Howard's Questionings.
When the fight begins within himself,
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up beneath his feet—both tug—
He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes
And grows.
—Browning.
PONTE ALLA CARRAJA, FLORENCE.
At last the morning came when the postponed visit to Santa Maria del Carmine, on the other side of the Arno, was to be made. Miss Sherman had so evidently desired to join in the study of the old painters that Mrs. Douglas suggested to her brother that she be invited to do so, but he had thought it not best.
"The others would not be so free to talk," he said. "I do not wish any constraint. Now we are only a family party,—with the exception of Howard, and I confess that I sometimes wish he did not join us in this." Malcom was again with them, for the first time since they were at Fiesole, and this was enough to make the occasion a particularly joyous one.
The romantic mystery of Masaccio's short life and sudden, secret death, and the wonderful advance that he effected in the evolution of Italian painting of the fifteenth century, had greatly interested them as they had read at home about him, and all were eager to see the frescoes.
"They are somewhat worn and dark," Mr. Sumner said, "and at first you will probably feel disappointed. What you must particularly look for here is that which you have hitherto found nowhere else,—the expression of individuality in figures and faces. Giotto, you remember, sought to tell some story; to illustrate some Bible incident so that it should seem important and claim attention. Masaccio went to work in a wholly different way. While Giotto would say to himself: 'Now I am going to paint a certain Bible story; what people shall I introduce so that this story shall best seem to be a real occurrence?' Masaccio would think: 'I wish to make a striking picture of Peter and John, or any other sacred characters. What story or incident shall I choose for representation that will best show the individual characteristics of these men?'
"Possessing this great love for people, he studied the drawing of the human figure as had never been done before in the history of Christian art. At this time, more than a hundred years after Giotto, artists were beginning to master the science of perspective drawing, and in Masaccio's pictures we see men standing firmly on their feet, and put upon different planes in the same picture; their figures well poised, and true to anatomy. In one of them is his celebrated naked, shivering youth, who is awaiting baptism,—the study of which wrought a revolution in painting."
A little afterward they were standing in the dim Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine, whose walls are covered with frescoes of scenes in the lives of Christ and His apostles. They had learned that there was an artist called Masolino, who, perhaps, had begun these frescoes, and had been Masaccio's teacher; and that a young man called Filippino Lippi had finished them some years after they had been left incomplete by Masaccio's early death.
All were greatly impressed by the fact that so little can be known of Masaccio, who wrought here so well; that even when, or how, or where he died is a mystery; and yet his name is one of the very greatest in early Italian art.
They talked of how the greatest masters of the High Renaissance—Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael—used to come here to study, and thus this little chapel became a great art school; and how, at the present time, it is esteemed by many one of the four most important art-buildings in the world;—the others being, Arena Chapel, Padua, where are Giotto's frescoes; Sistine Chapel, Rome, where are Michael Angelo's greatest paintings; and Scuola di San Rocco, Venice, which is filled with Tintoretto's work.
He then called their attention to the composition of Masaccio's frescoes; asking them especially to notice that, while only a few people are taking part in the principal scene, many others are standing about interested in looking on; all, men with strongly marked characteristics,—individual, and worthy of attention.
"May I repeat a verse or two of poetry right here where we stand, uncle?" asked Margery. "It keeps saying itself in my mind. I think you all know it and who wrote it, but that is all the better."
And in her own sweet way she recited James Russell Lowell's beautiful tribute to Masaccio:—
"He came to Florence long ago
And painted here these walls, that shone
For Raphael and for Angelo,
With secrets deeper than his own,
Then shrank into the dark again,
And died, we know not how or when.
"The darkness deepened, and I turned
Half sadly from the fresco grand;
'And is this,' mused I, 'all ye earned,
High-vaulted brain and cunning hand,
That ye to other men could teach
The skill yourselves could never reach?'
"Henceforth, when rings the health to those
Who live in story and in song,
O, nameless dead, that now repose
Safe in oblivion's chambers strong,
One cup of recognition true
Shall silently be drained to you!"
"But Masaccio does not need any other monument than this chapel. He is not very badly off, I am sure, while this stands, and people come from all over the world to visit it," exclaimed Malcom, as they left the Brancacci Chapel, and walked slowly down the nave of the church.
"Is this all he painted?" asked Barbara.
