If you doubt all this, how can you explain the fact that those painters of the early Renaissance who remained faithful to the Christian type—such men, I mean, as Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Alesso Baldovinetti, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio—all remained more or less faithful, too, to Orcagna's belief in ornament and pretty accessories; while all those painters who either carried on or developed the new spirit in Pisanello's, Ucello's, Masolino's and Masaccio's work— such men as Pollajuolo, Verrochio, Perugini, Bellini, and ultimately Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael—all discarded pretty and seductive accessories, or, when they did use them, made them completely subordinate to the human element in their work?
The gradual growth in the importance of the human body and of the Pagan type, in the Renaissance painters, from Masaccio to Michelangelo, with whom there can no longer be any question of convalescence, the rapid return to a healthy life-affirming type, and the ultimate triumph of this type in the very heart of the Vatican—the headquarters of the greatest negative religion on earth,—these are the facts which make the art of this age so admirable and so thrilling.
It represents the greatest stand which Europe has ever made against the denial of life, humanity and beauty; and if some of the artists, like Pisanello, Piero della Francesca, and ultimately Titian, in their great zeal, returned to nature with almost as much interest as to man, this is easily accounted for when it is remembered how long nature and man had been separated.[31]
But the fact that makes the final glory of the Renaissance type all the more glorious is the extraordinary circumstance that almost every one of the artists who fought for it, and for the principles it involved, from Piero della Francesca to Titian, were one after the other captured and enchained by the Church itself. Often it was in the very atmosphere of the high altar, with the fumes of the incense about them, that they asserted their positive faith in Life and Man. The greatest dangers, the greatest temptations surrounded them But they planted their banner, notwithstanding, in the centre of their true enemy's camp, and, for a while, their true enemy acquiesced, because the command was in the hands of men who were artists and pagans themselves, and who consequently did not believe in one single tenet of the negative creed which they professed.
Just as the realism of some of the early Renaissance artists, however, was the inevitable outcome of their convalescent state, so the strong realism of many of the painters and sculptors of the late Renaissance was the natural result of their combative attitude.
Fighting for a particular kind of man, against centuries of false and unhealthy tradition, it was necessary to bring forward the new ideal with every characteristic plainly, emphatically and powerfully expressed; for every characteristic of a new ideal is of the highest importance.
These new values of the Renaissance spirit were scarcely one hundred years old, when Michelangelo set himself the task of embodying them in his sculpture and painting. Would it be fair to criticize him from the standpoint of Egypt or even of Greece?
From the standpoint of Egypt he is disappointing. The preponderance of characteristic traits over simplicity in his work spoils the power of his conceptions. His prevailing lack of simplicity makes you guess at the youth of the values on which he stood, and his tortuous bodies often make you question whether his types have entirely left the nerves of the Gothic period behind them. But are not all these defects precisely of a kind which are unfortunately inseparable from the position which Michelangelo assumed?
He was the greatest of the Renaissance artists. In criticizing him, I have said all that can be said, from this particular standpoint, of his predecessors and contemporaries. His power lies in the forcibleness, the exhilaration, the exuberance and the wealth with which he brings forward his type. It lies in his absolute contempt of seductive prettiness, his sometimes terrible strength, his vehemence and his energy, and above all in his magnificent conceptions and the types with which he illustrates them. Compared with the art from which it had sprung, his art was stupendous.
And where he is weak, compared with a higher—and by no means a modern —concept of art, he suffers from the virtues of his position as a fighter and as an innovator.