IV
The Renaissance was born of defiance, and therefore it lacked depth, width and sureness of creative instinct. It is the one and only epoch which was more consistent in theory than in performance and—in sharp contrast to Gothic and Baroque—the only one in which theoretically-formulated intention preceded (often enough surpassed) the ability to perform. But the fact that the individual arts were forced to become satellites of a Classicist sculpture could not in the last analysis alter the essence of them, and could only impoverish their store of inward possibilities. For natures of medium size, the Renaissance theme was not too big; it was attractive indeed from its very plainness, and we miss consequently that Gothic wrestling with overpowering imprecise problems which distinguishes the Rhenish and Flemish schools. The seductive ease and clarity of the Renaissance rests very largely upon evasion—the evasion of deeper reluctances by the aid of speciously simple rule. To men of the inwardness of Memlinc or the power of Grünewald such conditions as those of the Tuscan form-world would have been fatal. They could not have developed their strength in and through it, but only against it. Seeing as we do no weakness in the form of the Renaissance masters, we are very prone to overrate their humanity. In Gothic, and again in Baroque, an entirely great artist was fulfilling his art in deepening and completing its language, but in Renaissance he was necessarily only destroying it. “ So it was in the cases of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, the only really great men of Italy after Dante. Is it not curious that between the masters of the Gothic—who were nothing but silent workers in their art and yet achieved the very highest that could be achieved within its convention and its field—and the Venetians and Dutch of 1600—who again were purely workers—there should be these three men who were not “sculptors” or "painters” but thinkers, and thinkers who of necessity busied themselves not merely with all the available means of artistic expression but with a thousand other things besides, ever restless and dissatisfied, in their effort to get at the real essence and aim of their being? Does it not mean—that in the Renaissance they could not “find themselves”? Each in his own fashion, each under his own tragic illusion, these three giants strove to be “Classical” in the Medicean sense; and yet it was they themselves who in one and another way—Raphael in respect of the line, Leonardo in respect of the surface, Michelangelo in respect of the body—shattered the dream. In them the misguided soul is finding its way back to its Faustian starting-points. What they intended was to substitute proportion for relation, drawing for light-and-air effect, Euclidean body for pure space. But neither they nor others of their time produced a Euclidean-static sculpture—for that was possible once only, in Athens. In all their work one feels a secret music, in all their forms the movement-quality and the tending into distances and depths. They are on the way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral. Raphael thawed the Florentine fresco, and Michelangelo the statue, and Leonardo dreamed already of Rembrandt and Bach. The higher and more conscientious the effort to actualize the ideas of the age, the more intangible it became.
Gothic and Baroque, however, are something that is, while Renaissance is only an ideal, unattainable like all ideals, that floats over the will of a period. Giotto is a Gothic, and Titian is a Baroque, artist. Michelangelo would be a Renaissance artist, but fails. Visibly, the plastic in him, for all its ambitiousness, is overpowered by the pictorial spirit—and a pictorial spirit, too, in which the Northern space-perspective is implicit. Even as soon as 1520 the beautiful proportion, the pure rule—that is, the conscious Classical—are felt as frigid and formal. The cornice which he put on to Sangallo’s purely “Classical” façade of the Palazzo Farnese was no doubt, from the strictly Renaissance standpoint, a disfigurement, but he himself and many with him felt it to be far superior to the achievements of Greeks and Romans.
