III
In the oil-painting age that followed the end of the Renaissance, the depth of an artist can be accurately measured by the content of his portraits. To this rule there is hardly an exception. All forms in the picture (whether single, or in scenes, groups or masses)[[346]] are fundamentally felt as portraits; whether they are meant to be so or not is immaterial, for the individual painter has no choice in the matter. Nothing is more instructive than to observe how under the hands of a real Faustian man even the Act transforms itself into a portrait-study.[[347]] Take two German masters like Lucas Cranach and Tilmann Riemenschneider who were untouched by any theory and (in contrast to Dürer, whose inclination to æsthetic subtlety made him pliant before alien tendencies) worked in unqualified naïveté. They seldom depict the Act, and when they do so, they show themselves entirely unable to concentrate their expression on the immediately-present plane-specified bodiliness. The meaning of the human phenomenon, and therefore of the representation of it, remains entirely in the head, and is consistently physiognomical rather than anatomical. And the same may be said of Dürer’s Lucrezia, notwithstanding his Italian studies and the quite opposite intention. A Faustian act is a contradiction in itself—hence the character-heads that we so often see on feeble act-representations (as far back as the Job of old French cathedral-sculpture) and hence also the laborious, forced, equivocal character that arouses our dislike in too manifest efforts to placate the Classical ideal—sacrifices offered up not by the soul but by the cultivated understanding. In the whole of painting after Leonardo there is not one important or distinctive work that derives its meaning from the Euclidean being of the nude body. It is mere incomprehension to quote Rubens here, and to compare[compare] his unbridled dynamism of swelling bodies in any respect whatever with the art of Praxiteles and even Scopas. It is owing precisely to his splendid sensuality that he is so far from the static of Signorelli’s bodies. If there ever was an artist who could put a maximum of “becoming” into the beauty of naked bodies, who could treat bodily floridness historically and convey the (utterly un-Hellenic) idea of an inexhaustible outflowing from within, it was Rubens. Compare the horse’s head from the Parthenon pediment[[348]] with his horses’ heads in the Battle of the Amazons,[[349]] and the deep metaphysical contrast between the two conceptions of the same phenomenal element is felt at once. In Rubens (recalling once more the characteristic opposition of Apollinian and Faustian mathematics) the body is not magnitude but relation. What matters is not the regimen of its external structure but the fullness of life that streams out of it and the stride of its life along the road from youth to age, where the Last Judgment that turns bodies into flames takes up the motive and intertwines it in the quivering web of active space. Such a synthesis is entirely un-Classical; but even nymphs, when it is Corot who paints them, are likewise shapes ready to dissolve into colour-patches reflecting endless space. Such was not the intention of the Classical artist when he depicted the Act.
At the same time, the Greek form-ideal—the self-contained unit of being expressed in sculpture—has equally to be distinguished from that of the merely beautiful bodies on which painters from Giorgione to Boucher were always exercising their cleverness, which are fleshly still-life, genre-work expressing merely a certain gay sensuousness (e.g., “Rubens’s wife in a fur cloak.”[[350]]) and in contrast with the high ethical significance of the Classical Act have almost no symbolic force.[[351]] Magnificent as these men’s painting is, therefore, they have not succeeded in reaching the highest levels either of portraiture or of space-representation in landscape. Their brown and their green and their perspective lack “religiousness,” future, Destiny. They are masters only in the domain of elementary form, and when it has actualized this their art is exhausted. It is they who constitute the substance-element in the development-history of a great art. But when a great artist pressed on beyond them to a form that was to be capable of embracing the whole meaning of the world, he had necessarily to push to perfection the treatment of the nude body if his world was the Classical, and not to do so if it was our North. Rembrandt never once painted an Act, in this foreground sense, and if Leonardo, Titian, Velasquez (and, among moderns, Menzel, Leibl, Marées and Manet) did so at all, it was very rarely; and even then, so to say, they painted bodies as landscapes. The portrait is ever the touchstone.[[352]]
But no one would ever judge masters like Signorelli, Mantegna, Botticelli or even Verrocchio, by the quality of their portraits. The equestrian statue of Can Grande[[353]] of 1330 is in a far higher sense a portrait than the Bartolommeo Colleoni is; and Raphael’s portraits (the best of which e.g., Pope Julius II were done under the influence of the Venetian Sebastian del Piombo), could be ignored altogether in an appreciation of his creative work. It is only with Leonardo that the portrait begins to count seriously. Between fresco-technique and oil-painting there is a subtle opposition. In fact, Giovanni Bellini’s “Doge” (Loredano)[[354]] is the first great oil-portrait. Here too the character of the Renaissance as a protest against the Faustian spirit of the West betrays itself. The episode of Florence amounts to an attempt to replace the Portrait of the Gothic style (as distinct from the “ideal” portrait of late-Classical art, which was well known through the Cæsar-busts) by the Act as human symbol. Logically, therefore, the entire art of the Renaissance should be wanting in the physiognomic traits. And yet the strong undercurrent of Faustian art-will kept alive, not only in the smaller towns and schools of middle Italy, but also in the instincts of the great masters themselves, a Gothic tradition that was never interrupted. Nay, the physiognomic of Gothic art even made itself master of the Southern nude body, alien as this element was. Its creations are not bodies that speak to us through static definition of their bounding surfaces. What we see is a dumb-show that spreads from the face over all parts of the body, and the appreciative eye detects in this very nudity of Tuscany a deep identity with the drapery of the Gothic. Both are envelopes, neither a limitation. The reclining nude figures of Michelangelo in the Medici chapel are wholly and entirely the visage and the utterance of a soul. But, above all, every head, painted or modelled, became of itself a portrait, even when the heads were of gods or