Fig. 113. Assistant of Perugino. Baptism. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel.
One of the most admired is the Baptism of Christ, Figure [113], by Pintorricchio, (or, as Venturi suggests, Andrea of Assisi) who here works as Perugino’s assistant. The story is told in the centre and reinforced by a spacious landscape which is confusingly full of attractive features. The theme is mechanically stretched to fill the space by adding at both flanks groups which have slight or no connection with the subject. These groups are interestingly diversified with fine portraits of the Pope’s relatives, the Roveres, and by the alert forms of children. The effect is fairly restful and idyllic, but the pattern is mechanical, and the emotional effect of the real theme is frittered away in the accessories. The method of enlarging a stock composition by adding portrait groups is standard for the Sistine Chapel and for the period. Masaccio had tried it more effectively in the Miracle of the Boy, and Filippo Lippi had made it seem almost organic in The Funeral of St. Stephen. Pintorricchio, if it be he, is more superficially alluring for his richness and variety, but really stands on a far lower plane of design than his predecessors.
Fig. 114. Botticelli. Moses in the Land of Midian. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel, Rome.
If this mechanical symmetry is the standard method, there are significant exceptions in the Sistine Chapel. The more sensitive spirits, Botticelli and Luca Signorelli, reject so trite a solution. Botticelli’s Moses in Midian, Figure [114], offers a delicate evasion, by promoting a minor motive to be the central theme. All the incidents that are dramatically important—the slaying of the Egyptian taskmaster, and the adoration of the Burning Bush from which Jehovah spoke—are done with the most energetic feeling, but are relegated to the background and edges of the composition. The picture is really the fine grove in which Moses gallantly helps the nymph-like daughters of Jethro to draw water. A fantastic idyl is foisted off on us as a substitute for one of the decisive moments in the Providential order. Botticelli is so winning in his evasion, that it seems almost unfeeling to note that no Gothic painter would have done anything so shifty. His success is not merely at the expense of the expression of his real theme, but also at the expense of the order and dignity proper to mural design. Having ordered a canto of an epic, the Pope received a delicious madrigal. His contentment is characteristic of the æsthetic casualness of the times.
Fig. 115. Signorelli, Design only. Last Days of Moses. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel, Rome.
Signorelli, in the Last Days of Moses, Figure [115], makes a similar but less egregious evasion. His centre of interest is the nude youth in the foreground, but he does give a certain prominence to the scenes where Moses invests Joshua with authority, and where both view the Promised Land from Mount Horeb. Though without much emotional accent, the crowds are agreeably disposed and diversified by graceful forms of women and children. Only the design is by Signorelli, the execution being by an assistant, Don Bartolommeo della Gatta. The picture is more delightful for such passages as the Apollo-like nude youth and the mother with her children in the right foreground than it is as a whole, though it is full of idyllic charm, and inadequate only when one considers the gravity of its theme.
