A Christian ideal was thus the aim of the early masters; and most surviving works of the Umbrian and Sienese schools carry in themselves ample evidence of intensely serious sentiment animating their authors. But to those who have not enjoyed opportunities of observing this peculiar characteristic of a style of art almost unknown in England, it may be acceptable to trace the same spirit in a language legible by eyes unaccustomed to the delicacies of pictorial expression. This confirmation is found in the rules adopted by guilds of painters, incorporated in different towns of Italy, which are upon this point more important, as proving how entirely devotional feeling was systematised, instead of being left to the accident of individual inspiration. The statutes of the Sienese fraternity, confirmed in 1357, are thus prefaced: "Let the beginning, middle, and end of our words and actions be in the name of God Almighty, and of his Mother, our Lady the Virgin Mary! Whereas we, by the grace of God, being those who make manifest to rude and unlettered men the marvellous things effected by, and in virtue of, our holy faith; and our creed consisting chiefly in the worship and belief of one God in Trinity, and of God omnipotent, omniscient, and infinite in love and compassion; and as nothing, however unimportant, can have beginning or end without these three necessary ingredients, power, knowledge, and right good-will; and as in God only consists all high perfection; let us therefore anxiously invoke the aid of divine grace, in order that we may attain to a good beginning and ending of all our undertakings, whether of word or work, prefacing all in the name and to the honour of the Most Holy Trinity. And since spiritual things are, and should be, far preferable and more precious than temporal, let us commence by regulating the fête of our patron, the venerable and glorious St Luke," &c. Several subsequent rules relate to the observance of other festivals, whereof fifty-seven are enjoined to be strictly kept without working, a number which, added to Sundays and Easter holidays, monopolises for sacred purposes nearly a third of the year.[107] The Florentine statutes, dated about twenty years earlier, direct that all who come to enrol themselves in the Company of painters, whether men or women, shall be penitent and confessed, or at least shall purpose to confess themselves at the earliest opportunity; that they shall daily repeat five paternosters, and as many aves, and shall take the sacrament at least once a year.[108] Nor let these be regarded as mere unmeaning phrases, or as the vapid lip-service of a formalist faith. The ceremonial observances of an age in which the Roman Church was indeed Catholic cannot fairly be judged by a Protestant standard, yet few, who have seen with intelligence the productions of those painters, will doubt that they were men of piety and prayer. A vestige of the same holy feeling hung over artists, even after it had ceased to animate their efforts; the forms survived, when the spirit had fled. Thus, "On Tuesday morning, the 11th of June 1573, at eleven in the forenoon, Giorgio Vasari began to paint the cupola of the cathedral at Florence; and, before commencing, he had a Mass of the Holy Spirit celebrated at the altar of the sacrament, after hearing which he entered upon the work."[109] Vasari was a religious man; but the favourite painter of a dissolute court could scarcely be a religious artist, nor could the pupil of Michael Angelo appreciate the quiet pathos or feel the gentle fervour of earlier and more spiritualised times.
In Spain, where art was always in the especial service of the priesthood, and not unfrequently subservient to priestcraft, religion was a requisite of painters to a much later date. The rules of the academy established at Seville by Murillo, in 1658, imposed upon each pupil an ejaculatory testimony of his faith in, and devotion for, the blessed sacrament and immaculate conception.[110] But whilst the piety of the Sienese and Florentine guilds was an inherent sentiment of their age, willingly adopted by professional etiquette, that of the Iberian artists in the sixteenth century was regulated by the Inquisition, and savoured of its origin. The former was joyous as the bright thoughts of youthful enthusiasm springing in a land of beauty; the latter shadowed the grave and sombre temperament of the nation by austerities congenial to the Holy Office. Hence the religious paintings of Spain, appealing to the spectator's terrors rather than to his sympathies, revelled in the horrible, eschewing as a snare those lovely forms which in Italy were encouraged as conducive to devotion.
Yet, if the genius of early painters was hampered, and the effect of their creations impaired, by prescribed symbols and conventional rules, they were not without countervailing advantages. A limited range of forms did not always imply poverty of ideas, nor was simplicity inconsistent with sublimity. Those, accordingly, who look with intelligence upon pictures, which, to the casual glance of an uninformed spectator, are mere rude and monstrous representations, will often recognise in them a grandeur of sentiment, and a majesty of expression, altogether wanting in more matured productions, wherein truth to nature is manifested through unimportant accessories, or combined with trivial details. Familiarity is notoriously conducive to contempt; and to associate the grander themes and dogmas of holy writ with multiplied adjuncts skilfully borrowed from ordinary life, is to detract from the awe and mystery whereof they ought to be especially suggestive.
