I.—ITALIAN PAINTERS AND PAINTINGS.
The present paper has been abridged from “Italian Paintings,” by Edward J. Poynter, R. A., and Percy R. Head.
Italian painting is divided into a number of schools, each of which has some illustrious artist as its founder, and a train of skillful and exact workmen following his methods. To study the style and methods of the master is to study the school. The most famous of these artists have been selected to represent the Art of Italy, the first of whom, the father of Italian painting, is
GIOTTO.
Giotto was born near Florence, in 1266. Employed as a boy in watching sheep, he is said to have been one day discovered by the artist Cimabue, as he was sketching one of his flock upon a stone. The painter, surprised at the promise shown by the boy, who was not more than ten years old, took him to Florence, and made him his pupil. Giotto’s earliest works were executed at Florence, and at the age of thirty he had already attained such fame that he was invited to Rome by Pope Boniface VIII., to take part in the decoration of the ancient Basilica of Saint Peter. The Navicella mosaic which he there executed, representing the Disciples in the Storm, is preserved in the vestibule of the present Saint Peter’s. The famous story of “Giotto’s O” belongs to this episode in his career. When the envoy sent by the pope to engage his services begged for some drawing or design which might be shown to his holiness in proof of the artist’s talent, Giotto, taking an ordinary brush full of color, and steadying his arm against his side, described a perfect circle on an upright panel with a sweep of the wrist, and offered this manual feat as sufficient evidence of his powers. The story shows the importance attached by a great artist to mere precision in workmanship, and teaches the useful lesson that genius, unsupported by the skill only to be acquired by discipline and labor, is wanting in the first condition which makes great achievements possible. This visit to Rome took place about 1298; soon afterward we find Giotto engaged on his frescoes in the church of Saint Francis at Assisi, a series of allegorical designs illustrating the saint’s spiritual life and character. In 1306 he was working at the fine series of frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua, which represent thirty-eight scenes from the lives of the Virgin and of Christ. We here see Giotto in the fulness of his powers; the incidents are treated with a charming simplicity and sentiment for nature, and he rises to great solemnity of style in the more important scenes. Important works by Giotto are found in many other places beside those mentioned above, including especially Naples, Ravenna, Milan, Pisa and Lucca. Perhaps the finest are those which have been discovered of late years in the Church of Santa Croce at Florence under coats of whitewash which happily had preserved them almost intact; the “Last Supper,” in the refectory of the convent attached to the church, is in remarkable preservation, and is a magnificent example of the style of the time. The twenty-six panels which he painted for the presses in the sacristry of the same church are good illustrations of his method of treatment; natural and dignified with the interest concentrated on the figures; the background and accessories being treated in the simplest possible manner, and hardly more than symbols expressing the locality in which the scene is enacted. Giotto was the first of the moderns who attempted portrait-painting with any success, and some most interesting monuments of his skill in that branch of art have been preserved to us. In 1840, discovery was made, in the chapel of the Podestà’s palace at Florence, of some paintings by Giotto, containing a number of portraits, among them one of his friend, the poet Dante; the portraits being introduced, as was usual among the early painters, and indeed frequent at all periods, as subordinate actors in the scene represented. Giotto was not only a painter; as a sculptor and architect he was also distinguished. Giotto died at Florence in January, 1337, and was buried with public solemnities in the cathedral. His style, though marked by the hardness and quaintness of a time when chiaro-scuro and perspective were very imperfectly understood, displays the originality of his genius in its thoughtful and vigorous design, and shows how resolutely the artist relied, not on traditions, but on keen and patient observation of nature.
FRA ANGELICO.
