But indeed, If ever I would have mine drawn to the life, I would have a painter steal it at such time I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers; There is then a heavenly beauty in"t; _the soul Moves in the superficies_.
The same Webster condemns that evil custom of aping life and movement on the monuments of dead men, which began to obtain when the motives of pure repose had been exhausted. "Why," asks the d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi, "do we grow fantastical in our death-bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?" "Most ambitiously," answers Bosola; "princes" images on their tombs do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks (as if they died of the toothache): they are not carved with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but, as their minds were wholly bent upon the world, the self-same way they seem to turn their faces." A more trenchant criticism than this could hardly have been p.r.o.nounced upon Andrea Contucci di Monte Sansavino"s tombs of Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo della Rovere, if Bosola had been standing before them in the church of S.
Maria del Popolo when he spoke. Were it the function of monumental sculpture to satirise the dead, or to point out their characteristic faults for the warning of posterity, then the sepulchres of these worldly cardinals of Sixtus IV."s creation would be artistically justified. But the object of art is not this. The idea of death, as conceived by Christians, has to be portrayed. The repose of the just, the resurrection of the body, and the coming judgment, afford sufficient scope for treatment of good men and bad alike. Or if the sculptor have sublime imagination, he may, like Michael Angelo, suggest the alternations of the day and night, slumber and waking, whereby "our little life is rounded with a sleep."
This digression will hardly be thought superfluous when we reflect how large a part of the sculptor"s energy was spent on tombs in Italy. Matteo Civitali of Lucca was at least Rossellino"s equal in the sculpturesque delineation of spiritual qualities; but the motives he chose for treatment were more varied. All his work is penetrated with deep, prayerful, intense feeling; as though the artist"s soul, poured forth in ecstasy and adoration, had been given to the marble. This is especially true of two angels kneeling upon the altar of the Chapel of the Sacrament in Lucca Cathedral. Civitali, by singular good fortune, was chosen in the best years of his life to adorn the cathedral of his native city; and it is here, rather than at Genoa, where much of his sculpture may also be seen, that he deserves to be studied. For the people of Lucca he designed the Chapel of the Santo Volto--a gem of the purest Renaissance architecture--and a pulpit in the same style. His most remarkable sculpture is to be found in three monuments: the tombs of Domenico Bertini and Pietro da Noceto, and the altar of S. Regulus. The last might be chosen as an epitome of all that is most characteristic in Tuscan sculpture of the earlier Renaissance. It is built against the wall, and architecturally designed so as to comprehend a full-length figure of the bishop stretched upon his bier and watched by angels, a group of Madonna and her child seated above him, a row of standing saints below, and a predella composed of four delicately finished bas-reliefs. Every part of this complex work is conceived with spirit and executed with care; and the various elements are so combined as to make one composition, the body of the saint on his sarcophagus forming the central object of the whole.
To do more than briefly mention the minor sculptors of this group would be impossible. Mino di Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterised by grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The tombs in the Abbey of Florence have an almost infantine sweetness of style, which might be extremely piquant, were it not that Mino pushed this quality in other works to the verge of mannerism.[104] Their architectural features are the same as those of similar monuments in Tuscany:--a shallow recess, flanked by Renaissance pilasters, and roofed with a semicircular arch; within the recess, the full-length figure of the dead man on a marble coffin of antique design; in the lunette above, a Madonna carved in low relief.[105]
Mino"s bust of Bishop Salutati in the cathedral church of Fiesole is a powerful portrait, no less distinguished for vigorous individuality than consummate workmanship. The waxlike finish of the finely chiselled marble alone betrays that delicacy which with Mino verged on insipidity. The same faculty of character delineation is seen in three profiles, now in the Bargello Museum, attributed to Mino. They represent Frederick Duke of Urbino, Battista Sforza, and Galeazzo Sforza. The relief is very low, rising at no point more than half an inch above the surface of the ground, but so carefully modulated as to present a wonderful variety of light and shade, and to render the facial expression with great vividness.
