for Raphael, the Carracci and Domenichino. Indeed a chief glory of the
+Bolognese Eclectics was that their critical method sufficed to nurture
+so classic a spirit as Poussin’s and so to establish the academic
+tradition for Northern Europe.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 314. Salvator Rosa. Landscape.—_Pitti._
+]
+
+Though the Eclectic movement is properly associated with the cousins
+Lodovico and Annibale Carracci,[90] it somewhat antecedes them. The
+impetus comes from Flanders with the painter of Antwerp, Denis Calvert,
+who came to Bologna late in the sixteenth century and founded an art
+school. Like all the better educated Flemings, he represented a profound
+nostalgia for Renaissance grandeur, and also a certain detachment from
+the particular Italian artists who had embodied the ideal of
+_grandezza_. Such a man is, perforce, an eclectic, studying widely the
+methods of his great predecessors and seeking to assimilate in his own
+art their various perfections. Besides, methods of comparative study
+which had formerly been extremely difficult if not impossible were now
+easy. Casts were available of the antique marbles, fairly faithful
+engravings were at hand for all the great painters. It is significant
+that both the Carracci were reproductive engravers. Denis Calvert was no
+genius, but a prudent and sagacious artist who made the most of a
+slender endowment. His critical and assimilative spirit passed over to
+his best pupils. Their reform, unlike Caravaggio’s, was not
+revolutionary, but based on a careful restudy of the grand style, which
+they had never wavered in venerating.
+
+Annibale Carracci was reared in devotion to Raphael, whose fine St.
+Cecilia was at Bologna. Venice lured him, but he was rebuffed by
+Tintoretto. Annibale made profound studies of Correggio at Parma, whence
+he writes that Raphael now seems wooden to him in comparison. He is now
+launched on the impossible quest of combining with the austere grandeur
+of the Roman School, the charm of Venetian coloring and the emotional
+instability of Correggio. Thus it was an attempt to restore the grand
+style largely in the name of one of its chief disintegrators, and as
+such it was from the first headed for failure. Yet it was an attempt
+dictated by the times, and the inevitable choice of any superior spirit
+who wished to reknit the Renaissance tradition.
+
+It was the moment of the Catholic Reaction and of the endeavor of the
+new Jesuit Order to rebuild a shaken Church on the basis of persuasion.
+Largely shorn of authority, the Church must now be popular or perish. It
+wisely chose to be popular, adopting the thrilling novelties of Baroque
+architecture, borrowing from the opera its swelling choral cadences,
+everywhere stressing the note of charm, surprise and emotion. So the
+moderation and austerity which underlay the Renaissance style were
+forbidden to the Eclectics, and they chiefly differed from the rival
+Naturalists in choosing to make their sensationalism as decorous as the
+circumstances permitted. Such is the social background of the Carracci’s
+reform, and they deserve utmost credit for achieving so much under such
+limitations.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 315. Lodovico Carracci. Assumption.—_Bologna._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 316. Annibale Carracci. Madonna in Glory.—_Bologna._
+]
+
+Agostino (1568–1602) was the brains of the family, courtier, scholar,
+man of the world. Annibale (1560–1609) was the nerves,—moody, shy,
+solitary, with titan ambitions in a small and unprepossessing frame. His
+cousin, Lodovico (1555–1619), was possibly the best artist of the three
+if only because he attempted less and followed sentimentalism frankly
+without too much bothering about grandeur.
+
+Lodovico, Figure 315, and Annibale, Figure 316, enriched the churches of
+Bologna with great animated altar-pieces which enthralled their
+contemporaries, and today seem more than a little affected. But that is
+merely because we no longer share what was an entirely sincere way of
+religious feeling. They started an Academy in which the antique, the
+nude, and competitive composition were the staple of instruction quite
+as in French and British State art schools today. In the Bolognese
+palaces the Carracci did in fresco great mythological series, consulting
+Homer, Virgil and Ovid and Apollonius of Rhodes. In the main they had
+friezes to do, and they drew heavily from Correggio, tempering his
+alacrity with something of the heavier energy of the Roman style.
+
+In 1585 the Carracci set up their Academy. It was soon thronged.
+Agostino, a courtly, learned and accomplished person, was the leading
+influence, being lecturer as well as drawing master. Even, Annibale,
+habitually an offish and difficult man, is said to have been affable and
+helpful to his disciples.
+
+In studying his pictures, one feels that he was thwarted of his true
+development. Not only was he much of a realist, painting tavern scenes,
+Figure 317, after Caravaggio’s lead, but also a studious and charming
+landscape painter, Figure 318. His soberly colored and gracefully
+composed landscapes were an important influence on Poussin. Annibale’s
+adventures in the grand style, though audacious and loudly applauded,
+really did some violence to his modest and sensitive spirit. His was the
+least academic temperament imaginable, and the final disastrous quarrel
+with his eminently academic brother, Agostino, was inevitable.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 317. Annibale Carracci. The Bean Eater.—_Prince Colonna, Rome._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 318. Annibale Carracci. Flight to Egypt.—_Doria, Rome._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 319. Annibale Carracci. Ceiling Detail.—_Farnese Palace, Rome._
+]
+
+Annibale and Agostino were called to Rome in 1595 to fresco Cardinal
+Odoardo Farnese’s palace. Annibale was thirty-five years old, Agostino a
+few years younger. Both had reaped all honors possible at Bologna, and
+they came to the Eternal City at a fortunate moment. The favorite
+decorators were men of routine talent, Taddeo Zuccaro and the Cavaliere
+d’Arpino. Caravaggio’s amazing and perturbing genius had already
+asserted itself, but he was not a mural painter. After a preliminary
+series of mythologies in the riverside casino of the Palazzo Farnese,
+Annibale turned, in 1597, to the decoration of the great hall. It was a
+lofty tunnel-like room of refractory proportions. The theme was to be
+the loves of the gods. But the great spaces in which are represented
+Bacchus and Ariadne, the Judgment of Paris, Polyphemus and Galatea,
+Cephalus and Aurora, Hero and Leander, amongst other subjects, yield in
+effect to the general plan and the incidental decoration. Annibale, who
+despite contemporary accounts to the contrary, controlled everything,
+has taken as his motive the architectural framework which Michelangelo
+designed for the Sistine, with its burden of decorative nudes. One looks
+past heavy painted cornices, Figure 319, to painted statuary in
+profusion, thickly set, and, behind, more nudes in natural hues, the
+whole echoed by nudes in stucco relief on the walls. We have instead of
+the relative flatness of Michelangelo and his predecessors a consistent
+lumpiness, which, while theoretically tasteless, is actually rich,
+satisfying, and even light. Only an extraordinary ability could have
+kept any kind of unity in this wilful and extravagant complexity, Figure
+320. But unity there is and coherent expression of a mood at once
+pompous and festal.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 320. Annibale Carracci and Helpers. Grand Hall, Farnese
+    Palace.—ROME.
+]
+
+The pictures, as we have noted, seem to count for less than their
+borders. When we examine the love scenes, we find them at once coarse
+and mannered. They are superficially like Giulio Romano at Mantua but
+without his self-satisfied brutality. To this extent they are inferior,
+and indeed the strain to be at once grand, graceful, and passionate is
+only too apparent throughout the pictorial part. Yet as a whole the
+decoration seems hardly inferior in power, ingenuity, and rhythmical
+fulness to such ancient masterpieces of kindred inspiration as the
+Pergamon frieze. For the moment the decoration was enthusiastically
+acclaimed, after three-quarters of a century it taught Charles Le Brun
+the way to decorate the Louvre and the Palace at Versailles, and even
+today the admirer of the fountains of Rome and of her Baroque churches
+must admit that Annibale caught the very spirit of his day, in its
+superfluity of learned vaingloriousness and shortage of the simpler and
+more noble passions.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 321. Guido Reni. Madonna with two Saints.
+]
+
+For the artist the work brought only chagrin. The Cardinal treated him
+with stinginess and personal spite. His irritation with his brother
+reached the explosive point. Agostino left him staggering under the
+weight of an ungrateful task, he fell into a dangerous melancholy, and
+in 1609 died miserably, leaving his helpers Albani and Domenichino to
+finish the gallery.
+
+Of the followers of the Carracci, Guido Reni[91] (1575–1642) and
+Domenichino (1581–1641), are the most important. At his worst Guido Reni
+is the most repellant of sentimentalists, at his best a realist of the
+calibre of Ribera himself. In his time there are no grander old men than
+his, better painted or more fully realized as characters. You find them
+at their best in the Madonna of St. Paul, at Berlin, or the Immaculate
+Conception at Petrograd, or the Madonna with St. Jerome, in the Vatican,
+Figure 321. It is hard to reconcile them with his sleek and cheaply
+seductive Magdalens, Cleopatras and Venuses. What steadies him in his
+inconsistency is a fine and simple sense of composition. He is lucid
+where his masters, the Carracci, tend to be confused. His taste is more
+coherent than his character. Under other conditions than those of
+academic Bologna and Papal Rome he might easily have become a realist of
+Zurbaran’s type. As it was, he undertook the usual synthesis of the
+grand style with the new sentimentality. Generally speaking he is
+neither grand nor sentimental enough, but superficial in both regards.
+Yet his discretion saves him in such works as the ceiling of the Villa
+Rospigliosi (1615) and the supremely elegant St. Michael, Figure 323, of
+the Cappucini. I like the Aurora, Figure 322, nay love it well this side
+of idolatry, for the same reason that I like Kipling’s lines
+
+                  “An’ the dawn comes up like thunder
+                  Outer China ’crost the bay.”
+
+Both the fresco and the verses have the same pounding and obvious, yet
+thrilling cadences, both bring lyricism to the brink of bombast without
+letting it go over.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 322. Guido Reni. Aurora. Ceiling Fresco.—_Casino Rospigliosi,
+    Rome._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 323. Guido Reni. Saint Michael.—_Cappucini, Rome._
+]
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 324. Domenichino. Last Communion of St. Jerome.—_Vatican._
+]
+
+Domenico Zampieri, called Domenichino,[92] (1581–1641) is a far more
+serious figure. We see him best not in the sentimental sibyls which he
+multiplied nor even in the studied emotionalism of his most famous
+altar-piece, the Last Communion of St. Jerome, in the Vatican, Figure
+324, but, rather in such decorations as those in S. Andrea della Valle,
+and in the monastic church of Grotta Ferrata. Here we find a heavy and
+simple emphasis, a great clarity both of figure construction and of
+composition. For his personal awkwardness, patience and quietism his
+comrades mockingly called him the Ox. It took character to play the ox
+amid the febrile sprightliness of the Catholic Reaction. His gravity is
+marked also in his color. He forsakes the old decorative conventions of
+the Renaissance and works in olive and silvery tones which suggest in a
+generalizing way the coolness and freshness of nature. Above all he is
+not facile like most of his contemporaries, but studious, dilatory, and
+considerate. At times he yields to the prevailing sentimentality, but
+usually he is both spontaneous and reticent. He seldom insists, but
+candidly lets the picture be seen. All these qualities appear in the
+modestly hoydenish masterpiece, Diana and her Nymphs, in the Borghese
+Gallery, Figure 325. It is completely captivating for its element of
+surprise, its manly wholesomeness, its winsome setting of lithe girlish
+bodies amid verdure under a gray sky. This unaffected mood in mythology
+has rarely been recaptured. We have it in Vermeer’s little Diana at the
+Hague and, only yesterday, in the Nausicaa of Lucien Simon. Such
+qualities of lucidity, reserve, and simple nobility made Domenichino the
+natural model for Nicholas Poussin. We can trace the influence through
+Poussin’s masterpieces, and had France been wise enough to understand
+her greatest painter, her academic tradition, which was promoted in
+Poussin’s name, might have taken a much more fruitful course than it
+actually did.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  FIG. 325. Domenichino. Diana and her Nymphs.—_Borghese, Rome._
+]
+
+An ill fate finally took Domenichino to Naples. There he found the
+ruffianly local painters banded against every foreigner, and in
+particular he met the systematic animosity of the truculent Spaniard,
+Ribera. Outright terrorism alternated with petty persecution. They
+defaced his work and tampered with his materials. Soon they broke his
+delicate and timid spirit, even turned him against the wife with whom he
+had lived on terms of ideal affection. Today it remains uncertain
+whether he died of shattered nerves or was actually poisoned. Presumably
+the barbarous Neapolitans would have done about the same to any visiting
+artist, but doubtless they turned the screw a shade harder upon a gentle
+idealist who brought into their realistic stews some afterglow of the
+quietistic dignity of a Montagna or a Cima.