The earliest of the great fifteenth-century painters belongs in the character of his works rather to the preceding century. The monk Guido di Pietro of Fiesole, commonly called Fra Angelico from the holiness and purity which were as conspicuous in his life as in his works, was born in 1387 at Vicchio, in the province of Mugello. At the age of twenty he entered the order of the Predicants at Fiesole, and took the name of Giovanni, by which he was afterward known. His first art work was the illumination of manuscripts. Quitting the monastery in 1409, he practiced as a fresco-painter in various places until 1418, when he returned to Fiesole, and continued to reside there for the next eighteen years. In 1436 he again quitted his retreat, to paint a series of frescoes on the history of the Passion for the convent of San Marco in Florence. This work occupied nine years, and on its completion Angelico was invited to Rome. The chief work which he undertook there was the decoration of a chapel in the Vatican for Pope Nicholas V. In 1447 he went to Orvieto to undertake a similar task, but returned in the same year, having done only three compartments of the ceiling, and leaving the rest to be afterward completed by Luca Signorelli. He then continued to reside in Rome, where he died and was buried in 1455. The most striking characteristics of Angelico’s art spring from the temper of religious fervor with which he practiced it. He worked without payment; he prayed before beginning any work for the Divine guidance in its conception; and believing himself to be so assisted, he regarded each picture as a revelation, and could never be persuaded to alter any part of it. His works on panel are very numerous, and are to be found in many public and private galleries; of the finest of these are, a “Last Judgment,” belonging to the Earl of Dudley, and the “Coronation of the Virgin” in the gallery of the Louvre. After his death he was “beatified” by the church he had served so devotedly—a solemnity which ranks next to canonization; and Il Beato Angelico is the name by which Fra Giovanni was and is most fondly and reverently remembered. His style survived only in one pupil who assisted him at Orvieto.
LEONARDO DA VINCI.
Leonardo da Vinci belonged to the Florentine school, the fifteenth century, of which he was the first great example. Leonardo was the son of a notary of Vinci, near Florence, and was born at that place in the year 1452. He became the pupil of Andrea Verrocchio, the Florentine sculptor and painter, and progressed so rapidly that he soon surpassed his master, who is said to have thereupon given up painting in despair. Leonardo’s studies at this time ranged over the whole field of science and art; beside being a painter and a sculptor, he was a practiced architect, engineer, and mechanician; profoundly versed in mathematics and the physical sciences; and an accomplished poet and musician. The famous letter in which he applied to the Duke of Milan for employment, enumerates only a few of his acquirements; he represents himself as skilled in military and naval engineering, offensive and defensive, and the construction of artillery, and as possessing secrets in these matters hitherto unknown; he can make designs for buildings, and undertake any work in sculpture, in marble, in bronze, or in terra-cotta; and “in painting,” he says, “I can do what can be done as well as any man, be he who he may.” He concludes by offering to submit his own account of himself to the test of experiment, at his excellency’s pleasure. He entered the Duke’s service about the year 1482, receiving a yearly salary of 500 scudi. Under his auspices an academy of arts was established in Milan in 1485, and he drew round him a numerous school of painters. Of the many works executed by Leonardo during his residence at Milan, the greatest was the world renowned picture of the “Last Supper,” painted in oil upon the wall of the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Whether it was the fault of the wall or the medium used by the painter, the great picture rapidly faded, and by the end of fifty years had virtually perished. It is still shown, but decay and restoration have left little of the original work of Leonardo. The best idea of it is to be got from the old copies, taken while the picture was yet perfect; of these the most valuable is the one executed in 1510 by Marco d’Oggione, now in the possession of the Royal Academy of London. His other important achievement, while at Milan, was a work of sculpture, which unfortunately perished within a few years of its completion. It seems to have occupied him at intervals for eleven years, for the completed model was first exhibited to the public in 1493. All that we now know of it is from the numerous sketches in the Royal Collection at Windsor. The model was still in existence in 1501, after which nothing more is recorded of it. He also at this time made a model for the cupola of Milan Cathedral, which was never carried out. In 1499 Leonardo left Milan and returned to Florence. He received a commission in 1503 to paint the wall at one end of the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio, the decoration of the other end being at the same time entrusted to Michelangelo. Leonardo’s picture was never completed, and Michelangelo’s apparently never begun; but the cartoons for their two compositions, known respectively as the “Battle of the Standard” and the “Cartoon of Pisa,” excited the greatest admiration, and were termed by Benvenuto Cellini “the school of the world;” both have been lost or destroyed; all that we know of Leonardo’s composition is gained from a drawing of it by Rubens in black and red chalk in the gallery of the Louvre, to which, though spirited enough, he contrived to impart the coarse Flemish character with which all his work is disfigured. In 1514 Leonardo visited Rome, and was to have executed some work in the Vatican, had not an affront put upon him by the pope given him offence and caused him to leave Rome. He went to the King of France, Francis I., who was then at Pavia, took service with him, and accompanied him to France, in the early part of 1516. He was, however, weakened by age and in bad health, and did little or no new work in France. In a little more than three years’ time, in May 1519, he died, at Cloux, near Amboise, at the age of sixty-seven.