Desiderio da Settignano, one of Donatello"s few scholars, was endowed with the same gift of exquisite taste as his friend Mino da Fiesole;[106] but his inventive faculty was bolder, and his genius more robust, in spite of the profuse ornamentation and elaborate finish of his masterpiece, the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce. The bust he made of Marietta di Palla degli Strozzi enables us to compare his style in portraiture with that of Mino.[107] It would be hard to find elsewhere a more captivating combination of womanly sweetness and dignity. We feel, in looking at these products of the best age of Italian sculpture, that the artists who conceived them were, in the truest sense of the word, gentle. None but men courteous and unaffected could have carved a face like that of Marietta Strozzi, breathing the very spirit of urbanity. To express the most amiable qualities of a living person in a work of art that should suggest emotional tranquillity by harmonious treatment, and indicate the temperance of a disciplined nature by self-restraint and moderation of style, and to do this with the highest technical perfection, was the triumph of fifteenth-century sculpture.
An artist who claims a third place beside Mino and his friend, "il bravo Desider si dolce e bello,"[108] is Benedetto da Majano. In Benedetto"s bas-reliefs at San Gemignano, carved for the altars of those unlovely Tuscan worthies, S. Fina and S. Bartolo, we find a pictorial treatment of legendary subjects, proving that he had studied Ghirlandajo"s frescoes.
The same is true about his pulpit in S. Croce at Florence, his treatment of the story of S. Savino at Faenza, and his "Annunciation" in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples. Benedetto, indeed, may be said to ill.u.s.trate the working of Ghiberti"s influence by his liberal use of landscape and architectural backgrounds; but the style is rather Ghirlandajo"s than Ghiberti"s. If it was a mistake in the sculptors of that period to subordinate their art to painting, the error, we feel, was aggravated by the imitation of a manner so prosaic as that of Ghirlandajo. That Benedetto began life as a _tarsiatore_ may perhaps help to account for his pictorial style in bas-relief.[109] In estimating his total claim as an artist, we must not forget that he designed the formidable and splendid Strozzi Palace.
It will be observed that all the sculptors. .h.i.therto mentioned have been Tuscans; and this is due to no mere accident--nor yet to caprice on the part of their historian. Though the other districts of Italy produced admirable workmen, the direction given to this art proceeded from Tuscany.
Florence, the metropolis of modern culture, determined the course of the aesthetical Renaissance. Even at Rimini we cannot account for the carvings in low relief, so fanciful, so delicately wrought, and so profusely scattered over the side chapels of S. Francesco, without the intervention of two Florentines, Bernardo Ciuff.a.gni and Donatello"s pupil Simone; while in the palace of Urbino we trace some hand not unlike that of Mino da Fiesole at work upon the mouldings of door and architrave, cornice and high-built chimney.[110] Not only do we thus find Tuscan craftsmen or their scholars employed on all the great public buildings throughout Italy; but it also happens that, except in Tuscany, the decoration of churches and palaces is not unfrequently anonymous.