+
+When all reservations are made, the Eclectics had fairly done their work
+of correcting the disorder of the late Renaissance and of restoring
+something of the old decorum. They made possible the revival of the
+grand style at Rome, in the eighteenth century, by Carlo Maratta and
+Raphael Mengs. The Eclectics were the bridge by which the classical
+manner passed over into Western Europe, an indispensable link in the
+chain of the great hellenistic tradition. That should be enough to keep
+them in memory if not in unqualified honor.
+
+Our review of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth, century in Italy
+will have served its purpose if it has convinced the reader that this
+was no time of stagnation. We have rather to do with activities of
+exploration and reconstruction which are much too restless and various.
+The intellectual power of the Italian painters had not greatly
+diminished in comparison with the Renaissance. Italy still was capable
+of giving the leads which have guided painting elsewhere ever since.
+What was lacking was not energy but patience, reflection and taste. The
+Italian artist tended to regard himself as a swift and resolute
+executant first of all, and no longer knew how to nourish his spirit as
+a man. Even as executants, the realists and eclectics had the
+humiliation of finding themselves outdone by foreigners. Successively in
+the seventeenth century Ribera, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velasquez, Claude
+Lorrain and Poussin came to Italy and sojourned there. It was in every
+case apparent that the foreigner excelled all native artists in his
+field. The traditional authority of Italian painting still held, but its
+contemporary glory was evidently waning.
+
+But even in decline Italy was strong enough to hand on her torch to
+newer hands. From Titian stems the florid classicism and aristocratic
+portraiture of Rubens and Van Dyck, which dominated the whole eighteenth
+century in France and England; through Caravaggio and Ribera, Italy made
+Velasquez the founder of those most characteristic nineteenth century
+movements, realism and impressionism; through Raphael, the Carracci and
+Domenichino, she fed the white flame of Poussin’s classicism, which in
+one way or another has determined the academic development of all
+Western Europe. Thus Italian painting, eternally alive in the timeless
+region where dwells the fame of Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Giorgione,
+Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, is as well most practically and actually
+alive in the recent and present struggles, failures, and triumphs of our
+modern schools. Without understanding Italian painting we cannot
+understand our own painting. And while the modern world will hardly
+return to the coherence, solidity, and grace of the great Gothic and
+Renaissance masters, I am confident that there can be no exit from our
+present confusion and incoherence until our painters learn at least to
+consult those great Italian predecessors who dwelt on the heights above
+which is the abode of the human spirit’s creative rest.
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER IX
+
+
+                         ON THE ECLECTIC IDEAL
+
+The nearly contemporary account of Carlo Cesare Malvasia, _Felsina
+Pittrice_, Bologna, 1841, Tom. I. p. 263 is instructive.
+
+  “Lodovico ... was the first who supplied a firm prop to tottering
+  painting and was able to save it from imminent harm and ruin. He was
+  the one who courageously opposed that vainglorious time, which
+  succeeded the most perfect age, and liberating it from the common ills
+  of those erroneous mannerisms which dared to tyrannize that fair
+  profession that had been raised so high, not only wished to restore it
+  to its first vigor, but also to a state still more perfect and
+  sublime.... Taking the best from all the best artists, one sees him,
+  with a facility no longer used and valued, form from them a brief
+  compendium, rather a precious extract, outside of and beyond which
+  little more remained for the studious to desire. And coupling and
+  uniting with the discretion of Raphael the intelligence of
+  Michelangelo, and adding withal with the color of Titian the angelic
+  purity of Correggio, he succeeded in forming from all these manners a
+  single one, which had nothing to envy in the Roman, Florentine,
+  Venetian and Lombard manners.”
+
+
+A Sonnet supposed, without complete evidence, to have been addressed by
+Annibale Carracci to the painter Niccolò d’Abate gives an even more
+complete and correct account of the elements that blended in the style
+of the Carracci. I quote it from Rouchès, _La Peinture Bolonaise_,
+Paris, 1913, p. 123, note 1.
+
+            “To make a good painter let him have
+            At ready and eager hand the drawing of Rome,
+            The movement with the shading of Venice,
+            And the dignified coloring of Lombardy.
+            The terrible manner of Michelangelo
+            And Correggio’s pure and sovereign style
+            And the true symmetry of Raphael,
+            Tibaldi’s decorum and substance,
+            The inventiveness of learned Primaticcio
+            And a little of Parmigianino’s grace.
+            Not without having strenuously made such studies
+            Let him place before himself for imitation
+            The works which our Niccolò has left here.”
+
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+
+
+                                 NOTES
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I.
+
+Footnote 1:
+
+  For the altar as tomb-shrine see Yrjö Hirn’s learned and fascinating
+  book, _The Sacred Shrine_, London, 1912.
+
+Footnote 2:
+
+  For the Byzantine pictorial style see the excellent summary in _Fogg
+  Art Museum, Collection of Mediaeval and Renaissance Paintings_,
+  Harvard Univ. Press, 1919, pp. 3–10; also a more extended treatment in
+  O. M. Dalton _Byzantine Art and Archaeology_, Oxford, 1911, chapters
+  V, VI, VII.
+
+Footnote 3:
+
+  For the influence of St. Dominic, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Francis
+  read the respective chapters in Taylor, _The Mediaeval Mind_; for St.
+  Francis, Thomas Okey’s translation, _The little Flowers of St.
+  Francis_ in “Everyman’s Library.” E. Gebhart, _Italie Mystique_,
+  Paris, 1908, is also enlightening.
+
+Footnote 4:
+
+  _Burlington Magazine_, Vol. XXXII (1918) pp. 45–6. Mr. Berenson in
+  _Rassegna d’Arte, “Dedalo,”_ Vol. II., (1921) fasc. V, makes this
+  superb Madonna a Constantinople picture of the late 12th century. His
+  confessedly slight argument fails to convince me. Aside from the air
+  of the picture, the form of the wooden throne is specific for Tuscany
+  and the second half of the 13th century.
+
+  _Cimabue._ Andreas Aubert, _Cimabue Frage_, Leipzig, 1907, is the
+  standard work. The various views on the early frescoes of the Upper
+  Church at Assisi are well summarized in Brown and Rankin, _A Short
+  History_, pp. 54 and 57–59.
+
+  An unsuccessful attempt to reduce Cimabue to a myth has been made by
+  Langton Douglas in his edition of _C. &. C._, Vol. I., p. 187–193. The
+  constructive and accepted view is that of Aubert. My list differs
+  slightly from his and is:
+
+  Louvre Madonna, about 1275, Louvre.
+
+  Trinità Madonna, about 1285, Uffizi.
+
+  The frescoes of the Choir and transepts of S. Francesco at Assisi,
+  saving possibly the big Ascent to the Cross, circa 1296, Assisi.
+
+  Madonna with St. Francis (fresco), after 1290, Assisi, Lower Church of
+  San Francesco.
+
+  St. John in mosaic in the Apse of the Cathedral at Pisa, 1301.
+
+  Venturi’s endeavor to attach to Cimabue some of the later New
+  Testament mosaics in the vault of the Florentine Baptistry, see
+  _Storia_, Vol. V., p. 229—is plausible but not convincing. His
+  attribution of lost frescoes in the portico of old St. Peter’s, known
+  from sketch copies, _Storia_, Vol. V, p. 195—has no solid basis. Two
+  fresco fragments, heads of Peter and Paul, remain, and are published
+  by Wilpert, _Die Mosaiken &_, bd. I, fig. 144, and by him correctly
+  assigned to Cavallini or some Roman follower.
+
+  R. van Marle, in _La Peinture Romaine_, Strasbourg, 1921, has made a
+  most careful study of all the earliest frescoes in the Upper Church.
+  Generally I concur in his conclusions, but cannot see Cavallini in the
+  far abler work of the Isaac Master. The date, 1296, which Van Marle
+  found in the Choir at Assisi, makes it pretty certain that all the
+  frescoes in the Upper Church were executed between 1293–5 and 1300.
+
+  In _Toskanische Maler im XIII Jahrhundert_, Berlin, 1922, Dr. O. Sirén
+  makes a comprehensive survey of the earliest painters of Lucca, Pisa,
+  and Florence. He endeavors to reconstruct the works of Coppo di
+  Marcovaldo whom he regards as a formative influence on Cimabue. To the
+  usual list of Cimabue’s works Dr. Sirén adds, with Aubert, a great
+  Madonna in the Servi, Bologna; and also a Madonna in the Verzocchi
+  Collection, Milan; and an extraordinarily fine crucifixion in the
+  d’Hendecourt Collection, London. Dr. Sirén also accepts for Cimabue
+  the triptych of Christ, St. Peter and St James, which Berenson first
+  published in _Art in America_, for 1920. Of these accretions none but
+  the d’Hendecourt Crucifixion is at all persuasive to me.
+
+Footnote 5:
+
+  The latest and fullest discussion of Pietro Cavallini is by Stanley
+  Lothrop in _Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome_, Vol. II, 1918. I
+  think he is in error in seeing Cavallini at Assisi and Perugia. Van
+  Marle, note above, has thrown additional light on the continuity of a
+  Roman school.
+
+Footnote 6:
+
+  _C. &. C._ (Ed. Hutton) Vol. I, pp. 194–5. Zimmermann (_Giotto_ &c.,
+  Leipzig, 1899), H. Thode (_Franz von Assisi_, Berlin, 1904), and Fr.
+  Hermanin (_Gallerie nazionali Italiane_, Vol. V (1902), p. 113)
+  ascribe the Stories of Isaac and some other superior frescoes of the
+  upper row to youthful Giotto. They seem too accomplished and mature
+  for that and are all allied to Gaddo Gaddi’s mosaics at Rome.
+
+Footnote 7:
+
+  _Giotto._ Osvald Sirén, _Giotto and Some of his Followers_, Cambridge,
+  Harvard Univ. Press, 1917, in 2 Vols., gives a reasonable chronology
+  and is valuable for illustrations.
+
+  Roger E. Fry, _Monthly Review_, Vol. I, pp. 126–151; Vol. II, pp.
+  139–157; Vol. III, pp, 96–121 is an admirable critical analysis of
+  Giotto’s style, but the ascriptions and chronology are often doubtful.
+  Excellent on the frescoes at Sta. Croce. The essay is reprinted in
+  _Vision and Design_, London, 1921.
+
+  J. B. Supino’s startling views in the chronology of Giotto, expressed
+  in _Giotto_, Florence, 1920, in 3 Vols., seem to me fantastic.
+
+  His general order is the Allegories of the Lower Church and the
+  Baroncelli altar-piece about 1300, the Arena frescoes 1305, the St.
