ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER III
Vasari on Masaccio
Vasari’s general estimate of Masaccio’s importance is still sound.
“With regard to the good manner of painting, we are indebted above all to Masaccio, seeing that he, as one desirous of acquiring fame, perceived that painting is nothing but the counterfeiting of all the things of nature, vividly and simply, with drawing and with colours, even as she produced them for us.... This truth, I say, being recognized by Masaccio, brought it about that by means of continuous study he learned so much that he can be numbered among the first who cleared away, in a great measure, the hardness, the imperfections, and the difficulties of the art, and that he gave a beginning to beautiful attitudes, movements, liveliness, and vivacity, and to a certain relief truly characteristic and natural; which no painter up to his time had done.... And he painted his works with good unity and softness, harmonizing the flesh-colours of the heads and of the nudes with the colours of the draperies, which he delighted to make with few folds and simple, as they are in life and nature....
“For this reason that chapel has been frequented continually up to our own day [1554] by innumerable draughtsmen and masters; and there still are therein some heads so life-like and so beautiful, that it may truly be said that no master of that age approached so nearly as this man did to the moderns. His labours, therefore, deserve infinite praise, and above all because he gave form in his art to the beautiful manner of the times.”
Vasari then names twenty-five artists who studied Masaccio’s frescoes. From De Vere’s translation of the Lives, Vol. II, p. 189, 90.
Leonardo da Vinci on Masaccio
Leonardo da Vinci uses Masaccio as the example of a painter who goes to nature rather than to other men’s painting.
That Painting declines and deteriorates from age to age, when painters have no standard but painting already done.
“Hence the painter will produce pictures of small merit if he takes for his standard the pictures of others. But if he will study from natural objects he will bear good fruit; as was seen in the painters after the Romans who always imitated each other, and so their art declined from age to age. After these came Giotto the Florentine who—not content with imitating the works of Cimabue; his master—being born in the mountains and in a solitude inhabited only by goats and such beasts, and being guided by nature to his art, began by drawing on the rocks the movements of the goats of which he was keeper. And thus he began to draw all the animals which were to be found in the country, and in such wise that after much study he excelled not only all the masters of his time but all those of many bygone ages.”
“Afterwards this art declined again, because everyone imitated the pictures that were already done; thus it went on from century to century until Tomaso, of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but nature—the mistress of all masters—weary themselves in vain.”
J. P. Richter “Literary Works of L. da V.,” Vol. I. p. 660.
But Leonardo approves also imitation of antiquity (Richter, Vol. II, ¶1445). “The imitation of antique things is better than that of modern things.” He would probably have sanctioned Masaccio’s devout study of Giotto. The warning is against slavish imitation of immediate predecessors.
Vasari on Paolo Uccello
The admirable and self sacrificing ardor of these first realists is best exemplified in the case of Paolo Uccello.
“For the sake of these investigations [in perspective] he kept himself in seclusion and almost a hermit, having little intercourse with anyone, and staying weeks and months in his house without shaving himself. And although those were difficult and beautiful problems, if he had spent that time in the study of figures, he would have brought them to absolute perfection; for even so he made them with passing good draughtsmanship. But, consuming his time in these researches, he remained throughout his whole life more poor than famous; wherefore the sculptor Donatello, who was very much his friend, said to him very often—when Paolo showed him Mazzocchi (facetted head-fillets) with pointed ornaments, and squares drawn in perspective from diverse aspects; spheres with seventy-two diamond-shaped facets, with wood-shavings wound round sticks on each facet; and other fantastic devices on which he spent and wasted his time—‘Ah, Paolo, this perspective of thine makes thee abandon the substance for the shadow; those are things that are only useful to men who work at the inlaying of wood, seeing that they fill their borders with chips and shavings, with spirals both round and square, and with other similar things.’”
Vasari, in Schele de Vere’s translation; Vol. II. p. 132, 3.
An Appraisal of Baldovinetti’s Frescoes
Here I may illustrate a common practice of the times in an appraisal of Baldovinetti’s frescoes in the choir of the Trinità by fellow artists including Benozzo Gozzoli, Cosimo Rosselli and Pietro Perugino.
“In the name of God—on the 19 of January 1496 (n. s. ’97)
We Benozzo di Lese, painter; and Piero di Cristofano da Castel della Pieve, painter; and Cosimo di Lorenzo Rosselli, painter, chosen by Alesso di Baldovinetti, painter, to see and judge and set a price on—empowered by a contract which said Alesso has with M. Bongianni de’Gianfigliazzi and his heirs—a chapel pictured in Santa Trinità of Florence—that is the choir of the said church, having seen, all together and agreeing, having examined all the costs of lime, azure, gold and all other colours, scaffolds and everything else, including his work, we judge from all this that the aforesaid Alesso should have one thousand broad gold florins.
“And for clearness and truth of the said judgment I Cosimo di Lorenzo aforesaid have made this writing with my own hand this aforesaid day, and so I judge; and here at the foot they will sign with their own hands that they are agreed with what is above written, and so judge.
Benozzo di Lese &c.
I Piero Perugino &c.
Translated from Herbert Horne’s edition of Alesso’s Ricordi in Burlington Magazine, Vol. II. (1903) p. 383.
Fig. 101. Ghirlandaio. Giovanna degli Albizzi.—J. P. Morgan Coll., New York.
Chapter IV
FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND THE NEW NARRATIVE STYLE
After Masaccio two tendencies,—towards prettiness and vivacious narrative; towards strenuous research—Fra Filippo Lippi celebrant of Gay Florence—Benozzo Gozzoli and Pageantry—Antonio Pollaiuolo and human dynamics—Piero della Francesca and impersonal observation of appearances—Dissolving tendencies in the new panoramic style—illustrated by the early frescoes in the Sistine Chapel—Perugino’s return to simple symmetries—The Cassone painters once more—Domenico Ghirlandaio and spectacular narrative—His portraits—The charm of the slighter narrative style.
In the last chapter we have dealt chiefly with innovators and reformers. Whether in art or life, these are not always the most agreeable companions. The charming person is generally a traditionalist, or a tactful profiteer by other men’s discoveries. So the popular favor has ever gone not to the strenuous artists of Masaccio’s type or Castagno’s, but to devotees of the charm of common folk and things, like Fra Filippo Lippi; to masters of pageantry and incident, like Benozzo Gozzoli; or to chroniclers of the festal richness of Florence in her short prime, like Domenico Ghirlandaio. These artists, while by no means giants, are highly representative of their times. They one and all aimed to please, and amply succeeded. Their importance in the history of art is rather slight; in the history of taste, on the contrary, they are very important. And it is from that point of view that we shall do well to consider them. These three masters cover the last two-thirds of the fifteenth century. They exemplify the taste of the new-rich merchants who flourished under the benevolent tyranny of the Medici.