This does not, however, interfere with the truth that sculpture, like all the arts, a.s.sumed a somewhat different character in each Italian city. The Venetian stone-carvers leaned from the first to a richer and more pa.s.sionate style than the Florentine, reproducing the types of Cima"s and Bellini"s paintings.[111] Whole families, like the Bregni--cla.s.ses, like the Lombardi--schools, like that of Alessandro Leopardi, worked together on the monumental sculpture of S. Zanipolo. In the tombs of the Doges the old Pisan motive of the curtains (first used by Arnolfo di Cambio at Orvieto, and afterwards with grand effect by Giovanni Pisano at Perugia) is expanded into a sumptuous tent-canopy. Pages and genii and mailed heroes take the place of angels, and the marine details of Roman reliefs are copied in the subordinate decoration. At Verona the mediaeval tombs of the Scaligers, with their vast chest-like sarcophagi and mounted warriors, exhibit features markedly different from the monuments of Tuscany; while the mixture of fresco with sculpture, in monuments like that of the Cavalli in S. Anastasia, and in many altar-pieces, is at variance with Florentine usage. On the terra-cotta mouldings, so frequent in Lombard cities, I have already had occasion to touch briefly. They almost invariably display a feeling for beauty more sensuous, with less of scientific purpose in their naturalism, than is common in the Tuscan style. Guido Mazzoni of Modena, called Il Modanino, may be mentioned as the sculptor who freed terra-cotta from its dependence upon architecture, and who modelled groups of overpowering dramatic realism. His "Pieta," in the Church of Monte Oliveto at Naples, is valuable, less for its pa.s.sionate intensity of expression than for the portraits of Pontano, Sannazzaro, and Alfonso of Aragon.[112] This sub-species of sculpture was freely employed in North Italy to stimulate devotion, and to impress the people with lively pictures of the Pa.s.sion. The Sacro Monte at Varallo, for example, is covered with a mult.i.tude of chapels, each one of which presents some chapter of Bible history dramatically rendered by life-size groups of terra-cotta figures. Some of these were designed by eminent painters, and executed by clever modellers in clay. Even now they are scarcely less stirring to the mind of a devout spectator than the scenes of a mediaeval Mystery may have been.
The Certosa of Pavia, lastly, is the centre of a school of sculpture that has little in common with the Florentine tradition. Antonio Amadeo[113]
and Andrea Fusina, acting in concert with Ambrogio Borgognone the painter, gave it in the fifteenth century that character of rich and complex decorative beauty which many generations of artists were destined to continue and complete. Among the countless sculptors employed upon its marvellous facade Amadeo a.s.serts an individuality above the rest, which is further manifested in his work in the Cappella Colleoni at Bergamo. We there learn to know him, not only as an enthusiastic cultivator of the mingled Christian and pagan manner of the _quattrocento_, but as an artist in the truest sense of the word sympathetic. The sepulchral portrait of Medea, daughter of the great Condottiere, has a grace almost beyond that of Della Quercia"s "Ilaria."[114] Much, no doubt, is due to the peculiarly fragile beauty of the girl herself, who lies asleep with little crisp curls cl.u.s.tering upon her forehead, and with a string of pearls around her slender throat. But the sensibility to loveliness so delicate, and the power to render it in marble with so ethereal a touch upon the rigid stone, belong to the sculptor, and win for him our worship.
The list of fifteenth-century sculptors is almost ended; and already, on the threshold of the sixteenth, stands the mighty form of Michael Angelo.
Andrea Contucci da Sansavino and his pupil Jacopo Tatti, called also Sansovino, after his master, must, however, next be mentioned as continuing the Florentine tradition without subservience to the style of Buonarroti. Andrea da Sansavino was a sculptor in whom for the first time the faults of the mid-Renaissance period are glaringly apparent. He persistently sacrificed simplicity of composition to decorative ostentation, and tranquillity of feeling to theatrical effect. The truth of this will be acknowledged by all who have studied the tombs of the cardinals in S. Maria del Popolo already mentioned,[115] and the bas-reliefs upon the Santa Casa at Loreto. In technical workmanship Andrea proved himself an able craftsman, modelling marble with the plasticity of wax, and lavishing patterns of the most refined invention. Yet the decorative prodigality of this master corresponded to the frigid and stylistic graces of the neo-Latin poets. It was so much mannerism--adopted without real pa.s.sion from the antique, and applied with a rhetorical intention. Those acanthus scrolls and honeysuckle borders, in spite of their consummate finish, fail to arrest attention, leaving the soul as unstirred as the Ovidian cadences of Bembo.
