Renaissance in Italy, Volume 3 (of 7) / The Fine Arts

by John Addington Symonds

CHAPTER I--THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS

Art in Italy and Greece—The Leading Phase of Culture—Æsthetic Type of Literature—Painting the Supreme Italian Art—Its Task in the Renaissance—Christian and Classical Traditions—Sculpture for the Ancients—Painting for the Romance Nations—Mediæval Faith and Superstition—The Promise of Painting—How far can the Figurative Arts express Christian Ideas?—Greek and Christian Religion—Plastic Art incapable of solving the Problem—A more Emotional Art needed—Place of Sculpture in the Renaissance—Painting and Christian Story—Humanization of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art—Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to Art—Compromises effected by the Church—Fra Bartolommeo's S. Sebastian—Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and Philosophy—Recapitulation—Art in the end Paganises—Music—The Future of Painting after the Renaissance.

It has been granted only to two nations, the Greeks and the Italians, and to the latter only at the time of the Renaissance, to invest every phase and variety of intellectual energy with the form of art. Nothing notable was produced in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art. If the methods of science may be truly said to regulate our modes of thinking at the present time, it is no less true that, during the Renaissance, art exercised a like controlling influence. Not only was each department of the fine arts practised with singular success; not only was the national genius to a very large extent absorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture; but the æsthetic impulse was more subtly and widely diffused than this alone would imply. It possessed the Italians in the very centre of their intellectual vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifestations of their thought and feeling, so that even their shortcomings may be ascribed in a great measure to their inability to quit the æsthetic point of view.

We see this in their literature. It is probable that none but artistic natures will ever render full justice to the poetry of the Renaissance. Critics endowed with a less lively sensibility to beauty of outline and to harmony of form than the Italians, complain that their poetry lacks substantial qualities; nor is it except by long familiarity with the plastic arts of their contemporaries that we come to understand the ground assumed by Ariosto and Poliziano. We then perceive that these poets were not so much unable as instinctively unwilling to go beyond a certain circle of effects. They subordinated their work to the ideal of their age, and that ideal was one to which a painter rather than a poet might successfully aspire. A succession of pictures, harmoniously composed and delicately toned to please the mental eye, satisfied the taste of the Italians. But, however exquisite in design, rich in colour, and complete in execution this literary work may be, it strikes a Northern student as wanting in the highest elements of genius—sublimity of imagination, dramatic passion, energy and earnestness of purpose. In like manner, he finds it hard to appreciate those didactic compositions on trifling or prosaic themes, which delighted the Italians for the very reason that their workmanship surpassed their matter. These defects, as we judge them, are still more apparent in the graver branches of literature. In an essay or a treatise we do not so much care for well-balanced disposition of parts or beautifully rounded periods, though elegance may be thought essential to classic masterpieces, as for weighty matter and trenchant observations. Having the latter, we can dispense at need with the former. The Italians of the Renaissance, under the sway of the fine arts, sought after form, and satisfied themselves with rhetoric. Therefore we condemn their moral disquisitions and their criticisms as the flimsy playthings of intellectual voluptuaries. Yet the right way of doing justice to these stylistic trifles is to regard them as products of an all-embracing genius for art, in a people whose most serious enthusiasms were æsthetic.