"There is one other fresco in the cloister of this same church, but it is sadly injured—indeed half obliterated," answered Mr. Sumner. "That is all. But his influence cannot be estimated. What he, then a poor, unknown young man, working his very best upon these walls, accomplished for the great world of painting can never be measured. He surely wrought 'better than he knew.' This was because he, for the first time in the history of modern painting, portrayed real life. All the conventionalities that had hitherto clung, in a greater or less degree, to painting, were dropped by him; and thus the way was opened for the perfect representations of the High Renaissance which so soon followed. We will next give some time to the study of the works of Ghirlandajo and Botticelli, who, with Filippino Lippi, who finished these frescoes which we have just been looking at, make a famous trio of Early Renaissance painters."
After they had crossed Ponte alla Carraja, Margery said she wished to do some shopping on Via dei Fossi, which was close at hand—that street whose shop windows are ever filled with most fascinating groups of sculptured marbles and bronzes, and all kinds of artistic bric-a-brac—and begged her uncle to accompany her.
"I wish no one else to come," she said, with her own little, emphatic nod.
"Oh, ho! secrets!" exclaimed Malcom; "so we must turn aside!"
"Do go to drive with me," begged Howard. "Here we are close to my hotel, and I can have the team ready right off."
So they walked a few steps along the Lung' Arno to the pleasant, sunny Hotel de la Grande Bretagne, which Howard had chosen for his Florentine home, and soon recrossed the Arno, and swept out through Porta Romana into the open country, behind Howard's beautiful gray horses.
The crisp, cool air brought roses into Barbara's and Bettina's cheeks, and ruffled their pretty brown hair. Malcom was in high spirits after his long confinement to the house, and Howard tried to throw off a gloomy, discouraged feeling that had hung over him all the morning. Seated opposite Barbara, and continually meeting her frank, steadfast eyes, he seemed to realize as he had never before done the obvious truth of Mrs. Douglas's words, when she had said that Barbara was perfectly unconscious of his love for her; and all the manhood within him strove to assert itself to resist an untimely discovery of his feeling, for fear of the mischief it might cause.
Howard had been doing a great deal of new thinking during the past weeks. He suddenly found himself surrounded by an atmosphere wholly different from that in which he had before lived.
Sprung from an aristocratic and thoroughly egoistic ancestry on his father's side, and a morbidly sensitive one on his mother's; brought up by his paternal grandmother, whose every thought had been centred upon him as the only living descendant of her family; surrounded by servants who were the slaves of his grandmother's and his own whims; not even his experience in the Boston Latin School, chosen because his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been educated there, had served to widen much the horizon of his daily living, or to make him anything like a typical American youth.
Now, during the last two or three months he had been put into wholly changed conditions. An habitual visitor to this family into whose life he had accidentally entered, he had been a daily witness of Mrs. Douglas's self-forgetting love, which was by no means content with ministering to the happiness of her own loved home ones, but continually reached out to an ever widening circle, blessing whomever it touched. He could not be unconscious that every act of Robert Sumner's busy life was directed by the desire to give of himself to help others; that a high ideal of beneficence, not gain, was always before him, and was that by which he measured himself. The wealth, the position of both, served only to make their lives more generous.
And he saw that the younger people of the household had caught the same spirit. Malcom, Margery, Barbara, and Bettina forgot themselves in each other, and were most generous in all their judgments. They esteemed people according to that which they were in themselves, not according to what they had, and shrank from nothing save meanness and selfishness.
As we have seen, he had been attracted in a wonderful way to Barbara ever since he had first met her. Her beauty, her unconscious pride of bearing, mingled with her sweet, unaffected enthusiasms, were a swift revelation to one who had never in his life before given a second thought to any girl; and a fierce longing to win her love had taken possession of his whole being, as he had confessed to Mrs. Douglas.
But to-day there was a chill upon him. He had before been confident of the future. It must not, should not disappoint him, he had said to himself again and again. Somehow he was not now so sure of himself and it. There seemed a mystery before him. The way that had always before seemed to open to his will refused to disclose itself. How could he win the affection of this noble girl, whose life already seemed so full that she felt no lack, who was so warm and generous in her feelings to all, so thoroughly unselfish, so wholesome, so lovable? How he did long to make all her wishes centre on him, even as his did upon her!