Alongside of these gracious and adaptable spirits, struggled the continuers of the realistic reform—Antonio Pollaiuolo, who first systematically studied the anatomy and dynamics of the human form; Andrea Verrocchio, who imbued accuracy and power with grace; Sandro Botticelli, who explored solitary roads of sentiment and wrought out of the ruggedness of the realists strange forms of recondite beauty. At all times we find the endeavor for artistic adaptation running alongside the passion for sheer discovery, and producing its own triumphs. It is this complicated, dual process which makes the richness and continuity of the Early Renaissance. If we compare the seventy-two years between the beginnings of Masaccio, say 1422, and the death of Ghirlandaio, in 1494, with the century and a half preceding, we shall note an extraordinary acceleration both of production and progress. There are no gaps and rests; each generation makes its discoveries and cashes them in. Architecture, sculpture, classical scholarship develop with a whirling rapidity which by no means precludes taste and reflection. In an almost reckless expansion of emotion, experience, and creative activity, Florence keeps her head though she risks losing her soul. And the true harbinger of this intoxicating new life is one who often lost his head and whose soul remains enigmatic, the wayward and fascinating painter-monk, Fra Filippo Lippi.[[39]]
Fig. 102. Filippo Lippi. Madonna in Adoration.—Berlin.
He was the first Italian painter to care greatly for the look of everyday people. Born about the year 1400, he was early orphaned and thrust willy-nilly into the Carmelite Order. As a young man he must have seen Masaccio painting those titanic designs in the Brancacci Chapel. From Masaccio Fra Filippo learned his trade, rather by observation than by direct instruction. But he cared for far different things. He really follows the tender narrative vein of Lorenzo Monaco. To the grandeur of miracle-working apostles, he preferred the gentle quaintness of the old man who kept the shops and practiced the trades of Florence; to the matronly dignity of Masaccio’s women, he preferred the shy and alluring sweetness of the Florentine girls about him; to the majestic sweeps of mountain and valley in Masaccio, the intimate appeal of the cypress groves, the little ledges and trickling springs. In technique, too, he avoided the bold short-cuts of his master. He hung on to the line, loved details, described everything with solicitude. It is an art of amiability and curiosity, generally disregardful of that grand style towards which in her greater moments Florence ever aspired. The advent of Fra Filippo in the Florence of Giotto and Orcagna and Masaccio, was like that of an irresistibly attractive youth in a solemn company. He loosened everything up. Unconsciously he demoralized the assembly; for two generations the art of Florence was to be boyish and girlish. That is its charm and its limitation, and the difference between the Early Renaissance and the Golden Age will be largely that the latter will prefer to depict with the gravity of maturity a world that has grown up.
Fig. 103. Fra Fillipo Lippi. Madonna and Child.—Uffizi.
One of the earliest and most exquisite panels by Fra Filippo was painted shortly after 1435 for the private chapel of Cosimo de’ Medici’s new palace, and is now at Berlin. The theme, young Mary kneeling before her Divine Infant, Figure [102], is a favorite with the Florentine artists of this century. Perhaps no one has conceived it more delightfully than Fra Filippo. The picture gets its peculiar sweetness from the gentle, girlish figure of the Maiden Mother, its quality of romance from the ledgy background watered by springs and spangled with modest flowers, its tang of reality from the chubby and stolid Christchild and the boyish St. John the Baptist. You could almost see such a thing today along the shaded upper Mensola when a young Florentine mother has taken the children for a Sunday picnic. For the old Gothic conventions and the bare majesty of Masaccio’s painting, Fra Filippo has substituted the everyday joys of a feeling eye, and the charm of closely-observed little things.
Fig. 104. Fra Filippo Lippi. Coronation of the Virgin.—Uffizi.
In most of his pictures this familiar quality is marked. His saints are not types, but people of the Florentine middle class. An early Madonna in the Uffizi, Figure [103], shows the Virgin as a slight girl with her ash-blond locks elaborately dressed and braided for a holiday. She is almost overborne by her sturdy Son, an exacting brute, one may imagine, while the attendant angel is a grinning street Arab caught in the intervals of mischief. Such pictures with their winsomeness and actuality worked powerfully to break down both the old Gothic decorum and the new sublimity of Masaccio.
To grasp the novelty of Fra Filippo’s most famous panel picture, The Coronation of the Virgin, painted for the nuns of St. Ambrogio in 1441, Figure [104], and now in the Uffizi, one has only to recall the devoutly formal and simple version of the subject which Fra Angelico painted about the same time for the convent of San Marco. The composition of Fra Filippo, on the contrary, is radiantly informal. We breathe the air of the commencement at a very nice girls’ school, with adoring friends and proud relatives moving at the edges of the ceremony. Indeed God the Father has merely the air of a benevolent trustee or visiting minor celebrity awarding a prize to the best girl. It is all like the crowning of a Rosière in a French village. Robert Browning in one of the most admirable poems in “Men and Women” makes Fra Filippo promise
“I shall paint
God in the midst, Madonna and her Babe.
Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood,
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root
When ladies crowd to church at Midsummer.”
Our picture is evidence enough that the time has come to Florentine art when youth shall be served.
Monastic vows, and in fact duties of any sort, bore lightly on Fra Filippo. He tasted the forbidden sweets of life recklessly, and worked only when the rare mood urged. He was in and out of the good graces of the Medici. Called to Prato to fresco the choir of the Collegiata, in 1455, he was nine years achieving what a steady workman would have done in two. But in the meantime Fra Filippo had run away with the nun, Lucrezia Buti, shuffled off his monastic vows (through the indulgence of the humanist Pope, Pius II), married and settled down as the father of a family. His random joyous course was nearly run, and his last frescoes at Prato show a kind of discipline that is foreign to his earlier work. In 1464 he completed the Feast of Herod and the Funeral of St. Stephen, frescoes which forecast the sort of narrative painting that was to mark the close of the century.