+  Francis series in the Upper Church about 1310, the Peruzzi Chapel
+  about 1312, etc.
+
+  My list would be:
+
+ The Early Part of the St. Francis Series (II-XVIII)   before         1300
+ The Mosaic of the Navicella (completely restored)     about          1300
+ Stigmatization of St. Francis (Louvre)                  „              „
+ The Arena Frescoes                                    about          1305
+ The Madonna of Ognissanti                               „              „
+ The Franciscan Allegories, Lower Church (design only)   „           1312–20
+ The Stefaneschi Altar-piece (in part)                   „    1320, perhaps earlier
+ The Peruzzi Chapel, Santa Croce                       after          1320
+ The Bardi Chapel,     „   „                           about          1325
+ The Dormition of the Virgin, at Berlin                  „            1325
+ Madonna, Ancona, Bologna (design only)                  „            1330
+ The Paradise in the Bargello                          after          1330
+ Part of the Magdalen Legends there                      „              „
+ Part of the Magdalen Legends, Lower Church, Assisi      „              „
+ Baroncelli Altar-piece (design only)                    „              „
+ Small panels of the Life of Christ
+ at New York, Fenway Court, Boston;                      „              „
+ Munich and Berenson Collection,                         „              „
+ Settignano (bottega works)                              „              „
+
+Footnote 8:
+
+  Padre Angelis, _Collis Paradisi_, 1704, I, p. 33.
+
+Footnote 9:
+
+  About the 28 stories of St. Francis there is no agreement except that
+  Nos. I and XXVI-VIII are by the “Cecelia Master.” Venturi sees Giotto
+  only in the later stories. I agree with Berenson that the ruder
+  frescoes, II-XVIII, which are based on the so-called Roman work above
+  show us Giotto at his beginnings. For the various views consult Brown
+  and Rankin, _A Short History_, pp. 48–9, 59, 61.
+
+Footnote 10:
+
+  Alex. Romdahl’s attempt to set the upper row many years later than the
+  rest is entirely unconvincing to me. See _Jahrbuch der K. Preussischen
+  Kunstsammlungen_, 1911, pp. 3–18.
+
+Footnote 11:
+
+  John Ruskin, _Mornings in Florence_, _passim_.
+
+Footnote 12:
+
+  _Giotto’s Followers._ Osvald Sirén, _Giotto and Some of his
+  Followers_, see note 7, may be freely consulted for illustrations and
+  very cautiously for attributions.
+
+Footnote 13:
+
+  Peleo Bacci’s ascription of the recently discovered Passion frescoes
+  in the Badia to Buffalmacco seems reasonable, _Bollettino d’ Arte_, V
+  (1911) pp. 1–27. Dr. Sirén ascribes these frescoes to Nardo di Cione
+  and follows Venturi in identifying Buffalmacco with the “Cecelia
+  Master.” _Burlington Magazine_, Vol. XXXVI, p. 10. The hypothesis
+  still lacks solid foundation.
+
+Footnote 14:
+
+  By Vasari the Spanish Chapel was divided between Taddeo Gaddi and
+  Simone Martini. _C. &. C._ discovered that the work was by an Andrea
+  da Firenze who as a document attests painted stories of S. Ranieri at
+  Pisa, in 1377. The contract which proves this Andrea to have been
+  Andrea Bonaiuti, active 1343–77, was published in _Arte e Storia_,
+  Florence, Feb., 1917, p. 33. It gives the date of the contract for the
+  Spanish Chapel, 1365.
+
+  The very elaborate decoration of the Spanish Chapel is fully described
+  in _C. &. C._ (Hutton) Vol. I., pp. 309–312. There are useful literary
+  illustrations in Venturi, _Storia dell’ arte italiana_, Vol. V., pp.
+  792–809. Ruskin in _Mornings in Florence_ gives a partial analysis
+  which is fascinating from a literary point of view, but badly
+  overestimates the merit of the work.
+
+
+                           CHAPTER II.—SIENA
+
+GENERAL WORKS:
+
+ Langton Douglas. _A History of Siena._ New York, 1902.
+ Ferdinand Schevill. _Siena, the Story of a Mediæval Commune_, New York,
+    1909.
+ Edmund G. Gardiner. _The Story of Siena and San Gemignano_, London,
+    1902.
+ William Heywood and Lucy Olcott. _Guide to Siena, History and Art_,
+    London, 1903.
+
+  PAINTING, THE SCHOOL.
+
+      Emil Jacobsen. _Sienesische Meister des Trecento in der Gemälde
+          Galerie zu Siena_, Strassburg, 1907; _Das Quattrocento in
+          Siena_, Strassburg, 1908; _Sodoma und das Cinquecento in
+          Siena_, Strassburg, 1910; all very valuable for illustrations.
+
+      Venturi, _Storia dell’ Arte Italiana_, Vols. V and VII.
+
+      Bernard Berenson, _Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance_,
+          New York and London, 1909.
+
+      C. Ricci, _Il Palazzo Pubblico di Siena e la Mostra d’Antica Arte
+          Senese_, Bergamo, 1904, offers a good and inexpensive survey
+          of Sienese handicraft in general.
+
+  SIENESE PICTURES IN THE UNITED STATES. Consult the illustrated
+      catalogues of the Fogg Museum, Harvard; and of the Jarves
+      Collection, Yale. Also many special articles in _Art in America_,
+      especially the series in Vol. VIII-IX, by F. Mason Perkins, _Some
+      Sienese Paintings in American Collections_.
+
+Footnote 15:
+
+  The fact that the Madonna of the Palazzo Pubblico had been much
+  repainted in Duccio’s time not unnaturally threw Milanesi and other
+  critics off the track. But the date is entirely genuine (see _C. & C._
+  [Douglas] Vol. I, p. 162, note 1*; and E. Jacobsen, _Das Trecento_, p.
+  18). The latter writes, “The signature and date are genuine. There is
+  no tenable ground for doubting them.”
+
+  I have satisfied myself by close inspection that such is the case, and
+  the half dozen or so other panels associated with this Madonna
+  stylistically all seem to belong to the first half of the 13th
+  century.
+
+Footnote 16:
+
+  Sirén, _Burlington Magazine_, XXXII (1918) p. 45, ascribes this panel
+  to Cavallini. Berenson in _Dedalo_, Vol. II, fasc. v, allots it to
+  Constantinople at the end of the 12th century. Neither view is even
+  plausible to me.
+
+Footnote 17:
+
+  _Duccio._ A. Lisini, _Notizie di Duccio_ &c. Siena, 1898. Curt
+  Weigelt, _Duccio di Buoninsegna_, Leipzig, 1911, the standard
+  monograph, well illustrated.
+
+Footnote 18:
+
+  The whole matter of the Rucellai Madonna is well discussed by Douglas
+  in his edition of _C. & C._, Vol. I. Appendix to chapter VI. Andreas
+  Aubert, _Cimabue_, p. 138 ff., and Curt Weigelt, _Duccio_, both agree
+  that the Rucellai Madonna is the picture called for by the contract of
+  1285, hence is by Duccio. Aside from many stylistic similarities to
+  Duccio’s early Madonna with Franciscans in the Siena Academy, the
+  exquisitely drawn bare feet of the Angels in the Rucellai Madonna
+  amount almost to a signature for Siena’s greatest painter. H. Thode
+  and O. Sirén hold that a picture designed and begun by Duccio was
+  finished by Cimabue, _Toskanische Maler_, pp. 308–9, and note 41 to
+  latter page. The hypothesis that Duccio was strongly influenced by
+  Cimabue in this work seems simpler.
+
+Footnote 19:
+
+  The contract is worth quoting in part from G. Fontana, _Due documenti
+  inediti riguardanti Cimabue_, Pisa, 1878; it is reprinted in
+  Strzygowski, _Cimabue und Rom_, Wien, 1888. The papers were recovered
+  from a grocer who was about to use them for wrappers.
+
+
+  “Which picture of the Majesty of Divine and Blessed Virgin Mary and of
+  the Apostles and other saints is to be made in columns and in the
+  predella and [main] spaces of the picture good and pure florin gold
+  shall be used; the other pictures which are to be made in the
+  aforesaid panel above the columns in tabernacles, gables, and frames
+  shall be made ... of good silver gilt.”
+
+
+  The picture apparently was a polyptych of three, five, or seven panels
+  with columns and round arches, with an upper order of gables and
+  tabernacles. It seems to have been the first well-peopled Madonna in
+  Majesty, and it probably served as Duccio’s exemplar. Cimabue died
+  before finishing it, but since in Nov. 1302 he received a large
+  installment of 40 Pisan _lire_, he must at least have fully drawn the
+  composition on the panel.
+
+Footnote 20:
+
+  _Simone Martini._ See the standard work by Raimond van Marle, _Simone
+  Martini_, Strasbourg, 1920.
+
+  There is considerable difference among critics in dating these
+  frescoes, and no objective evidence. The early date, 1322–25,
+  suggested by Venturi and Van Marle, is confirmed by the stylistic
+  character of the work. It lacks the calligraphic, linear formulas
+  which abound in Simone’s works after 1330. The early date also agrees
+  with the general probabilities of the course of events in the
+  decoration of the Lower Church at Assisi.
+
+Footnote 21:
+
+  Frey’s ed. Berlin, 1886, p. 42.
+
+Footnote 22:
+
+  The contract for this altar-piece is translated in the illustrations
+  to chapter II, p. 106.
+
+Footnote 23:
+
+  Venturi, Vol. V, pp. 680–694, offers a sensible compromise view of the
+  authorship of this series, assigning to Pietro himself only the
+  Deposition, Entombment, Stigmatization of St. Francis and a Madonna
+  and Saints, ascribing most of the subjects to an assistant. Dr. Ernest
+  Dewald in a forthcoming Princeton dissertation takes a more skeptical
+  view than Venturi as to Pietro’s presence at Assisi.
+
+Footnote 24:
+
+  However the “Cecelia Master,” active about 1300, deals ably with such
+  spatial problems. See O. Sirén, _Burlington Magazine_, Vol. XXXIV, p.
+  234, and XXXVI, p. 4. and _Giotto_, plates 11–13, Vol. II.
+
+Footnote 25:
+
+  _Sassetta._ Bernard Berenson. _A Painter of the Franciscan Legend_,
+  (Sassetta), London and New York, 1909.
+
+Footnote 26:
+
+  _Matteo di Giovanni._ We have the standard work of G. Hartlaub,
+  _Matteo da Siena_, Strassburg, 1910. Mr. Berenson in _Essays in the
+  Study of Sienese Painting_, New York, 1918, essay on Cozzarelli, has
+  made useful criticisms of the list of pictures usually ascribed to
+  Matteo.
+
+Footnote 27:
+
+  _Sodoma._ Hobart Cust, _Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, usually styled
+  “Sodoma,”_ New York, 1906.
+
+
+               CHAPTER III.—MASACCIO AND THE NEW REALISM
+
+On the general matter of the realists of the Early Renaissance not much
+has been added to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, but Mr. Berenson’s comment in
+_Florentine Painters_ and _Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance_
+is of high critical value. Vasari is interesting, but never more
+inaccurate than when dealing with this group. As usual the latest
+collected information is in Venturi. _Storia_, Vol. VII, part I, and
+elsewhere.
+
+Footnote 28:
+
+  Matteo Villani, _Istorie_, Florence, 1581, Lib. I, cap. iv, pp. 5–6.
+
+Footnote 29:
+
+  _Lorenzo Monaco._ The standard work is by O. Sirén, _Don Lorenzo
+  Monaco_, Strassburg, 1905.
