A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 116. Ghirlandaio. Christ calling Peter and Andrew. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel, Rome.

In his Calling of Peter and Andrew, Figure [116], to be fishers of men, Domenico Ghirlandaio makes a skilful and impressive use of that approved mechanical symmetry which has already been noticed in Pintorricchio’s Baptism. Everything is well centralized, the river view is a welcome outlet, the stereotyped bystanders on the flanks at least are telling portraits and, while not bound into the central motive, have withal a gravity that sufficiently accords with it. The arrangement is lucid, and the surplus accessories fairly well subordinated. A rather perfunctory quality in the central scene of homage and dedication reveals Ghirlandaio’s scanty imagination. His impressiveness has a certain dullness about it.

Few words need be spent on the picturesque and irresponsible confusion which reigns in Cosimo Rosselli’s Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, Figure [117]. Cosimo was one of the older painters in the chapel, forty-two years old. Yet a juvenile sensationalism and uncalculated restlessness prevail, and his attempts at vivacity and grace are as unhappy as his striving for effects of terror. It may well be that his eccentric young pupil, Piero di Cosimo, gave this fresco its febrile energy and its theatrical landscape. Certain it is that the three other frescoes by Cosimo are unmitigatedly dull. Oddly it was he alone who won the praise of Pope Sixtus, mostly for his profuse introduction of gold ornament.

Fig. 117. Cosimo Rosselli. Destruction of Pharaoh’s Army. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel.

Fig. 118. Perugino. Christ giving the Keys to Peter. Fresco.—Sistine Chapel, Rome.

We have seen in the Sistine Chapel a mechanical and rather perfunctory symmetry, various clever evasions of an idyllic sort, and a picturesque disorder side by side. The most ambitious decorative scheme of the time seems to result in a kind of artistic bankruptcy. But fortunately the Sistine Chapel contains its own self-criticism and remedy, in the extraordinary fresco by Pietro Perugino, Christ delivering the Keys to Peter, Figure [118]. Perugino is an Umbrian from Città della Pieve, thirty-five years old, and with a certain amount of Florentine training. He has, like Masaccio sixty years before, looked at the art of his times and found it wanting. He has had the lucidity to see that the malady is surplusage and disorder. Hence, he argues, the remedy is simplicity and order. To this he adds a sense of vastness. In this picture the temple platform, a vastness made by man, is set within the vastness of a river valley made by nature. The foreground group is arranged in a formal half military order which is cunningly made easy and flexible by differences of posture and gesture. Every tilted head and pointed foot has its reason. Without undue insistence, all the apostles are interested in the rite which ordains their chief. Here is no casual pleasure ground in which you may delightfully look about, here is a definite vision of a momentous act which you must see swiftly, completely, and precisely as the artist intends you shall see. It is the only well-considered design among these frescoes. It points the simplest and surest way by which the exuberance of the Early Renaissance might be disciplined into a noble order, and within twenty years the lesson was to be reread for all Italy by young Raphael of Urbino. Meanwhile the somewhat irresponsible exuberance of the new narrative painting has after all its winning aspect, is a sign of an energy and enthusiasm that need not so much to be tamed as to be intellectualized.

In discussing the last twenty years of the fifteenth century in Florence I am embarrassed by the richness of the field. Beside such typical figures as Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, we have to do with such sensitive and morbid spirits as Filippino Lippo and Piero di Cosimo; with Andrea Verrocchio and a group of imitators of his fastidious manner, notable among them young Leonardo da Vinci; with a host of secondary painters, particularly of furniture panels, and small altar-pieces, while if we consider rather artistic training than accident of birth, we must reckon with the Florentine achievement the rugged triumphs of Luca Signorelli. But since the more distinctive and progressive of these artists are really precursors of the Golden Age, or symptomatic of the unrest that was its prelude, they may best be treated later. That will leave us only the painters who are fully representative of the festal moment of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s greatness—the furniture painters and Ghirlandaio.

Those excesses of vivacity, those extravagances of invention, those juvenile graces which were a weakness in mural painting, were admirably in place in the decoration of chests and wainscots. The greater artists gladly accepted this little work, and some painters painted exclusively trousseau chests (cassoni) for young brides—an enviable occupation, for surely these fair young creatures had to be personally consulted. The subjects glorify love, magnify valor, celebrate the festal life of the day, its pageants, feasts, and dances. Of professional cassoni painters Francesco Pesellino[^[44]] (1422–1457) is the most famous. He is bewitching in variety and sensitiveness of invention, in refinement of story telling, and in glamour of color. Two admirable cassone fronts by him are owned by Mrs. John L. Gardner, Figure [119]. They represent the six triumphs described by Petrarch in so many Canzoni. Love, Chastity, Death, Time, Fame, and Eternity are figured forth much as these themes were embodied in contemporary pageants, about the year 1450. The subjects were favorites for cassoni less because of their grave moral import than because Petrarch was Love’s accredited Poet Laureate.