Jacopo Tatti was a genius of more distinction. Together with San Gallo and Bramante he studied the science of architecture in Rome, where he also worked at the restoration of newly discovered antiques, and cast in bronze a copy of the "Laoc.o.o.n." Thus equipped with the artistic learning of his age, he was called in 1523 by the Doge, Andrea Gritti, to Venice. The material pomp of Venice at this epoch, and the pride of her unrivalled luxury, affected his imagination so powerfully that his genius, tutored by Florentine and Umbrian masters among the ruins of old Rome, became at once Venetian. In the history of the Renaissance the names of t.i.tian and Aretino, themselves acclimatised aliens, are inseparably connected with that of their friend Sansovino. At Venice he lived until his death in 1570, building the Zecca, the Library, the Scala d"Oro in the Ducal Palace, and the Loggietta beneath the bell-tower of S. Mark. In all his work he subordinated sculpture to architecture, and his statuary is conceived in the _bravura_, manner of Renaissance paganism. Whatever may be the faults of Sansovino in both arts, it cannot be denied that he expressed, in a style peculiar to himself, the large voluptuous external life of Venice at a moment when this city was the Paris or the Corinth of Renaissance Europe. At the same time, the shallowness of Sansovino"s inspiration as a sculptor is patent in his masterpieces of parade--the "Neptune" and the "Mars," guarding the Scala d"Oro. Separated from the architecture of the court and staircase, they are insignificant in spite of their colossal scale. In their place they add a haughty grandeur, by the contrast which their flowing forms and arrogant att.i.tudes present to the severer lines of the construction. But they are devoid of artistic sincerity, and occupy the same relation to true sculpture as flourishes of rhetoric, however brilliant, to poetry embodying deep thought or pa.s.sion.
At first sight they impose: on further acquaintance we find them chiefly interesting as ill.u.s.trations of a potent civic life upon the wane, gorgeous in its decay.
Sansovino was a first-rate craftsman. The most finished specimen of his skill is the bronze door of the Sacristy of S. Marco, upon which he is said to have worked through twenty years. Portraits of the sculptor, t.i.tian, and Pietro Aretino are introduced into the decorative border.
These heads start from the surface of the gate with astonishing vivacity.
That Aretino should thus daily a.s.sist in effigy at the procession of priests bearing the sacred emblems from the sacristy to the high altar of S. Mark, is one of the most characteristic proofs of sixteenth-century indifference to things holy and things profane.
Jacopo Sansovino marks the final intrusion of paganism into modern art.
The cla.s.sical revival had worked but partially and indirectly upon Ghiberti and Donatello--not because they did not feel it most intensely, but because they clung to nature far more closely than to antique precedent. This enthusiasm inspired Sansovino with the best and strongest qualities that he can boast; and if his genius had been powerful enough to resist the fascination of merely rhetorical effects, he might have produced a perfect restoration of the cla.s.sic style. His was no lifeless or pedantic imitation of antique fragments, but a real expression of the fervour with which the modern world hailed the discoveries revealed to it by scholarship. This is said advisedly. The most beautiful and spirited pagan statue of the Renaissance period, justifying the estimate here made of Sansovino"s genius, is the "Bacchus" exhibited in the Bargello Museum.
Both the Bacchus and the Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism, irradiated and idealised by the sculptor"s vivid sense of natural gladness. Considered as a rest.i.tution of the antique manner, this statue is decidedly superior to the "Bacchus" of Michael Angelo. While the mundane splendour of Venice gave body and fulness to Sansovino"s paganism, he missed the self-restraint and purity of taste peculiar to the studious shades of Florence. In his style, both architectural and sculptural, the neo-pagan sensuality of Italy expanded all its bloom.