But here it may be well to premise that, our observations upon Christian art being purely æsthetical, it forms no part of our plan to analyse its influences in a doctrinal view, or to discuss the Roman system of teaching religion to the laity, by attracting them to devotional observances through pictures and sculpture, to the exclusion of the holy scriptures; still less to raise any controversy regarding the incidents or tenets thus usually inculcated. We, therefore, pause not to inquire how far the Roman legends—often beautifully suggestive of truth, but how frequently redolent of fatal error!—have originated in art, or been corrupted by its creations. One danger of teaching by pictures is obvious; for where the eye is offered but a few detached scenes, without full explanation of their attendant circumstances and connecting links, very imperfect impressions and false conclusions may result. Under such a system, figurative representation will often be literally interpreted, symbols will be mistaken for facts, dreams for realities; and thus have the fertile imaginations of artists and commentators mutually reacted upon each other, until historical and spiritual truth is lost in a maze of allegory and fable, and error has been indelibly ingrafted upon popular faith. The dim allegories of early art have accordingly been overlaid by crude inventions, or obscured by gross ignorance and enthusiastic mysticism. Religious truth being thus misstated, or its symbols misread, those who thirsted for the waters of life were repelled by tainted streams, and hungry souls were mocked by stones for bread. It ought, however, to be constantly borne in mind that we are dealing with times when the authority of Rome was absolute throughout Europe; and that, whatever may now be alleged against the dogmas or legends embodied by early artists, they were then universally received. For our purpose they ought, therefore, to be examined by the light then enjoyed, not by that shed upon them in after times of gospel freedom. Neither ought we to forget the impressionable qualities of a southern people, when disposed to question the tendencies of religious instruction through the senses and the imagination. And, granting that it is well to employ such means, the mute eloquence of an altar-picture, or a reliquary, though less startling than impassioned pulpit appeals, less thrilling than choral voices sustained by the organ's impressive diapason, had the advantages of being accessible at all hours to devout visitors, and of demanding from them no sustained attention.
Such was Christian art in Italy during the fourteenth century, when it was destined to undergo very considerable modifications. As yet it had been exercised almost exclusively for decorating churches and monastic buildings with extensive works intended to nourish or revive devotion in the masses who resorted to them. In ages when the intelligence capable of ordering these works was almost limited to convents, and when it was only from such representations that the unlettered eye could convey impressions to the mind of the laity, Christian paintings were an effective adjunct to Christian preaching and devotional exercises. But, as the dark cloud began to roll away before the dawn of modern cultivation, mankind awoke to new wants. No longer content with the pittance of religious knowledge which their spiritual guides doled out to them, they sought to secure a store for their own uncontrolled use. Those who could vanquish the difficulties of reading, found in their office-books a continuation of the church services; the less educated placed by their bed, or in their domestic chapel, a small devotional picture, as a substitute for the larger representations which invoked them to holy feelings in the house of God. Thus there arose a general desire for objects of sacred art. The privilege assumed by all who wished for such, of ordering them in conformity with their individual feelings or superstitions, quickly introduced greater latitudinarianism as to the selection and treatment of the subjects. The demand so created exceeded the productive powers of such painters as had been regularly initiated into the language of form, according to the settled conventionalities of their sanctified profession. The chain of pictorial tradition was snapped, when a host of new competitors entered the field, free from its trammels. But the public taste had been too long and thoroughly imbued with a uniform class of religious compositions to relish any great innovations; and although historical painting began to find a place in the palace-halls of the princes and republics of Italy, works commissioned by private persons continued almost exclusively of a sacred cast. Thus for a time was the new path little frequented. Artists felt their way with caution, unaware of the direction whither it might lead them; timid of their own powers, doubtful of their influence on the public. They contented themselves at first with enlarging the range of subjects, or with varying the pose of the actors. Fearing to abandon traditional types, they ventured not beyond the addition of accessories, such as architecture, landscape, animals, fruits, and flowers, or a disposal of the draperies with greater freedom and attention to truth. But, the further they departed from received forms, the more willingly did their genius pluck by the way those graceful aids and appliances which spontaneous nature offered in a land of beauty; and every new combination which that awakened genius inspired, induced, and to a certain extent authorised, fresh novelties.