Those pictures of Leonardo, which we may regard with confidence as the work of his own hand, fully justify the exceptional admiration with which he has always been regarded. He was excessively fastidious in his work, “his soul being full of the sublimity of art,” and spent years over the execution of some of his works. The painting of the portrait of Madonna Lisa is said to have extended over four years, and to have been then left incomplete. His mind also was at times equally bent on scientific matters, and for long periods he was entirely absorbed in the study of mathematics. For these reasons he produced but few pictures; if, however, he had left none, his drawings, which fortunately exist in large numbers, would suffice to account for the enthusiasm which his work has always excited. It is certain that we do not see his pictures in the state in which they left his easel; from some causes, unnecessary to discuss, they have blackened in the shadows, and the colors have faded. Vasari praises beyond measure the carnations of the Mona Lisa, which, he says, “do not appear to be painted, but truly flesh and blood;” but no trace of these delicate tints now remains.
Leonardo was the author of many treatises, some of which only have been published. The most celebrated is the “Trattato della Pittura,” still a book of high authority among writings on art.
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI
Was born at Castel Caprese, near Arezzo, in 1475. In 1488 he entered the school of Ghirlandaio, the master giving a small payment for the boy’s services. His precocious abilities soon attracted the notice of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and until the death of that prince in 1492, Michelangelo worked under his especial patronage. His earliest drawings show a spontaneous power which made Fuseli say that “as an artist he had no infancy;” but for many years he confined himself almost entirely to sculpture; and some of his greatest achievements in that kind of art were executed before he undertook his first considerable work with the pencil. This was the “Cartoon of Pisa,” finished in 1505, and intended as a design for a mural picture to face that of Leonardo in the Council Hall at Florence. This cartoon is lost, but a copy in monochrome, containing probably the whole of the composition, exists in England. During its progress he had broken off to visit Rome, and execute some sculptural work for the pope; and in 1508 he went to Rome again to begin the great achievement of his life, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. The paintings of the ceiling illustrate the Creation and the Fall of Man, together with other scenes and figures typical of the Redemption. The middle part of the ceiling is divided into nine compartments, containing the “Creation of Eve” (placed in the center, as symbolizing the woman of whom the Messiah was born), the “Creation of Adam,” the “Temptation, Fall and Expulsion” in one composition, the “Separation of Light from Darkness,” the “Gathering of the Waters,” the “Creation of the Sun and Moon,” the “Deluge,” the “Thanksgiving of Noah,” and the “Drunkenness of Noah.” At the corners of the ceiling are four designs of the great deliverances of the children of Israel, the Brazen Serpent, David and Goliath, Judith with the head of Holofernes, and the punishment of Haman. There are six windows on each side of the chapel; the lunettes which surround them, and the spaces above them, are occupied by groups of the ancestors of Christ. Between the windows, at the springing of the vault, are colossal seated figures of the Prophets and Sibyls who foretold the coming of the Savior. They are arranged alternately as follows:—Jeremiah, Persian Sibyl, Ezekiel, Erythræan Sibyl, Joel, Delphic Sibyl, Isaiah, Cumæan Sibyl, Daniel, Libyan Sibyl; Jonah and Zachariah are placed one at each end of the chapel, between the historical compositions at the angles of the ceiling. These single figures are the most striking features of the design, and calculated skilfully to help the architectural effect. The side walls of the chapel, below the springing of the vault, had already been decorated with frescoes executed by Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Ghirlandaio, Luca Signorelli, and Perugino. Michelangelo’s frescoes were finished toward the end of the year 1512. Vasari’s statement that he painted them all in twenty months without any assistance is undoubtedly exaggerated; it possibly refers to the completion of the first half of the ceiling.
For the next twenty years Michelangelo did little or nothing in painting; but in 1533, at the age of fifty-nine, he began the cartoons for the fresco of the “Last Judgment” on the wall behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel. This celebrated composition is entirely of nude figures, no accessories being introduced to add to the terror of the scene. Each figure throughout this vast composition has its appropriate meaning, and the power of design and mastery of execution are unsurpassed and unsurpassable. The picture was finished in 1541. Two frescoes in the neighboring Pauline Chapel, the “Conversion of Saint Paul,” and the “Crucifixion of Saint Peter,” which were finished in 1549, were his last paintings. He had accepted, in 1547, the position of architect of Saint Peter’s, stipulating that his services should be gratuitous. He continued to carry the building forward, altering materially the original design of Bramante, until his death, which took place in February, 1564. His body was taken to Florence, and buried in Santa Croce.