About the brutality of the Feast of Herod, Figure [105], Fra Filippo has cast a dreamy glamour, as indeed Giotto had before him. The youthful guests are absorbed in Salome’s dancing. Following the sculptors of the day, Fra Filippo has made her slight and graceful, as she trips a careless measure. The air is simply that of a gentle society. The grim motive of the delivery of the head of John the Baptist to Herodias is gently emphasized by the charming act of two little handmaids who clutch each other for fright. The sprightliness of the invention, the generalized idyllic charm of the feeling, the rich variety of accessories, the youthful timbre of the whole—make this not merely one of the best but also one of the most characteristic narrative mural paintings of the Early Renaissance. It strikes the note which will be echoed by Fra Filippo’s apprentice, Sandro Botticelli; which will be exaggerated by Fra Filippo’s son, Filippino, and distantly imitated by many another Florentine successor.
Fig. 105. Fra Filippo Lippi. Feast of Herod. Salome’s Dance. Fresco.—Collegiata. Prato.
If the Feast of Herod best exemplifies the element of homely poetry and inventive grace in Fra Filippo, the Burial of St. Stephen, Figure [106], just opposite in the choir proves that he was not oblivious to the high and decorous prose of his master Masaccio. In formality and power of construction few painters then living could have equalled it, and those few could not have rivalled its spacious architectural setting and its suggestion of atmosphere. At first sight it seems nearly equal to the Tribute Money or at least to the Tabitha. On more careful survey it is less noble, more insistently pathetic, and in every way more loosely knit. In particular the portraits at the sides have little but a mechanical relation to the theme. Masaccio himself had admitted a similar gallery of mere bystanders in The Miracle of the Prince, but had he lived to complete the fresco, he would doubtless have brought the portrait figures into some relation of interest in the miracle. Fra Filippo virtually waives that problem and merely flanks his real subject with bordering groups of persons of contemporary importance. As a matter of fact, the Florentine donor was no longer humble-minded and content to appear among the saints in miniature and unobtrusive guise. He now insisted in being painted to the life with his family, friends, and dependents,—a complacent, incongruous apparition amid the humility or heroism of the saints. Fra Filippo made the sensible adjustment that the donors should serve as a sort of human frame for the religious picture in the centre. This solution became tiresomely standard and lasted for fifty years or so, until the High Renaissance had authority enough to impose considerations of taste and self-effacement even upon wealthy donors.
In 1465 Fra Filippo was called to Spoleto, and there having started a lovely apse decoration, A Coronation, for the cathedral, he died and was buried. Quite unconsciously he had temporarily shattered that intellectual formalism which is the very essence of Florentine art, and had inaugurated that moral and artistic holiday which is made visible in the painting of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio and audible in the songs of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
This holiday mood is strong in Benozzo Gozzoli, and he spread it through Umbria and the Sienese country. Born in 1420, for a time an assistant of Fra Angelico, Benozzo’s task was to depict with more vivacity than insight the splendors and humors of life. This he does, whether his theme be the legend of St. Francis, as at Montefalco in 1462, the Cavalcade of the Magi, Florence, 1469, the Life of St. Augustine, San Gimignano, 1465, or the doings of the Old Testament Patriarchs and Matriarchs, at Pisa, 1468–1484. He is always sunny, profuse, witty in an obvious way; and not without his tinge of the poetry of youth. He loves gardens, courtyards, forests, and equally well palaces, colonnades, crowds and incidents. He is indefatigably panoramic, and his frescoes, if hardly good pictures, are at least good pickings, for their abundant and often refreshing detail.
Fig. 106. Fra Filippo Lippi. Funeral of St. Stephen. Fresco.—Collegiata. Prato.
Very splendid is that pageant of the Wise Men from the East, Figure [107], which he painted about 1469[[40]] for the private chapel of Cosimo de’ Medici’s palace. The gorgeous procession winds about the walls, moving over the mountain roads and through the forests which you may still see up the Arno valley towards Vallombrosa. Their goal was the little panel over the altar where Filippo Lippi painted the Madonna reverently kneeling before her Son, Figure [102]. This little picture was flanked by choirs, in fresco, of singing angels. For the oldest of the Three Kings Benozzo chose, according to tradition, the unfortunate Emperor John Palaeologus, who thirty years earlier had come to Florence on the vain mission of uniting the Eastern and Western branches of the Christian Church. The youthful kings are said to portray Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici. What we really have is a pictorial version of those religious pageants or representations which were common at the times. Many times Florence had seen her patricians in such a cavalcade. Benozzo’s fresco in its undiminished loveliness of color and gold—the Medici apparently either ordered few masses or burned few candles in their family chapel—is a most precious relic of bygone splendors. Indeed they passed before Benozzo himself, for he lived on till 1498, four years after Lorenzo the Magnificent’s death, and the year of Savonarola’s martyrdom; the year, too, when Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was being finished. Few artists have had such emphatic intimations that their world and they themselves were obsolete. It is in every way to be hoped in Benozzo’s case that he was at once too cheerful and too unintelligent to grasp the situation. This may be fairly supposed of a man who was content for fifty years of a swiftly moving world with what could be learned from Fra Angelico.
Fig. 107. Benozzo Gozzoli. Detail from Procession of Magi.—Riccardi Palace.
Fig. 108. Antonio Pollaiuolo. Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.—London.
Of course some painters declined to keep holiday and feverishly pursued the lines of realistic investigation laid down by Castagno and his contemporaries. The most notable of these is Antonio Pollaiuolo.[[41]] He was trained in sculpture under Ghiberti, and worked most variously, at sculpture, painting, engraving, glass designing, and even embroiderers’ patterns. Everywhere he pursued with an almost ferocious intensity the secrets of anatomy and especially of the human body in violent action. He conceived the body as a powerful machine and rejoiced to display its mechanisms—knotted muscles, straining sinews. He chose his subjects with this sort of display in mind: Hercules and his feats, the archers setting their bows and crossbows for the slaying of St. Sebastian, nude men in deadly combat with dirks and axes, nude men wildly dancing. Nearly all these works suffer from their avowed experimentalism, but all are alive with a tingling not to say brutal energy. Antonio Pollaiuolo is the ancestor of all the strong painters who for over four centuries have delighted to appal the mild and sheeplike throng with wolfish antics. He is the first artist who is a specialist, pursuing his own ends in disregard of the surrounding public. As a matter of fact, Antonio’s muscular paganism fitted in fairly well with the notions of a Florence that worshipped power. The Medici ordered the twelve feats of Hercules for their palace, about the year 1460. The great pictures are lost, but little copies by Antonio himself give an idea of their truculent force. In the Uffizi are Hercules crushing the breath out of the earthborn demigod Antæus, and Hercules slaying the Hydra. The tension, ardor, and ferocity of these tiny pictures are extraordinary. They seem to enhance our own physical life. At New Haven is the panel of Hercules shooting the Centaur Nessus, who races across a ford with Deinaira on his back. The background is an exact picture of the Arno valley looking from the west towards Florence. The representation of the run of the river is extraordinary. Pollaiuolo had adopted Domenico Veneziano’s miniature conception of landscape, but has introduced swing and motion.
