In the foregoing chapters I have not sought to write again the history of art, so much as to keep in view the relation between Italian art and the leading intellectual impulses of the Renaissance. In the masters of the sixteenth century—Lionardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and the Venetians—the force inherent in the Italian genius for painting reached full development. What remained was but an after-bloom rapidly tending to decadence. To surpass those men in their own line seemed impossible. What they had achieved was so transcendent that imitation satisfied their successors; and if they refused imitation, originality had to be sought by deviating into extravagances. Meanwhile no new stock of thoughts had been acquired; and students of history are now well aware that for really great art ideas common to the nation are essential. The motives suggested by mediæval Christianity, after passing through successive stages of treatment in the quattrocento, had received the grand and humane handling of the golden age. The motives of revived paganism in like manner were exhausted, and at this time the feeling for antiquity had lost its primal freshness. It might seem superfluous to carry this inquiry further, when we have thus confessedly attained the culminating point of painting. Yet the sketch attempted in this volume would be incomplete and liable to misinterpretation, if no account were taken of the legacy bequeathed to the next generation by the great masters.
Lionardo da Vinci formed, as we have seen, a school at Milan. It was the special good fortune of his pupils that what he actually accomplished, bore no proportion to the suggestiveness of his teaching and the fertility of his invention. Of finished work he left but little to the world; while his sketches and designs, the teeming thoughts of his creative brain, were an inestimable heritage. The whole of this rich legacy of masterpieces, projected, but not executed, was characterised by a feeling for beauty which has fallen to no other painter. When we examine the sketches in the Royal Collection at Windsor, we perceive that the exceeding sense of loveliness possessed by Lionardo could not have failed to animate his pupils with a high spirit of art. At the same time the extraordinary variety of his drawing—sometimes reminding us of German method, sometimes modern in the manner of French and English draughtsmen—by turns bold and delicate, broad and minute in detail—afforded to his school examples of perfect treatment in a multiplicity of different styles. There was no formality of fixed unalterable precedent in Lionardo, nothing for his scholars to repeat with the monotony of mannerism.
It remained for his disciples, each in his own sphere, with inferior powers and feebler intellect, to perpetuate the genius of their master. Thus the spirit of Lionardo continued to live in Lombardy after he was dead. There alone imitation was really fruitful, because it did not imply mere copying. Instead of attempting to give a fresh and therefore a strained turn to motives that had already received consummate treatment, Lionardo's successors were able to execute what he had planned but had not carried to completion. Nor was the prestige of his style so oppressive through the mass of pictures painted by his hand as to check individuality or to prevent the pupil from working out such portions of the master's vein as suited his own talent. Each found enough suggested, but not used, to give his special faculty free scope. This is in fact the reason why the majority of pictures ascribed to Lionardo are really the production of his school. They have the excellence of original work, but not such excellence as Lionardo could have given them. Their completion is due, as searching criticism proves, to lesser men; but the conception belongs to the greatest.
Andrea Salaino, Marco d'Oggiono, Francesco Melzi, Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio, and Cesare da Sesto, are all of them skilled workmen, losing and finding their individuality, as just described, in the manner of their master. Salaino brings exquisite delicacy of execution; d'Oggiono, wild and bizarre beauty; Melzi, the refinements of a miniaturist; Beltraffio, hard brilliancy of light and colour; Cesare da Sesto, somewhat of effeminate sweetness; and thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend themselves again in what is Lionardo's own. It is surely not without significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover of all things double-natured and twin-souled.