+
+Footnote 30:
+
+  _Fra Angelico._ Langton Douglas. _Fra Angelico_, London and New York,
+  1900.
+
+  Vasari’s _Life_ is admirable and in essentials correct.
+
+Footnote 31:
+
+  _Masolino-Masaccio._ The summary in _C. & C._ (Douglas) Vol. IV;
+  (Hutton), Vol. II, reasonably brings the controversy up to date. The
+  latest review is by Dr. Richard Offner, _Art in America_, Vol. VIII,
+  pp. 68–76, _A St. Jerome by Masolino_. Dr. Offner, in _Dedalo_, Mar.,
+  1923, publishes a fine St. Julian, by Masolino, which reveals in a new
+  light that artist’s romantic temperamentalism. Mr. Berenson, l. c.,
+  publishes a predella piece for the same panel.
+
+  The large album of plates accompanying August H. Schmarsow’s
+  _Masaccio, der Begründer des Klassischen Stils_ &c. Kassel, 1900, is
+  indispensable to the serious student. It is available in the great
+  libraries. Cuts of all the works involved in the controversy are more
+  readily attainable in P. Toesca’s _Masolino da Panicale_, Bergamo,
+  1908, and in Venturi, _Storia_, Vol. VII, pt. I.
+
+Footnote 32:
+
+  The rider with his back turned at the left of the fresco of the
+  Calvary has a rondel protecting the nape of his neck. It is a
+  short-lived and unsuccessful invention which was not used before
+  1435–40. This information, which I owe to Dr. Bashford Dean of the
+  Metropolitan Museum, dates the Calvary well after Masaccio’s death,
+  and, inferentially, all the other frescoes in the same chapel.
+
+Footnote 33:
+
+  _Cassoni_ and other Furniture Panels. The standard work is by Paul
+  Schubring, _Cassoni_ &c. Leipzig, 1915.
+
+  Many of the examples in American Collections have been published and
+  discussed by William Rankin and myself in the _Burlington Magazine_,
+  Vol. VIII, IX. See also a popular sketch by me in _Arts and
+  Decoration_, Dec. ’05. The furnishing and decoration of a patrician
+  Florentine house in the 15th century is learnedly and delightfully
+  treated by A. Schiaparelli, _La Casa fiorentina_ &c., Florence, 1908.
+
+Footnote 34:
+
+  See my article in _Art in America_, Vol. VIII, p. 154, and in _Arts
+  and Decoration_, Note 6, above.
+
+Footnote 35:
+
+  _Masaccio_, bibliography in Note 4 above.
+
+  In essentials the view and chronology of Masaccio’s works here given
+  differs from Cavalcaselle’s only in relegating the frescoes in S.
+  Clemente to Masolino and their proper date in the late 30s or early
+  40s. In this I have been partially anticipated by Pietro Toesca,
+  _Masolino da Panicale_, Bergamo, 1908.
+
+  The reader may justly wish me to commit myself on this most disputed
+  question to the extent of a list. I give it in a tentative
+  chronological order assuming that Masaccio may have begun to work as
+  early as 1420.
+
+
+                _Early Works under Masolino’s influence_:
+
+  Madonna and Saints (fresco). Shrine at Montemarciano near S. Giovanni.
+  Pietà (fresco).   Cathedral, Empoli.
+  Miracle of healing by Christ (ruined by repainting). John C. Johnson
+     Coll., Philadelphia.
+  Madonna and St. Ann.   Uffizi, Florence.
+  Adam and Eve Tempted (fresco).   Brancacci Chapel.
+  Resuscitation of Tabitha (fresco).   Brancacci Chapel.
+
+
+                              _Later Works_:
+
+  St. Peter Preaching (fresco, possibly earlier). Brancacci Chapel.
+  Birth of St. John (salver). Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin.
+  Polyptych for the Carmine, Pisa, 1426.
+      The Madonna, some small pilaster pieces, and a small rondel with
+         bust of God Father. National Gallery, London.
+      Three predella panels (largely school work) and some small
+         pilaster pieces. Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin.
+      Crucifixion central pinnacle. Naples Museum.
+      A Saint (upper order). Civic Museum, Pisa.
+      A Saint (upper order). Lanckoronski, Vienna.
+  The Trinity (fresco). S. Maria Novella, Florence.
+  All the remaining frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel save the parts and
+     panels now universally assigned to Filippino Lippi.
+
+Footnote 36:
+
+  Schmarsow, _Masaccio Studien_, bd. 3. p. 27, 8.
+
+Footnote 37:
+
+  _Andrea del Castagno_, see the important articles by Herbert P. Horne
+  in the _Burlington Magazine_, Vol. VII, 1905. Richard Offner, in _Art
+  in America_, Vol. VII, pp. 227–35, first published the admirable
+  portrait in Mr. Morgan’s Library, New York. A magnificent tournament
+  shield with the figure of a David is in the Widener Collection, Elkins
+  Park, Penna., and was first published by Guido Cagnola in _Rassegna d’
+  Arte_, Vol. XIII (1913), p. 49.
+
+  Andrea worked at Venice in 1442. See G. Fiocca, _Burlington Magazine_,
+  Vol. XL, p. 11.
+
+Footnote 38:
+
+  _Alesso Baldovinetti._ See E. Londi, _Alesso Baldovinetti_, Firenze,
+  1907.
+
+
+       CHAPTER IV.—FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE
+
+Footnote 39:
+
+  _Fra Filippo Lippi._ Edward C. Strutt, _Fra Filippo Lippi_, London,
+  1906. Vasari’s _Life_ is capital. Robert Browning’s poem, in _Men and
+  Women_, an admirable side-light.
+
+Footnote 40:
+
+  _Benozzo Gozzoli._ I accept Col. G. F. Young’s date for these
+  frescoes. See _The Medici_, New York, 1909, Vol. I., Chapter vii,
+  where there is a good analysis of this decoration.
+
+Footnote 41:
+
+  _Antonio Pollaiuolo._ Maud Crutwell’s _Antonio Pollaiuolo_, London and
+  New York, 1907. For later information consult Venturi, _Storia_, Vol.
+  VII, pt. I, pp. 558–578.
+
+Footnote 42:
+
+  _Piero della Francesca._ W. G. Waters, _Piero della Francesca_,
+  London, 1901; and Corrado Ricci’s superbly illustrated folio, _Piero
+  della Francesca_, Rome, 1910.
+
+Footnote 43:
+
+  _Early Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel._ Magnificently reproduced in
+  the album accompanying Ernst Steinmann’s _Die Sixtinische Cappelle_,
+  Munich, 1901.
+
+Footnote 44:
+
+  _Francesco Pesellino._ Consult Dr. W. Weisbach’s able and beautifully
+  illustrated work, _Francesco Pesellino und die Romantik der
+  Frührenaissance_, Berlin, 1901. For cuts of _Cassoni_, Paul Schubring,
+  _Cassoni_, Leipzig, 1915, and the books and articles already cited in
+  note 6 to Chapter 3.
+
+Footnote 45:
+
+  _Domenico Ghirlandaio._ A copious and satisfactory life is that of
+  Gerald S. Davies, _Ghirlandaio_, London and New York, 1909. Briefer
+  but of greater cultural scope is Ghirlandaio, by Henri Hauvette,
+  Paris, “Les maîtres de l’art.” For a summary criticism my article in
+  _The Nation_ (N. Y.), Aug. 20, 1908, p. 167. Ruskin’s famous assault
+  on Ghirlandaio in _Mornings in Florence_ is joyous reading if
+  whimsically exaggerated.
+
+
+              CHAPTER V.—BOTTICELLI AND LEONARDO DA VINCI
+
+Footnote 46:
+
+  _Botticelli._ The standard work is Herbert P. Horne, _Sandro
+  Botticelli_, London, 1908. A little additional information may be
+  found in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _A History of Painting in Italy_,
+  Hutton Ed. Vol. II, and in Venturi, _Storia dell’ Arte Italiana_, Vol.
+  VII, pt. 1.
+
+  Walter Pater’s essay in _The Renaissance_ offers beautifully a
+  one-sided view. The essays, the _Soul of a Fact_, and
+  _Quattrocentisteria_, in Maurice Hewlett’s _Earthwork out of Tuscany_
+  are poetically illuminative. Mr. Berenson’s analysis in _Florentine
+  Painters of the Renaissance_ is important. I have written more fully
+  on Botticelli in _Estimates in Art_, New York, 1912.
+
+  Botticelli’s Dante illustrations are published in a cheaper and more
+  sumptuous form by Friedrich P. Lippmann. _Botticelli, Zeichnungen von
+  Sandro Botticelli_, Berlin, 1896.
+
+  Lists of Botticelli’s works differ considerably. I incline to accept a
+  number of early paintings which are neglected by such exclusive
+  critics as Berenson and Horne. My own list, which for reasons of space
+  cannot be given here, would not differ much from that of A. Venturi,
+  in _Storia_ VII, i, 588–642.
+
+Footnote 47:
+
+  _Filippino Lippi._ I. B. Supino, _Les deux Lippi_, Firenze, 1904.
+
+Footnote 48:
+
+  _Piero di Cosimo._ Fritz Knapp, _Piero di Cosimo_, Halle, 1899. As
+  usual later information in Venturi, _Storia_, Vol. VII, pt. 1.
+
+Footnote 49:
+
+  This extraordinary series of which four have been recovered is fully
+  discussed and somewhat differently interpreted by Roger E. Fry, in
+  _Burlington Magazine_, Vol. XXXVIII, p. 131_f._ See also letter on
+  page 257.
+
+Footnote 50:
+
+  _Leonardo da Vinci._ The standard life is by W. von Seidlitz,
+  _Leonardo da Vinci_, Berlin, 1909. The early work of Leonardo and his
+  relations with Verrocchio have been thoroughly and lucidly analyzed by
+  Jens Thys, _Leonardo da Vinci_, London, 1913. Amid the confusingly
+  rich bibliography, the student may do well to stick to Vasari’s
+  admirable _Life_ in any of the translations, to Dr. O. Sirén’s
+  scholarly and cautious book _Leonardo da Vinci_, New Haven, and
+  London, 1916 and to the late Dr. J. P. Richter’s incomparable work
+  “The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci,” London, 1883, obtainable
+  only in libraries. Giovanni Poggi, _Leonardo da Vinci_, Firenze, 1919,
+  has thoroughly edited Vasari’s _Life_, and should be consulted for
+  latest views and for illustrations. My own view on the early
+  development of Leonardo, a most disputed matter, is set forth more
+  fully in _Art and Archæology_, Vol. IV. pp. 111–122.
+
+  For literary side-lights Walter Pater’s essay, in _The Renaissance_;
+  for an iconoclastic view Berenson in _Study and Criticism of Italian
+  Art_, Fourth Series, New York, 1920. Edward McCurdy’s selected
+  translations from _The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci_, New York,
+  1906, are valuable for those to whom Richter is inaccessible.
+  Leonardo’s drawings, which are no less important than his paintings,
+  may best be approached through Mr. Berenson’s monumental work, _The
+  Drawings of the Florentine Painters_, New York and London, 1903, while
+  the drawings before 1480 are clearly and ably discussed by Dr. Thys.
+
+Footnote 51:
+
+  The capital mistake of the more exclusive critics of Leonardo’s early
+  work is that they set this delightful little masterpiece at the
+  beginning of the series in an impossibly early date. There is no such
+  manipulation of paint and no such feeling for unity of landscape
+  before 1475 or so. Being a revision of the design of the Uffizi
+  Annunciation, it is necessarily later.