Equally remarkable is the Arno landscape in the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Figure [108], which was painted in 1475. It has the defects of an experimental and academic performance, is a show piece. The executioners are even repeated, to show both front and rear aspects. All the same, its power is impressive and beyond the range of any artist then living, with the possible exception of Piero della Francesca. In painting Pollaiuolo’s accomplishment is so even, and in draped figures so ugly, that we may well pass the series of Virtues which with his brother Piero he did in 1469 for the Mercantile Court, and consider his great engraving known as the Ten Nudes, Figure [109], the odd decorative disposition of which is imitated by Botticelli in the Allegory of Spring; and the fresco of Dancing Men, in which Pollaiuolo successfully vies with the convivial and Bacchic themes of the Greek vase painters. The group is odd and effective as pattern, and inspired by a joyous energy.
Painting only claimed a fraction of Antonio’s effort; often he merely made the sketch and left the execution to his rather tame brother, Piero. At the end of his life he was called down to Rome to make the bronze tomb for Sixtus IV. There he died in the year 1498, being sixty-three years old. While his own achievement was somewhat cramped and limited, he had made the most valuable contributions to the art, or rather to the science of painting. He had inspired a titan like Signorelli and a poet like Botticelli, and in certain aspects Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo only continued and perfected his work. As late as Benvenuto Cellini’s day his sketches were passed about the studios for the instruction of young painters in anatomy.
Fig. 109. Antonio Pollaiuolo. Fighting Men—“The Ten Nudes.” Engraving.
A kindred strenuous spirit, Piero della Francesca,[[42]] affords an interesting contrast to Pollaiuolo. Though an Umbrian, he belongs spiritually to Florence. For Piero the world was a frozen thing. He investigated with utmost zeal the mathematical basis of perspective, producing on that topic a laborious and quite unreadable book. He studied anatomy and construction in light and dark, and all the atmospheric problems therewith associated. To attain atmospheric envelopment, he sacrificed color. His pictures exist in silvery grays, suggesting the blondness and tonal unity of modern open-air painting. The drama of life never engrossed him. His world is passionless and almost motionless, coldly impressive. Although he practiced all refinements of modelling, he never made those relaxations of contour which suggest movement. His figures are finely constructed and beautifully placed but emotionally unrelated. They merely exist rather splendidly, as do some of Manet’s figures. Indeed the warning of George Moore as regards Manet applies equally to Piero. It is futile to seek from him anything but fine painting.
Fig. 110. Piero della Francesca. The Resurrection.—Borgo S. Sepolcro.
Of his origins we know next to nothing. He was born about 1410 in the Umbrian town of Borgo San Sepolcro. For several years after 1439 we find him at Florence as a paid assistant of Domenico Veneziano, whose pale tonalities and topographically minute landscape reappear throughout Piero’s work. His austere power is best represented in the bleak Resurrection, Figure [110], which he painted in 1460 for his native city. The stalwart Conqueror of Death has an apparitional impressiveness. He comes with power from beyond the grave. He dominates the world as represented by the sleeping athletes of the guard. A most potent effect is obtained without sacrifice to sentiment. There is a similar detachment in the Baptism of Christ, in the National Gallery, London. Its pearly loveliness of color is in odd contrast to its evasions of anything like warmth or tenderness. It is less an event than a magnificently posed scene. The landscape is a liberating and informal feature, a skilful adaptation of the method of Domenico Veneziano and Pollaiuolo. It is as crisp and calculated as a Japanese print, yet it gives its effect of space and breadth.
Fig. 111. Piero della Francesca. Battle of Constantine, detail from fresco.—S. Francesco, Arezzo.
Piero’s great opportunity came about 1465 when he painted in the choir of San Francesco at Arezzo ten stories from the Legend of the Holy Cross. For stark impressiveness it is hard to match them in Italy in this century. Only Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci will at all bear the comparison. On analysis, the power rests mostly on the seriousness with which Piero takes his technical problem. There is little real grief or pathos in the Last Days of Adam, it is merely impersonally solemn. Even of the admirable fresco which represents Constantine in the uneasy dream in which he saw the vision of the cross, there is no warmth, no unexpected or emotional quality. So it is throughout the series; in the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, even in the splendid battle-piece, the Victory over Maxentius, Figure [111], the obvious sentiment of the theme is ignored, the figures have a kind of splendid unrelated existence that requires no apology or explanation. It is an effect that recalls the best archaic Greek sculpture.
Taken all in all, Piero is a formidable and enigmatic figure, an exception in an eager and emotional age. His truth to his vision is what counts. One feels it in the portrait of the humanist sovereign and captain of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro. It was painted about 1472 and is in the Uffizi, Figure [112]. How sternly honest it is, and what a presentation of a powerful and beneficent personality. Even the little decorative picture on the back of the panel, a Triumph of Fame, has an effect beyond its scale and obvious intention. It suggests wide dominions and heavy responsibilities manfully met.
Piero della Francesca lived out his life mostly in Umbria and far from the artistic centre of things. There is a self-sufficing quality in this voluntary isolation. He lived on to great old age, dying in 1492, and unless his declining years were perturbed by the faintly rising star of Leonardo da Vinci, he might boast himself, in the words of his and Leonardo’s friend, Fra Luca Pacioli, “the monarch of his times in the science of painting.”
We must leave for the Umbrian chapter such sturdy continuers of Piero della Francesca’s experimentalism as Melozzo da Forlì and Luca Signorelli. What is more important to note in leaving him is that such triumphs as his in fresco painting were highly exceptional in the second half of the fifteenth century. The successes of the period are in the minor art of panel painting. The fantasies of Botticelli, the best portraits of Ghirlandaio, the early panels of Perugino and Signorelli and Leonardo da Vinci—these are the outstanding things. In mural painting Florence actually retrograded, not merely as compared with the days of Masaccio, Fra Filippo and Fra Angelico, but even as compared with the earlier days of Andrea Bonaiuti, Agnolo Gaddi and Spinello Aretino. The fact has been obscured by the superficial gain in small realism, in sprightliness, and mere prettiness, but in all the serious qualities of monumental design the decadence is unmistakable. The favorite decorators simply executed on a large scale the sort of compositions that would have been charming on the front of a bride-chest. In the general enthusiasm for the parts of pictures the sense of pictures as a whole seemed in danger of being lost. The undiscriminating enthusiasm for the primitive painting of the Early Renaissance which has ruled for two generations has so clouded critical opinion on this point, that I must be at some pains to make my case good.
