Fig. 95. Andrea del Castagno. Pippo Spano.—Sant’ Apollonia.
Fig. 97. Andrea del Castagno. Tomb portrait of Niccolò da Tolentino.—Cathedral.
Far the most powerful of these early realists is Andrea del Castagno.[[37]] His aggressive and truculent forms savor of Donatello without Donatello’s fineness. He searches the secrets of anatomy, locates and describes the muscles and sinews, depicts a world ruled by force of arm. Although he builds in heavy shadows, after Masaccio’s fashion, he retains an outline that vibrates with nervous strength. His truthful sternness still wins approbation. He was born about 1390. We meet him first in full maturity, perhaps about the year 1435, as decorator of the Villa of the Pandolfini. To strengthen the ambition of that proud race, he painted in their great hall nine figures of heroes and heroines noted in war or in the arts. Recently transferred to the Convent of Sant’ Apollonia, which already had a Last Supper and a Calvary by Andrea, you may see the austere forms of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, of Esther, Queen Thomyris and the Cumean Sibyl, of the warrior Farinata degli Uberti, Niccolò Accaiuoli, and Filippo Scolari. This potent and melancholy figure of Pippo Spano, Figure [95], whom we already know as the patron of Masolino, at Buda, is the most striking representation that painting has given us of those masterful Italian soldiers of fortune who managed war and government for the less advanced nations. Pippo Spano had gone to Buda as a clerk and had quickly become a generalissimo, Obergespann of Temesvár. For King Sigismund of Hungary he stemmed the Turkish onslaught, did much to save Central Europe for Christianity. As he stands thoughtfully confident, holding the scimitar, the weapon of his foes, he is the beau ideal of that Italy soon to be immortalized by Machiavelli, in which virtue meant successful force, and both were on sale. A man’s portrait, Figure [96], in the collection of Mr. J. P. Morgan, New York, has an even more sinister intensity. Equally remarkable for its heroic aggressiveness in the young David adorning a tournament shield in the Widener Collection, Figure [70].
In the fresco of the Crucifixion, now in the Uffizi, Andrea reveals great knowledge linked to tragic expressiveness. No tenderness veils the appalling theme. An athlete suffers stoically while his mother and cousin shudder with grief. Of its ruthless kind it is a great masterpiece and quite unforgettable.
In 1456 Andrea painted for the Cathedral the equestrian portrait of the partisan leader, Niccolò da Tolentino, Figure [97]. It is a companion piece to Uccello’s Hawkwood, and like it simulates statuary, in monochrome. It is more martial and restless, in the toss of the horse’s head and the snap of the rider’s cloak. It suggests not ceremonious dignity, but noise and impending action. It may very powerfully have influenced Verrocchio twenty years later when he modelled for Venice the Colleoni statue.
The truculence of Andrea’s manner led to a false and scandalous tradition, promulgated by Vasari, that he slew his rival Domenico Veneziano out of jealousy. As a matter of prosaic record, Domenico Veneziano survived his alleged assassin’s death, in 1457, by all of four years.
Domenico came down from Venice somewhere about 1438 and brought with him a new technical method. He finished the pictures, which he began in tempera, with veilings or glazes in an oil or varnish medium. He avoided the old frank Gothic coloring in favor of pale tonalities which oddly forecast our modern open-air school. The new method permitted of bolder brushwork and successive over paintings. For the moment it wrought havoc with the old conventional beauty, but it offered the painter new resources and refinements, and eventually made possible the triumphs of Leonardo and Titian.