+
+  My list of Leonardo’s would include, in approximate order:
+
+   1. In Verocchio’s Baptism. The landscape at left and distance, the
+        Angel kneeling to right, about 1470, Uffizi.
+
+   2. Madonna and Child with an Angel, design by Verrocchio, London.
+
+   3. The Annunciation, design mostly by Verrocchio, about 1475, Uffizi.
+
+   4. Portrait of a Girl, possibly a Verrocchio, Prince Liechtenstein,
+        Vienna.
+
+   5. Annunciation, Louvre.
+
+   6. Benois Madonna, about 1478–9, Petrograd.
+
+   7. St. Jerome, unfinished, Vatican, Rome.
+
+   8. Adoration of the Magi, left unfinished about 1481, Uffizi.
+
+   9. Cartoon of St. Ann, Burlington House, London.
+
+  10. Madonna of the Rocks, between 1480–83, Paris.
+
+  11. So-called Belle Ferronnière, perhaps bottega piece, about 1490,
+        Paris.
+
+  12. Girl with an Ermine, perhaps a bottega piece, about 1495, Cracow.
+
+  13. Clay model of the Sforza horse, destroyed in 1500.
+
+  14. Last Supper, 1498, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.
+
+  15. Cartoon for a St. Ann, lost but represented by sketches at Venice,
+        1503.
+
+  16. Madonna of the Distaff, represented by old copies.
+
+  17. Cartoon for Battle of Anghiari, only central group painted, partly
+        represented by sketches and old copies, 1504.
+
+  18. Portrait of Mona Lisa, Paris.
+
+  19. Cartoon for a standing Leda, probably only the figure, since
+        numerous old copies have widely varying accessories.
+
+  20. Madonna of the Rocks, 1507, London.
+
+  21. Cartoon for a Kneeling Leda, the figure only. Sketches and old
+        copies.
+
+  22. Madonna and St. Ann, Paris.
+
+  23. St. John, half-length, Paris.
+
+  All Leonardo’s main activity as a painter lies from 1470–1500. He
+  painted a picture about every two years.
+
+  Various sculptures have been ascribed to Leonardo. Of these only two,
+  which will have been made in Verrocchio’s _bottega_ and under his
+  direction, seem to me to deserve the distinction. A terra cotta
+  Madonna and Child in the Metropolitan Museum, there ascribed to
+  Verrocchio’s school, may represent Leonardo’s modelling about 1465. A
+  stucco Madonna owned by Mr. George Diblee, at Oxford, is perhaps ten
+  years later. The first is discussed by me in _Art and Archaeology_,
+  Vol. IV, p. 122; the second is reproduced and accepted as a Leonardo
+  by Prof. A. Venturi in _L’ Arte_, Vol. XXV, p. 131.
+
+Footnote 52:
+
+  The best study of this picture and of its contemporary influence is
+  that of George Gronau in _Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst_. N. F. Vol.
+  XXIII, pp. 253–259. He fails to perceive that so primitive a picture
+  as late as 1478 furnishes the best reason for accepting most of the
+  rejected early Leonardos.
+
+Footnote 53:
+
+  In all this matter Jens Thys’s admirable studies are indispensable.
+  See note 5 above.
+
+Footnote 54:
+
+  The Lady and the Ermine and the Belle Ferronnière are thoroughly
+  discussed by H. Ochenkowski, _Burlington Magazine_, Vol. XXXIV, p. 186
+  _f._, where a full bibliography will be found.
+
+Footnote 55:
+
+  This error which has persisted since Vasari was finally corrected by
+  the great restorer Cavenaghi in his report of the last restoration.
+  Malaguzzi Valeri in _Milano_, Bergamo, 1906, pt. 2, p. 14, first
+  advanced the correct view that the painting was done in tempera.
+
+Footnote 56:
+
+  Kenyon Cox, _Concerning Painting_, New York, 1917, p. 73.
+
+Footnote 57:
+
+  _Fra Bartolommeo._ The standard work is Fritz Knapp’s _Fra Bartolommeo
+  della Porta_, Halle, 1903. H. v. d. Gablentz, _Fra Bartolommeo_ in 2
+  vols., Leipzig, 1922.
+
+Footnote 58:
+
+  _Andrea del Sarto._ H. Guinness, _Andrea del Sarto_, London and New
+  York, 1901. Andrea’s drawings are finely analyzed by Bernard Berenson
+  in _The Drawings of the Florentine Painters_.
+
+Footnote 59:
+
+  _Bronzino._ Hans Schulze, _Die Werke Angelo Bronzino’s_, Strassburg,
+  1911.
+
+Footnote 60:
+
+  _Pontormo._ We have two admirable books by the same writer, Dr. F. M.
+  Clapp; _Les Dessins de Pontormo_, Paris, 1914; _Pontormo, his Life and
+  Work_, New Haven, 1916.
+
+  Pontormo’s supreme masterpiece of portraiture, The Halberdier, is
+  published by myself in _Art in America_, Vol. X, p. 66.
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE HIGH RENAISSANCE. The indispensable books are, for leading ideas, J.
+C. Burckhardt, _Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy_, New York,
+1890; for the stylistic development in Art, H. Wölfflin, _The Art of the
+Italian Renaissance_, New York, 1913. Very valuable for history and
+biography are J. Addington Symonds’s _The Renaissance in Italy_, 5
+Vols., London; and H. O. Taylor’s _Thought and Expression in the
+Sixteenth Century_, New York, 1920. For Renaissance ideals of nobility
+and moderation the capital contemporary work is _Il Cortegiano_, by
+Baldassare Castiglione, translated as _The Courtier_ by L. E. Opdycke,
+New York, 1905. For stylistic analysis Berenson’s introductions to
+_Florentine Painters_, and to _Central Italian Painters of the
+Renaissance_, are suggestive and important.
+
+Footnote 61:
+
+  _Gentile da Fabriano._ A. Colasanti, _Gentile da Fabriano_. Bergamo,
+  1909. Also my Essay review. _The Nation_, Vol. 89 (1909) pp. 168–170.
+
+Footnote 62:
+
+  _Andrea da Bologna._ _The Nation_ (N. Y.) Vol. 95. (1912) p. 392.
+
+Footnote 63:
+
+  _Fifteenth Century Umbrians._ Walter Rothes, in _Anfänge ... der
+  Alt-Umbrischen Malerschulen_, Strassburg, 1908, gives excellent
+  illustrations for the Early Umbrian Artists. Also for cuts, U. Gnoli,
+  _La Mostra Umbra_, Bergamo.
+
+Footnote 64:
+
+  _Melozzo da Forlì._ A. Schmarsow, _Melozzo da Forlì_, Berlin, 1886,
+  and C. Ricci, _Melozzo da Forlì_, Rome, 1911, are the standard works.
+
+Footnote 65:
+
+  _Luca Signorelli._ Maud Crutwell, _Luca Signorelli_, London, 1901. See
+  Venturi, vii, as usual.
+
+Footnote 66:
+
+  _Pietro Perugino._ Venturi, _Storia_, Vol. VII, pt. 2, ch. v, makes
+  Perugino the direct pupil of Piero della Francesca, ascribing to
+  Perugino many pictures formerly ascribed to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. The
+  view while attractive is not wholly convincing to me. All of
+  Perugino’s works are published in _Klassiker der Kunst_, No. XXV,
+  Stuttgart, 1914. The best general estimate of Perugino is that of
+  Wölfflin and of Berenson, in _Central Italian Painters_.
+
+Footnote 67:
+
+  The _Cambio_ frescoes. While it is inherently likely that Raphael
+  worked on these frescoes, Prof. Venturi’s plea for Raphael’s
+  authorship of God, the Prophets and Sibyls, _Storia_, Vol. VII, pt. 2,
+  p. 828 _ff._ depends largely on the shaky evidence of drawings
+  attributed arbitrarily to Raphael.
+
+  RAPHAEL AND MICHELANGELO. From the point of view of pure style the
+  best treatment of these artists and of the High Renaissance is that of
+  Heinrich Wölfflin in _The Art of the Italian Renaissance_, New York,
+  1913. It is a book that every student should read and if possible own.
+  Mr. Berenson’s treatment of space composition, in the introduction to
+  _Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance_, is perhaps his finest
+  achievement in criticism.
+
+Footnote 68:
+
+  _Raphael._ Hermann Grimm’s two volume _Life of Raphael_ is still
+  valuable for background. Among the numerous popular books in English
+  none is outstanding. Henry Strachey’s _Raphael_, in “Great Masters of
+  Art,” is good, and so are Julia Cartwright’s two monographs: _The
+  Early Work of Raphael_ and _Raphael in Rome_, in the _Portfolio
+  Series_, London, 1895.
+
+        For Raphael’s participation in the frescoes of the Cambio it
+  seems to me that Professor Venturi, in _Storia dell’ Arte Italiana_,
+  Vol. VII, part 2, makes out only a plausible case.
+
+        Reproductions of all of Raphael’s works in _Klassiker der
+  Kunst_, No. I., _Raphael_, Stuttgart and Leipzig.
+
+        Among the innumerable essays on Raphael none is more
+  understanding than John La Farge’s, in _Great Masters_, New York,
+  1903.
+
+Footnote 69:
+
+  _Michelangelo._ The best source for the study of Michelangelo,
+  painter, is the superb plates in Ernst Steinmann’s _Die Sixtinische
+  Cappelle_, Munich, 1901. Among recent short biographies that of
+  Charles Holroyd, _Michelangelo_, London and New York, 1911 and Romain
+  Rolland (a longer study, _The Life of Michelangelo_, New York, 1912; a
+  different and shorter work, _Michelangelo, a Study, &c._, New York,
+  1915) are perhaps the best. The two volume biographies by Hermann
+  Grimm and by J. Addington Symonds are valuable, especially for
+  historical background. But the reader may be wise to content himself
+  with one of the brief biographies and such contemporary lives as
+  Vasari’s, Ascanio Condivi’s, and Francesco d’Olanda’s. The two latter
+  are translated in Holroyd’s book. The drawings of Michelangelo are
+  admirably discussed and presented in a perfect selection by Mr.
+  Berenson in _The Drawings of the Florentine Painters_. The drawings
+  are chronologically arranged and beautifully reproduced by Karl Frey,
+  _Die Handzeichnungen Michelangelo’s_, 2 vols., Berlin, 1911. W. R.
+  Valentiner treats _The Late Years of Michelangelo_ (New York, 1914)
+  with insight, devoting himself chiefly to the more finished drawings.
+  For a brief yet comprehensive survey, John La Farge in _Great
+  Masters_, New York, 1903. The works are completely reproduced in
+  _Klassiker der Kunst_, No. VII. _Michelangelo_, Stuttgart and Leipzig.
+
+
+                  CHAPTER VII.—EARLY VENETIAN PAINTING
+
+Footnote 70:
+
+  Little literature of a general sort is available to the English
+  speaking reader. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _A History of Painting in
+  Northern Italy_, admirably edited by Tancred Borenius, in three
+  volumes, London, 1913, is the chief repository of facts. Evelyn March
+  Phillipps, _The Venetian School of Painting_, London, 1912, is an
+  excellent brief survey. For readers of Italian Lionello Venturi’s _Le
+  Origini della Pittura Veneziana_, Venice, 1911, is the best book. A
+  treasure house of materials in Laudadeo Testi’s two volumes, _La
+  Storia della Pittura Veneziana_, Bergamo. John Ruskin’s masterpiece,
+  _Stones of Venice_, may be consulted with profit and delight. There
+  are treasures of antiquarian information in Pompeo Molmenti, _La
+  Storia di Venezia nella Vita Privata_, 3 vols., Bergamo, 1905.