For the artist at this period a Greek myth and a Christian legend were all one. Both afforded the occasion for displaying technical skill in fluent forms, devoid of any but voluptuous feeling; while both might be subordinated to rich effects of decoration.[116] To this point the intellectual culture of the fifteenth century had brought the plastic arts of Italy, by a process similar to that which ended in the "Partus Virginis" of Sannazzaro. They were still indisputably vigorous, and working in accordance with the movement of the modern spirit. Yet the synthesis they attempted to effect between heathenism and Christianity, by a sheer effort of style, and by indifferentism, strikes us from the point of view of art alone, not reckoning religion or morality, as unsuccessful. Still, if it be childish on the one hand to deplore that the Christian earnestness of the earlier masters had failed, it would be even more ridiculous to complain that paganism had not been more entirely recovered. The double-mind of the Renaissance, the source of its weakness in art as in thought, could not be avoided, because humanity at this moment had to lose the mediaeval sincerity of faith, and to a.s.similate the spirit of a bygone civilisation. This, for better or for worse, was the phase through which the intellect of modern Europe was obliged to pa.s.s; and those who have confidence in the destinies of the human race, will not spend their strength in moaning over such shortcomings as the periods of transition bring inevitably with them. The student of Italian history may indeed more reasonably be allowed to question whether the arts, if left to follow their own development unchecked, might not have recovered from the confusion of the Renaissance and have entered on a stage of n.o.bler activity through earnest and unaffected study of nature. But the enslavement of the country, together with the counter-Reformation, suspended the Renaissance in mid-career; and what remains of Italian art is incomplete. Besides, it must be borne in mind that the confusion of opinions consequent upon the clash of the modern with the ancient world, left no body of generally accepted beliefs to express; nor has the time even yet arrived for a settlement and synthesis that shall be favourable to the activity of the figurative arts.
Sansovino himself was neither original nor powerful enough, to elevate the mixed motives of Renaissance sculpture by any lofty idealisation. To do that remained for Michael Angelo. The greatness of Michael Angelo consists in this--that while literature was sinking into the frivolity of Academies and the filth of the Bernesque "Capitoli," while the barefaced villanies of Aretino won him credit, while sensual magnificence formed the ideal of artists who were neither Greeks nor Christians, while Ariosto found no subject fitter for his genius than a glittering romance, he and he alone maintained the Dantesque dignity of the Italian intellect in his sculpture. Michael Angelo stands so far apart from other men, and is so gigantic a force for good and evil in the history of art, that to estimate his life and labour in relation to the Renaissance must form the subject of a separate chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that his immediate scholars, Raffaello da Montelupo, and Gian Angelo Montorsoli, caught little from their master but the mannerism of contorted form and agitated action. This mannerism, a blemish even in the strong work of Buonarroti, became ridiculous when adopted by men of feeble powers and pa.s.sionless imagination. By straining the art of sculpture to its utmost limits, Michael Angelo expressed vehement emotions in marble; and the forced att.i.tudes affected in his work had their value as significant of spiritual struggle. His imitators showed none of their master"s sublime force, none of that _terribilita_ which made him unapproachable in social intercourse and inimitable in art. They merely fancied that dignity and beauty were to be achieved by placing figures in difficult postures, exaggerated muscular anatomy, and twisting the limbs of their models upon sections of ellipses in uncomfortable att.i.tudes, till the whole of their work was writhen into uncouth lines. Buonarroti himself was not responsible for these results. He wrought out his own ideal with the firmness of a genius that obeys the law of its own nature, doing always what it must. That the decadence of sculpture into truculent bravado was independent of his direct influence, is further proved by the inefficiency of his contemporaries.
Baccio Bandinelli and Bartolommeo Ammanati filled the squares of the Italian cities with statues of Hercules and Satyrs, Neptune and River-G.o.ds. We know not whether to select the vulgarity, the feebleness, or the pretentiousness of these pseudo-cla.s.sical colossi for condemnation.
They have nothing Greek about them but their names, their nakedness, and their a.s.sociation with myths, the significance whereof was never really felt by the sculptors. Some of Bandinelli"s designs, it is true, are vigorous; but they are mere drawings from undraped peasants, life studies depicting the human animal. His "Hercules and Cacus," while it deserves all the sarcasm hurled at it by Cellini, proves that Bandinelli could not rise above the wrestling bout of a porter and a coal-heaver. Nor would it be possible to invent a motive less in accordance with Greek taste than the conceit of Ammanati"s fountain at Castello, where Hercules by squeezing the body of Antaeus makes the drinking water of a city spout from a giant"s mouth. Such pitiful misapplications of an art which is designed to elevate the commonplace of human form, and to render permanent the n.o.bler qualities of physical existence, show how superficially and wrongly the antique spirit had been apprehended.