Perhaps I can do no better than to review some of the frescoes which Pope Sixtus IV ordered about 1481 for the new chapel of the Vatican Palace.[[43]] He summoned to the Sistine Chapel the best available artists from both Tuscany and Umbria. By the measure of their success we may estimate the mural painting of the time.
Fig. 112. Piero della Francesca. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, despot of Urbino.—Uffizi.
Originally the decorative scheme, later amplified by Michelangelo, required sixteen scriptural stories, in which the deeds of Moses were parallelled by those of Christ. The two first and two last subjects, on the end walls, have been destroyed, but we still see the twelve on the side walls. In general they all show the old Gothic coloring, are mostly vivacious in a confused and over-rich way, and lack unity of pattern and dramatic coherence.
Fig. 113. Assistant of Perugino. Baptism. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel.
One of the most admired is the Baptism of Christ, Figure [113], by Pintorricchio, (or, as Venturi suggests, Andrea of Assisi) who here works as Perugino’s assistant. The story is told in the centre and reinforced by a spacious landscape which is confusingly full of attractive features. The theme is mechanically stretched to fill the space by adding at both flanks groups which have slight or no connection with the subject. These groups are interestingly diversified with fine portraits of the Pope’s relatives, the Roveres, and by the alert forms of children. The effect is fairly restful and idyllic, but the pattern is mechanical, and the emotional effect of the real theme is frittered away in the accessories. The method of enlarging a stock composition by adding portrait groups is standard for the Sistine Chapel and for the period. Masaccio had tried it more effectively in the Miracle of the Boy, and Filippo Lippi had made it seem almost organic in The Funeral of St. Stephen. Pintorricchio, if it be he, is more superficially alluring for his richness and variety, but really stands on a far lower plane of design than his predecessors.
Fig. 114. Botticelli. Moses in the Land of Midian. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel, Rome.
If this mechanical symmetry is the standard method, there are significant exceptions in the Sistine Chapel. The more sensitive spirits, Botticelli and Luca Signorelli, reject so trite a solution. Botticelli’s Moses in Midian, Figure [114], offers a delicate evasion, by promoting a minor motive to be the central theme. All the incidents that are dramatically important—the slaying of the Egyptian taskmaster, and the adoration of the Burning Bush from which Jehovah spoke—are done with the most energetic feeling, but are relegated to the background and edges of the composition. The picture is really the fine grove in which Moses gallantly helps the nymph-like daughters of Jethro to draw water. A fantastic idyl is foisted off on us as a substitute for one of the decisive moments in the Providential order. Botticelli is so winning in his evasion, that it seems almost unfeeling to note that no Gothic painter would have done anything so shifty. His success is not merely at the expense of the expression of his real theme, but also at the expense of the order and dignity proper to mural design. Having ordered a canto of an epic, the Pope received a delicious madrigal. His contentment is characteristic of the æsthetic casualness of the times.
Fig. 115. Signorelli, Design only. Last Days of Moses. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel, Rome.
Signorelli, in the Last Days of Moses, Figure [115], makes a similar but less egregious evasion. His centre of interest is the nude youth in the foreground, but he does give a certain prominence to the scenes where Moses invests Joshua with authority, and where both view the Promised Land from Mount Horeb. Though without much emotional accent, the crowds are agreeably disposed and diversified by graceful forms of women and children. Only the design is by Signorelli, the execution being by an assistant, Don Bartolommeo della Gatta. The picture is more delightful for such passages as the Apollo-like nude youth and the mother with her children in the right foreground than it is as a whole, though it is full of idyllic charm, and inadequate only when one considers the gravity of its theme.
Fig. 116. Ghirlandaio. Christ calling Peter and Andrew. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel, Rome.
In his Calling of Peter and Andrew, Figure [116], to be fishers of men, Domenico Ghirlandaio makes a skilful and impressive use of that approved mechanical symmetry which has already been noticed in Pintorricchio’s Baptism. Everything is well centralized, the river view is a welcome outlet, the stereotyped bystanders on the flanks at least are telling portraits and, while not bound into the central motive, have withal a gravity that sufficiently accords with it. The arrangement is lucid, and the surplus accessories fairly well subordinated. A rather perfunctory quality in the central scene of homage and dedication reveals Ghirlandaio’s scanty imagination. His impressiveness has a certain dullness about it.
Few words need be spent on the picturesque and irresponsible confusion which reigns in Cosimo Rosselli’s Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, Figure [117]. Cosimo was one of the older painters in the chapel, forty-two years old. Yet a juvenile sensationalism and uncalculated restlessness prevail, and his attempts at vivacity and grace are as unhappy as his striving for effects of terror. It may well be that his eccentric young pupil, Piero di Cosimo, gave this fresco its febrile energy and its theatrical landscape. Certain it is that the three other frescoes by Cosimo are unmitigatedly dull. Oddly it was he alone who won the praise of Pope Sixtus, mostly for his profuse introduction of gold ornament.
Fig. 117. Cosimo Rosselli. Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel.
Fig. 118. Perugino. Christ giving the Keys to Peter. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel, Rome.
We have seen in the Sistine Chapel a mechanical and rather perfunctory symmetry, various clever evasions of an idyllic sort, and a picturesque disorder side by side. The most ambitious decorative scheme of the time seems to result in a kind of artistic bankruptcy. But fortunately the Sistine Chapel contains its own self-criticism and remedy, in the extraordinary fresco by Pietro Perugino, Christ delivering the Keys to Peter, Figure [118]. Perugino is an Umbrian from Città della Pieve, thirty-five years old, and with a certain amount of Florentine training. He has, like Masaccio sixty years before, looked at the art of his times and found it wanting. He has had the lucidity to see that the malady is surplusage and disorder. Hence, he argues, the remedy is simplicity and order. To this he adds a sense of vastness. In this picture the temple platform, a vastness made by man, is set within the vastness of a river valley made by nature. The foreground group is arranged in a formal half military order which is cunningly made easy and flexible by differences of posture and gesture. Every tilted head and pointed foot has its reason. Without undue insistence, all the apostles are interested in the rite which ordains their chief. Here is no casual pleasure ground in which you may delightfully look about, here is a definite vision of a momentous act which you must see swiftly, completely, and precisely as the artist intends you shall see. It is the only well-considered design among these frescoes. It points the simplest and surest way by which the exuberance of the Early Renaissance might be disciplined into a noble order, and within twenty years the lesson was to be reread for all Italy by young Raphael of Urbino. Meanwhile the somewhat irresponsible exuberance of the new narrative painting has after all its winning aspect, is a sign of an energy and enthusiasm that need not so much to be tamed as to be intellectualized.
