Towards the end of this century sprung up a new influence,—the revival of classical learning, a passionate enthusiasm for the poetry and mythology of the Greeks, and a taste for the remains of antique art. This influence on the representations of the Virgin, as far as it was merely external, was good. An added dignity and grace, a more free and correct drawing, a truer feeling for harmony of proportion and all that constitutes elegance, were gradually infused into the forms and attitudes. But dangerous became the craving for mere beauty,—dangerous the study of the classical and heathen literature. This was the commencement of that thoroughly pagan taste which in the following century demoralized Christian art. There was now an attempt at varying the arrangement of the sacred groups which led to irreverence, or at best to a sort of superficial mannered grandeur; and from this period we date the first introduction of the portrait Virgins. An early, and most scandalous example remains to us in one of the frescoes in the Vatican, which represents Giulia Farnese in the character of the Madonna, and Pope Alexander VI. (the infamous Borgia) kneeling at her feet in the character of a votary. Under the influence of the Medici the churches of Florence were filled with pictures of the Virgin, in which the only thing aimed at was an alluring and even meretricious beauty. Savonarola thundered from his pulpit in the garden of San Marco against these impieties. He exclaimed against the profaneness of those who represented the meek mother of Christ in gorgeous apparel, with head unveiled, and under the features of women too well and publicly known. He emphatically declared that if the painters knew as well as he did the influence of such pictures in perverting simple minds, they would hold their own works in horror and detestation. Savonarola yielded to none in orthodox reverence for the Madonna; but he desired that she should be represented in an orthodox manner. He perished at the stake, but not till after he had made a bonfire in the Piazza at Florence of the offensive effigies; he perished—persecuted to death by the Borgia family. But his influence on the greatest Florentine artists of his time is apparent in the Virgins of Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and Fra Bartolomeo, all of whom had been his friends, admirers, and disciples: and all, differing from each other, were alike in this, that, whether it be the dignified severity of Botticelli, or the chaste simplicity of Lorenzo di Credi, or the noble tenderness of Fra Bartolomeo, we feel that each of them had aimed to portray worthily the sacred character of the Mother of the Redeemer. And to these, as I think, we might add Raphael himself, who visited Florence but a short time after the horrible execution of Savonarola, and must have learned through his friend Bartolomeo to mourn the fate and revere the memory of that remarkable man, whom he placed afterwards in the grand fresco of the "Theologia," among the doctors and teachers of the Church. (Rome, Vatican.) Of the numerous Virgins painted by Raphael in after times, not one is supposed to have been a portrait: he says himself, in a letter to Count Castiglione, that he painted from an idea in his own mind, "mi servo d' una certa idea che mi viene in mente;" while in the contemporary works of Andrea del Sarto, we have the features of his handsome but vulgar wife in every Madonna he painted.[1]
[Footnote 1: The tendency to portraiture, in early Florentine and German art, is observable from an early period. The historical sacred subjects of Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and Van Eyck, are crowded with portraits of living personages. Their introduction into devotional subjects, in the character of sacred persons, is far less excusable.]
In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the constellation of living genius in every department of art, the riches of the Church, the luxurious habits and classical studies of the churchmen, the decline of religious conviction, and the ascendency of religious controversy, had combined to multiply church pictures, particularly those of a large and decorative character. But, instead of the reign of faith, we had now the reign of taste. There was an absolute passion for picturesque grouping; and, as the assembled figures were to be as varied as possible in action and attitude, the artistic treatment, in order to prevent the lines of form and the colours of the draperies from interfering with each other, required great skill and profound study: some of these scenic groups have become, in the hands of great painters, such as Titian, Paul Veronese, and Annibale Caracci, so magnificent, that we are inclined to forgive their splendid errors. The influence of Sanazzaro, and of his famous Latin poem on the Nativity ("De Partu Virginis"), on the artists of the middle of the sixteenth century, and on the choice and treatment of the subjects pertaining to the Madonna, can hardly be calculated; it was like that of Dante in the fourteenth century, but in its nature and result how different! The grand materialism of Michael Angelo is supposed to have been allied to the genius of Dante; but would Dante have acknowledged the group of the Holy Family in the Florentine Gallery, to my feeling, one of the most profane and offensive of the so-called religious pictures, in conception and execution, which ever proceeded from the mind or hand of a great painter? No doubt some of the sculptural Virgins of Michael Angelo are magnificent and stately in attitude and expression, but too austere and mannered as religious conceptions: nor can we wonder if the predilection for the treatment of mere form led his followers and imitators into every species of exaggeration and affectation. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the same artist who painted a Leda, or a Psyche, or a Venus one day, painted for the same patron a Virgin of Mercy, or a "Mater Purissima" on the morrow. Here, the votary told his beads, and recited his Aves, before the blessed Mother of the Redeemer; there, she was invoked in the purest Latin by titles which the classical mythology had far otherwise consecrated. I know nothing more disgusting in art than the long-limbed, studied, inflated Madonnas, looking grand with all their might, of this period; luckily they have fallen into such disrepute that we seldom see them. The "Madonna dell' lungo Collo" of Parmigiano might be cited as a favourable example of this mistaken and wholly artificial grace. (Florence, Pitti Pal.)
