VARIATIONS ON A THEME
Among these multitudinous Madonnas, and countless Crucifixions, and Entombments innumerable, who shall dare award the palm for nobility of conception? But there is a minor theme of Renaissance Art as to which I do not hesitate. It is the Pietà theme, but with angels replacing or supplementing the Madonna who cherishes the dead Christ, and it is significant that the finest treatment of it I have seen comes from the greatest craftsman who treated it—to wit, Giovanni Bellini. His Cristo Sorretto da Angioli you will find painted on wood—a tavola—in the Palazzo Communale of Rimini. The Christ lies limp but tranquil, in the peace, not the rigidity, of death, and four little angels stand by, one of them half hidden by the dead figure. The exquisite appeal of this picture, the uniqueness of the conception, lies in the sweet sorrow of the little angels—a sorrow as of a dog or a child that cannot fathom the greatness of the tragedy, only knows dumbly that here is matter for sadness. The little angels regard the wounds with grave infantile concern. Sacred tragedy is here fused with idyllic poetry in a manner to which I know no parallel in any other painter. The sweet perfection of Giovanni Bellini, too suave for the grim central theme of Christianity, here finds triumphant and enchanting justification.
It is perhaps worth while tracing how every other painter’s handling of the theme that I have chanced on fails to reach this lyric pathos.
Bellini himself did not perhaps quite reach it again, though he reaches very noble heights in two pictures (one now in London and the other in Berlin), in which the reduction in the number of angels to two makes even for enhancement of the restful simplicity, while in the Berlin picture there is a touching intimacy of uncomprehending consolation in the pressing of the little angelic cheeks against the dead face. But the fact that in both pictures one angel seems to understand more or to be more exercised than the other contributes a disturbing complicacy. The serene unity is, indeed, preserved by Bellini in his Pietà in the Museo Correr of Venice. But here the three young angels supporting the body are merely at peace—there is nothing of that sweet wistfulness.
For a contrary reason the woodland flavour is equally absent from its neighbour, a picture by an unknown painter of the Paduan school. Here the peace is exchanged, not for poetry but tragedy. The Christ is erect in his tomb, and the two haloed baby angels who uphold his arms are the one weeping, the other horror-struck. The horror is accentuated and the poetry still further lessened in an anonymous painting in a chapel of S. Anastasia in Verona, where boy angels are positively roaring with grief. Nor is the poetry augmented in that other anonymous painting in the Palazzo Ducale of Venice, where one angel kisses the dead hand and the other the blood-stained linen at the foot. In Girolamo da Treviso’s picture in the Brera one child angel examines the bloody palm and the other lifts up the drooping left arm with its little frock. Great round tears run down their faces, which are swollen and ugly with grief. Still more tragic, even to grotesquerie, is an old fresco fragment in an underground church in Brescia, where the little angels are catching the sacred blood in cups—those cups invented by Perugino and borrowed even by Raphael. Francesco Bissolo, in the Academy of Venice, preserves the tranquillity of Bellini, but by making the angels older loses not only the seductive naïveté but the whole naturalness, for these angels are old enough to know better, one feels. They have no right to such callousness. Raphael’s father in his picture in the cathedral of Urbino escapes this pitfall, for his adult angels bend solicitously over the Christ and support his arms from above. But Lorenzo Lotto, though he gives us innocent child-angels, tumbles into an analogous trap, for he forgets that by adding a Madonna and a Magdalen in bitter tears he transforms these untroubled little angels into little devils, who have not even the curiosity to wonder what in heaven’s name their mortal elders are weeping over. In Cariani’s so-called Deposizione at Ravenna one little angel does weep in imitation of the mortals, leaning his wet cheek on the Christ’s dead hand—“tears such as angels weep”—but he only repeats the human tragedy, and might as well be a little boy. Two older angels howl and grimace in Marco Zoppo’s picture in the Palazzo Almerici of Pesaro, while the haloed, long-ringleted head of the Christ droops with slightly open mouth and a strange smile as provoking as Mona Lisa’s. Francia in the National Gallery gives us a red-eyed Madonna with one calm and one compassionate angel, and Zaganelli in the Brera vies with Bellini in the vague, tender wonderment of the child angels who lift up the arms, but the picture is second-rate and the angels are little girls with bare arms and puffed sleeves. Nor is it a happy innovation to show us the legs of the Christ sprawling across the tomb.