As Petrarch was the first, so Michelangelo was the last Florentine who gave himself up passionately to the Antique. But it was no longer an entire devotion. The Franciscan Christianity of Fra Angelico, with its subtle gentleness and its quiet, reflective piety—to which the Southern refinement of ripe Renaissance work owes far more than has been supposed[[356]]—came now to its end. The majestic spirit of the Counter-Reformation, massive, animated, gorgeous, lives already in Michelangelo. There is something in Renaissance work which at the time passed for being “Classical” but is really only a deliberately noble dress for the Christian-German world-feeling; as we have already mentioned, the combination of round-arch and pillar, that favourite Florentine motive, was of Syrian origin. But compare the pseudo-Corinthian column of the 15th Century with the columns of a real Roman ruin—remembering that these ruins were known and on the spot! Michelangelo alone would tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The question of form was for him a religious matter; for him (and only for him) it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art; of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the terribile in his forms that frightened his contemporaries. The one half of his nature drew him towards the Classical and therefore to sculpture—we all know the effect produced upon him by the recently-discovered Laocoön. No man ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel into a buried world. Everything that he created he meant sculpturally—sculpturally, that is, in a sense of the word that he and he alone stood for. “The world, presented in the great Pan,” the element which Goethe meant to render when he brought Helena into the Second Part of Faust, the Apollinian world in all its powerful sensuous corporal presence—that was what Michelangelo was striving with all his might to capture and to fix in artistic being when he was painting the Sistine ceiling. Every resource of fresco—the big contours, the vast surfaces, the immense nearness of naked shapes, the materiality of colour—was here for the last time strained to the utmost to liberate the paganism, the high-Renaissance paganism, that was in him. But his second soul, the soul of Gothic-Christian Dante and of the music of great expanses, is pulling in the opposite sense; his scheme for the ensemble is manifestly metaphysical in spirit.
His was the last effort, repeated again and again, to put the entirety of the artist-personality into the language of stone. But the Euclidean material failed him. His attitude to it was not that of the Greek. In the very character of its being the chiselled statue contradicts the world-feeling that tries to find something by, and not to possess something in, its art-works. For Phidias, marble is the cosmic stuff that is crying for form. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea expresses the very essence of that art. But for Michelangelo marble was the foe to be subdued, the prison out of which he must deliver his idea as Siegfried delivered Brunhilde. Everyone knows his way of setting to work. He did not approach the rough block coolly from every aspect of the intended form, but attacked it with a passionate frontal attack, hewing into it as though into space, cutting away the material layer by layer and driving deeper and deeper until his form emerged, while the members slowly developed themselves out of the quarry. Never perhaps has there been a more open expression of world-dread in the presence of the become—Death—of the will to overpower and capture it in vibrant form. There is no other artist of the West whose relation to the stone has been that of Michelangelo—at once so intimate and so violently masterful. It is his symbol of Death. In it dwells the hostile principle that his daemonic nature is always striving to overpower, whether he is cutting statues or piling great buildings out of it.[[357]] He is the one sculptor of his age who dealt only with marble. Bronze, as cast, allows the modeller to compromise with pictorial tendencies, and it appealed therefore to other Renaissance artists and to the softer Greeks. The Giant stood aloof from it.
The instantaneous bodily posture was what the Classical sculptor created, and of this Faustian man was incapable. It is here just as it is in the matter of love, in which Faustian man discovers, not primarily the act of union between man and woman, but the great love of Dante and beyond that the caring Mother. Michelangelo’s erotic—which is that of Beethoven also—is as un-Classical as it is possible to be. It stands sub specie æternitatis and not under that of sense and the moment. He produced acts—a sacrifice to the Hellenic idol—but the soul in them denies or overmasters the visible form. He wills infinity as the Greek willed proportion and rule, he embraces past and future as the Greek embraced present. The Classical eye absorbs plastic form into itself, but Michelangelo saw with the spiritual eye and broke through the foreground-language of immediate sensuousness. And inevitably, in the long run, he destroyed the conditions for this art. Marble became too trivial for his will-to-form. He ceased to be sculptor and turned architect. In full old age, when he was producing only wild fragments like the Rondanini Madonna and hardly cutting his figures out of the rough at all, the musical tendency of his artistry broke through. In the end the impulse towards contrapuntal form was no longer to be repressed and, dissatisfied through and through with the art upon which he had spent his life, yet dominated still by the unquenchable will to self-expression, he shattered[shattered] the canon of Renaissance architecture and created the Roman Baroque. For relations of material and form he substituted the contest of force and mass. He grouped the columns in sheaves or else pushed them away into niches. He broke up the storeys with huge pilasters and gave the façade a sort of surging and thrusting quality. Measure yielded to melody, the static to the dynamic. And thus Faustian music enlisted in its service the chief of all the other arts.
