SCHOOL OF SIENA.
In the enumeration of Tuscan art, some lovers of subdivision have fancied, with more refinement than solidity, to discover in the style of Sienese artists a characteristic sufficiently distinct from the Florentine, to erect Siena into a school. This characteristic, we are told, is a peculiar gaiety in the selection of colour, and an air of physiognomic vivacity and serenity of face; both, it seems, the inheritance of the Sienese race. They have, accordingly, divided this school into three epochs: the first is that of the ancients (gli antichi); and its first palpable patriarch, Guido, or Guidone, commonly called Guido da Siena, and noticed already in the beginning of our chapter on the Florentine school. He flourished before the birth of Cimabue, in the first half of the thirteenth century, and is followed by the names of Ugolino da Siena and Duccio surnamed di Boninsegna, the precursors of Simone Memmi, the contemporary of Giotto, who painted Laura and survives in the sonnets of her lover. Lippo Memmi and Cecco da Martino, his relatives, float in the obscurity which prevailed till the appearance of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti. Of the first there still exists an extensive work in the public palace, or rather a didactic poem, which in suitable allegories and in varied views, exhibits the vices of a bad government, and personifies the qualities necessary to form the rulers of a virtuous republic—a work which, with less monotony of features, and more judgment in the division of the subjects, would, in the opinion of Lanzi, find little to envy in the best-treated histories of Pisa's Campo Santo. In partnership with his brother Pietro, he painted, in the Hospital of Siena, the Presentation and the Espousal of the Madonna—pictures destroyed in 1720. This is that Pietro who, in the Campo Santo of Pisa, painted the Hermits of the Desert, and the Terrors of Solitude invaded by an Infernal Apparition, with a novelty of conception and a richness of fancy, that render his work the most interesting of the whole series. That, notwithstanding the plague, which had wasted the population of Siena at that period, the art continued to flourish, is proved by the numbers who formed themselves into a civil body under the immediate patronage of the Republic itself. In some families it became an heirloom: such were the Vanni and the Bartoli. Andrea di Vanni, or more properly, di Giovanni, not only figured as an artist in his native city, but was delegated by the Republic to the Pope at Avignon, and appears in the records as "Capitano del Popolo;" and among the letters of Santa Caterina da Siena, there are three addressed to him.[84] Vasari has mentioned Taddeo di Bartolo, (1351—1410.) whose works still exist in the public palace and the adjoining hall. They pretend to represent a number of celebrated republicans, and chiefly Greeks and Romans, but their physiognomies are all ideal, and their dresses the costume of Siena. Something was added to the monotony of these family styles under the Pontificate of Pio II. or Enea Silvio, (1503,) by Matteo di Giovanni, in disposition, variety, expression, drapery; he has accordingly been complimented by some as the Masaccio of Siena, but remained unknown to Vasari. The art gained still more under the auspices of a second Piccolomini, Pio III. (1503.) He employed Pinturicchio, Raffaello, and other strangers, to perpetuate the achievements of his predecessor Enea; and they, Raffaello excepted, continued with Signorelli and Genga to exercise their talents in decorating the Palace of Pandolfo Petrucci, who had usurped supreme power in the Republic.
The second period of Sienese art opens with the sixteenth century, and the works of Giacomo Pacchiarotto, or Pacchiarotti. They resemble the produce of Perugino's school, though distinguished by more vigour of composition. But what entitles this epoch to the claim of establishing the peculiar style of this school, must be looked for in the works of Giannantonio Razzi, Domenico Beccafumi, and Baldassare Peruzzi.