But Barbara's ideals were high. She would demand much of him whom she could love. Only the other day he had heard her say in a voice deep with feeling that money and position were nothing in comparison with a life that was ever giving itself to enrich others. Whom did she mean? he wondered. It seemed as if she knew some one who was even then in her mind, and a fierce jealousy sprang up with the thought. She surely could not have meant him, for he had never lived for any other than himself, nor did he wish to think of anything but himself. He wanted to get well and to have Barbara love him. Then he would take her away from everybody else and lavish everything upon her, and how happy would he be! Could he only look into the future, he thought, and see that this was to come, he would ask nothing else.
Poor Howard! Could the future have opened before his wish never so little, how soon would his restless, raging emotions have become hushed into a great silence!
A few evenings afterward, as they were all sitting together in the library, and Howard with them, Mr. Sumner, knowing that the young people had been reading and talking of Ghirlandajo and Botticelli, said that perhaps there would be no better time for talking of these artists than the present.
"With Masaccio," he continued, "we have begun a new period of Italian painting,—the period of the Early Renaissance. All the former great artists,—Cimabue, Giotto, and Fra Angelico, whom we have particularly studied,—and the lesser ones, about whom you have read,—Orcagna, Taddeo Gaddi, and Uccello, the bird-lover (who gave himself so untiringly to the study of linear perspective),—belong to the Gothic period, literally the rude period; in which, although a steady advance was made, yet the works are all more or less very imperfect art-productions. All these are wholly in the service of the Church, and are painted in fresco on plaster or in tempera on wood. In the Early Renaissance, however, a new impulse was seen. Artists were much better equipped for their work, nature-study progressed wonderfully, anatomy was studied, perspective was mastered, the sphere of art widened to take in history, portraits, and mythology; and in the latter part of this period, as we shall see, oil-painting was introduced."
"Can you give us any dates of these periods to remember, uncle?" asked Malcom.
"Roughly speaking, the Gothic period covers the years from about 1250 to 1400; the Early Renaissance, from about 1400 to 1500. Masaccio, as we have seen, was the first great painter of the Early Renaissance, and he lived from 1401 to 1428. But these dates are not arbitrary. Fra Angelico lived until 1455, and yet his pictures belong wholly to the Gothic period; so also do those of other Gothic painters whose lives overlap the Early Renaissance in point of time. It is the spirit of the art that definitely determines its place, although the general dates help one to remember.
"We will not talk long of Ghirlandajo,—Domenico Ghirlandajo (for there is another, Ridolfo by name, who is not nearly so important to the art-world). His composition is similar to that of Masaccio. A few people are intimately engaged, and the others are bystanders, or onlookers. One characteristic is that many of these last are portraits of Florentine men and women who were his contemporaries, and so we get from his pictures a knowledge of the people and costumes of his time. His backgrounds are often masses of Florentine architecture, some of which you will readily recognize. His subjects are religious.
"For studying his work, go again to Santa Maria Novella, where is a series of frescoes representing scenes in the lives of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. I would give some time to these, for in them you will find all the characteristics of Ghirlandajo's frescoes, which are his strongest work. Then you will find two good examples of his tempera painting on wooden panels in the Uffizi Gallery: an Adoration of the Magi, and a Madonna and Saints, which are in the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco near Fra Angelico's Madonna—the one which is surrounded by the famous musical Angels. Others are in the Pitti Gallery and Academy. His goldsmith's training shows in these smaller pictures more than in the frescoes. We see it in his love for painting golden ornaments and decoration of garments."
"Is his work anything like that of Michael Angelo, Mr. Sumner?" asked Barbara. "He was Angelo's teacher, was he not?"
"Yes, history tells us that he held that position for three years; but judging from the work of both, I should say that not much was either taught or learned. Ghirlandajo's work possesses great strength, as does Michael Angelo's, but on wholly different lines. Ghirlandajo loved to represent grave, dignified figures,—which were portraits,—clad in long gowns, stiff brocades, and flowing mantles; and there are superb accessories in his pictures,—landscapes, architecture, and decorated interiors. On the other hand, Michael Angelo's figures are most impersonal, and each depends for effect simply on its own magnificence of conception and rendering. The lines of figures are of far more importance than the face, which is the farthest possible removed from the portrait—and for accessories of any kind he cared not at all."
At this moment callers were announced and Mr. Sumner said they would resume their talk some other time.
"It will be well for you if you can look at these paintings by Ghirlandajo to-morrow morning if it be a bright day," he said, "while all that I have told you is fresh in your minds. I cannot go with you, but if you think of anything you would like to ask me about them, you can do so before we begin on Botticelli."