In discussing the last twenty years of the fifteenth century in Florence I am embarrassed by the richness of the field. Beside such typical figures as Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, we have to do with such sensitive and morbid spirits as Filippino Lippo and Piero di Cosimo; with Andrea Verrocchio and a group of imitators of his fastidious manner, notable among them young Leonardo da Vinci; with a host of secondary painters, particularly of furniture panels, and small altar-pieces, while if we consider rather artistic training than accident of birth, we must reckon with the Florentine achievement the rugged triumphs of Luca Signorelli. But since the more distinctive and progressive of these artists are really precursors of the Golden Age, or symptomatic of the unrest that was its prelude, they may best be treated later. That will leave us only the painters who are fully representative of the festal moment of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s greatness—the furniture painters and Ghirlandaio.
Those excesses of vivacity, those extravagances of invention, those juvenile graces which were a weakness in mural painting, were admirably in place in the decoration of chests and wainscots. The greater artists gladly accepted this little work, and some painters painted exclusively trousseau chests (cassoni) for young brides—an enviable occupation, for surely these fair young creatures had to be personally consulted. The subjects glorify love, magnify valor, celebrate the festal life of the day, its pageants, feasts, and dances. Of professional cassoni painters Francesco Pesellino[[44]] (1422–1457) is the most famous. He is bewitching in variety and sensitiveness of invention, in refinement of story telling, and in glamour of color. Two admirable cassone fronts by him are owned by Mrs. John L. Gardner, Figure [119]. They represent the six triumphs described by Petrarch in so many Canzoni. Love, Chastity, Death, Time, Fame, and Eternity are figured forth much as these themes were embodied in contemporary pageants, about the year 1450. The subjects were favorites for cassoni less because of their grave moral import than because Petrarch was Love’s accredited Poet Laureate.
Fig. 119. Francesco Pesellino. Cassone Front. Triumphs of Love, Chastity, and Death.—Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston.
We have in the New York Historical Society the superb salver, Figure [119a], which was prepared against the birth of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Appropriately it shows knights acclaiming fame. The date is 1448, the painter of the school of Domenico Veneziano.
We often see the Queen of Sheba reverently approaching Solomon. It is the admonition that a young bride should seek wisdom. Battles and Roman triumphs are tediously common. They set a mark of valor for the bridegroom. Wedding Feasts are almost tautological on a bride-chest, but they afford charming pictures of the Florence that amused itself.
Fig. 119a.> Follower of Domenico Veneziano, perhaps Baldovinetti. Triumph of Fame. Birth Salver for Lorenzo de’ Medici.—N. Y. Historical Society.
Mythology often dignifies these painted stories, the reference being generally to that beauty which is institutional in brides. Thus we have in a spalliera panel in the Fogg Museum the Judgment of Paris, with the competing goddesses more modestly clothed than Ovid’s record justifies. The work is possibly an exceptionally amiable product of Cosimo Rosselli, and the date may be about 1475. The Rape of Helen, which was of course due to her fatal beauty, is a common if unedifying subject for bride-chests. So is Actæon torn by the hounds of the Divine Huntress for his temerity in surprising Diana at her bath. A delightful panel in the possession of Mr. Martin Ryerson at Chicago recounts in many episodes the adventures of Ulysses from his escape from Polyphemus to his home-coming at Ithaca. The dalliances of the much-experienced wanderer are by no means concealed, but at least the scene opens with prominent display of the episode most creditable to him as a married man, the baffling of the Sirens, and closes with the exemplary figure of constant Penelope weaving her interminable web.
Fig. 120. Bartolommeo di Giovanni under Botticelli’s direction. Nastagio degli Onesti’s Feast. Spalliera panel.—Spiridon Coll., Paris.
In furniture painting we are generally in the realm of comedy. But we touch pathos in Boccaccio’s story of patient Griselda, at Bergamo, Modena, and elsewhere; while we approach tragedy in the many versions of chaste Susanna assailed and traduced by the elders, and attain to notable melodrama in Boccaccio’s grim vision of the spirit lover eternally harrying the miserable ghost of his merciless lady through the pine wood of Ravenna. The best of these panels is in the Spiridon Collection, Paris. The ghostly scene of the chase takes place before the picnic party, Figure [120], artfully arranged by Nastagio degli Onesti to prove to his unfeeling lady that there is a penalty in the next world for being too cruel to a lover in this. The lesson Boccaccio tells us was effective, and they lived happily together ever afterwards. The panel was designed by Botticelli and painted by his assistant, Bartolommeo di Giovanni, for the wedding of a Bini groom and a Pucci bride in the year 1487.
With it we take leave of Florentine furniture painting, an art too unpretentious to be considered at length in a general survey, yet too charming in itself and too representative of the heyday of Florentine wealth and gayety to be wholly neglected.
Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio mark in very different fashions the culmination and the close of the Early Renaissance in Florence. Botticelli is the poet of its nostalgia. He expresses not its joyous average, but the erotic and mystical subtilities of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy, and later the Apocalyptic hopes and despairs that gathered around Savonarola. He utters a discontent and ideality which in part are completely contained in his work and in part were only fulfilled in the rapidly approaching Golden Age. He is aristocratic and individual, hence we shall consider him in connection with his fellow intellectuel, Leonardo da Vinci. Domenico Ghirlandaio,[[45]] on the contrary, is the most completely contented creature, imaginable. He never even dreamt of anything desirable beyond his Florence. He loved the local spectacle too dearly to represent it literally. He generally prettified it, more rarely he glorified it. Its mundane ideals were his. Towards its people, its young men and maidens and grave merchants and magistrates he brought, without Fra Filippo Lippi’s sensitiveness, an equal curiosity and admiration. And Florence fairly deserved the adoration of such a man as was he. Wisely and generously ruled by Lorenzo de’ Medici, who exemplified not merely the practical virtues of the city but also her more engaging vices, author of wise policy and of wittily dissolute songs; combining the self-respecting appearances of liberty with the advantages of benevolent despotism, abounding in new wealth, lavish in pleasure and spectacle, unrestrained by a religion which was becoming merely a social decency and a form of fire-insurance against a not impossible hell—Florence had reached a pitch of complacency and worldly well-being the like of which the world has perhaps never seen before or since. The menacing sword of the spirit was already swaying over it in the eloquence of a young Dominican monk at Ferrara. But Florence trod the primrose path unconscious of the doom at hand for her. And Ghirlandaio was present to immortalize everything that was pleasant in her short prime.
