Other arts at this time rose to a highly flourishing condition. The connection between architecture and cabinet-making, and that between sculpture and goldsmith’s work, have been repeatedly referred to. The architect and cabinet-maker were often one, down to the middle of the following century, when the Del Tasso family continued their double occupation. But artistic cabinet-work was also connected with sculpture and painting, as may be seen by the rich choir-stalls of many churches; the ceilings and other woodwork of the palaces, with their fine reliefs, elegant panelling, and wood-mosaic (tarsia), much used to represent perspective as well as to imitate flowers and foliage. Many of the artists mentioned furnished work of this kind to the cathedral of Sta. Maria del Fiore, and to the palace of the Signoria. The goldsmith’s art was in its glory, followed as it was by great sculptors, who found excellent assistants in those who never rose to the height of sculpture. The finest work of this kind in Florence is the silver reredos for the Baptistery (mentioned at p. 130), which was never quite finished. The growing taste for ornamental vessels and other objects favoured this branch of art; as did also the custom of presenting silver helmets or pieces of plate to commanders and others who had deserved well of the Republic. As early as the summer of 1397, 436 florins were paid to the goldsmiths Piero, Matteo and Donato, for silver gold and enamel, for dishes (bacinetti) intended for the generals Paolo Orsini, Giovanni Colonna and Bernardin de Serre. Antonio del Pollaiuolo made a large silver dish for the Signoria, and various ornaments for rich families; and the churches were adorned with silver crucifixes and elegant lamps.
Die-cutting was only a branch of sculpture and the goldsmith’s art, sure to be practised where these two arts flourished, and contemporary history furnished a store of materials. But here the Tuscans do not hold the foremost place, either in time or in excellence of workmanship. Natives of Northern Italy, Lombards, and Venetians, came before them in the great cast portrait-medallions, by which Vittore Pisanello made a name in the fifteenth century. Donatello’s followers strove to follow but never came up to him. Three of the Tuscan medallists—Antonio Pollaiuolo, Bertoldo, and Andrea Guazzalotti of Prato, had dealings with the Medici. Only the first is known to have struck a medal referring to his country’s history, namely, one relating to the Pazzi conspiracy. Guazzalotti, who was in correspondence with Lorenzo and cast statues for him, commemorated the Pope and the Duke of Calabria as victors over the Turks; the medals are characteristically conceived, but lacking in delicacy of treatment. Medals of Cosimo and of Filippo de’ Medici, Archbishop of Pisa, are attributed to Pisanello, the latter probably incorrectly; a medallion with the head of Lorenzo seems to be the work of a Florentine, Pietro di Niccolò.[202]
Yet another branch of art reached a high perfection in Florence—that of engraving precious stones. The taste for engraved gems, which kept pace with the increasing knowledge of antiquity and the passion for books and antique works of all kinds, revived the art of cutting cameos and precious stones. A good example of the growth of this taste is related by Vespasiano da Bisticci in the ‘Life of Niccoli,’[203] whose house was full of antiquities. Passing along the street one day, he saw a boy wearing round his neck a chalcedony with a figure engraved, which the learned man thought he recognised as a work of Polycletes. He inquired the name of the boy’s father, and sent to ask him whether he would sell the stone. The man was willing to let him have it for five florins, which he thought good payment. Now, in the days of Pope Eugene, the future Cardinal Luigi Scarampi—who had much taste for matters of this sort—being in Florence, asked Niccoli to show him the stone, and offered him two hundred ducats for it. Niccoli, who was not rich, accepted, and the chalcedony passed into the hands of Scarampi, then to Paul II., and, after his death, to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Lorenzo’s uncle, Giovanni, had collected many gems, of which not the least famous was the carnelian representing Apollo and Marsyas. It was supposed to be Nero’s seal, and was set in gold by Lorenzo Ghiberti.[204] Lorenzo considerably increased the collection of antique gems inherited from his father, and formed a treasury, of which numerous remains still exist, after all the disasters that befell his posterity. He and Paul II. inspired this branch of art with new life, and enabled modern workers to enter the lists against the ancients. The first modern gem of known date, is a portrait of Pope Paul in 1470, now in the Uffizi collection. Giovanni delle Corniuole formed himself on the models in the Medici collection, and attained the perfection conspicuous in his famous head of Savonarola. He had a competitor in the Milanese Domenico de’ Cammei, who worked chiefly for Lodovico il Moro, and to whom is attributed the portrait of Lorenzo on an onyx of three strata, placed with that of the great Dominican in the Uffizi collection. Many other stones, with subjects taken from mythology, sacred history, &c., are works of this period, when, also, much antique work was copied. The name of Lorenzo de’ Medici, to be read on many gems in Florence and elsewhere, recalls the former wealth told of in Latin verses, and in the testimonies of contemporaries.[205]
