A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

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.”

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.

Fig. 128. Botticelli. Chigi Madonna.—Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fig. 134. Botticelli. St. Augustine. Fresco.—Ognissanti.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fig. 141. Filippino Lippi. St. Bernard’s Vision.—Badia.

Fig. 143. Piero di Cosimo. Primitive Man. Spalliera panel.—Metropolitan Museum, N. Y.

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.

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.

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.

Fig. 146. Leonardo da Vinci, Head at Left; Verrocchio, Head at Right. Details from Verrocchio’s Baptism.—Uffizi.

Fig. 146a.> Verrocchio and Leonardo. Baptism of Christ.—Uffizi.

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.

Fig. 148. Leonardo da Vinci. Landscape. Pen Drawing.—Uffizi.

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.

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!

Fig. 151. Leonardo. Sketch for Adoration.—Louvre.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fig. 162a. 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.

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.

Fig. 163. Bronzino. Eleonora of Toledo and her son.—Uffizi.

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.

Fig. 166. Pontormo. Frescoed Lunette.—Poggio a Cajano.