+
+Footnote 71:
+
+  _Jacopo Bellini._ The extraordinary and fascinating sketch books are
+  published in two forms, by Corrado Ricci, _Jacopo Bellini e i suo
+  libri di designi_, 2 vols., Florence, 1908, and by V. Goloubew, _Les
+  Dessins de Jacopo Bellini_, Bruxelles, 1908.
+
+Footnote 72:
+
+  G. McNeill Rushforth, _Carlo Crivelli_, London, 1900.
+
+Footnote 73:
+
+  _Andrea Mantegna._ The standard work is by Paul Kristeller, _Andrea
+  Mantegna_, London and New York, 1901. Maud Crutwell’s short biography,
+  _Andrea Mantegna_, London, 1901, is excellent. Mr. Berenson’s subtle
+  analysis in _North Italian Painters of the Renaissance_ perhaps
+  overstresses Andrea’s defects. Mantegna’s complete works are
+  reproduced in _Klassiker der Kunst_, No. XVI, Stuttgart, 1910.
+
+Footnote 74:
+
+  _Antonello da Messina._ See L. Venturi, _Le Origini_, and A. Venturi,
+  _Storia_, VII, pt. 4. Recent attributions, Bernard Berenson, _Study
+  and Criticism of Italian Art_, 3rd Series, London, 1916, p. 79 _ff._
+
+Footnote 75:
+
+  _Giovanni Bellini._ Nothing notable in English except casual criticism
+  by Ruskin and Roger E. Fry’s admirable little book, _Giovanni
+  Bellini_, London, 1899, which is unfortunately out of print. For such
+  as read German—Georg Gronau, _Die Künstler-familie Bellini_, Leipzig,
+  1907, with abundant illustrations. Recently discovered pictures and a
+  better chronology, in Bernard Berenson: _Venetian Painting in
+  America_, New York, 1916.
+
+Footnote 76:
+
+  _Vettor Carpaccio._ Ludwig and Molmenti’s _The Life and Works of
+  Victor Carpaccio_, London, 1907, gives, aside from its main topic, a
+  vivid picture of the cultural condition of Venice about 1500. See my
+  essay review of it in _The Nation_, Vol. 86, (1908) pp. 315 _ff._ John
+  Ruskin’s delightful comments on Carpaccio are mostly in the _Guide to
+  the Academy_ at Venice and in _St. Mark’s Rest_, chapter _The Shrine
+  of the Slaves_, Library ed. Vol. XXIV.
+
+Footnote 77:
+
+  _Giorgione._ For the smallest list L. Venturi, _Giorgione e il
+  Giorgionismo_, Milan, 1913; for the longest list Herbert Cook,
+  _Giorgione_; for a middle view L. Justi, _Giorgione_, 2 vols., Berlin,
+  1908, most useful plates.
+
+  The general conditions of the problem are clearly stated by the late
+  Richard Norton in _Bernini and other Studies_, New York, 1914. L.
+  Hourticq, in _La Jeunesse de Titien_, Paris, 1919, has lately worked
+  over the pictures which lie between Titian and Giorgione in an
+  interesting but highly subjective fashion. Kenyon Cox, _Art in
+  America_, Vol. I, pp. 115 _ff._, makes the plausible suggestion that
+  the several portraits signed V or VV are by Titian, the letters
+  meaning Vecellius Venetus. This would make the Berlin portrait a
+  Titian.
+
+  Walter Pater’s essay on _The School of Giorgione_, in _The
+  Renaissance_ is as masterly for insight as it is for verbal beauty.
+
+  I hesitate to add one more to the varying opinions concerning
+  Giorgione’s paintings. At least I may introduce a novelty by classing
+  them according to probability, or rather according to the completeness
+  of my own conviction. In the whole matter we are largely in the field
+  of taste and opinion. E means early.
+
+
+                  _Paintings, m. j. surely by Giorgione_
+
+  1. The Shepherds finding the Infant Paris (repainted fragment, E)
+  Budapest
+
+  2. “The Soldier and the Gipsy” E. Prince Giovanelli
+
+  3. Madonna with St. Francis and St. George (1504) Castelfranco
+
+  4. The Three Philosophers (finished by Sebastiano del Piombo) Vienna
+
+  5. Orpheus and Eurydice (_cassone_ panel) Bergamo
+
+  6. The Sleeping Venus (landscape by Titian) Dresden
+
+  7. Fresco of Nude Woman, nearly effaced (1508), represented by
+  Zanetti’s print Fondaco de’ Tedeschi
+
+  8. Judith (cut down at sides) Petrograd
+
+  9. His own Portrait (much cut down and damaged) Brunswick
+
+  10. Christ with his Cross Church of S. Rocco
+
+  11. The Concert (finished by Titian? or repainted in his manner?)
+  Florence
+
+
+  _Paintings probably by Giorgione._ I accept these, but do not think
+  the evidence demonstrative.
+
+  12–13. Stories of the Infant Paris (two _cassone_ panels, E.) Sir
+  Martin Conway, Allington Castle, Maidstone, England
+
+  14. The Fire Ordeal of Moses (door panel, E.) Florence
+
+  15. The Judgment of Solomon (door panel, E.) Florence
+
+  16. Christ bearing his Cross, E. Fenway Court, Boston.
+
+  17. Homage to a Poet, E. London
+
+  18. Portrait of a Young Man (possibly an early Titian) Berlin
+
+  19. Boy With an Arrow (old copy?) Vienna
+
+  20. Shepherd with a Flute Hampton Court
+
+  21. David with Goliath’s Head (copy? or ruined original?) Vienna
+
+  22. Altar-piece of St. John Chrysostom (mostly executed by Sebastiano
+  del Piombo) S. Giovanni Crisostomo
+
+  23. The Pastoral Symphony (radically repainted in recent times.) Paris
+
+  24. Portrait of a Man New York
+
+
+  This list might still be extended by half a dozen numbers by including
+  pictures which may represent lost originals by Giorgione, but here we
+  are in a field too subjective for profitable discussion in a handbook.
+
+  _Pictures generally ascribed to Giorgione, I think erroneously._
+
+  The Knight of Malta (probably a Titian about 1515) Florence
+
+  Portrait of Broccardo Budapest
+
+  Storm Calmed by St. Mark (probably a Palma) Venice
+
+  Judgment of Solomon (Hourticq plausibly regards as copy of lost fresco
+  by Titian) Banks Coll., Kingston Lacy
+
+  Madonna with St. Antony and St. Roch (probably a Titian) Madrid
+
+  Portrait of a Woman Casino Borghese, Rome
+
+  The reason for excluding such works is their over-pathetic or
+  over-dramatic quality. The argument applies especially to the
+  Adulteress before Christ at Glasgow. Corroborative technical evidence
+  against this group may be found in L. Venturi’s excellent monograph.
+
+
+           CHAPTER VIII.—TITIAN AND THE VENETIAN RENAISSANCE
+
+On the Venetian Renaissance in general we have the works cited at the
+head of Notes for Chapter VII and for biographies and lists D. V.
+Hadeln, new ed. Ridolfi, _Le Maraviglie dell’ Arte_, Berlin, 1914. A
+brief survey by the late Kenyon Cox, in _Concerning Painting_, New York,
+1917, pp. 98–132, is valuable.
+
+Footnote 78:
+
+  _Titian._ Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s _The Life and Times of Titian_, in
+  2 vols., London, 1881, is still the fullest repository of information.
+  Georg Gronau’s popular but carefully done _Titian_, London and New
+  York, 1904, takes account of later documentary discoveries. As a
+  painter’s analysis of technical aims Charles Rickett’s _Titian_,
+  London, 1910, is noteworthy. Nearly all of Titian’s works are
+  published in _Klassiker der Kunst_, No. III, Stuttgart, 1906. Several
+  newly discovered pictures are reproduced in the recent volumes,
+  1918–22, of the _Burlington Magazine_, _Art in America_, and
+  _Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst_.
+
+Footnote 79:
+
+  _Titian’s Age._ All the available material on this disputed matter is
+  offered by Mr. Herbert Cook and Dr. George Gronau in a controversy
+  printed as appendices to Cook’s _Giorgione_, London, 1907. The early
+  evidence is very conflicting.
+
+    Writing in 1557   Dolce implies    Titian was born about  1489
+       „    „  1566–7 Vasari             „     „   „     „    1489
+       „    „  1564   A Spanish Envoy          „   „     „    1474
+       „    „  1567   A Spanish Consul         „   „     „    1482
+       „    „  1571   Titian himself     „     „   „     „    1477
+       „    „  1584   Borghini           „     „   „     „   1478–9
+
+  Writing in 1545 and 1548 Titian refers to his old age and disabilities
+  (Cook, p. 141 note), expressions more natural if he was sixty-eight
+  and seventy-one than they would be if he were only fifty-six and
+  fifty-nine.
+
+  Mr. Cook’s theory that Titian and his Spanish official friends grossly
+  exaggerated his age to secure prompter remittances from the Emperor
+  seems to me gratuitous and flimsy. Dr. Gronau convinces me that
+  neither Dolce nor Vasari can be regarded as serious witnesses. L.
+  Hourticq in _La Jeunesse de Titien_, Paris, 1919, adds next to nothing
+  to Cook in maintaining the later date for Titian’s birth.
+
+  The whole weight of evidence points to the fact that Titian told the
+  broad truth about his age, perhaps, indulging in a round number. I am
+  sure he was well over ninety when he described himself as ninety-five
+  in the letter of 1571, and that he died all but a centenarian.
+
+Footnote 80:
+
+  Pietro d’Achiardi, _Sebastiano de Piombo_, Roma, 1908.
+
+Footnote 81:
+
+  Max von Boehn, _Giorgione und Palma Vecchio_, Leipzig, 1908.
+
+Footnote 82:
+
+  Bernard Berenson, _Lorenzo Lotto_, London, 1905. Comprises also
+  careful studies of Alvise Vivarini, Cima, Montagna and other Venetic
+  painters. In _The Study and Criticism of Italian Art_, 3rd series,
+  London, 1916, the superb Saint Justine of the Valsecchi Collection is
+  rightly restored to Giovanni Bellini, l.c. p. 38 _ff._
+
+Footnote 83:
+
+  _Correggio._ The standard work, C. Ricci, _Antonio Allegri da
+  Coreggio_, New York, 1896. A delightful critical study, T. Sturge
+  Moore, _Correggio_, London and New York, 1906. The complete works in
+  _Klassiker der Kunst_, No. XVII, Stuttgart.
+
+  A new and convincing view of Correggio’s date of birth and early
+  development in Venturi, _Storia_, Vol. VII, pt. iii, pp. 1152 _ff._
+
+Footnote 84:
+
+  Evelyn March Phillipps, _Tintoretto_, London, 1911. Many of the
+  extraordinary tempera sketches are reproduced in the _Burlington
+  Magazine_ for January and February, 1910. H. Thode, _Tintoretto_,
+  Leipzig, 1901.
+
+  Many eloquent criticisms by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_ and _Stones of
+  Venice_ (see indices) and in the _Guide to the Academy at Venice_,
+  Library ed. Vol. XXIV.
+
+Footnote 85:
+
+  _Paolo Veronese._ See Kenyon Cox’s masterly essay in _Old Masters and
+  New_, New York.
+
+Footnote 86:
+
+  _G. B. Tiepolo._ The standard work is by Pompeo Molmenti. _G. B.
+  Tiepolo_, Milan, 1909.