Some years before his death Ammanati expressed in public his regret that he had made so many giants and satyrs, feeling that, by exhibiting forms of l.u.s.t, brutality, and animalism to the gaze of his fellow-countrymen, he had sinned against the higher law revealed by Christianity. For a Greek artist to have spoken thus would have been impossible. The Faun, the t.i.tan, and the Satyr had a meaning for him, which he sought to set forth in accordance with the semi-religious, semi-poetical traditions of his race; and when he was at work upon a myth of nature-forces, he well knew that at the other end of the scale, separated by no spiritual barrier, but removed to an almost infinite distance of refinement, Zeus, Phoebus, and Pallas claimed his loftier artistic inspiration. Ammanati"s confession, on the contrary, betrays that schism between the conscience of Christianity and the l.u.s.ts let loose by ill-a.s.similated sympathy with antique heathenism, which was a marked characteristic of the Renaissance. The coa.r.s.er pa.s.sions, held in check by ecclesiastical discipline, dared to emerge into the light of day under the supposed sanction of cla.s.sical examples. What the Visconti and the Borgias practised in their secret chambers, the sculptors exposed in marble and the poets in verse. All alike, however, were mistaken in supposing that antique precedent sanctioned this efflorescence of immorality. No amount of Greek epigrams by Strato and Meleager, nor all the Hermaphrodites and Priapi of Rome, had power to annul the law of conduct established by the founders of Christianity, and ratified by the higher instincts of the Middle Ages. Nor again were artists justified before the bar of conscience in selecting the baser elements of Paganism for imitation, instead of aiming at Greek self-restraint and Roman strength of character. All this the men of the Renaissance felt when they listened to the voice within them. Their work, therefore, in so far as it pretended to be a reconstruction of the antique was false. The sensuality it shared in common with many Greek and Roman masterpieces, had ceased to be frank and in the true sense pagan. To shake off Christianity, and to revert with an untroubled conscience to the manners of a bygone age, was what they could not do.
The errors I have attempted to characterise did not, however, prevent the better and more careful works of sculpture, executed in ill.u.s.tration of cla.s.sical mythology, from having a true value. The "Perseus" of Cellini and some of Gian Bologna"s statues belong to a cla.s.s of aesthetic productions which show how much that is both original and excellent may be raised in the hotbed of culture.[117] They express a genuine moment of the Renaissance with vigour, and deserve to be ranked with the Latin poetry of Poliziano, Bembo, and Pontano. The worst that can be said of them is that their inspiration was fact.i.tious, and that their motives had been handled better in the age of Greek sincerity.
Gian Bologna, born at Douai, but a Florentine by education, devoted himself almost exclusively to mythological sculpture. That he was a greater sculptor than his immediate predecessors will be affirmed by all who have studied his bronze "Mercury," the "Venus of Petraja," and the "Neptune" on the fountain of Bologna. Something of the genuine cla.s.sic feeling had pa.s.sed into his nature. The "Mercury" is not a reminiscence of any antique statue. It gives in bronze a faithful and spirited reading of Virgil"s lines, and is conceived with artistic purity not unworthy of a good Greek period. The "Neptune" is something more than a muscular old man; and, in its place, it forms one of the most striking ornaments of Italy. It is worthy of remark that sculpture, in this stage, continued to be decorative. Fountains are among the most successful monuments of the late Renaissance. Even Montorsoli"s fountain at Messina is in a high sense picturesquely beautiful.