Two painters of the Lombard school, Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, demand separate notice. Without Lionardo it is difficult to say what Luini would have been: so thoroughly did he appropriate his teacher's type of face, and, in oil-painting, his refinement. And yet Luini stands on his own ground, in no sense an imitator, with a genius more simple and idyllic than Da Vinci's. Little conception of his charm can be formed by those who have not seen his frescoes in the Brera and S. Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, in the church of the Angeli at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage church of Saronno. To the circumstance of his having done his best work in places hardly visited until of late years, may in part perhaps be attributed the tardy recognition of a painter eminently fitted to be popular. Luini was essentially a fresco-painter. None, perhaps, of all the greatest Italian frescanti realised a higher quality of brilliancy without gaudiness, by the scale of colours he selected and by the purity with which he used them in simple combinations. His frescoes are never dull or heavy in tone, never glaring, never thin or chalky. He knew how to render them both luminous and rich, without falling into the extremes that render fresco-paintings often less attractive than oil-pictures. His feeling for loveliness of form was original and exquisite. The joy of youth found in Luini an interpreter only less powerful and even more tender than in Raphael. While he shared with the Venetians their sensibility to nature, he had none of their sensuousness or love of pomp. In idyllic painting of a truly great type I know of nothing more delightful than his figures of young musicians going to the marriage feast of Mary, nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned and seated at the foot of the cross.[[389]] The sentiment for naive and artless grace, so fully possessed by Luini, gave freshness to his treatment of conventional religious themes. Under his touch they appeal immediately to the most untutored taste, without the aid of realistic or sensational effects. Even S. Sebastian and S. Rocco, whom it is difficult to represent with any novelty of attitude or expression, became for him the motives of fresh poetry, unsought but truly felt.[[390]] Among all the Madonnas ever painted his picture of Mary with the espalier of white roses, and another where she holds the infant Christ to pluck a purple columbine, distinguish themselves by this engaging spontaneity. The frescoes of the marriage of the Virgin and of S. Catherine carried by angels to Mount Sinai might be cited for the same quality of freshness and unstudied poetry.[[391]]
When the subject demanded the exercise of grave emotion, Luini rose to the occasion without losing his simplicity. The "Martyrdom of S. Catherine" and the fresco of Christ after the Flagellation are two masterpieces, wherein the depths of pathos have been sounded, and not a single note of discord is struck.[[392]] All harsh and disagreeable details are either eliminated, or so softened that the general impression, as in Pergolese's music, is one of profoundest and yet sweetest sorrow. Luini's genius was not tragic. The nearest approach to a dramatic motive in his work is the figure of the Magdalen kneeling before the cross, with her long yellow hair streaming over her shoulders, and her arms thrown backwards in an ecstasy of grief.[[393]] He did well to choose moments that stir tender sympathy—the piety of deep and calm devotion. How truly he felt them—more truly, I think, than Perugino in his best period—is proved by the correspondence they awake in us. Like melodies, they create a mood in the spectator.
What Luini did not learn from Lionardo, was the art of composition. Taken one by one, the figures that make up his "Marriage of the Virgin" at Saronno, are beautiful; but the whole picture is clumsily constructed; and what is true of this, may be said of every painting in which he attempted complicated grouping.[[394]] We feel him to be a great artist only where the subject does not demand the symmetrical arrangement of many parts.
Gaudenzio Ferrari was a genius of a different order, more robust, more varied, but less single-minded than Luini. His style reveals the influences of a many-sided, ill-assimilated education; blending the manners of Bramantino, Lionardo, and Raphael without proper fusion. Though Ferrari travelled much, and learned his art in several schools, he, like Luini, can only be studied in the Milanese district—at his birthplace Varallo, at Saronno, Vercelli, and Milan. It is to be regretted that a painter of such singular ability, almost unrivalled at moments in the expression of intense feeling and the representation of energetic movement, should have lacked a simpler training, or have been unable to adopt a manner more uniform. There is a strength of wing in his imaginative flight, a swiftness and impetuosity in his execution, and a dramatic force in his conception, that almost justify Lomazzo's choice of the eagle for his emblem. Yet he was unable to collect his powers, or to rule them. The distractions of an age that had produced its masterpieces, were too strong for him; and what he failed to find was balance. His picture of the "Martyrdom of S. Catherine," where reminiscences of Raphael and Lionardo mingle with the uncouth motives of an earlier style in a medley without unity of composition or harmony of colouring, might be chosen as a typical instance of great resources misapplied.[[395]]