But even Giovanni Bellini, with his sense of restful perfection and unity of theme, cannot resist putting in microscopic accessories that only catch the eye from anear, as into his green-throned Madonna and Child in the Brera he introduces a horseman, two men talking by a tree, a shepherd, a flock of sheep, and, strangest of all, a shadowy ape crouching on a tomb which bears his signature: “Johannes Bellinus.” What is the significance of this shadowy ape? What mockery of the theme, or of humanity, or of himself, was here shadowed forth?
And that even more sinister ape in Tura’s Virgin supporting the Dead Christ—what does he here? The mother, seated on the tomb, holds the poor bleeding figure as though it were again her baby. They are alone, they and the thieves and the cross; other men are moving away, bearing a ladder. The picture is complete, a grim, solemn, soul-moving unity. Why then did Tura, that master of the conscious grotesque, throw in that grinning monkey on that strange fruit-tree? Was he, who lived to see the Borgian Pope become the Vicar of Christ, suggesting sardonically what quaint sequels of orgiastic splendour, what pride and lust of life, were to spring from this tragic sacrifice?
A less perturbing monkey looks on with other creatures at The Creation of Man in a Venetian picture now in Ravenna. A red-girt, blue-mantled Deity floats over a huge recumbent Adam, whose thigh he touches, while the monkey, eating an apple, appears to follow with interest the next phase in evolution, when fruit would be forbidden.
Apes appear again in Fogolino’s Adoration of the Magi in Vicenza; squatting below the castled rocky ways and mountain-bridges, over which winds the great procession with its beautifully caparisoned horses. These apes, like the ape on the elephant’s back in Raphael’s treatment of the same theme, might be merely designed to suggest the East, were it not for the disconcerting, mysterious, lobster-red, sprawling wings? What further note of discord do we catch here?
But it is in the unconscious grotesque that Italian art is richest. I have already shown some of the trap-doors that lead to it, but to enumerate them all is impossible. There are so many ways in which humour can be absent. Perhaps one might generalise as a source of the unconscious grotesque the convention dating from the Byzantine period which expresses souls as small swaddled dolls. See, for example, Paolo da Venezia’s Death of Mary, where, by a seeming inversion of rôles, Christ flies up to heaven with his mother-doll. Perhaps, too, all pictures connected with stigmata or vernicles are foredoomed to farce. There may be a noble way of expressing this material transference, but I have never seen one. St. Veronica receiving on a handkerchief a head with neatly parted hair is prosaic if not comic, while St. Francis receiving the stigmata is simply ludicrous.
In a picture in the Museum of Vicenza the kneeling saint is apparently flying a kite by red strings passing through holes in his hands and feet. The seeming kite is really a small winged nude figure, feathered at head and feet like a cock—the six-winged seraph of the Legenda Trium Sociorum that bears the crucified figure,—red strings passing through corresponding holes in his head and feet. The treatment of the same scene by Giotto (in the Louvre) gives this kite-like appearance to Jesus himself.
Even more absurdly geometrical is Gentile da Fabriano’s handling of the theme at Urbino, five strong red cords passing to the saint’s breast, hands, and feet from an eight-winged figure on a cross, naked to its waist. It is a relief to find these Euclidian lines absent from the representation in the church of Assisi itself, though it is only in seventeenth-century painters like Sisto Badalocchio in Parma or Rochetti in Faenza that the stigmata are transmitted from a celestial glory or down a broad ray of golden light. Macrino d’Alba at Turin shows the saint receiving the image of a praying Christ on a slate with a golden frame, and this image has the tonsured head of a monk!
And what can be quainter than the six-winged cherubs who hover round the Madonna in a picture of the Botticelli school at Parma? Two of their red wings are spread, the second pair crossed like legs, and the last pair crossed over the head, making a sort of pointed cap. The faces attached to these wings are mature, as of elderly, clean-shaven barristers. Another comical circle of these seraphs, a few with blue wings, tends to spoil a charming fifteenth-century Coronation of the Virgin in Florence.
Martyrdoms, too, are a rich mine of the grotesque, as witness the boiling of St. John in the National Gallery, with its accessories of the bellows and the blowpipe, and God lifting the saint bodily up to heaven.
In the exhilarating frescoes of Montagna in the church of the Eremitani at Padua, St. James’s hair, which is yellowish throughout, turns black, apparently, under the horror of an impending mallet, despite that his halo seems like a protective plate of yellow armour. A very gay and pleasing picture this.