+
+Footnote 87:
+
+  G. A. Simonson. _Francesco Guardi_, London, 1905. Numerous additions
+  by the same author in the _Burlington Magazine_ for succeeding years.
+
+
+                 CHAPTER IX.—THE REALISTS AND ECLECTICS
+
+On this period there is little available literature in English, but
+there are excellent sketches of most of the artists treated in this
+chapter in C. Ricci, _Art in Northern Italy_, New York, 1911.
+
+A. Pératé in A. Michel, _Histoire de l’Art_, Vol. Vª, gives a fuller
+summary.
+
+Footnote 88:
+
+  _Caravaggio._ W. Kallab, Austrian _Jahrbuch_, Vol. XXVI (1906), p. 272
+  _ff._, brief illustrated essay. Felix Witting, _Michelangelo da
+  Caravaggio_, Strassburg, 1916.
+
+Footnote 89:
+
+  _Salvator Rosa._ Lady Morgan, _The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa_,
+  in two vols., Paris, 1824. Leandro Ozzola, _Vita e opere di Salvator
+  Rosa_, Strassburg, 1908.
+
+  The passages translated in the text are from Bottari, _Raccolta di
+  lettere sulla Pittura_ &c., Vol. I, pp. 447, 450 _f._, Milan, 1822.
+
+Footnote 90:
+
+  _The Carracci._ The fundamental source is Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s
+  highly contentious and anecdotal work _Felsina Pittrice_; I have used
+  the two volume edition, Milan, 1841.
+
+  Gabriel Rouchès, _La Peinture Bolonaise à la Fin du XVI^e Siècle_,
+  Paris, 1913, is the standard work on the Eclectic School. On the
+  landscape of this school, which is highly important as preparatory to
+  Claude and Poussin, Rouchès has two remarkable essays in _Gazette des
+  Beaux Arts_, 5^e période Tome, III. (Jan. and Feb. nos. 1921) pp. 7
+  _ff._, and 119 _ff._
+
+  Hans Tietze, in Austrian _Jahrbuch_, Vol. XXVI (1906) p. 51 _ff._,
+  _Annibale Carracci’s Galerie im Palazzo Farnese und seine Römische
+  Werkstätte_—a very thorough and richly illustrated monograph on the
+  Carracci, including such scholars as Francesco Albani, and
+  Domenichino.
+
+Footnote 91:
+
+  _Guido Reni._ Max von Boehn, _Guido Reni_, Leipzig, 1910, fully
+  illustrated.
+
+Footnote 92:
+
+  _Domenichino._ Luigi Serra, _Domenico Zampieri detto Domenichino_,
+  Rome, 1909. Also Tietze’s article, above, note 3.
+
+
+
+
+                           HINTS FOR READING
+
+
+COMPREHENSIVE HISTORIES OF ITALIAN PAINTING. For English speaking
+readers the greatest resource for reference is Crowe and Cavalcaselle,
+_A New History of Painting in Italy_, which covers the Central Italian
+field up to about 1500. I prefer the three volume edition by Edward
+Hutton, published by J. M. Dent and Co., London; and E. P. Dutton, New
+York, (1908–9) to the fuller six-volume edition annotated by Langton
+Douglas and published conjointly by the Murrays of London and the
+Scribners of New York. For the North Italian field Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle’s _History of Painting in Northern Italy_, re-edited in
+three volumes by Tancred Borenius, John Murray-Charles Scribner’s Sons,
+1912, is indispensable. Both works are ordinarily cited as “C. & C.” The
+Italian articles in A. Michel’s _Histoire de l’Art_, Paris, are
+excellent.
+
+MANUALS. Bernard Berenson’s four Handbooks, _Venetian Painters of the
+Renaissance_, _Florentine Painters of the Renaissance_, _Central Italian
+Painters of the Renaissance_, and _Northern Italian Painters of the
+Renaissance_, New York and London, G. P. Putnam and Sons, are uniquely
+useful. Each contains a thorough critical discussion and lists of the
+works of the more important painters. The latest editions should be
+used.
+
+_A Short History of Italian Painting_, by Alice van Vechten Brown and
+William Rankin, Dent-Dutton, 1914, offers brilliant, if uneven,
+characterizations and able summaries of contested points.
+
+TECHNIQUE. Consult the delightful _The Book of Art by Cennino Cennini_,
+edited by Christiana J. Herringham, London: George Allen, 1922, for
+methods of painting in tempera and fresco.
+
+BIOGRAPHY. Giorgio Vasari’s picturesque _Lives of the Painters_ may most
+profitably be read in the translation of Gaston DuC. de Vere, in ten
+volumes, London: Philip Lee Warner; New York: The Macmillan Company.
+There are many color-prints. The matter is available inexpensively in
+the handy “Everyman’s Library.” Mrs. Ady, “Julia Cartwright,” has
+epitomized the chief lives agreeably, with necessary corrections, in
+_The Painters of Florence_, E. P. Dutton and Company, 1916.
+
+PERIODICALS. The reader may most profitably cultivate the habit of
+paging over the files of _The Burlington Magazine_ and _Art in America_,
+_Rassegna d’Arte_ and _L’Arte_, which contain good reproductions of many
+fine Italian pictures in private collections.
+
+HISTORICAL BACKGROUND. Excellent the many Italian Chapters in Henry
+Osborn Taylor’s _The Mediaeval Mind_, in two volumes, The Macmillan
+Company, 1911. For Florentine conditions consult Guido Biagi, _Men and
+Manners of Old Florence_, Chicago, A. C. McClurg and Company, 1909, and
+_The Builders of Florence_, by J. Wood Brown, London, Methuen and
+Company, 1907.
+
+PHOTOGRAPHS, etc. The ideal way to use a handbook would be to skim it
+before visiting a great European gallery and to reread it carefully
+while the impression of the pictures themselves was still vivid. But the
+student must also depend much on photographic reproductions. For Italy
+those of Messrs. Alinari at Florence and of Dominick Anderson at Rome
+are comprehensive, finely made, and remarkably cheap. Alinari has most
+of the Italian paintings of the Louvre and Dresden Gallery; Anderson,
+those of the Prado, Madrid, and National Gallery, London. The
+collections of Hanfstaengl and of Bruckmann, Munich, cover most of the
+galleries of Northern and Central Europe. Photographs of the Italian
+pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts,
+Boston; the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass., and the Jarves Collection,
+Yale University, New Haven, Conn., may be purchased from those museums.
+Besides these four main collections of Italian pictures in America, that
+of the New York Historical Society, New York, and of Mrs. John L.
+Gardner, Fenway Court, Boston, occasionally open to the public, are
+noteworthy. The art museums of Worcester, Mass., Providence, R. I.,
+Cleveland, O., Indianapolis, Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis have
+Italian pictures of quality. There is something in the Wilstach Gallery,
+Philadelphia, and whenever the John G. Johnson Collection shall be
+worthily exhibited, Philadelphia will be rich indeed in Italian art. The
+student should not fail to utilize such local resources, however slight
+they may seem, for one minor original thoroughly enjoyed is worth days
+of poring over reproductions.
+
+For students who cannot afford a considerable number of photographs the
+_University Prints_, Newton, Mass., afford a tolerable substitute. For
+quick reference the numerous cuts in Venturi’s monumental _Storia dell’
+Arte Italiana_, Milan, Ulrico Hoepli, are very useful. The halftones in
+the “Künstler Monografien,” Leipzig, Velhagen and Klasing, and the
+larger prints in the “Klassiker der Kunst,” Stuttgart and Leipzig, serve
+a similar purpose. Details may be had from any importing bookseller.
+
+
+
+
+                                 INDEX
+
+
+Where an artist has a family name, that is the indexed word, e.g.,
+Bellini, Giovanni. Where there is no surname, the Christian name is
+used, e.g., Nardo di Cione, Andrea da Bologna. So is the Christian name
+the index word when an apparent surname is really only descriptive of
+birthplace or civil estate, e.g., Domenico Veneziano, Lorenzo Monaco. In
+the case of well-known artists, the most familiar name is employed,
+e.g., Angelico, Fra; Giorgione, Titian, Perugino, Raphael, Andrea del
+Sarto, Pontormo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, etc.
