The century of Columbus

by James J. Walsh

"In fact," as Hope Rea says in his "Tuscan and Venetian Artists," [Footnote 10] "the total amount of work produced by him in the middle twenty years of his life shows him to have been one of those strenuous laborers in art, the like of whom have hardly been seen before or since the years of the Renaissance." Luca never married, but he gave every opportunity to his nephew, Andrea della Robbia, who was an apt pupil, but who confined himself practically entirely to the new style invented by his uncle. In spite of what might be expected, the young man, with the advantage of his uncle's training and the possession of his uncle's secrets, did not do better work, though the amount of it that he turned out made the della Robbia terra-cotta an important part of Florentine art. In his hands, and those of his son Giovanni, what had been as pure an art as any form of sculpture came to be merely a decorative craft. Andrea's many beautiful pieces, however, and especially the well-known "Bambine," the swaddled infant medallions of the Hospital of the Innocents, have been very popular at all times and have entered into renewed popularity in our day. The great series of incidents of St. Francis' life, executed by Andrea for the Franciscan monastery of La Verna, represents the climax of his art work. He was thoroughly sympathetic with the early Franciscan traditions and he expressed the details of them beautifully.

[Footnote 10: "The Tuscan and Venetian Artists: Their Thought and Work," by Hope Rea. London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1904.]

DONATELLO. GATAMELATA

One of the greatest of the sculptors of the Renaissance, who must indeed be reckoned among the greatest artists of all times, is Leonardo da Vinci's teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio. He was one of the wonderful Florentine artists whose genius was recognized by Lorenzo the Magnificent and was given the opportunity to express his artistic conceptions worthily by this liberal patron of the arts and literature. Three of his great [{91}] works, the tomb of Piero and Giovanni de Medici in the Church of San Lorenzo; his "David," which is in the National Museum, the Bargello in Florence and the "Child Holding a Dolphin," now in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, were all three executed for Lorenzo. These are all in bronze, but with the versatility of the men of his time, Verrocchio could express himself in other media just as charmingly. Michel has said of the terra-cotta "Madonna" made for the Hospital of Santa Maria Novella that in it "supreme distinction of thought is combined with the most scrupulous observation of nature." The famous marble bust of a "Flower Girl" is in the Bargello. A silver basso-rilievo, the "Beheading of John the Baptist," is now in the Cathedral Museum at Florence.

His two masterpieces are "The Incredulity of St. Thomas" and the statue of Colleoni, the celebrated condottiere who had commanded the Venetian troops. Both of these are in bronze. Little as the deep feeling of the scene between Christ and the doubting Thomas might seem apt to lend itself to expression in sculpture, Verrocchio has succeeded in making an extremely beautiful and touching work of art. The Divine Humanity, urging Thomas the doubter to put his hand into His pierced side, is a wonderful realization of one of the most pathetic of incidents. The triumph of Verrocchio's genius, however, is the "Colleoni." It is probably the greatest equestrian statue ever made. His contemporaries declared that Leonardo da Vinci's figure of the Duke of Milan on horseback surpassed it. Sometimes doubt is expressed as to whether Donatello's "Gatamelata" does not rival it. That question must be left for great artists and sculptors to decide, and in the meantime there is no doubt at all that Verrocchio was one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived. Burckhardt declared that "we have a right to call this equestrian statue the finest in the world."

Unfortunately Verrocchio was seized with a chill while casting it and died at the early age of forty-three, or we might have had some still more wonderful work from him. He is a typical many-sided genius of the Renaissance, though in sculpture particularly only two, perhaps three, of his greatest contemporaries ever equalled him; it is even doubtful if they [{92}] have excelled his "Colleoni," yet everything that he ever did was an advance on his previous accomplishment. His disciple, Leopardi, who finished the casting of the "Colleoni," is another great sculptor of the time who, in any other period, would be looked upon as a supreme artist. He has shone with reflected glory, besides, for his part in the "Colleoni," though it is very doubtful whether any but very small credit is due to him for the completion of this work which Verrocchio had left in such a state that but little was required to make it what it had been ever since, one of the world's greatest monuments of sculpture.

A great sculptor of the Renaissance, whose career presents many other features of interest, however, which have made him famous, is Benvenuto Cellini. He was born in 1500 and, like many of the artists and most of the sculptors of the time, began his life work as an apprentice to a goldsmith. After a troubled early manhood in Rome and other Italian cities, during which he executed some medals that are among the best of their kind ever made, and various ornamental pieces in the precious metals, he was for a time at the court of Francis I. Afterwards he worked in Florence, lending his genius to the fortification of the city during the war with Siena. While his career is entirely exceptional among the great artists of the time it is often taken for a type of the restless, rather unmoral than immoral, character that was supposed to be produced by the paganizing influence of the New Learning. The true types of Columbus' Century among the artists, however, are such men as Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo, deeply intent on their work, anxious only for the opportunity to accomplish high artistic purpose and without any of that restless unmorality that is at least supposed to have characterized Cellini. It would be much nearer the truth to point to the lives of such men as Fra Angelico or Fra Bartolommeo, happy in their monastery homes, or Correggio, who spent his time so peacefully with the religious of the little town in which he lived, than to appeal to Benvenuto's chequered stormy career as typical of the Renaissance.

Cellini's autobiography, as great a work of imaginative art, very probably, as any that he ever executed in plastic materials, has attracted as much attention in literature as his great [{93}] sculptures have in art. His name, then, has become familiar to many who know nothing about the intimate personal careers of the great artists of the time and who will in all good faith continue to draw their conclusions as to the character of the men of the Renaissance from Cellini's rather boastful proclamation of his successful vices, though this exactly represents the exception which proves the rule to be the opposite. In spite of his forbidding picture of himself he had moments of intense religious feeling and highest inspiration. Anyone who has seen his famous "Christ" in marble in the Escurial will not be likely to think that he was entirely lacking in deep religious feeling. His famous bronze group of "Perseus holding the Head of Medusa," to which deservedly the Florentines have given a distinguished place in front of the old ducal palace at Florence, is one of the masterpieces of modern sculpture. W. M. Rossetti spoke of it in his article in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" as "a work full of the fire of genius and the grandeur of a terrible beauty. One of the most typical and unforgettable monuments of the Italian Renaissance." His story of the casting of this great monument shows the difficulties under which the sculptors of the time labored, and yet how triumphantly they overcame technical obstacles and made great works of art.

While so great as a sculptor in monumental work, Cellini never thought art objects of small size beneath his attention, and like Raphael, willing to make the cartoons for the tapestries of the Sistine Chapel and composing great pictorial scenes as their subjects, so Cellini, with a true Renaissance artistic spirit, modelled beautifully any and every form of work in metal. He modelled flagons, bells and even rings and jewels, designed coins and medals for the Papal mint and for the Medici at Florence. It has been said that everything minted under his direction attained the highest excellence. His work in alto-rilievo was as fine as that in basso-rilievo. All over Europe there are well-authenticated specimens of smaller pieces from his hands, a bell in the Rothschild collection, a gold salt-cellar in Vienna, a shield elaborately wrought in Windsor Castle and even beautifully chased armor, such as he made for Charles IX of Sweden, which may be seen at Stockholm.