The speech of the Italians at that epoch, their social habits, their ideal of manners, their standard of morality, the estimate they formed of men, were alike conditioned and qualified by art. It was an age of splendid ceremonies and magnificent parade, when the furniture of houses, the armour of soldiers, the dress of citizens, the pomp of war, and the pageantry of festival were invariably and inevitably beautiful. On the meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and platters, door-panels and chimney-pieces, coverlets for beds and lids of linen-chests, a wealth of artistic invention was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less skilled in technical details than distinguished by rare taste. From the Pope upon S. Peter's chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every Italian was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, without which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied. During that period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for producing it in every conceivable form. As we travel through Italy at the present day, when "time, war, pillage, and purchase" have done their worst to denude the country of its treasures, we still marvel at the incomparable and countless beauties stored in every burgh and hamlet. Pacing the picture galleries of Northern Europe, the country seats of English nobles, and the palaces of Spain, the same reflection is still forced upon us: how could Italy have done what she achieved within so short a space of time? What must the houses and the churches once have been, from which these spoils were taken, but which still remain so rich in masterpieces? Psychologically to explain this universal capacity for the fine arts in the nation at this epoch, is perhaps impossible. Yet the fact remains, that he who would comprehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the labyrinthine windings of national character. He must learn to recognise that herein lay the sources of their intellectual strength as well as the secret of their intellectual weakness.

It lies beyond the scope of this work to embrace in one inquiry the different forms of art in Italy, or to analyse the connection of the æsthetic instinct with the manifold manifestations of the Renaissance. Even the narrower task to which I must confine myself, is too vast for the limits I am forced to impose upon its treatment. I intend to deal with Italian painting as the one complete product which remains from the achievements of this period, touching upon sculpture and architecture more superficially. Not only is painting the art in which the Italians among all the nations of the modern world stand unapproachably alone, but it is also the one that best enables us to gauge their genius at the time when they impressed their culture on the rest of Europe. In the history of the Italian intellect painting takes the same rank as that of sculpture in the Greek. Before beginning, however, to trace the course of Italian art, it will be necessary to discuss some preliminary questions, important for a right understanding of the relations assumed by painting to the thoughts of the Renaissance, and for explaining its superiority over the sister art of sculpture in that age. This I feel the more bound to do because it is my object in this volume to treat of art with special reference to the general culture of the nation.

What, let us ask in the first place, was the task appointed for the fine arts on the threshold of the modern world? They had, before all things, to give form to the ideas evolved by Christianity, and to embody a class of emotions unknown to the ancients.[^[2]] The inheritance of the Middle Ages had to be appropriated and expressed. In the course of performing this work, the painters helped to humanise religion, and revealed the dignity and beauty of the body of man. Next, in the fifteenth century, the riches of classic culture were discovered, and art was called upon to aid in the interpretation of the ancient to the modern mind. The problem was no longer simple. Christian and pagan traditions came into close contact, and contended for the empire of the newly liberated intellect. During this struggle the arts, true to their own principles, eliminated from both traditions the more strictly human elements, and expressed them in beautiful form to the imagination and the senses. The brush of the same painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of Calvary. Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and undeterred by the dread of encouraging pagan sensuality, the artists wrought out their modern ideal of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hellenic legend. Before the force of painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed the whole cycle of thoughts and feelings that form the content of the modern mind. Throughout this performance, art proved itself a powerful co-agent in the emancipation of the intellect; the impartiality wherewith its methods were applied to subjects sacred and profane, the emphasis laid upon physical strength and beauty as good things and desirable, the subordination of classical and mediæval myths to one æsthetic law of loveliness, all tended to withdraw attention from the differences between paganism and Christianity, and to fix it on the goodliness of that humanity wherein both find their harmony.

This being in general the task assigned to art in the Renaissance, we may next inquire what constituted the specific quality of modern as distinguished from antique feeling, and why painting could not fail to take the first place among modern arts. In other words, how was it that, while sculpture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, painting became the distinguishing fine art of the modern era? No true form of figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting. The latter took up the work of investing thought with sensible shape from the dead hands of the former. Nor had the tradition that connected art with religion been interrupted, although a new cycle of religious ideas had been substituted for the old ones. The late Roman and Byzantine manners, through which the vital energies of the Athenian genius dwindled into barren formalism, still lingered, giving crude and lifeless form to Christian conceptions. But the thinking and feeling subject, meanwhile, had undergone a change so all-important that it now imperatively required fresh channels for its self-expression. It was destined to find these, not as of old in sculpture, but in painting.