In painting we now witness the development of the tendencies which first appeared in Masaccio, and were so actively reciprocated by the sister-art of sculpture. Here the two branches of art frequently met, and their reciprocal influence is discernible in the character of the work. It was thus with Verrocchio, and the Pollaiuoli. The former, of no great distinction as a painter, recalls his bronze works in his picture of the Baptism of Christ.[206] The brothers Pollaiuoli, whose grave, quiet faces may be seen together on their tomb in San Pietro in Vincoli at Rome, cannot well be separated in their works; and, though Piero occupied himself with painting more than Antonio, the inscription by the latter on the monument of Pope Sixtus IV. shows his excellence in gold and silver work, in painting, and bronze casting. Antonio painted for Lorenzo the Labours of Hercules, of which some small copies are still in existence. The picture of St. James was painted for the chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal; that of the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian,[207] the most famous work of these painters, was executed in 1475, for the Pucci chapel in the entrance-court of the Annunziata. In these works may be recognised the sculptor, and the student of anatomy, to whom fidelity in representing the figure is more important than the feeling for beauty. Alesso Baldovinetti, who was probably a pupil of Uccello, and a fellow-worker of Andrea del Castagno, experienced the influence of sculpture indirectly; and where he might have learned from it, in regard to modelling, he has only acquired a constrained, angular style, which is far from pleasing. An example of this may be seen in his picture of the Madonna enthroned with saints, painted for the villa at Caffaggiuolo, and now in the Uffizi collection. More satisfactory is a work executed from a design of his—the picture of Dante in Sta. Maria del Fiore which represents the altissimo Poeta in the attitude of speaking, with his open book in his hand; on his right is hell, on his left the city of Florence, in the background the Mount of Purgatory, above his head the firmament. This picture was actually attributed to Orcagna, till the artist’s name—Domenico di Michelino—and the date of execution, 1466, were discovered.[208]
Benozzo Gozzoli’s most important works—his Pisan frescoes—were executed from 1469 onwards; they display great creative power, though the harmony is defective and the masses and spaces are ill distributed. It is observable in the works of Filippo Lippi, Gozzoli, and Baldovinetti, a far inferior artist, that the custom was growing in Florence of introducing into historical and religious compositions portraits of spectators who had nothing to do with the subject. Nothing remains of the frescoes painted by Baldovinetti for the Gianfigliazzi in the choir of Sta. Trinità; they contained portraits of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, Bongianni and others of the Gianfigliazzi, Luigi Guicciardini, Luca Pitti, Diotisalvi Neroni, Filippo Strozzi, Lorenzo della Volpaia, and Paolo Toscanelli.[209] This branch of painting reached its highest development in the hands of Baldovinetti’s famous pupil, Domenico Ghirlandajo. Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi pursued the same branch of art. The former learned the goldsmith’s trade in his youth, and shows traces of the influence of the Pollaiuoli. He was the pupil of Fra Filippo and became the master of his son, whom he survived, though Filippino was his junior by twenty years. In the paintings of both there is a peculiar fantastic element, attractive and interesting at first, but tiresome after a time. In the faces it degenerates into a constantly recurring type, and in the composition becomes mannerism. The way, too, in which both painters employ allegory increases the appearance of affectation. Yet both were men of great talent, with a fine and delicate sense of beauty when not marred by superficiality and exaggeration. Both had much to do with Lorenzo. None of the pictures painted for him by Botticelli are now in existence, but his fine picture of the Epiphany must have been a commission from the Medici, for in this work (formerly in Sta. Maria Novella, and now in the Uffizi) the Three Kings have the features of three members of the family—Cosimo the elder, his younger son Giovanni, and his grandson Giuliano.[210] The colouring is more like that of Ghirlandajo, to whom the picture was long attributed, than the brighter, thinner tone of most of Botticelli’s works. Florence contains many of his allegorical pictures, as well as Madonnas and saints; among them the Coronation of the Virgin, painted for the church of San Marco, as a commission for the Silk-workers’ Guild.[211] Botticelli not only introduced likenesses into his historical pictures, he painted separate portraits; among them those of Lorenzo’s mother and Giuliano’s early lost love, the ‘bella Simonetta,’ very pleasing in the gentle simplicity which characterises her expression, her attitude, and even her dress. Both heads are in profile, the contour a little exaggerated, in the manner of this artist.[212] Botticelli’s close connection with the Medici is shown by the circumstance that after the conspiracy of the Pazzi he undertook to paint the likenesses of the conspirators on the wall of the palace of the Podestà.[213]