Fig. 121. Domenico Ghirlandaio. St. Jerome. Fresco.—Ognissanti.
He was born in 1449, his father appropriately being a garland-maker for gay Florence. He was trained under Alesso Baldovinetti, but prudently declined to compromise his own bright coloring with the new technic of oil painting. He studied with profit the ornate narratives of Benozzo Gozzoli. One of his earliest frescoes, painted about 1470 in Ognissanti, already reveals the grounds of his later popularity. The vivid portraits of the Vespucci family so crowd about a Madonna of Pity as to make her seem quite secondary.
Somewhat later he painted the legend of Santa Fina at San Gimignano. Here Gozzoli’s simpler vein is imitated, and the effect has a rusticity befitting the theme. Soon the bottega at Florence flourished mightily. There were two younger brothers to help, and all commissions were executed with businesslike dispatch. About 1480 we find him once more painting for the Church of Ognissanti. His St. Jerome there, Figure [121], is a beautifully groomed old prelate in a wonderfully kept study. The Saint is caught in an interval of work, searching perhaps for the right Latin word to render the Hebrew text before him. He is grave and not too stern. The colors are vivid without much regard for harmony. Very little of the fire of the missionary who declined to subject the mysteries of God to the rules of the grammarian Donatus is suggested. One has only to look at Botticelli’s St. Augustine, opposite in the church, agonized by the burden of thought, to realize that Ghirlandaio has cared nothing for the psychology of his theme, but has given us any comfortable old Florentine scholar placidly occupied in his scriptorium.
Fig. 122. Ghirlandaio. The Last Supper. Fresco.—Refectory, Ognissanti.
A similar lack of emotional content mars the otherwise delightful Last Supper, Figure [122], which was painted that same year for the refectory of Ognissanti. Pathos, not to say tragedy, is carefully kept out of the most solemn of scenes. The eye is likely to go first to the tree-tops and flying birds seen above the screen, then it becomes vaguely aware of a gentle company quietly feasting. Except for a faint trace of classicism in the costumes, it could be any governing board of any religious confraternity of the day, decorously enjoying its annual dinner. The qualities and defects of Ghirlandaio are fully apparent in this fresco—his lucidity and sweetness, his emotional nullity.
The next year, 1481, Ghirlandaio painted in the Sistine Chapel at Rome Christ Calling Peter and Andrew. We have already considered this his nearest approach to monumental design. Shortly before the Roman trip he married, and when his wife Costanza died, after a decent interval, he repeated the adventure. The two wedlocks were blessed by nine children of whom one, Ridolfo, was to become in turn a notable painter. Such fecundity was worthy of the man who once sighed for a commission to fresco the seven-mile circuit of the walls of Florence. On his return from Rome Ghirlandaio decorated the great hall of the Palace of the Priors, and from now on merely a list of his commissions and patrons would be a blue book of the old aristocracy and new wealth of Florence.
Fig. 123. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Miracle of the Spini Boy. Fresco.—Trinità.
Thus in 1485 he contracted with Francesco Sassetti to do a chapel in the Trinità with Stories of St. Francis. Sassetti was confidential treasurer for Lorenzo the Magnificent, about the most important financial position in the world at the moment; a selfmade and ambitious man. He had tried in vain to get a finer chapel in a bigger church, but the patrician vested interests prevented. Still the chapel to the right of the Choir of the Trinità was no mean place, this Vallombrosan foundation being one of the oldest in Florence. Ghirlandaio took special pains with the frescoes, studying with intelligence Giotto’s famous versions of the stories at Santa Croce. He is most nearly monumental where he follows Giotto, as in the Death of St. Francis, but he also shows surprising felicities of his own. The scene where Pope Honorius III constitutes St. Francis and his fellows a monastic order, is remarkable for not only fine incidental portraiture, but for a nobility of space composition faintly anticipating Raphael. One scarcely realizes the subject as such. All the dramatic features with which Giotto emphasized the eagerness of the saint, the humility of his companions, the professional dignity of the Pope and the half-veiled hostility of the papal court are absent. One’s eyes go over the group to the familiar grandiose prospect of the Piazza della Signoria at Florence, and one feels that never till now has he rightly apprehended its amplitude and splendor. Then there are sharp pleasant surprises. At the left is the ugly and fascinating figure of Lorenzo de’ Medici and behind him the gross apparition of Francesco Sassetti himself. And in front there are people coming up from a lower level, only their heads and shoulders emerging. The swarthy man who leads is Angelo Poliziano, greatest of humanistic poets, tutor of Lorenzo’s sons. And the boys are these gifted children destined to be popes, and granddukes. The combination of great spaciousness and centrality with casual unexpected graces is so piquant and original, that I suppose Ghirlandaio may have hit upon it almost accidentally, owing to the inevitable relations of his Gothic lunette to the architectural forms in the fresco. In any case Ghirlandaio never again did anything as impressive. It is his greatest hymn of praise to the Florence that he so dearly loved.
Fig. 124. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Adoration of the Magi.—Innocenti.
In the same chapel is a remarkable picture representing the Piazza of the Trinità with St. Francis resuscitating a boy of the Spini family, Figure [123]. It has extraordinary bits of invention, but lacks the organization of the fresco just discussed. The altar-piece for the chapel, an Adoration of the Shepherds, now in the Uffizi, represents the graciousness of Ghirlandaio in familiar narrative his willing acceptance of the panoramic richness of the age, and his exceptional power of portraiture in these rustics painted from himself and from members of the Sassetti family. The ruggedness of the characterization suggests Flemish painting. Ghirlandaio may well have been influenced by the great Nativity with Portraits which Hugo van der Goes sent down from Ghent, in 1476, to the Hospital Church of Santa Maria Nuova.
Ghirlandaio’s altar-pieces are many. They are brilliant without real harmony of color; pretty, without much insight, in the types of the Virgin and youthful saints. The most elaborate of these panels, An Adoration of the Magi, Figure [124], was finished in 1488 for the Foundling Hospital dedicated to the Massacred Innocents of Bethlehem. It still stands on its original altar in the chapel of the Innocenti, and is a radiant thing. The crowded group of adorers in the foreground is well knit together. Ghirlandaio had taken a shrewd look at Botticelli’s Epiphany (now at Petrograd), or at Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished masterpiece. By a touching and appropriate invention, Ghirlandaio has set two of the martyred Innocents kneeling in white robes and crowned with a saint’s nimbus among the Wise Men. There are, as usual, many portraits, including Ghirlandaio’s own, by the pillar at the right. The deep river valley, suggested by northern paintings or engravings, relieves the somewhat congested character of the figure arrangement. The girlish Madonna would do no discredit to the front cover of a nation-wide periodical today. So gracious and ingenious is this picture that one regrets to note that it is rather cleverly staged than deeply felt, its manifold prettiness and picturesqueness, of a quite obvious character.