saints. The whole of the portrait-work of A. Rossellino, Donatello, Benedetto de Maiano, Mino da Fiesole, stands so near in spirit to that of Van Eyck, Memlinc and the Early Rhenish masters as to be often indistinguishable from theirs. There is not and there cannot be, I maintain, any genuine Renaissance portraiture, that is, a portraiture in which just that artistic sentiment which differentiates the Court of the Palazzo Strozzi from the Loggia dei Lanzi and Perugino from Cimabue applies itself to the rendering of a visage. In architecture, little as the new work was Apollinian in spirit, it was possible to create anti-Gothically, but in portraiture—no. It was too specifically Faustian a symbol. Michelangelo declined the task: passionately devoted as he was to his pursuit of a plastic ideal, he would have considered it an abdication to busy himself with portraiture. His Brutus bust is as little of a portrait as his de’ Medici, whereas Botticelli’s portrait of the latter is actual, and frankly Gothic to boot. Michelangelo’s heads are allegories in the style of dawning Baroque, and their resemblance even to Hellenistic work is only superficial. And however highly we may value the Uzzano bust of Donatello[[355]]—which is perhaps the most important achievement of that age and that circle—it will be admitted that by the side of the portraits of the Venetians it hardly counts.
It is well worth noting that this overcoming of, or at least this desire to overcome, the Gothic portrait with the Classical Act—the deeply historical and biographical form by the completely ahistoric—appears simultaneously with, and in association with, a decline in the capacity for self-examination and artistic confession in the Goethian sense. The true Renaissance man did not know what spiritual development meant. He managed to live entirely outwardly, and this was the great good fortune and success of the Quattrocento. Between Dante’s “Vita Nuova” and Michelangelo’s sonnets there is no poetic confession, no self-portrait of the high order. The Renaissance artist and humanist is the one single type of Western man for whom the word “loneliness” remained unmeaning. His life accomplished its course in the light of a courtly existence. His feelings and impressions were all public, and he had neither secret discontents nor reserves, while the life of the great contemporary Netherlanders, on the contrary, moved on in the shadow of their works. Is it perhaps permissible to add that it was because of this that that other symbol of historic distance, duration, care and ponderation, the State, also disappeared from the purview of the Renaissance, between Dante and Michelangelo? In “fickle Florence”—whose great men one and all were cruelly maltreated and whose incapacity for political creation seems, by the side of other Western state-forms, to border on sheer bizarrerie—and, more generally, wherever the anti-Gothic (which in this connexion means anti-dynastic) spirit displayed itself vigorously in art and public life, the State made way for a truly Hellenic sorriness of Medicis, Sforzas, Borgias, Malatestas, and waste republics. Only that city where sculpture gained no foothold, where the Southern music was at home, where Gothic and Baroque joined hands in Giovanni Bellini and the Renaissance remained an affair of occasional dilettantism, had an art of portraiture and therewith a subtle diplomacy and a will to political duration—Venice.
IV
The Renaissance was born of defiance, and therefore it lacked depth, width and sureness of creative instinct. It is the one and only epoch which was more consistent in theory than in performance and—in sharp contrast to Gothic and Baroque—the only one in which theoretically-formulated intention preceded (often enough surpassed) the ability to perform. But the fact that the individual arts were forced to become satellites of a Classicist sculpture could not in the last analysis alter the essence of them, and could only impoverish their store of inward possibilities. For natures of medium size, the Renaissance theme was not too big; it was attractive indeed from its very plainness, and we miss consequently that Gothic wrestling with overpowering imprecise problems which distinguishes the Rhenish and Flemish schools. The seductive ease and clarity of the Renaissance rests very largely upon evasion—the evasion of deeper reluctances by the aid of speciously simple rule. To men of the inwardness of Memlinc or the power of Grünewald such conditions as those of the Tuscan form-world would have been fatal. They could not have developed their strength in and through it, but only against it. Seeing as we do no weakness in the form of the Renaissance masters, we are very prone to overrate their humanity. In Gothic, and again in Baroque, an entirely great artist was fulfilling his art in deepening and completing its language, but in Renaissance he was necessarily only destroying it. “ So it was in the cases of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, the only really great men of Italy after Dante. Is it not curious that between the masters of the Gothic—who were nothing but silent workers in their art and yet achieved the very highest that could be achieved within its convention and its field—and the Venetians and Dutch of 1600—who again were purely workers—there should be these three men who were not “sculptors” or "painters” but thinkers, and thinkers who of necessity busied themselves not merely with all the available means of artistic expression but with a thousand other things besides, ever restless and dissatisfied, in their effort to get at the real essence and aim of their being? Does it not mean—that in the Renaissance they could not “find themselves”? Each in his own fashion, each under his own tragic illusion, these three giants strove to be “Classical” in the Medicean sense; and yet it was they themselves who in one and another way—Raphael in respect of the line, Leonardo in respect of the surface, Michelangelo in respect of the body—shattered the dream. In them the misguided soul is finding its way back to its Faustian starting-points. What they intended was to substitute proportion for relation, drawing for light-and-air effect, Euclidean body for pure space. But neither they nor others of their time produced a Euclidean-static sculpture—for that was possible once only, in Athens. In all their work one feels a secret music, in all their forms the movement-quality and the tending into distances and depths. They are on the way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral. Raphael thawed the Florentine fresco, and Michelangelo the statue, and Leonardo dreamed already of Rembrandt and Bach. The higher and more conscientious the effort to actualize the ideas of the age, the more intangible it became.