Only one work of Filippino Lippi is mentioned as having been executed for Lorenzo—the unfinished fresco, representing a sacrifice, in the hall at Poggio a Cajano—but their intimacy is well known. The commission given to Filippino by Cardinal Olivieri Caraffa for the painting of his chapel in Sta. Maria sopra Minerva is said to have been procured by Lorenzo, and so, probably, were those of Matthias Corvinus. The influence exercised on the views and tendencies of the son by his father’s works, especially those at Prato—where Filippino passed most of his youth—was mingled with that of Botticelli. The former comes out most in the earlier works, notably in the frescoes of the Brancacci chapel at San Pietro in Carmine, painted about 1485; the latter in the wall-paintings begun for Filippo Strozzi, but not finished till long after, in the chapel in Sta. Maria Novella. The immediate neighbourhood of Masaccio’s works had, no doubt, a beneficial effect on the young artist in his earlier works, for Filippino, not yet thirty, shows in the Brancacci frescoes infinitely more fidelity to nature and feeling for historical composition than in the paintings of the Caraffa and Strozzi chapels. The scenes in the last,[214] from the Acts and legends of the Apostles, display undeniable tokens of spirit and imagination, giving a vivid representation of the passions. But there is affected mannerism, inharmonious colouring, and an apparent delight in light tints playing into each other. Some of these defects may be partly laid to the account of restoration. The preference, noticeable in Botticelli, for antique accessories, produces in Filippino an effect of artificial overloading. Among his easel-pieces, the great Madonna with saints, painted in 1485 for the council-chamber of the palace of the Signoria, is distinguished by grace and earnest work.[215] Filippino, too, was fond of introducing figures of contemporaries. In his frescoes at S. Pietro in Carmine may be seen Tommaso Soderini, Piero Guicciardini (father of the historian), Luigi Pulci, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Sandro Botticelli, Francesco Granacci, and the painter himself. In an altar-piece (now in the Uffizi), representing the Epiphany, are portraits of several members of the younger branch of the Medici, doubtless benefactors of the convent of San Donato, for which the picture was painted four years after Lorenzo’s death. There are Pierfrancesco, grandson of Giovanni di Bicci, his son Giovanni, father of the famous leader of the Black Bands and grandfather of the first Grand-Duke, and the younger Pierfrancesco, father of Lorenzino, the murderer of the first Duke of Florence.[216] Other portraits, such as those of the Nerli family in Sto. Spirito, represent donors. In Cosimo Rosselli’s greatest work, the Procession with the Chalice in the church of Sant’Ambrogio, only one portrait is named, that of Pico della Mirandola. In Lucca, where Rosselli painted a good deal, he fell into the reigning fashion. He had formed himself on the model, first of Fra Angelico, then of Benozzo Gozzoli, and with moderate talents endeavoured to combine the conventional with the naturalistic tendency.[217]
The highest achievements of painting in Lorenzo’s days were those of Domenico Ghirlandajo. He is a nobler Benozzo, guided by a refined sense of symmetry. His power of drawing figures and groups is combined with variety and animation. He has a strong feeling for historical character, and makes a moderate use of architecture and accessories that heighten the interest of his compositions without seeming obtrusive. What he lacks in point of ideality is compensated by his love of nature and that cultivated sense of form which makes him select natural beauty and avoid whatever is repulsive in the reality. His scenes from Scripture and the history of the Saints are full of figures, and produce a grand, often a solemn, effect without being at all forced or far-fetched. They transport us, undisturbed by anything foreign or strange, into the Florence of his day. We seem to stand in the middle of that gay and busy life, among the gallant active citizens and the stately, beautiful women of that city, which, according to the inscription—doubtless Poliziano’s—on the picture in the choir of Sta. Maria Novella of the Angel appearing to Zacharias, was rich in the spoils of victory and the treasures of art, in noble buildings, in plenty, health, and peace.