As Ghirlandaio had moved from success to success, so he was destined to end in his day of highest glory. In 1485 he signed a contract with Giovanni Tornabuoni, of the old nobility, to decorate the choir of the most aristocratic church in Florence, Santa Maria Novella. The subjects, the Life of the Virgin and St. John the Baptist, were already on the wall in the guise of water-soaked and ruined frescoes by Andrea Orcagna. Ghirlandaio provided pastoral scenes with wide landscapes, city prospects with charming girls plentiful in foreground, rich patrician interiors with graceful women and their attendants making visits of ceremony, rare religious events with heavy magistrates and dignitaries standing inattentively by—everything in short that a prosperous and well-bred Florentine of the moment was accustomed to think desirable in beauty, gentleness, or worldly estate. Characteristic are the Salutation of Mary and Elizabeth, a picture in which the solemnity of the scene, so magnificently asserted by Giotto at Padua, slips away into mere spectacle and civility; the Birth of Saint John, Figure [125], with a young girl of the Tornabuoni family making her visit with her maids, and all manner of graceful and rich accessories; or again, the Presentation in The Temple, with a whole tribe of Tornabuonis and Ghirlandaios in negligent attendance on the sacred rite. These may stand for the whole. For their casual and mundane richness John Ruskin has poured upon these frescoes his double-distilled vials of wrath. What he says as to their superficiality and emptiness of religious feeling is true enough, yet his denunciatory rhetoric serves but as a trip-hammer to demolish an eggshell which has after all its iridescent frail beauty. Gentler methods are better with so gently mundane a creature as Ghirlandaio. The Lord’s people, as he saw them about him, were good enough for him and for his art. Criticism should rather insist that, being worldly, he was not worldly enough to be strong and lucid, but too readily had recourse to promiscuous richness and perfunctory ideals of prettiness. Still, it does not befit the age or race whose characteristic art product is the smiling or pensive girl on the cover of the popular magazine to throw the first stone at Domenico Ghirlandaio.
Fig. 125. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Birth of St. John.—Santa Maria Novella.
Fig. 126. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Old Man and Boy.—Paris.
Whatever the verdict as to his nominally religious painting, in portraiture Ghirlandaio is one of the greatest figures of his time. Portraits of the finest qualities abound in his frescoes, and he has left a few incomparable things on panel. Few Renaissance portraits have the authority of the amazing old man, Figure [126], in the Louvre, who fondles an adoring boy. In this picture, deformity becomes a grace, and the spiritual and material interpretation are of equal incisiveness and beauty. As fine in another vein is the profile of Giovanna degli Albizzi in the J. P. Morgan Collection, Figure [101]. It is dated in 1488. It is the supreme portrait of a Florentine beauty of a passing and lovely moment. An instant of time, when the old simplicity had enriched itself with new learning; when with the new humanism the tournament and court of love persisted; when courtly manners had become an ideal without freezing into an official code—all this is for a sensitive and informed observer in this placid well-poised head of an ill-starred Florentine bride. She died in 1488, a little before the overthrow of the Florence she typifies. Her accomplished young husband, Lorenzo Tornabuoni, equally adequate in the tilt yard, the study, or the council hall, lived on for nine years and shared the death agony of the society of which he was a chief ornament. When his head fell under Savonarola’s orders, a splendid chapter of early Florentine humanism closed. Thus these young people died with their Florence, leaving no descendants, but a memory eternally fragrant.
The year of Giovanna’s death, 1488, Ghirlandaio, being thirty-nine years old, took a new wife, and continued diligently at the frescoes of Santa Maria Novella. Not being overburdened with imagination, he probably never guessed he was occupied with a memorial of a society already doomed. Doubtless he followed the fashionable throng to San Marco where for a year Fra Girolamo Savonarola had been preaching against the current vanities. Ghirlandaio presumably approved the oratory, with a comfortable sense that while unworldliness might very properly be preached, no sensible city could ever be induced to practice it. Perhaps he never woke up to the appalling fact that Savonarola literally meant business both evangelically and politically.
So Ghirlandaio’s Florence moved swiftly to its doom, and the while he saved much of its look and grace on the walls of his choir. For a year a touchy and ugly little boy who carried the disproportionately great name of Michelangelo Buonarotti scrambled discontentedly about the scaffolding of the choir, lending a hand here and there, and learning the old art of fresco painting. Ghirlandaio of course never knew that in the restless apprentice he was training a titan. He probably thought him a nuisance. By the end of 1493 the frescoes of the Virgin and St. John the patron of Florence were nearly finished, and the altar-piece, an Assumption, was already planned. At forty-four Ghirlandaio had at once reached his climax and painted himself down an anachronism. Of course he didn’t know it; such self-knowledge is mercifully spared us. The luck of Ghirlandaio was extraordinarily constant. Nowhere is it more signally shown than in the date of his death. Some inkling that things were going ill under Piero de’ Medici’s fitful rule must have come to him, but he died in January 1494, a good ten months before the Medici were expelled, their palaces sacked, and Savonarola in charge of a Florence terrified into sobriety.
To those painters from Fra Filippo to Ghirlandaio who caught the look and unpretentious poetry of Medicean Florence we owe an especial gratitude. They are not in the direct line of progress and they none of them reached the heights of art. But for centuries they have never failed to give delightful information, while infallibly touching average human sympathies. We do ill to idolize them, for they were after all rather small men, but we do well also to honor them according to their accomplishment. They did their particular task of enlivening decoration with illustrative episodes, with tact, refinement and knowledge; with all the sympathy of the modestly observant eye. Most of their work had to be undone before the Grand Style was possible, but it all evinces the vitality and variety without which as preliminary training the Grand Style itself could hardly have attained its elaborate and strictly ordered composure. We do well to take Vasari’s general view of these artists of the human spectacle—not considering them so much as weak links in a mighty chain, but as complete in themselves, as a youth may be complete even though the young man dies in the glory of his unfolding. Why expect prematurely the sedate splendors of middle age? Take then this art for what it offers—an unsystematic fairy land which is yet half real, and keep your higher standards in reserve for artists who better deserve them. For austere standards are held by a truly civilized person for purposes of discriminate praise and not as a ready means of promiscuous blame.