Casting a glance backward over the foregoing sketch of Italian sculpture, it will be seen that three distinct stages were traversed in the evolution of this art. The first may be called architectural, the second pictorial, the third neo-pagan. Defined by their artistic purposes, the first idealises Christian motives; the second is naturalistic; the third attempts an idealisation inspired by revived paganism. As far as the Renaissance is concerned, all three are moments in its history; though it was only during the third that the influences of the cla.s.sical revival made themselves overwhelmingly felt. Niccola Pisano in the first stage marked a fresh point of departure for his art by a return to Graeco-Roman standards of the purest type then attainable, in combination with the study of nature. Giovanni Pisano effected a fusion between his father"s manner and the Gothic style. The Pisan sculpture was wholly Christian; nor did it attempt to free itself from the service of architecture. Giotto opened the second stage by introducing new motives, employed by him with paramount mastery in painting. Under his influence the sculptors inclined to picturesque effects, and the direction thus given to sculpture lasted through the fifteenth century. For the rest, the style of these masters was distinguished by a fresh and charming naturalism and by rapid growth in technical processes. While a.s.similating much of the cla.s.sical spirit, they remained on the whole Christian; and herein they were confirmed by the subjects they were chiefly called upon to treat, in the decoration of altars, pulpits, church facades, and tombs. The revived interest in antique literature widened their sympathies and supplied their fancy with new material; but there is no imitative formalism in their work. Its beauty consists in a certain immature blending of motives chosen almost indiscriminately from Christian and pagan mythology, vitalised by the imagination of the artist, and presented with the originality of true creative instinct. During the third stage the results of prolonged and almost exclusive attention to the cla.s.sics, on the part of the Italians as a people, make themselves manifest. Collections of antiquities and libraries had been formed in the fifteenth century; the literary energies of the nation were devoted to the interpretation of Greek and Latin texts, and the manners of society affected paganism. At the same time a worldly Church and a corrupt hierarchy had done their utmost to enfeeble the spirit of Christianity. That art should prove itself sensitive to this phase of intellectual and social life was natural. Religious subjects were now treated by the sculptors with superficial formalism and cynical indifference, while all their ingenuity was bestowed upon providing pagan myths with new forms. How far they succeeded has been already made the matter of inquiry. The most serious condemnation of art in this third period is that it halted between two opinions, that it could not be sincere. But this double-mindedness, as I have tried to show, was necessary; and therefore to lament over it is weak. What the Renaissance achieved for the modern world was the liberation of the reason, the power of starting on a new career of progress. The false direction given to the art of sculpture at one moment of this intellectual revival may be deplored; and still more deplorable is the corresponding sensual debas.e.m.e.nt of the race who won for us the possibility of freedom. But the life of humanity is long and vigorous, and the philosopher of history knows well that the sum total of accomplishment at any time must be diminished by an unavoidable discount. The Renaissance, like a man of genius, had the defects of its qualities.
FOOTNOTES:
[56] _Sketches of the History of Christian Art_, vol. ii. p. 102.
[57] Since I wrote the paragraph above, I have chanced to read Mr.
Buskin"s eloquent tirade against the modern sceptical school of critics in his "Mornings in Florence," _The Vaulted Book_, pp. 105, 106. With the spirit of it I thoroughly agree; feeling that, in the absence of solid evidence to the contrary, I would always rather accept sixteenth-century Italian tradition with Vasari, than reject it with German or English speculators of to-day. This does not mean that I wish to swear by Vasari, when he can be proved to have been wrong, but that I regard the present tendency to mistrust tradition, only because it is tradition, as in the highest sense uncritical.
[58] See Appendix I., on the Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello.
[59] The data is extremely doubtful. Were we to trust internal evidence--the evidence of style and handling--we should be inclined to name this not the earliest but the latest and ripest of Pisano"s works.
It may be suggested in pa.s.sing that the form of the lunette was favourable to the composition by forcing a gradation in the figures from the centre to either side. There is an engraving of this bas-relief in Ottley"s _Italian School of Design._
[60] Rheims Cathedral, for example, was begun in 1211. Upon its western portals is the loveliest of Northern Gothic sculpture.