But in the midst of these paganized and degenerate influences, the reform in the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church was preparing a revolution in religious art. The Council of Trent had severely denounced the impropriety of certain pictures admitted into churches: at the same time, in the conflict of creed which now divided Christendom, the agencies of art could not safely be neglected by that Church which had used them with such signal success. Spiritual art was indeed no more. It was dead: it could never be revived without a return to those modes of thought and belief which had at first inspired it. Instead of religious art, appeared what I must call theological art. Among the events of this age, which had great influence on the worship and the representations of the Madonna, I must place the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, in which the combined fleets of Christendom, led by Don Juan of Austria, achieved a memorable victory over the Turks. This victory was attributed by Pope Pius V. to the especial interposition of the Blessed Virgin. A new invocation was now added to her Litany, under the title of Auxilium Christianorum; a new festival, that of the Rosary, was now added to those already held in her honour; and all the artistic genius which existed in Italy, and all the piety of orthodox Christendom, were now laid under contribution to incase in marble sculpture, to enrich with countless offerings, that miraculous house, which the angels had borne over land and sea, and set down at Loretto; and that miraculous, bejewelled, and brocaded Madonna, enshrined within it.
* * * * *
In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Caracci school gave a new impetus to religious, or rather, as it has been styled in contradistinction, sacerdotal or theological art. If these great painters had been remarkable merely for the application of new artistic methods, for the success with which they combined the aims of various schools—
"Di Michel Angiol la terribil via
E 'l vero natural di Tiziano,"
the study of the antique with the observation of real life,—their works undoubtedly would never have taken such a hold on the minds of their contemporaries, nor kept it so long. Everything to live must have an infusion of truth within it, and this "patchwork ideal," as it has been well styled, was held together by such a principle. The founders of the Caracci school, and their immediate followers, felt the influences of the time, and worked them out. They were devout believers in their Church, and most sincere worshippers of the Madonna. Guido, in particular, was so distinguished by his passionate enthusiasm for her, that he was supposed to have been favoured by a particular vision, which enabled him more worthily to represent her divine beauty.
It is curious that, hand in hand with this development of taste and feeling in the appreciation of natural sentiment and beauty, and this tendency to realism, we find the associations of a peculiar and specific sanctity remaining with the old Byzantine type. This arose from the fact, always to be borne in mind, that the most ancient artistic figure of the Madonna was a purely theological symbol; apparently the moral type was too nearly allied to the human and the real to satisfy faith. It is the ugly, dark-coloured, ancient Greek Madonnas, such as this, which had all along the credit of being miraculous; and "to this day," says Kugler, "the Neapolitan lemonade-seller will allow no other than a formal Greek Madonna, with olive-green complexion and veiled head, to be set up in his booth." It is the same in Russia. Such pictures, in which there is no attempt at representation, real or ideal, and which merely have a sort of imaginary sanctity and power, are not so much idols as they are mere Fetishes. The most lovely Madonna by Raphael or Titian would not have the same effect. Guido, who himself painted lovely Virgins, went every Saturday to pray before the little black Madonna della Guardia, and, as we are assured, held this old Eastern relic in devout veneration.
In the pictures of the Madonna, produced by the most eminent painters of the seventeenth century, is embodied the theology of the time. The Virgin Mary is not, like the Madonna di San Sisto, "a single projection of the artist's mind," but, as far as he could put his studies together, she is "a compound of every creature's best," sometimes majestic, sometimes graceful, often full of sentiment, elegance, and refinement, but wanting wholly in the spiritual element. If the Madonna did really sit to Guido in person, (see Malvasia, "Felsina Pittrice,") we fancy she must have revealed her loveliness, but veiled her divinity.