Although the genius of Michelangelo has exercised a vast and widely diffused influence over all subsequent art, yet this master, unlike Raphael, formed no school of his own immediate followers. It must be admitted that Raphael owes him much, for he never found his full strength until he had seen Michelangelo’s works at Rome, when his style underwent immediate improvement. None of those who worked under Michelangelo dared to walk directly in his steps; there is in his style, as there was in the character of the man himself, a certain stern individuality which gives the impression of solitary and unapproachable greatness. Of his assistants, the most eminent was Sebastiano del Piombo.
RAFFAELLO SANZIO,
Always called Raphael, was born at Urbino in 1483. His father died when he was eleven years old, and the boy was placed by his uncles, who became his guardians, with Perugino. His handiwork at this time is no doubt to be traced in many of Perugino’s pictures and frescoes; and, as may be seen, he was an important coadjutor with Pinturicchio at Siena. The earliest picture known to be painted entirely by himself is a “Crucifixion,” in the collection of Lord Dudley, done at the age of seventeen, which closely resembles the style of Perugino. In 1504 he first visited Florence, where he enjoyed the friendship of Francia and Fra Bartholommeo, and made acquaintance with the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo—new influences which considerably affected his style. With the exception of short visits to Perugia, Bologna, and Urbino, he was resident in Florence until 1508. In that year he went to Rome at the invitation of Pope Julius II., and was for the rest of his life continually in the employment of that pontiff and his successor, Leo X. Raphael died on his birthday, the 6th of April, 1520, aged exactly thirty-seven years.
Raphael’s manner as a painter is divided into three styles, corresponding with the broad divisions of his life’s history. Unlike Michelangelo, whose genius and individuality is stamped on the earliest works from his hand, Raphael gained, as his experience of what had been done by his contemporaries was enlarged, a deeper and further insight into his own powers. His first, or Peruginesque style, characterizes those works which he produced while still the companion of his master, before his first visit to Florence; of these pictures the most important are the “Sposalizio” (or “Marriage of the Virgin,”) at Milan, and the “Coronation of the Virgin,” in the Vatican. His second, or Florentine, style covers the four years from his arrival in Florence in 1504, to his departure for Rome in 1508; here the manner of Fra Bartholommeo had great influence upon him; to this period belong the “Madonna del Cardellino” (“of the Goldfinch,”) in the Uffizi, “La Belle Jardinière,” of the Louvre, the “Madonna del Baldacchino,” in the Pitti (which was left incomplete by Raphael, and finished by another hand), and the “Entombment” in the Borghese Gallery, at Rome, his first attempt at a great historical composition. It is in his third, or Roman, style that Raphael fully asserts that sovereignty in art which has earned him the name of Prince of painters, and appears as the head of his own school, which, generally called the Roman School, might perhaps, as he collected round him followers from all parts of Italy, more fitly be termed the Raphaelesque. This third period includes all his great frescoes in the Vatican, with a host of easel pictures; for, short as Raphael’s life was, his works are wondrously numerous, and our space permits mention of only a few of even the most celebrated.
It has been questioned whether Raphael’s art gained by what he learnt from Michelangelo, some critics affirming that his earlier style is his best. This, however, must be considered to be entirely a matter of taste. Most painters—unless, like Fra Angelico, so entirely absorbed in the mystical side of their art as never to change their style—as they gain in power of expression, lose something of their youthful emotional fervor; and it is possible to assert that in the magnificent design of the “Incendio del Borgo” the dramatic element is more in evidence than in the “Disputa.” But what is lost on the emotional and religious side is compensated for by the gain in power of representation; and it is difficult to stand before the cartoon of “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,” and not to confess that Giotto himself could not have imparted a more implicit trustfulness and childlike belief in the power of the Redeemer to the look and gesture of St. Peter; and while the magnificent simplicity of the youths drawing the net is conceived in an equal spirit of truthfulness to nature, the grandeur of style and the knowledge displayed in the drawing is so much pure gain on his earlier manner.
The Loggie, or open corridors of the Vatican, were also adorned by Raphael’s scholars with a series of fifty-two paintings of Biblical subjects from his designs; the whole series was known as “Raphael’s Bible.”
In 1515 he was commissioned to design tapestries for the Sistine Chapel; of the ten cartoons (distemper paintings on paper) for these tapestries three have been lost; the other seven after many dangers and vicissitudes came into the possession of Charles I. of England. They are perhaps the most remarkable art treasures belonging to England, and are at present exhibited, by permission of Her Majesty, in the South Kensington Museum.