Marco Palmezzano, with inferior beauty, also trenches on Bellini’s ground; but not only is the Christ sitting up, not quite dead, but one of the two child angels is calling out as for aid, so that the restful finality of Bellini is vanished. Still nearer to the Bellini idea approaches a picture in the Academy of Venice attributed to Marco Basaiti and an unknown Lombardian. But if this avoids tragedy, the turn is too much in the direction of comedy. The child angels are made still more infantine, so that there is neither horror nor even perturbation, merely a shade of surprise at so passive a figure. One plays with the Christ’s hair, the other with his feet—the Blake-like tenderness is not absent, but the poetry of this utter unconsciousness is not so penetrating as the wistful yearning of the Bellini angels before some dim, unsounded ocean of tragedy. This precise note I did, indeed, once catch in a corner of Domenichino’s Madonna del Rosario, where a baby surveys the crown of thorns; but this is just a side-show in a joyous, thickly populated picture, and the Christ is not dead, but a live bambino, who showers down roses on the lower world of martyrdom and sorrow.
He is almost too dead in the fading fresco of the little low-vaulted, whitewashed, ancient church of S. Maria Infra Portas in Foligno. A great gash mutilates his side, his head, horribly fallen back, lies on the Madonna’s lap, his legs and arms droop. The mother’s long hair hangs down from her halo, she clasps her hands in agony, and a child angel on either side looks on commiseratingly. Strange to say, this conserves the poetry, despite the horror, though the horror removes it out of comparison with Bellini’s handling.
In Genoa I found three more variations on the theme, two in the cathedral, the first with four angels, all gravely concerned, and the second with quite a crowd of little boys and angels, nearly all weeping. One of the little angels has taken off the crown of thorns—a good touch in a bad picture. The third variant is by Luca Cambiaso, and in the Palazzo Rosso, with a single agitated boy angel. A Pietà in Pistoja takes its main pathos from its lonely position on the staircase of the fusty town hall: a last rose of summer, all its companions are faded and gone, all save one pretty lady saint blooming in a vast ocean of plaster. Even its own Madonna and Apostles are half obliterated; but the boy angel remains in a curious posture: he has got his head betwixt the legs of the Christ, and with his arms helps to sustain the drooping figure. Still more original touches appear in Andrea Utili’s picture in Faenza. Here the Christ has his arms crossed, and his halo, tilted back over his crown of thorns, gleams weirdly in red and gold, and on his tomb rest pincers and a hammer. The two youthful angels are deeply moved; one holds a cross and the other three nails.
If any painter could vie in enchantment with Giovanni Bellini it is Crivelli, and, indeed, there are fascinating things in his Pietà in the Brera, idyllic sweetness in the angels, original decorative touches in the book and burning taper, and masterly imagination in the ghastly lack of vitality with which each dead hand of the Christ droops on the tender living hand of an angel. Had only the angels been a little younger, this would have been as sweetly lyrical as Bellini. From Michelangelo we have only a sketch of the subject, with his wingless child angels, over whom stands the Mater Dolorosa with useless outspread arms, that should have been helping the poor little things to support their burden. In Guido Reni’s Pietà at Bologna her hands droop in folded resignation, while one angel weeps and one adores and pities. I fear the presence of the Madonna and other mortals destroys the peculiar celestial poetry, though of course the conjunction of mortals and angels brings a poetry of its own.
Tura’s treatment of the theme in Vienna I have not seen. But Vivarini breaks out in a new direction. His two angels fly from right and left towards the tomb, under full canvas, so to speak. But it is a pattern et præterea nihil. More poetic in its originality is a picture of the Veronese school in the Brera, showing us two baby angels, half curious, half apprehensive, unfolding the Christ’s winding-sheet. But it is a dark, poorly painted picture. Another new invention is Garofalo’s in the same gallery. He gives us a crowd of commonplace weeping figures in a picturesque landscape, and his angel is a sweet little cherub aloft on a pillar over the heads of the mourning mob. But the angel might be a mere architectural decoration, for all his effect upon the picture.
Thus have we seen almost every possible variation tried—adult angels and young angels and baby angels, calm angels and callous angels, lachrymose angels and vociferous angels, helpless angels and hospital angels, boy angels and girl angels, and only one artist has seen the sole permutation which extracts the quintessential poetry of the theme—the high celestial tragedy unadulterated by human grief, and sweetened yet deepened by angels too young to understand and too old to be unperturbed, too troubled for play and too tranquil for tears.