The modifications thus introduced have been distinguished in modern phrase by the term naturalism, in contradistinction to those traditional forms and spiritualised countenances which constitute the mysticism of mediæval art. It would lead us too far from our subject to trace the progress of naturalism from such early symptoms as we have indicated, until portraits, at first interponed as donors of the picture, or as spectators of its incident, were habitually selected as models for the most sacred personages. That the adaptation of nature to the highest purposes of art, by skilful selection and by judicious idealisation, is the noblest object which pictorial genius can keep in view for its inventions will scarcely be contested. But another consideration, inherent in the axioms of the mystic school, was too often lost sight of by the naturalists. The portraiture of criminal or even vulgar life, in deeply religious works, is an outrage upon all holy feeling, whether in the example of Alexander VI., who commanded Pinturicchio to introduce into one of the Vatican frescoes his own portrait, kneeling before the ascending Redeemer;[111] or in the case of those painters in Rome whose favourite model for the Saviour has of late years been a cobbler, hence known in the streets by the blasphemous name of Jesus Christ.
To the naturalism which became gradually prevalent in most Italian schools after the beginning of the fourteenth century, there was, in the fifteenth, added another principle of antagonism to mystic feeling. In purist nomenclature it has been denominated paganism, but it seems to consist of paganism and classicism. By the former is to be understood that fashion for the philosophy, morality, literature, and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, which, introduced from the recovered authors of antiquity, was assiduously cultivated by the Medici in their lettered but sceptical court, until it left a stamp on the literature and art of Italy not yet effaced. Under its influence, the vernacular language was neglected, or cramped into obsolete models; dead tongues monopolised students; the doctrines of Aristotle and Plato divided men, clouding their faith, and warping their morals from Christian standards; the beauty of holiness yielded before an ideal of form; and that unction which had purified the conceptions and guided the pencils of devotional painters, evaporated as they strove to master the technical excellences of the new manner. To the maxims and principles of revived pagan antiquity, the philosophic Schlegel has traced the selfish policy and morals of Italian tyrants and communities; but it seems easier to detect their fatal tendency in painting and sculpture than upon statecraft and manners.
Classicism, as here used, means that innovation of antique taste in art which arose out of renewed interest in the picturesque ruins of Rome, in her mighty recollections, in the excavation of her precious sculptures, and which imparted to pictorial representations sometimes a hard and plastic treatment, sometimes ornamental architecture, bas-reliefs, or grotesques. By paganism a blighting poison was infused through the spirit of art, while classicism has often ennobled the work and enriched its details, without injury to its sentiment. To schools such as those of Florence and Padua, wherein nature or classic imitation prevailed, there belonged the materialism of facts, the severity of definite forms.[*112] These qualities obtained favour from men of mundane pursuits and literary tastes; from citizens greedy after gainful commerce and devoted to political intrigue; or from princes who patronised, and pedants who deciphered, long forgotten, but at length reviving lore. The "new manner," as it was called, had, in Michael Angelo, a supporter whose mighty genius lent to its solecisms an irresistible charm. Yet against such innovations protests were long occasionally recorded. An anonymous writer, in 1549, mentions a Pietà, said to have been designed by "Michael Angelo Buonarroti, that inventor of filthy trash, who adheres to art without devotion. Indeed, all the modern painters and sculptors, following the like Lutheran [that is, impious] caprices now-a-days, neither paint nor model for consecrated churches anything but figures that distract one's faith and devotion; but I hope that God will one day send his saints to cast down such idolatries."[113] In a land where mythology had slowly been supplanted by revelation, especially in a city successively the capital of paganism and Christianity, these influences were necessarily in frequent antagonism, or in forced and unseemly juxtaposition. Whilst art thus lost in sentiment, it gained in vigour; and although classic taste and the study of antique sculpture unquestionably tarnished its mystical purity, may they not have preserved it from the fate of religious painting in Spain, which, debarred by the Inquisition from access to nude models, and elevated by no refined standard, oscillated between the extremes of gloomy asceticism and grovelling vulgarity? The paganism of the Medici and Michael Angelo scared away the seraphic visions of monastic limners, but it also rescued Italy from religious prudery, and saved men from addressing their orisons to squalid beggars.[*114]
The brief sketch which we have thus introduced of the progress and tendency of Christian art, may be fittingly concluded by the definition of it supplied by Baron v. Rumohr, one of the laborious, learned, and felicitous expositors of mediæval art whom the reviving taste of later times produced. "It is consecrated to religion alone; its object is sometimes to induce the mind to the contemplation of sacred subjects, sometimes to regulate the passions, by awakening those sentiments of peace and benevolence which are peculiar to practical Christianity." To narrate its extinction in the sixteenth century, speedily followed by the decline of all that was noblest in artistic genius, is a task on which we are not now called to enter. We approached the subject because, in the mountains of Umbria, that mystic school long maintained its chief seat; because there its types sank deepest into the popular mind; and because it reached its culminating point of perfection and glory in Raffaele of Urbino.