I
In the Italian devotional pictures of the early Renaissance there are usually two quite unrelated parts: the foreground and the background.
The foreground is conventional. Its personages—saints, angels and Holy Family—are the direct descendants of a long line of similar figures. Every detail of dress and attitude has been settled beforehand by laws which the artist accepts as passively as the fact that his models have two eyes apiece, and noses in the middle of their faces. Though now and then some daring painter introduces a happy modification, such as the little violin-playing angels on the steps of the Virgin’s throne, in the pictures of the Venetian school, such changes are too rare and unimportant to affect the general truth of the statement. It is only in the background that the artist finds himself free to express his personality. Here he depicts not what some one else has long since designed for him, in another land and under different conceptions of life and faith, but what he actually sees about him, in the Lombard plains, in the delicately-modelled Tuscan hill-country, or in the fantastic serrated landscape of the Friulian Alps. One must look past and beyond the central figures, in their typical attitudes and symbolical dress, to catch a glimpse of the life amid which the painting originated. Relegated to the middle distance, and reduced to insignificant size, is the real picture, the picture which had its birth in the artist’s brain and reflects his impression of the life about him.
Here, for instance, behind a Madonna of Bellini’s, white oxen graze the pasture, and a shepherd lolls on a bank beside his flock; there, in the train of the Eastern Kings, real soldiers, clerks, pedlars, beggars, and all the miscellaneous rabble of the Italian streets wind down a hill-side crowned by a mediæval keep, and cross a bridge with a water-mill—just such a bridge and water-mill as the artist may have sketched in his native village. And in the scenes of the life of the Virgin, what opportunities for genre-painting present themselves! In Ghirlandaio’s fresco of the Birth of the Virgin, in the apse of Santa Maria Novella, fine ladies in contemporary costume are congratulating the conventionally-draped Saint Anna, while Crivelli’s Annunciation, in the National Gallery, shows an ornate Renaissance palace, with peacocks spreading their tails on the upper loggia, a sumptuous Eastern rug hanging over a marble balustrade, and the celestial messenger tripping up a flight of marble stairs to a fashionable front door.
No painter was more prodigal than Carpaccio of these intimate details, or more audacious in the abrupt juxtaposition of devotional figures with the bustling secular life of his day. His Legend of Saint Ursula, in the Accademia of Venice, is a storehouse of fifteenth-century anecdote, an encyclopædia of dress, architecture and manners; and behind his agonizing Saint Sebastian, tied to a column and riddled with arrows, the traffic of the Venetian canals goes on unregardingly, as in life the most trivial activities revolve unheeding about a great sorrow.
Even painters far less independent of tradition than Carpaccio and Crivelli succeeded in imparting the personal note, the note of direct observation, to the background of their religious pictures. If the figures are placed in a landscape, the latter is not a conventional grouping of hill, valley and river: it has the unmistakable quality of the chose vue. No one who has studied the backgrounds of old Italian pictures can imagine that realistic landscape-painting is a modern art. The technique of the early landscape-painters was not that of the modern interpreter of nature, but their purpose was the same; they sought to render with fidelity and precision what they saw about them. It is this directness of vision which gives to their backgrounds such vividness and charm. In these distances one may discover the actual foreground of the artist’s life. Here one may learn what was veritably happening in fifteenth-century Venice, Florence and Perugia; here see what horizons the old masters looked out on, and note that the general aspect of the country is still almost as unchanged as the folds of the Umbrian mountains and the curves of the Tuscan streams.