And it is to that incarnation of evil, Sigismondo Malatesta, that we owe this masterpiece of lyric simplicity, for ’twas the Magnificent Monster himself that commissioned it—His rolling and reverberating Magnificence, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo—whose polyphonous, orotund name and the black and white elephants of whose crest pervade the splendid temple which he remodelled at Rimini for the glory of God. And lest the world should forget ’twas he to whom heaven owed the delicious Pagan reliefs by the pillars, or the now-faded ultramarine and starry gold of the chapels, each first pilaster bears in Greek the due inscription:
TO THE IMMORTAL GOD
SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA DI PANDOLFO
(Pray do not pause here—epigraphs, like telegrams, are not punctuated)
PRESERVED FROM MANY OF THE GREATEST PERILS OF THE ITALIAN WAR
ERECTED AND BEQUEATHED MAGNIFICENTLY LAVISH
AS HE HAD VOWED IN THE VERY MIDST OF THE STRUGGLE
AN ILLUSTRIOUS AND HOLY MEMORIAL
No less reflexive was his apotheosis of the frail Isotta, of whom he first made an honest woman and then a goddess. What wonder if his critics carped at the “Disottæ,” the “divine Isotta,” he wrote over her tomb, in lieu of the conventional “Dominæ Isottæ Bonæ Memoriæ”! But one must do the bold, bad condottiere the justice to say that while two angels bear this inscription over her in gold, his own tomb is comparatively modest. It is Isotta whose tomb is supported by shield-bearing elephants and culminates in flourishes as of elephants’ trunks, Isotta who stands over her altar in the guise of a gold-winged angel. Malatesta’s patronage of Giovanni Bellini was not his only contribution to the arts, for a cluster of poets found hospitality at his court and burial at his temple—with a careful inscription that it was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo who buried them—though these seem to have plied the trade of Laureate, if I may judge from the volume published at Paris, “L’Isotteo.” I cannot pretend to be read in Porcellio de’ Pandone or Tommaso Seneca or Basinio of Parma. But Bellini’s tavola suffices to make me say with riddling Samson, “Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness.”
For this is perhaps the teleological purpose of the Magnificent Ones, to play the Mæcenas to some starveling artist or penurious poet. There is in the santuario of the Malatesta temple a fresco of this Sigismondo. He is seen in the flush of youth, gay in a brocaded mantle and red hose, but somewhat disconcertingly on his knees before a crowned figure—his patron saint according to some, the Emperor Sigismondo more probably. Let us call it that sovereign fate to which even megaphonious Magnificence must bow. Almost divine in his lifetime, within a few years the Magnificent One’s character commences to decay, as if that too could not resist the corruption of death. Happy the prince of whom some not malodorous shred of reputation remains a century after his death. The evil that men do lives after them, the good they have not done is oft interred with their bones.
Yes, there is a pathos in the Magnificent Ones. When I consider how their autocosm ensnared them with a sense of their own perdurability, lured them into engaging painters and architects and statuaries to express their triumphant sense of timeless energising, and then ebbed away from them, leaving them putrid carbonates, phosphates, and silicates, while the work of Beauty lived on and lives, having used these momentarily swollen creatures as its channel and tool, then I find it in me to pity these frog-bulls of egotism, so cruelly bemocked and deluded.
Before parting with the Pietà theme I would remark that in the Italian galleries the name Pietà is often—with apparent inaccuracy—given to pictures of the dead Christ alone in his tomb. One of the most curious pictures of this sort I came upon in the gallery of Faenza, where Christ stands in his tomb, yet still nailed on the Cross, from either end of which depends a scourge. I found the same design in the centre of a little stone shield over a building marked as the “Mons Pietatis” of Faenza. And this set me speculating whether such an image as a symbol of the Monte di Pietà was due to the mere suggestiveness of the word Pietà, or whether there was a more mystical connection implied between the Crucifixion and the loan-offices instituted in Italy by Bernardino da Feltre to frustrate the usury of the Jews. It is the Monte di Pietà of Treviso that shelters the Entombment ascribed to Giorgione. It seems a long way from Golgotha to the pawn-shop, yet we still talk of pledges being redeemed.