’Twas not till I had found out for myself that the overwhelming preponderance in Art of the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, the Entombment, and the Pietà were due in no small measure to the opportunities they afforded of painting the nude figure, that I discovered why St. Sebastian was the most popular of all the saints, exploited in every other sacred picture, and—naked and unashamed—the almost inseparable attendant of the Madonna when she sits in saintly society. The superiority of his martyrdom at the hands of a troop of archers to other paintable forms of death leaps to the eye, for the arrows must be seen quivering in the target of his naked figure, though I have seen this pictorially precious nudity marred by such a plethora of arrows—as in the Opera del Duomo at Florence—that the saint is become a porcupine. The grim humour of the situation lies in the fact that St. Sebastian recovered from his arrows to be subsequently clubbed to death, but this deutero-martyrdom is hushed up by the Italian painters. To add to St. Sebastian’s sufferings at their hands, he has been made a plague-saint and his invaluable nudity haled into plague-pictures and plague-churches, as by Bartolommeo Montagna, who turned his arrows into the metaphoric shafts of the Pest. Not that I can blame the Italian painters. If I had ever been inclined to underrate the artistic significance of the nude, I should have been converted by the full-dressed angelets of Borgognone’s Gesù Moriente in the Pavian Certosa. These delicious little creatures were once without a fig-leaf, but at the Father Superior’s protest they were clad in belted tunics and skirts, thus becoming squat little figures whose wings burst comically through their clothes. What might have been a masterpiece is thus a grotesque.
But if St. Sebastian must go sempiternally branded with arrows, like a British convict, it is St. Lawrence who has the clumsiest symbol to drag about. He and his gridiron are as inseparable as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Often it stands on end and seems the iron framework of a bed. Like his halo, it is with him long before his martyrdom, as it accompanies him to heaven. Only once in all Florence do I remember seeing it in its proper place—under the grilling saint—and then he is turning his other side to the flame in true culinary Christianity (“Jam versa: assatus est”). The artist has spared us nothing except the towels with which the angels wiped his face, and these may be seen at Rome in S. Giovanni in Laterano. St. Stephen is also heavily burdened with the stones that still keep falling on his head. In Bernardo Daddi’s frescoes in S. Croce they stick to him like burrs. St. John, transformed to an angel, contemplates his own (haloed) head on a platter, as if thinking two heads are better than one. Lucy keeps her eyes in a dish. St. Bartholomew holds his skin. St. Nicholas—the patron of commerce and the pawnbroker—is known by his three golden balls. Even families had their symbols, and the Colonnas, the complacent Colonnas, had themselves painted as soaring heavenwards at the last trump, each with a small column rising from his shoulder—literal pillars of Church and State.
These symbols, and many others less grotesque, disappear either with the gradual obscuration of the legends or the development of purer artistic ideas. There is another kind of symbolism, which may be called the shorthand of primitive art, and which may be studied in the archaic mosaics of St. Mark’s. Egypt dwindles to a gate (as though it and not Turkey were the Porte). Alexandria is expressed by its Pharos. Trees stand for the Mount of Olives. There is much of the rebus in these primitive representations. The Byzantine symbolism of St. Mark’s reaches its most curious climax in the representation of the four rivers that watered the Biblical Garden of Eden by classical river gods. The palm branch as the shorthand for martyrdom is a more congruous convention. In the mosaics of S. Vitale in Ravenna, Jerusalem and Bethlehem are expressed by towers, in Sant’ Appolinare Nuovo a few Roman buildings stand for Classe. In a Venetian painting ascribed to Carpaccio, Bethlehem is spelt by palm-trees and a queer beast tied to one of them, probably meant for a camel.
A more pretentious form of symbolism lies in the allegory proper, but even when the painting avoids the grotesque, the meaning is often hopelessly obscure. Such popular pictures as Botticelli’s Spring, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, and Paris Bordone’s Lovers are still unsolved puzzles, and perhaps only the more satisfactory for that. But allegories that are enigmatic without being beautiful are merely bores. Such are the two pictures of the school of Lazzaro Sebastiani in Venice, in which a company of figures holding scrolls is perched in the boughs of a tree, looking at a distance like a full orchestra. Both of these pictures come from monasteries, and are therefore to be presumed sacred. And in one of them Adam and Eve are unmistakable under the tree, with mice and lizards gambolling around them, so that the tree must be the Tree of Life or of Knowledge; but who is the youth who stands beneath the other tree in a strange city of spires and towers and plays on a golden ’cello, while a maiden offers him an apple? Such intellectually faded pictures illustrate clearly the limitations of painting as a medium for intellectual propositions. But the most lucid of allegories or symbolisms has its own peculiar pitfalls. Luca Mombella introduces into a Coronation of the Virgin a figure of “Humilitas” who is magnificently attired and wears pearls in her hair, while Montagna’s Nestor Victorious over the Vices (in the Louvre) proves that most of the Vices are at least devoted mothers, for they burden their flight by snatching up their satyr-like brood.