[218] Ghirlandajo’s frescoes are a sort of monumental glorification of Lorenzo’s latter years. Among the many portraits which give these works a value, independent of their qualities as works of art, may be seen Lorenzo’s in the Sassetti chapel in Sta. Trinità, which was decorated in 1485 with scenes from the history of St. Francis of Assisi. The frescoes in the choir of Sta. Maria Novella make quite a portrait gallery. They were begun in 1490 for Giovanni Tornabuoni, and after five years’ work were finished four years before the death of the painter, who is here seen at his best. Here are limned many members of the Tornabuoni and Tornaquinci families (between whom there was a connection), as well as numerous friends—Ficino, Landino, Poliziano, Gentile of Urbino, the most distinguished scholars of the time. Baldovinetti, too, is there; David Ghirlandajo, Domenico’s brother; his brother-in-law Bastiano Mainardi and himself; Andrea de’ Medici, Federigo Sassetti, Gianfrancesco Ridolfi—a partner in the Medicean bank—besides noble ladies and matrons, among whom is Ginevra de’ Benci, a famous beauty also painted by Leonardo da Vinci, and another pleasing face, that of Giovanna degli Albizzi, who married Lorenzo Tornabuoni in 1486.[219]
Like the Brancacci chapel, the choir of Sta. Maria Novella was a school for painters in the palmy days of art; Andrea del Sarto, in particular, received a great impulse from the compositions of Ghirlandajo. When it is considered that the latter was taken away in the full strength of manhood, at the age of forty-five, and that his development was not rapid, it is hard to understand how he could have executed so many works in Florence and elsewhere. The frescoes may have been done in part by his pupils, but the easel-pieces—of which there are so many, executed with the most careful technical perfection—must have come chiefly from his own hand. Of those in Florence it will suffice to name one, the fine Epiphany painted in 1488 for the church of the Foundling Hospital. For Lorenzo, in 1488, he painted in the villa at Spedaletto some mythological subjects of Vulcan and his comrades, of which little now remains. For Giovanni de’ Medici he did two altar-pieces in the abbey church of San Giusto near Volterra, of which one, ‘Christ in the act of Blessing, with Saints,’ still exists. But Ghirlandajo’s chief patrons were the Tornabuoni, family connections of the Medici. That he and several other Tuscan artists were sent for to Rome to decorate the Sixtine Chapel may safely be attributed to these two families. About twenty years before the close of the century—when Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, and his pupil Piero di Cosimo, were painting there with and after Ghirlandajo—the Pope and Lorenzo were reconciled; and as in Florence nothing was ever done in matters of art without him, he and Giovanni Tornabuoni doubtless procured these commissions.
The diplomatic, literary, and artistic intercourse between Florence and Rome had never been so active and fertile as in those days when the predominance of Florentine influence in Rome was openly acknowledged. Almost all the remarkable works of the time of Sixtus IV. are due to Florentine architects, sculptors, and painters. They may have commenced even before the Pazzi conspiracy, for Baccio Pontelli began to build the chapel in 1473, and Sixtus was urgent for its completion. Beside the Florentine painters above named two other Tuscans were employed, Don Bartolommeo della Gatta, abbot of a small Camaldulensian convent at Arezzo, and perhaps a Florentine by birth, and Luca Signorelli of Cortona, who by his connection with Piero della Francesca forms a link between Tuscan and Umbrian art. His chief works belong to an Umbrian city, Orvieto, where indeed Tuscan masters had long taken the lead. Luca Signorelli also painted for Lorenzo. A Madonna, once in the villa at Castello now in the Uffizi, and a mythological picture, the ‘Education of Pan,’ seem to have been offerings of the artist to his patron. The last-named picture recalls the grandeur of conception and strong feeling for form noticeable in the frescoes in the chapel of San Brizio in Orvieto Cathedral.[220]
The head of the Umbrian school in the latter decades of the century, Pietro Perugino, made repeated and long visits to Florence, and was considerably influenced by Florentine art, though with an admixture of other elements. Thus was formed a style which, opposed on the one hand to the naturalism of most of the Florentines, on the other to the enthusiastic tendencies of some among them, gave expression to the religious element which long remained dominant in the master’s own country and beyond it. It is ascertained that Perugino was in Florence in 1482 and in the beginning of 1491, but nothing is known of what he did then. His chief works in Florence are of later date, as are those of his school, first among which is the ‘Last Supper,’ in Sant’ Onofrio, probably by Bernardino Pinturicchio. In 1496, Perugino had thoughts of building a house in Florence, and in 1515—when his talent was on the wane—he purchased a future resting-place in the Annunziata; such tokens did he give of his attachment to the city which, spite of the superhuman activity of Rome, was yet the focus of all artist-life and work. Of paintings by Perugino for the Medici nothing is known.