Among the greatest oil pictures of Raphael’s third period may be enumerated the “Madonna di Foligno” in the Vatican; the “Madonna della Sedia” in the Pitti Palace at Florence; the “Saint Cecilia” at Bologna; the “Madonna of the Fish,” and the picture of “Christ Bearing His Cross,” known as the “Spasimo,” in the splendid collection at Madrid; the “Madonna di San Sisto” at Dresden, which obtained for the artist the name of “the Divine;” and finally the “Transfiguration” at the Vatican, the sublime picture on which his last working hours were spent, and which was carried at his funeral before its colors were dry.
TIZIANO VECELLIO,
Commonly called by the anglicised form of his Christian name, Titian, was born at Cadore, near Venice, in 1477. His studies in art began at the age of ten, under a painter named Zuccato, from whose studio he passed to Gentile Bellini’s, and from his again to that of his brother Giovanni. Space forbids us to do more than indicate the chief landmarks in Titian’s long, eventful, and illustrious life. When his reputation as a great artist was new, before he was thirty years old, he visited the court of Ferrara, and executed for the duke two of his earliest masterpieces, the “Tribute Money,” now at Dresden, and the “Bacchus and Ariadne,” in the National Gallery of London. In 1516 he painted his great altarpiece, the “Assumption,” now removed from its church to the Accademia at Venice, and was at once placed by this incomparable work in the highest rank of painters. The “Entombment” of the Louvre was painted about 1523; and in 1528 he executed another magnificent altarpiece, the “Death of St. Peter Martyr,” in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, which was destroyed in the fire of 1867. In 1530 Titian was invited to Bologna, to paint the portrait of the Emperor Charles V.; and he is supposed by some writers to have accompanied the emperor shortly afterward to Spain. Owing to the patronage which Charles V. and his son Philip II. liberally conferred on the artist, Madrid possesses a collection of his works second in number and importance only to the treasures of Venice. The “Presentation in the Temple,” in the Accademia at Venice, dates from about 1539, and the “Christ at Emmaus,” in the Louvre, from about 1546. In 1545 he painted at Rome the celebrated portrait of “Pope Paul III.,” in the Naples Museum. Titian continued active in his art even up to the time of his death, which occurred in 1576, at the great age of ninety-nine. His style, as is to be expected, changed considerably in the course of his long life, and the pictures painted in his last years, though full of color, are infirm in drawing and execution; in the full vigor of his powers he was a draughtsman second to none, though never aiming at the select beauty of form attained by the Florentine school, and by Raphael. It was this that led Michelangelo to say that, with a better mode of study, “This man might have been as eminent in design as he is true to nature and masterly in counterfeiting the life, and then, nothing could be desired better or more perfect;” adding, “for he has an exquisite perception, and a delightful spirit and manner.”
The splendid artistic power of Titian may perhaps be better discerned in his portraits than in the more ambitious works of sacred art. He stands unquestionably at the head of portrait painters of all ages and of all schools; not even Velasquez equaling him at his best. Beside religious pictures and portraits he painted a great number of subjects from classical mythology. Among the most famous, beside the “Bacchus and Ariadne,” mentioned above—the pride of the English collection—may be named the “Bacchanals” of Madrid, the two of “Venus” in the Uffizi, at Florence, the “Danae,” at Naples, and the often repeated “Venus and Adonis,” and “Diana and Callisto.” He is seen at his very best in the “Venus” of the Tribune, at Florence, perhaps the only work of his which has escaped retouching, and in the exquisite allegory called “Sacred and Profane Love,” at the Borghese Palace, at Rome. As a landscape painter, he possessed a sentiment for nature in all its forms which had never before been seen, and his backgrounds have never been equaled since. The mountains in the neighborhood of his native town, Cadore, of which, as well as of other landscape scenes, numerous pen and ink drawings by his hand are in existence, inspired him, doubtless, with that solemn treatment of effects of cloud and light and shade and blue distance for which his pictures are conspicuous.
It is unnecessary to deal with the school of painting which exists in Italy at the present day. It would be paying it too high a compliment to regard it as the legitimate successor of the art of those great epochs whose course we have tried to sketch. The modern Italian school is little more than an echo of the modern French. And seeing that there is no principle clearer or more certain than this, that a great national school of art can flourish only when it springs from a sane and vigorous national existence, it is not to be wondered at if a country so convulsed by the political passions and so vulgarized by the social triviality and meanness of modern times, should be in this respect cast down further than her more fortunate neighbors by the same causes which have soiled even the best art of the nineteenth century with something of dilettantism and affectation.
