Bronzino was another victim to his pious epoch, though he emancipated himself almost as largely as Moroni. His Madonna in the Brera is remarkable for the secular modernity of the Virgin’s companions. On her right is an ultra-realistic old woman; on her left Bernard Shaw looks down with his sarcastic, sceptical gaze.
Even the Netherlanders who had had the fortune to be born free would, after their wander-years in Italy, come back as Italians and paint in the grand manner. Hence the religious and historic Van Dycks which compare so poorly with the portraits, hence Rembrandt’s fat vrow as Madonna, hence the Lenten attempts of Rubens to bant.
AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE: WITH A GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN FALLACIES
Touching is that quaint theological tree in the cell of sainted Antoninus in San Marco, upon whose red oval leaves grow the biographies of the brethren. They lived, they prayed, they died—that is all. One little leaf suffices to tell the tale. This brother conversed with the greatest humility, and that excelled in silence. A third was found after his death covered with a rough hair shirt (aspro cilicio). In the holy shade of this goodly tree sits St. Dominic, separating—as though symbolically—the monks on his right from the nuns on his left.
Naïveté can no further go. And, indeed, if one were to regard the naïveté and forget the sweet simplicity, there is much in the mediæval world that one would relegate to the merely absurd. The masterpieces of Art have been sufficiently described. What a book remains to be written upon its grotesques!
The word is said to derive from the arabesques found in grottoes or excavated Roman tombs; those fantastic combinations of the vegetable and animal worlds by which the art of Islam avoided the representation of the real. But by the art of Christendom the grotesque was achieved with no such conscientious search after the unreal. Nor have I in mind its first fumblings, its crudities of the catacombs, its simplicities of the missal and the music-book, its Byzantine paintings with their wooden figures and gold embroidery. I am not even thinking of those early Masters whose defects of draughtsmanship were balanced by a delicious primitive poetry, which makes a Sienese Madonna preferable to a Raphael, and the early mosaics of St. Mark’s more desirable than the sixteenth-century work that has replaced them. The grotesque lies deeper than unscientific drawing; it mingles even with the work of the most scholarly Masters, and springs from the absence of a sense of history or a sense of humour. That the Gospel incidents should be depicted in Italian landscape and with Italian costumes was perhaps not unnatural, since, as I have already pointed out, every nation remakes the Christ in its own image—psychologically when not physically. Even the Old Testament was de-Orientalised by Raphael and his fellow-illustrators. Bonifacio Veronese, for example, put Italian hills and music-books into The Finding of Moses, and his Egypt is less Eastern than the Venice he lived in. But that the fancy-dress Bible should include also Doges and Cardinals and Magnificent Families, and that a Tintoretto in everyday clothes should look on at his own Miracle of St. Mark or a Moretto come to his own Supper at Emmaus, this it is that lifts the eyebrows of a modern. One can permit Dominican friars to witness The Incredulity of St. Thomas, or Franciscans to assist—as in Marco Basaiti’s picture—at The Agony in the Garden. These holy brethren are at least in the apostolic chain; and in the latter picture, which is becomingly devotional, the scene is suggested as a mystic vision to justify the presence of these anachronistic spectators. But how is it possible to tolerate proud Venetian senators at The Ascension of Christ, or to stomach the Medici at the building of the Tower of Babel? It is true sacred subjects had become a mere background for lay portraits, but what absence of perspective!
It would be an interesting excursion to trace the steps by which the objective conception of a picture—true to its own time and place—was reached, or the evolution by which singleness of subject was substituted for exuberance of episodes and ideas, till at last Art could flower in a lovely simplicity like that of Simone Martini’s Annunciation. You shall see St. Barbara throned at the centre of her anecdotal biography, or the Madonna della Misericordia sheltering virtues under her robe, while her history circles around her. Even when the picture itself is simple and single, the predella is often a congested commentary upon the text, if, indeed, it has any relevant relation to the text at all. What can be more charming than the little angels round the throne of the Madonna in Benaglio Francesco’s picture in Verona—angels with golden vases of red and white roses, angels playing spinets and harps and pipes and lutes and little drums and strange stringed instruments that have passed away! But what can be more grotesque than the predella of this delightful picture, the Entombment and the saints with the insignia of their martyrdom (hammer and tongs and fiery braziers), and the cock that crew, and the kiss of Judas!
In a picture by Lorenzo Monaco at Florence the Virgin and St. John raise Christ out of his tomb, and above are not only a cross and the instruments of martyrdom, but a bust and floating hands, while spice vessels figure below.
To a modern the mere treatment of God the Father suffices to create a category of the grotesque, even though His head has usually the venerable appearance of the aged Ruskin and He is kept a discreet kit-kat or a half-length. But Fra Bartolommeo in Lucca paints Him at full length with His toes on a little angel and a placard in His hand bearing the letters alpha and omega. And Lorenzo Veneziano parts His hair neatly in the middle.
Our catalogue of grotesques is swollen by the explanatory scrolls and inscriptions of the early pictures; by the crude religious allegories, in which devils gnash teeth when Virtue routs Temptation; by the political cartoons at Siena—of Good and Bad Government (though these are more primitive than comic); by the literal genealogic trees—like that of Jesse in St. Mark’s, or on the stone door-posts of the Baptistery of Parma; by the Tree of the Cross in Florence, which shoots out branches with round leaves containing scenes from the life of the central crucified figure, and supports a pyramid of saints and celestials; by the devices of symbolism for representing abstract ideas or identifying saints. All haloes are proleptic even from childhood, and a martyr and his passion can never be parted. Those poor martyrs, what they suffered at the hands of painters without a gleam of humour!