Gothic and Baroque, however, are something that is, while Renaissance is only an ideal, unattainable like all ideals, that floats over the will of a period. Giotto is a Gothic, and Titian is a Baroque, artist. Michelangelo would be a Renaissance artist, but fails. Visibly, the plastic in him, for all its ambitiousness, is overpowered by the pictorial spirit—and a pictorial spirit, too, in which the Northern space-perspective is implicit. Even as soon as 1520 the beautiful proportion, the pure rule—that is, the conscious Classical—are felt as frigid and formal. The cornice which he put on to Sangallo’s purely “Classical” façade of the Palazzo Farnese was no doubt, from the strictly Renaissance standpoint, a disfigurement, but he himself and many with him felt it to be far superior to the achievements of Greeks and Romans.
As Petrarch was the first, so Michelangelo was the last Florentine who gave himself up passionately to the Antique. But it was no longer an entire devotion. The Franciscan Christianity of Fra Angelico, with its subtle gentleness and its quiet, reflective piety—to which the Southern refinement of ripe Renaissance work owes far more than has been supposed[[356]]—came now to its end. The majestic spirit of the Counter-Reformation, massive, animated, gorgeous, lives already in Michelangelo. There is something in Renaissance work which at the time passed for being “Classical” but is really only a deliberately noble dress for the Christian-German world-feeling; as we have already mentioned, the combination of round-arch and pillar, that favourite Florentine motive, was of Syrian origin. But compare the pseudo-Corinthian column of the 15th Century with the columns of a real Roman ruin—remembering that these ruins were known and on the spot! Michelangelo alone would tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The question of form was for him a religious matter; for him (and only for him) it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art; of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the terribile in his forms that frightened his contemporaries. The one half of his nature drew him towards the Classical and therefore to sculpture—we all know the effect produced upon him by the recently-discovered Laocoön. No man ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel into a buried world. Everything that he created he meant sculpturally—sculpturally, that is, in a sense of the word that he and he alone stood for. “The world, presented in the great Pan,” the element which Goethe meant to render when he brought Helena into the Second Part of Faust, the Apollinian world in all its powerful sensuous corporal presence—that was what Michelangelo was striving with all his might to capture and to fix in artistic being when he was painting the Sistine ceiling. Every resource of fresco—the big contours, the vast surfaces, the immense nearness of naked shapes, the materiality of colour—was here for the last time strained to the utmost to liberate the paganism, the high-Renaissance paganism, that was in him. But his second soul, the soul of Gothic-Christian Dante and of the music of great expanses, is pulling in the opposite sense; his scheme for the ensemble is manifestly metaphysical in spirit.
His was the last effort, repeated again and again, to put the entirety of the artist-personality into the language of stone. But the Euclidean material failed him. His attitude to it was not that of the Greek. In the very character of its being the chiselled statue contradicts the world-feeling that tries to find something by, and not to possess something in, its art-works. For Phidias, marble is the cosmic stuff that is crying for form. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea expresses the very essence of that art. But for Michelangelo marble was the foe to be subdued, the prison out of which he must deliver his idea as Siegfried delivered Brunhilde. Everyone knows his way of setting to work. He did not approach the rough block coolly from every aspect of the intended form, but attacked it with a passionate frontal attack, hewing into it as though into space, cutting away the material layer by layer and driving deeper and deeper until his form emerged, while the members slowly developed themselves out of the quarry. Never perhaps has there been a more open expression of world-dread in the presence of the become—Death—of the will to overpower and capture it in vibrant form. There is no other artist of the West whose relation to the stone has been that of Michelangelo—at once so intimate and so violently masterful. It is his symbol of Death. In it dwells the hostile principle that his daemonic nature is always striving to overpower, whether he is cutting statues or piling great buildings out of it.[[357]] He is the one sculptor of his age who dealt only with marble. Bronze, as cast, allows the modeller to compromise with pictorial tendencies, and it appealed therefore to other Renaissance artists and to the softer Greeks. The Giant stood aloof from it.