Giannantonio Razzi,[85] commonly called "Il Soddoma," is said by some to have been a native of Vergille, in the territory of Siena; by others, of Vercelli, in Piedmont. Long residence, however, supplied the want of birthright: Siena claims him for her own; and if a charming whole, suavity of tint combined with force of chiaroscuro, be the principal characteristic of that school, no native has expressed it with equal evidence and felicity. This gaiety of tone and manner some have traced to the jovial turn of the man himself; as careless as gay, ever in pursuit of youth and beauty, though with an indiscretion that brands him with the stain tacked to his name, from a character so volatile and dissipated, that inequality of execution might be expected which marks his happiest effusions. Thus, in the Church of S. Domenico, where he represented Sta. Caterina of Siena, on receiving the stigmata, fainting in the arms of two sister nuns, we forgive to the energy of conception, the pathos of expression, and the sympathy of tone that press the principal group on our hearts, that neglect which left the figure of the Saviour below mediocrity, and own, with Baldassare Peruzzi, that we never saw mental dereliction and fainting beauty expressed with deeper sentiment and truth; a verdict which receives full sanction from him who relates it, Vasari, less the biographer than the merciless censor of the obnoxious Razzi, for whose moral turpitude and technic slovenliness his sanctimonious asperity found no other excuse than that of madness, which swayed him to neglect or misapply the powers of genius. Thus, in speaking of the fresco at Monte Oliveto, in which Soddoma had chosen to represent a bevy of harlots let loose with song and dance on St. Benedetto and his flock, to try their sanctity, he reprobates the licentiousness that had larded the subject with additional obscenity, whilst he concludes by owning that it is one of the best pictures in the Convent. How are we to reconcile the neglect which, disdaining to consult Nature, or to regulate a picture by cartoon or design, relied for the whole on practice and on chance, with the praise bestowed on Razzi's composition, the faces that speak, the breasts that palpitate, the torsos compared by some to the antique, by others to Michael Angelo, but by that indifference which often distinguishes the man of genius from the man of talent, him who possesses by Nature from him who acquires by art? Capacity and attachment unite not always; and to Soddoma, vain, whimsical, volatile, art appears to have been no more than the readiest means of procuring amusement or pleasure. "My art dances to the sound of your purse," said he to the Abbot of Monte Oliveto.
Agostino Chigi, pleased with the art, and still more the whimsies of Soddoma, if we believe Vasari, carried him to Rome, and introduced him to Giulio II. to co-operate with Pietro Perugino, &c. in the Vatican; but his labours being superseded by the novel powers of Raffaelle, Agostino, whose attachments were not regulated by the Pontiff's whims, employed him in the decorations of his own palace, now the Farnesina; where, in a principal apartment leading to the great saloon reserved for Raffaelle, he painted the Nuptials of Alexander and Roxana in a style no doubt inferior to the Loves of Amor and Psyche, but not of an inferiority sufficient to account for the enormous disparity of fame that separates both.
Domenico Mecherino,[86] the son of a Sienese peasant, better known by the adopted name of Beccafumi, inferior to Razzi in elegance of line and suavity of colour, excelled him in energy of conception and style. Vasari, who invests Beccafumi with every excellence and virtue, of which the defect or opposite vice disgraced Razzi, still owns that he did not reach the physiognomic suavity that marks the faces of Soddoma; and after leading him from the scanty elements of Pietro Perugino to Rome, the Antique, the Chapel of M. Angelo, and the works of Raffaelle, by a kind of anticlimax brings him back to Siena to complete his studies by adopting the principles of Giannantonio. A modern writer,[87] on the contrary, has discovered that the talents of Domenico, overpowered by the genius of M. Angelo, turned their current awry, and failed to produce the legitimate efforts which might have been expected from a steady adherence to the principles of Raffaelle—opinions less founded on the character of the artist and the spirit of his works than on the partiality and prejudice of the critics. Beccafumi was not of the first class, less made to lead than to follow with an air of originality; to amalgamate principles not absolutely discordant—thus, in single figures, he sometimes more than imitates, he equals M. Angelo, as in those noticed by Bottari;—and again, in larger compositions, such as those on the pavement of the Cathedral, works by which he is chiefly known, we see him on the traces of Raffaelle, and emulating the variety and graces of Polydoro: these graces frequently vanished, and correctness as often ceased with the increased size of his figures: the foreshortenings, in which he delighted, savour more of the "sotto in su," introduced by Correggio to Upper Italy, than of the principles of M. Angelo; they are generally attended by a magic chiaroscuro, like that of the figure of Justice, on which Vasari expatiates, on the ceiling of the public hall at Siena, which, from profound darkness gradually rising into light, seems to vanish in celestial splendour. He is said by Vasari to have preferred fresco and distemper to oil paint, as a purer, simpler, and of course more durable medium; and though the predominant red of his flesh-tints has more freshness than glow, such is the solidity of his impasto and the purity of his method, that his panels present us to this day less with the injuries than the improvements of time.
The style of Mecherino did not survive him: for Giorgio da Siena, his pupil, confined himself to grotesque work, in imitation of Giovanni da Udine; Giannella, or Giovanni of Siena, turned to architecture: of Marco Pino, commonly called Marco da Siena, his reputed pupil, the style, decidedly built on the principles of M. Angelo, renders all notion of his having received more than the first rudiments from Beccafumi or any other master, nugatory: but the conjecture of Lanzi, that Domenico was the master of Danielle Ricciarelli, known to have begun his studies at Siena, though unsupported by tradition, acquires an air of probability less from the supposed mutual attachments to M. Angelo, than the versatility of their talents and similarity of pursuits.