With Michelangelo the history of Western sculpture is at an end. What of it there was after him was mere misunderstandings or reminiscences. His real heir was Palestrina.
Leonardo speaks another language. In essentials his spirit reached forward into the following century, and he was in nowise bound, as Michelangelo was bound by every tie of heart, to the Tuscan ideal. He alone had neither the ambition to be sculptor nor the ambition to be architect. It was a strange illusion of the Renaissance that the Hellenic feeling and the Hellenic cult of the exterior structure could be got at by way of anatomical studies. But when Leonardo studied anatomy it was not, as in Michelangelo’s case, foreground anatomy, the topography of human surfaces, studied for the sake of plastic, but physiology studied for the inward secrets. While Michelangelo tried to force the whole meaning of human existence into the language of the living body, Leonardo’s studies show the exact opposite. His much-admired sfumato is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal bounds, in the name of space, and as such it is the starting-point of Impressionism. Leonardo begins with the inside, the spiritual space within us, and not with the considered definition-line, and when he ends (that is, if he ends at all and does not leave the picture unfinished), the substance of colour lies like a mere breathing over the real structure of the picture, which is something incorporeal and indescribable. Raphael’s paintings fall into planes in which he disposes his well-ordered groups, and he closes off the whole with a well-proportioned background. But Leonardo knows only one space, wide and eternal, and his figures, as it were, float therein. The one puts inside a frame a sum of individual near things, the other a portion cut out of the infinite.
Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood. It was no Renaissance spirit that brought him to that—on the contrary, the whole course of his thought took him right outside the conceptions of his age. Neither Michelangelo nor Raphael could have done it, for their painter’s anatomy looks only at the form and position, not the function, of the parts. In mathematical language, it is stereometry as against analysis. Did not the Renaissance find it quite sufficient preparation for great painted scenes to study corpses, suppressing the becoming in favour of the become and calling on the dead to make Classical ἀταραξία accessible to Northern creative energy? But Leonardo investigated the life in the body as Rubens did, and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did. His discovery was contemporary with that of Columbus, and the two have a deep affinity, for they signify the victory of the infinite over the material limitedness of the tangibly present. Would a Greek ever have concerned himself with questions like theirs? The Greeks inquired as little into the interior of their own organization as they sought for the sources of the Nile; these were problems that might have jeopardized the Euclidean constitution of their being. The Baroque, on the other hand, is truly the period of the great discoveries. The very word “discovery” has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything cosmic, but to do just this is the most characteristic impulse of a Faustian nature. The discoveries of the New World, the circulation of the blood, and the Copernican universe were achieved almost simultaneously and, at bottom, are completely equivalent; and the discovery of gunpowder (that is, the long-range weapon[[358]]) and of printing (the long-range script) were little earlier.
Leonardo was a discoverer through-and-through, and discovery was the sum in one word of his whole nature. Brush, chisel, dissecting-knife, pencil for calculating and compasses for drawing—all were for him of equal importance. They were for him what the Mariner’s Compass was for Columbus. When Raphael completes with colour the sharp-drawn outline he asserts the corporeal phenomenon in every brush-stroke, but Leonardo, in his red-chalk sketches and his backgrounds reveals aerial secrets with every line. He was the first, too, who set his mind to work on aviation. To fly, to free one’s self from earth, to lose one’s self in the expanse of the universe—is not this ambition Faustian in the highest degree? Is it not in fact the fulfilment of our dreams? Has it never been observed how the Christian legend became in Western painting a glorious transfiguration of this motive? All the pictured ascents into heaven and falls into hell, the divine figures floating above the clouds, the blissful detachment of angels and saints, the insistent emphasis upon freedom from earth’s heaviness, are emblems of soul-flight, peculiar to the art of the Faustian, utterly remote from that of the Byzantine.