+
+ Academic, light and shade, Leonardo, 226;
+   theory of generalization, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 318;
+   of selection and Belle Nature, Leonardo, 258;
+   L. Dolce, 445
+
+ Altar, as shrine and tomb, influence on subjects of painting, 7
+
+ Alunno (Niccolò Liberatore), 273
+
+ Andrea da Bologna, 271
+
+ Andrea del Castagno, 146–147, 201
+
+ Andrea del Sarto, 248–253
+
+ Angelico of Fiesole, Fra, 112, 114–122, 267
+
+ Antonello da Messina, 345–348, 355, 360
+
+ Antonio da Negroponte, 335
+
+ Ariosto, list of greatest painters, 385
+
+
+ Baldovinetti, Alesso, 148;
+   an official appraisal of his frescoes, 153
+
+ Barna of Siena, 88, 89
+
+ Bartolo di Fredi, 86
+
+ Baroque decorative painting, derives from Mantegna, 337, 340–341;
+   Correggio, 340, 415–416;
+   Tiepolo, 442;
+   Influence of Catholic Reaction on mood of, 459
+
+ Bartolommeo, Fra (Baccio della Porta), 246, 247–248, 282, 290
+
+ Bartolommeo della Gatta, Don, 177
+
+ Bellini, Gentile, 348–352, 364
+
+ Bellini, Giovanni, 324, 352–362, 369
+
+ Bellini, Jacopo, 330–333, 334
+
+ Bembo, Pietro, 373
+
+ Benvenuto di Giovanni, 99
+
+ Birth salvers (deschi da parto), 99, 128, 181
+
+ Bologna School and Eclecticism, _passim_, 458–465, 471
+
+ Bonfigli, Benedetto, 271
+
+ Botticelli, Sandro (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi), 122, 163, 175,
+    184, 202–220, 255
+
+ Brancacci Chapel, problem of the frescoes, 131–141
+
+ Byzantine manner, 10–12;
+   in Venetia, 324, 326, 327
+
+ Bartolommeo di Giovanni, 183
+
+ Bassano, Jacopo and Leandro, 424
+
+ Bonauiti, Andrea, decorator of the Spanish Chapel, 51–53
+
+ Bronzino, Agnolo, 251
+
+ Brunellesco, investigator of perspective, 110
+
+
+ Canale, Antonio, 442
+
+ Caravaggio (Michelangelo Amerighi), 453–456, 470
+
+ Carpaccio, Victor, 364–370
+
+ Carracci, their academy at Bologna, 461.;
+   Carlo Malvasia on the Eclecticism of the C., 471
+
+ Carracci, Annibale, 453, 459–465;
+   sonnet ascribed to, 471
+
+ Cassone painters, before 1450, 127–130;
+   after 1450, 180–183
+
+ Castiglione, Baldassare, 266, 298;
+   list of greatest artists, 315
+
+ Cavallini, Pietro, 16–18
+
+ Cimabue, 12, 14–15, 20
+
+ Classic Spirit, Kenyon Cox on, 319
+
+ Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 340, 415–417;
+   Initiator of the Baroque Manner, 416
+
+ Cox, Kenyon, on the Classic Spirit, 319
+
+ Crivelli, Carlo, 267, 271, 334–335
+
+
+ Dante, 3, 8;
+   Giotto’s portrait of, 40;
+   Botticelli’s drawings for, 215
+
+ Domenico di Bartolo, 89
+
+ Domenico Veneziano, 147–148, 168, 201, 267, 271
+
+ Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), 465, 467–469
+
+ Donatello, 110, 333
+
+ Duccio di Buoninsegna, 12, 13, 60, 63–72;
+   Procession on installation of his great Madonna, 106
+
+
+ Florence, about 1300 described, 2–4, 55;
+   the new looser manners after the plague of 1348, 110, 111;
+   Renaissance pageantry in, 195–196;
+   Savonarola’s revolution, 193, 215, 302;
+   End of liberty in and demoralization, 320
+
+ Folgore da San Gemignano, Sienese sonnet quoted, 104
+
+ Francesco di Giorgio, 100
+
+ Francis of Assisi, St., initiator of the new emotionalism in painting,
+    7, 8
+
+ Fresco, method of painting in, 6
+
+
+ Gaddi, Agnolo, 46
+
+ Gaddi, Gaddo, possibly to be identified with the “Isaac Master,” 18
+
+ Gaddi, Taddeo, 40, 45, 46
+
+ Gentile da Fabriano, 267–270, 328, 330
+
+ Ghiberti, Lorenzo, Sienese anecdote by, 104;
+   his studies, 109
+
+ Ghirlandaio (Domenico Bigordi), 122, 142, 143, 177, 184–194
+
+ Giorgione, 370–383;
+   problem of, 370;
+   early works, 371, 372;
+   his Arcadianism related to pastoral poetry, 373–374;
+   his dreamy and indeterminate mood, 374–377;
+   Castelfranco Madonna, and other later works, 378–380;
+   pastoral symphony, 380–382;
+   The Concert, its problems, 381–382;
+   Summary, 383;
+   Suggestion of G’s subjects in Leonardo’s “Trattato,” 385–386
+
+ Giottino, 46
+
+ Giotto’s pupils, “Master of the Right Transept,” 43–45;
+   Taddeo Gaddi, 45, 46;
+   Buffalmacco, 46;
+   Bernardo Daddi, 46;
+   Giottino, 46, 47
+
+ Giotto di Bondone, 18;
+   early work at Assisi, 20–22;
+   at Rome, 23;
+   at Padua, 23–29;
+   later work, the Allegories at Assisi, 31–34;
+   at Santa Croce, 34–39;
+   The Campanile and last phase, 40, 41;
+   general characterization, 42, 43;
+   poem by, 56;
+   mentioned, 136, 267
+
+ Giovanni di Paolo, 93–95
+
+ Girolamo di Benvenuto, 99
+
+ Giulio Romano, 294, 297, 452–453
+
+ Gozzoli, Benozzo, 142, 143, 165–166, 267, 271
+
+ Grand style defined, 265–266;
+   Sir Joshua Reynolds on, 318–319;
+   L. Dolce on, in Titian, 445
+
+ Guariento of Padua, 324
+
+ Goya, Francisco, quoted, 131
+
+ Guardi, Francesco, 443
+
+ Guido of Siena, 12
+
+
+ “Isaac Master,” perhaps Gaddo Gaddi, 18
+
+ Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, relations with Mantegna, 343;
+   Opinion of him, 384
+
+
+ Landscape, new sense of the picturesque in, and Salvator Rosa, 456–457
+
+ LeBrun, Charles, dependence as decorator on A. Carracci, 465
+
+ Leonardo da Vinci, 1;
+   on Masaccio, 151, 202, 223–235, 260;
+   His new principles, 224;
+   Early Florentine period, 225–237;
+   Adoration of the Magi, 233–236;
+   Madonna of the Rocks, 236;
+   First Milanese period, 238–240;
+   Last Supper, 239–240;
+   Second Florentine Period; Mona Lisa, Anghiari, 239–241;
+   Second Milanese Period; St. Ann, Second Madonna of the Rocks,
+      243–244;
+   Roma and France, 244–245;
+   His Influence, 245–246;
+   Tractate on Painting, 257–260, 285, 286, 287, 290, 292, 300, 371,
+      383, 385
+
+ Lomazzo, Paolo, Great Italian painters compared with the poets, 385
+
+ Longhi, Pietro, 444
+
+ Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 40, 42–45, 72, 76, 79, 84
+
+ Lorenzetti, Pietro, 76–78;
+   Followers of, at Assisi, 79;
+   Contract for Arezzo altar-piece, 105–106
+
+ Lorenzetti followers, Triumph of Death, Pisa, 88, 89
+
+ Lorenzettian, panoramic style, 86, 126, 172
+
+ Lotto, Lorenzo, 411–413
+
+ Lorenzo de’ Medici, his birth salver, 181–184
+
+ Lorenzo Monaco, Don, 112
+
+ Lorenzo da San Severino, 272
+
+ Lorenzo Veneziano, 326, 327
+
+
+ Mantegna, Andrea, 333, 337–345, 348, 352, 355, 356.;
+   Titian on, 324
+
+ Marcovaldo, Coppo di, 62
+
+ Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Tommaso Guidi), 50, 130–142, 151,
+    201
+
+ Masolino da Panicale, 122–127
+
+ Matteo di Giovanni, of Siena, 97–99
+
+ Melozzo da Forlì, 273–274
+
+ Michelangelo Buonarotti, 19, 193, 263;
+   perturbing influence on Raphael, 288, 294, 295;
+   Early works;
+     Doni Madonna, The Bathers, 301–303;
+     The Sistine Ceiling, 304–313;
+     The Last Judgment, 313–314;
+   Defects of his followers, 315;
+   Advice on posture, 317,
+   on the unity of painting and sculpture, 317, 318, 407, 429
+
+ Michelozzo, 115
+
+ Modern sensibility, in Pontormo, 253;
+   Moretto, Lotto, Correggio, Tintoretto, 411
+
+ Moretto of Brescia, 412–413
+
+ Moroni, Giambattista, 423
+
+
+ Nardo di Cione, 48
+
+ Neroccio di Landi, 100
+
+
+ Oil Painting, introduced at Florence by Domenico Veneziano, 147,;
+   practiced in Lombardy by Antonello da Messina, 345
+
+ Orcagna (Andrea di Cione), 47–50;
+   Contract for Strozzi altar-piece, 56
+
+ Ottaviano Nelli, 271
+
+
+ Palma Giovine, on Titian’s technique, 390
+
+ Palma Vecchio, 407, 411
+
+ Paolo Veronese (Caliari), 436–440
+
+ Pastoral poetry as background of Giorgione’s inventions, 370–374
+
+ Perspective, discovery by Brunellesco, 110,;
+   Uccello’s experiments in, 144, 152;
+   Piero della Francesca’s book on, 169;
+   Mantegna’s illusionistic, 337, 339–340;
+   further developed by Correggio, 340, 415–416
+
+ Perugino (Pietro Vannucci), 117, 178, 223, 265, 269, 276–280, 283, 288,
+    297, 267, 271, 273, 278–282, 285, 290, 299
+
+ Pesellino, Francesco, 181
+
+ Piero della Francesca, 169–172, 201, 273
+
+ Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 158, 166–169, 201, 205
+
+ Piero di Cosimo, 177, 202, 221–223, 246
+
+ Pintorricchio, 101, 174
+
+ Pisanello (Antonio Pisano), 328
+
+ Plague banners, Umbrian, 263, 313
+
+ Poliziano, Angelo, his poetry as an inspiration for Botticelli,
+    Raphael, Titian, 255–256
+
+ Pontormo (Jacopo Carrucci), 253
+
+ Poussin, Nicholas, derives from Raphael and the Eclectics, 458
+
+
+ Raphael Sanzio, 19, 256, 263;
+   His Umbrian beginnings, 282–283.
+   At Florence, 283–288.
+   At Rome, The Segnatura, 289–293;
+   Stanze of Heliodorus and of the Incendio, 294–296.
+
+ Realists, Early Florentine, enumerated, 143
+
+ Reni, Guido, 465–466
+
+ Reynolds, Sir Joshua, on the Grand style, 318–319
+
+ Rodin, Auguste, on Michelangelo, 313
+
+ Roman revival before 1300, 16
+
+ Rosa, Salvator, 456–457
+
+ Rosselli, Cosimo, 172, 221
+
+ Rubens, Peter Paul,
+   his praise of Leonardo, 258,
+   derives from Titian, 468
+
+
+ Sannazaro, Jacopo, 373, 374
+
+ Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), 72, 90–92
+
+ Sebastiano del Piombo, 295, 408–409
+
+ Signorelli, Luca, 176, 273–278
+
+ Sistine Chapel, early frescoes analyzed, 173–179
+
+ Savonarola, Fra Girolamo, 193, 215, 217, 302
+
+ St. Dominic, 8, 52
+
+ Siena, the Sienese temperament illustrated, 59–61;
+   its artistic conservation, 61
+
+ Simone Martini, 72–76, 267
+
+ Sodoma (Antonio Bazzi), 102, 471
+
+ Squarcione, Francesco, School of, 334
+
+ Starnina, Gherardo, 50
+
+
+ Tempera, painting in, 5, 6
+
+ Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, 440–442, 444
+
+ Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), 424–435
+
+ Titian of Cadore (Tiziano Vecellio), 256, 389–408, 418–423.
+   His calculating character and technique, 389–390;
+   his four periods, 390–391;
+   Early, Giorgionesque period, 392–398;
+   (1515–1533), 396–404;
+   (1533–1548), 404–407;
+   (1548–1577), subjective and impressionistic phase, 418–423.
+   Lodovico Dolce on T’s impressionism in landscape, 446;
+   G. F. Watt on T’s classical quality, 446
+
+ Tommé, Luca, 86
+
+ Torriti (Jacopo), 12
+
+
+ Uccello, Paolo, 143–144, 152, 201, 334
+
+ Umbria,
+   its characteristics, 266–267;
+   foreign painters in, 267
+
+
+ Vasari, Giorgio, on Masaccio, 151;
+   on Paolo Uccello, 152;
+   on a Trick to get a chapel, 196–197;
+   on the “Modern style,” 316, 317;
+   boasts of his own dexterity, 451.
+
+ Velasquez, draws from Caravaggio and the Italian Tenebrists, 456, 470
+
+ Venice, its colorful aspect, and nature of its civilization, 323–326
+
+ Veronese, see Paolo Veronese
+
+ Veronese, early panoramic manner, 328–330, 331
+
+ Verrocchio, Andrea, 158, 201, 203, 227–230
+
+ Villani, Giovanni, summary of Florence, 9, 54–56
+
+ Villani, Matteo, on the relaxation of Florentine morals after the
+    plague of 1348, 110–111
+
+ Vivarini, Antonio, 330, 363
+
+ Vivarini, Bartolommeo, 362, 363
+
+ Vivarini, Alvise, 363
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
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+                 PUBLISHERS      (VI ’23)      NEW YORK
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+                 _Revised and Enlarged, Fifth Edition_
+
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+                         THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE
+
+                              COMPILED BY
+
+                          BURTON E. STEVENSON
+
+                    (American and English 1580–1920)
+
+The third edition was revised from end to end—590 poems added, pages
+renumbered, author, title, and first line indices, and the biographical
+matter corrected, etc., etc. In the two editions since there has been
+little change beyond the noting of some dates of deaths, etc.
+
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+corrections as well as the columns of reviews of the first edition have
+been considered. Poets who were chary of lending their support to an
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+
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+FROST, RUPERT BROOKE, DE LA MARE, RALPH HODGSON, etc.
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+------------------------------------------------------------------------
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+
+
+                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+
+
+ 1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
+      spelling.
+ 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
+ 3. Re-indexed footnotes using numbers.
+ 4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
+ 5. Enclosed bold font in =equals=.
+ 6. Denoted superscripts by a caret before a single superscript
+      character, e.g. M^r.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69844 ***