Our theme is that brief moment of accomplishment which witnessed the rise of Rome as centre of art, and the greatest painting of Raphael and Michelangelo. We need not hesitate to apply to it the oldfashioned term, the Golden Age. But we shall not use it with quite the oldfashioned unction, knowing as we do the heavy sacrifice involved in attaining the so-called Grand Style, and the still heavier penalty it imposed upon the art that succeeded it.
The Florentines believed that painting had reached its height in the years 1504 and 1505, when Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were designing the great competitive battle-pieces for the Priors’ Palace at Florence, and Raphael was painting his loveliest Madonnas. Modern critics might rather be inclined to date the grand climacteric from a pathetic incident of a few years later. In 1508, when Pope Julius II wished to decorate the new ante-rooms of the Vatican, the famous Stanze he called the best of the older painters—Sodoma, Perugino, Signorelli, among others. No sooner had they begun to decorate the vaults than their work seemed inadequate. They were turned off incontinently and the young man Raphael called down from Florence to take their place. The incident shows how suddenly the new beauty dawned upon the world of art patronage. Vividly conscious of its advent, the Italians were less conscious of the equally sudden waning of the great style. With the wisdom of hindsight we can now see that the whole development was a marvelous spurt, lasting a bare dozen years, from the battle cartoons of 1505 to Raphael’s tapestry cartoons of 1516. Raphael and Michelangelo, who created the lasting glory of the Renaissance, also dug its grave. Before considering the creative and destructive energies of these two giants, we may profitably note the characteristics of what whether for praise or mockery has ever since been called the Grand Style. And here I have little to do beyond condensing Professor Wölfflin’s excellent book.
In the Grand Style the accent was on maturity, decorum, and measured power. Vivacious and picturesque incidents are eschewed. The new art demands simplicity and centrality. The human figure dominates the compositions. The frame is filled densely with a complicated group. The figures themselves are ample and mature. The Madonna is no longer a girl, but a gracious woman of thirty years. The Christ Child is no longer an infant, but a well-grown lad, whose supple curves harmonize with those of grown folks. As to pose, the figures no longer are casually arranged or in some posture required by a specific action. They are cast in conventional poses which bring out the active beauty of the body. Heads swing across shoulders, the upper body turns against the thrust of the lower, the arms counter the action of the legs. Such counterpoise is always active, implying motion. Straight lines give way to weavings of S curves—so many springs whose tension is kept equal. Violent motion or torsion of the body is frequent, but one motion or torsion must be immediately taken up and balanced by some equivalent. Following the general principle of centrality, colors are fewer and more studied. In portraiture, for example, we no longer have landscape or elaborate interiors, but plain dark backgrounds. At all points we have left spontaneity and happy accident behind and have entered a world of exquisite calculation. Society had moved with art towards ideals of simplicity and decorum. You no longer find the braided, beribboned and jewelled coiffures of Botticelli’s women, but serene brows with the hair drawn back evenly from its part and disposed as a mass in a net. Young gallants wear their abundant locks much the same way and sport seignorial spade beards. Old men are even more magnificently provided with beards of monumental scale. Such men are clothed no longer in parti-colored raiment, but in richly sober black. The ideal is dignity, composure, and magnanimity. You may trace it through all its intricacies of casuistry in what is still one of the best pictures of what a gentleman and lady should be, the Cortegiano of Baldassare Castiglione. It was finished in 1516 while his friend Raphael was designing the tapestry cartoons. And you may read much of this high teaching in Count Castiglione’s own sensitive and comprehending face, Figure [167], as Raphael then painted it. It breathes that fine interplay of pride and humility which was the mainspring of the Renaissance, and it brings us back to the double origin of the Grand Style in the pride of Florence and the humility of Umbria.
Umbria in the narrow sense includes only the lovely stretches of the upper Tiber, and the rolling banks of Lakes Trasimene and Bolsena. But all the way over the mountains to the Adriatic the civilization was of a similar type, and so the art. Thus we may reckon the Adriatic Marches from Ancona to Ravenna as Umbrian from the point of view of the historian of painting. There were no great cities and little commerce. It is a region of small hill-top communes within the walls of which the peasants huddled for protection at night, going down to the fields in the day. It was a country of hot passions and violent feuds, and equally of religious enthusiasm and mystical piety. Great heresies had swept the land and so had the joyous and practical Christianity of St. Francis, greatest of Umbria’s sons. We have much of the volatility that we noted in Siena, without, however, a capital city to centralize it, and we also have what Siena lacked—an abiding and beautiful humility. Umbria knew her provincial estate and accepted its limitations.
Nowhere is this more plainly shown than in her art. For two centuries she was in the position of inducing foreign artists to come in, ever in an attitude of admiration and docility. Thus Giunta of Pisa, Cimabue and his Roman contemporaries; Giotto and his Florentine pupils; Simone Martini and other Sienese painters decorated the chief monument of Umbria, the Basilica of St. Francis at Assisi. Their work extended over a century to say 1330. Later still Sienese artists were employed at Perugia, among others, Taddeo Bartoli, and the region promised to become an artistic dependency of Siena. But with the dawning of the Renaissance and the extension of Florentine power beyond Arezzo, Florentine artists are preferred. We find Domenico Veneziano at Perugia, in 1438, in the pay of the ruling Baglioni. A little earlier Fra Angelico had painted for several years at Cortona. In the early fifties Benozzo Gozzoli painted his Franciscan frescoes at Montefalco, and was otherwise active in the Tiber valley. In 1468 Fra Filippo Lippi was called to Spoleto. Soon after, Umbria learned to depend on her own artists. In the Adriatic Marches there had been a limited penetration of Giotto’s style, chiefly by way of Padua and Rimini. By the end of the century the Lorenzettian manner dominated. It was succeeded by the influence of the Venetian Renaissance as exemplified by such rather backward artists as the Vivarini and Carlo Crivelli. Still later the diffused influence of Giovanni Bellini meets harmoniously that of Perugino.
Thus in humility and teachableness Umbria very slowly, and through most various stages of discipleship, worked out her own originality. And when it came one felt deeply in it the teaching of her spacious intervals and blue mountains.
It is so with the first notable painter that Umbria produced, Gentile da Fabriano.[[61]] He felt landscape as no artist before him. Born about 1360, he was trained by his fellow townsman, Alegretto Nuzi. Alegretto had made sound studies at Florence and had also observed with admiration the pictures of the Lorenzetti. His own altar-pieces have the Sienese splendor with a touch of sweetness that is wholly Umbrian. His pupil Gentile prefers more ornate and florid compositions such as we see in his early Coronation of the Virgin at Milan. Soon Gentile gave himself to the panoramic narrative style, outdoing the Lorenzetti in elaboration, vivacity, and gracefulness. Superficially he resembles such Florentine contemporaries as Lorenzo Monaco and Masolino, but his mood is broader and more genial, and his decorative accent more splendid. Before 1410 he was called to Venice to paint in the new Ducal Palace. His animated historical frescoes were soon destroyed by fire, but his sojourn was long enough to impress his manner, through his pupil Jacopo, Bellini, and numerous imitators, on the Venetian narrative school.
Fig. 168. Gentile da Fabriano. Adoration of the Magi.—Uffizi.