[61] Antonio Filarete was commissioned, soon after 1431, by Eugenius IV., to make the great gates of S. Peter"s. The decorative framework represents a mult.i.tude of living creatures--snails, snakes, lizards, mice, b.u.t.terflies, and birds--half hidden in foliage, together with the best known among Greek myths, the Rape of Proserpine, Diana and Actaeon, Europa and the Bull, the Labours of Hercules, &c. Such fables as the Fox and the Stork, the Fox and the Crow, and old stories like that of the death of aeschylus, are included in this medley. The monument of Paul III.
is placed in the choir of S. Peter"s. Giulia Bella was the mistress of Alexander VI., and a sister of the Farnese, who owed his cardinal"s hat to her influence. To represent her as an allegory of Truth upon her brother"s tomb might well pa.s.s for a grim satire. The Prudence opposite is said to be a portrait of the Pope"s mother, Giovanna Gaetani. She resembles nothing more than a duenna of the type of Martha in Goethe"s Faust. Here, again, the allegory would point a scathing sarcasm, if we did not remember the navete of the Renaissance.
[62] See above, Chapter II, Italian want of feeling for Gothic.
[63] Having said so much about this pulpit of S. Andrea, I am sorry that I cannot refer the English reader to any accessible representation of it.
For its sake alone, if for no other purpose, Pistoja is well worth a visit.
[64] It was long believed that he died of eating poisoned figs.
[65] See above, Footnote 16, for the original conception of this motive at Orvieto.
[66] See _Il Duomo di Orvieto, descritto ed ill.u.s.trato per Lodovico Luzi_, pp. 330-339.
[67] See Luzi, pp. 317-328, and the first extant commission given in 1310 to Maitani, which follows, pp. 328-330.
[68] The whole series has been admirably engraved under the superintendence of Ludwig Gruner. Special attention may be directed to the groups of angels attendant on the Creator in His last day"s work; to the "Adoration of the Shepherds," distinguished by tender and idyllic grace: and to the "Adoration of the Magi," marked no less by majesty. The dead breaking open the lids of their sarcophagi and rising to judgment are justly famous for spirited action.
[69] In Gothic sculpture of an early date the Bible narrative is literally represented. G.o.d draws Eve from the open side of sleeping Adam.
On the facade of Orvieto this motive is less altered than refined. The wound in Adam"s side is visible, but Eve is coming from behind his sleeping body in obedience to the beckoning hand of her Creator. Ghiberti in the bronze gate of the Florentine Baptistery still further develops the poetic beauty of the motive. Angels lift Eve in the air above Adam, in whose side there is now no open wound, and sustain her face to face with G.o.d, who calls her into life. Della Quercia, on the facade of S.
Petronio, confines himself to the creative act, expressed by the raised hand of the Maker, and the answering att.i.tude of Eve; and this conception receives final treatment from Michael Angelo in the frescoes of the Sistine.
[70] _Le Tre Porte del Battistero di San Giovanni di Firenze, incise ed ill.u.s.trate_ (Firenze, 1821), contains outlines of all Andrea Pisano"s and Ghiberti"s work.
[71] See above, Chapter I, Greek and Christian Ideals.
[72] See above, Chapter I, Greek and Christian Ideals.
[73] What Giotto himself was, as a designer for sculpture, is shown in the little reliefs upon the bas.e.m.e.nt of his campanile.
[74] What has previously been noted in the chapter upon architecture deserves repet.i.tion here--that the Italian style of building gave more scope to independent sculpture, owing to its preference for flat walls, and its rejection of multiplied niches, canopies, and so forth, than the Northern Gothic. Thus, however subordinated to architecture, sculpture in Italy still had more scope for self-a.s.sertion than in Germany or France.
[75] See Perkins, _Italian Sculptors_, p. 109, for a description of the Arca di S. Agostino, which he a.s.signs to Matteo and Bonino da Campione.