But these confused or unintelligible allegories are far preferable to symbolisms which are perfectly decipherable yet perfectly repellent, like Giovanni da Modena’s fresco in S. Petronio which shows us Christ on his cross agonising between two female figures, one bestriding a full-maned lion (the Catholic Church) and the other riding blindfold on a goat (Heresy). The lion has four different feet—a pedal man (St. Matthew), a pedal ox (St. Luke), an eagle’s claw (St. John), and a real foot (St. Mark). The blood from the side of Christ flows into the chalice held by the Church, and in the middle of the stream is formed the wafer. The four ends of the cross turn into hands: the upper hand opens with a key the gate of Paradise—strangely like a church; the lower hand opens Hell with a winch; the right hand blesses the Catholic Church, the left stabs Heresy. Garofalo has a vast but still poorer fresco of this sort in Ferrara, brought from a refectory. Each arm of the cross branches into two hands engaged in much the same occupations as in the Bolognese fresco save that one hand crowns Wisdom. The foot of the cross also turns into hands, the right holding a cross towards Limbo, the function of the left fortunately faded. It is refreshing to turn from such geometrical symbolisms to the meaningless flower-patterns of F. dei Libri, in which Crucifixions, cherubs reading, satyrs blowing brass instruments, and putti playing citharas or puffing at bagpipes are interwoven with wriggling snakes, contemporary poets and ecclesiasts, and shaven monks performing service.
This, of course, is the conscious grotesque, like the borders which Girolamo dei Libri put round a serious picture of the Magi—vignettes of other scenes, hands of donors, floral patterns and scutcheons with strange ramping beasts.
To the deliberate grotesque belong, of course, the stone beasts that crouch before the old cathedrals, the griffin of Perugia, and the heraldic beasts of Tura. I should have added Raphael’s dragons to the same category were it not that though deliberately drawn and though delightfully grotesque, they are mere representation of an object that happens to be grotesque in itself, and this is no more the artistic grotesque than the portrait of a beautiful woman is necessarily the artistic beautiful. There is a deal of movement, spirit, and invention in these great worms of Raphael, and every individual St. George, St. Michael, or St. Margaret is handsomely provided with an original and unique dragon, each with an elegant precision of fearsome form. But Raphael drew with equal hand and the same loving seriousness a monster or a Madonna.
Equally conscientious is the Medusa’s head once ascribed to Da Vinci, with its carefully combed snaky locks and its frogs and bats and toads. Carpaccio’s dragon has far more fun in him, for all his grisly litter of skulls and skeletons.
And I like Vasari’s dragon in his St. George in Arezzo, with its spitting double tongue and its half-eaten man, and the gorgeous dragon on a piece of majolica in Urbino, into whose mouth St. George is driving his spear, and the fierce-clawed, winged dragon of the spirited Tintoretto in the National Gallery, and above all the dragon of Piero di Cosimo’s Andromeda in Florence, with that delightful curling tail and that broad back on which Perseus can stand securely while delivering his stroke.
But the deliberate grotesque without fun—this, I confess, is a note in Italian art which I find disquieting. For into this polished and palatial world there intrudes at times a touch of something sinister, cynical and mocking, as though the artist, constricted by pompous conventions, sought relief by sticking out his tongue. Leonardo—whatever Mona Lisa’s smile may mean—kept his grotesquerie for his caricatures. But other of the Masters were less discriminating. This something of enigmatic and perturbing—perhaps it is only the acute Renaissance consciousness of the skeleton at the feast—I find most of all in Crivelli—Venetian soldier, as he once signed himself—whose rich lacquer work has had more attention than this diablerie of his. Nobody else touches the grotesque so consciously, dares to give us such quaint, ill-drawn angels as those in his Madonna and Child in Verona, with that bird-pecked giardinetto of fruits over the Virgin’s head, and Christ in a gold frock as in some Byzantine mosaic. The microscopic Crucifixion is perhaps no more incongruous with the subject of this picture than its landscapes seen through arches, its chivalry and pomp of horses. But one cannot help feeling that Crivelli had a grim joy in perching that vulture on the large gaunt tree. And in his Brera Madonna, in which St. Peter holds two heavy real keys, gilded and silvered, he gives the celestial doorkeeper a crafty ecclesiastical look, while his St. Dominic looks sawny. Even his baby Christ is cruelly squeezing a little bird. There is a leer in the whole picture. The accident of juxtaposition has accentuated the wilfulness of Crivelli’s grimace, for in the Brera there are two Madonnas, side by side, yet at the extreme poles of his genius. In the Madonna della Candeletta we have beauty unalloyed. The tiny candle standing at the foot of the Madonna’s throne strikes, indeed, a note of bizarrerie, but it is beautiful bizarrerie, and the Madonna, marvellously robed and embowered in fruit and leaves, who is offering a great pear to a charming Child, is less the Mother of God than a crowned queen of faery with an infant prince in a golden robe and a golden halo, and less a queen with a prince than a wonderful decorative pattern, a study in gold and marble and precious stones and brocaded gowns, broidered, rich-dyed, and fantastic with arabesques. And beside this poem hangs the other Crivelli, a gaunt crucifix with ugly, contorted figures of the Madonna and St. John. And it is sardonic humour, not naïveté, that has turned his St. Sebastian (in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli) into a porcupine.