| Baldovinetti. Virgin and Child | Collection Jacquemart-André |
| Plate IX. |
do with what he actually accomplishes; that the fundamental quality of his work seems to come out unconsciously as a by-product of his conscious activity. And so it was in Uccello’s case. If one had asked him what his perspective was for, he would probably have said that when once it was completely mastered it would enable the artist to create at will any kind of visual whole, and that this would have the same completeness, the same authenticity as an actual scene. As a matter of fact such a conception is unrealisable; the problem is too complex for solution in this way, and what happened to Uccello was that the simplifications and abstractions imposed upon his observation of nature by the desire to construct his whole scene perspectively, really set free in him his power of a purely æsthetic organisation of form. And it is this, in fact, that makes his pictures so remarkable. In the Jacquemart-André picture, for instance, we see how the complex whole which such a scene as the legend of S. George suggests is reduced to terms of astounding simplicity; saint, horse, dragon, princess are all seen in profile because the problems of representation had to be approached from their simplest aspect. The landscape is reduced to a system of rectilinear forms seen at right angles to the picture plane for the same reason.
And out of the play of these almost abstract forms mainly rectangular, with a few elementary curves repeated again and again, Uccello has constructed the most perfect, the most amazingly subtle harmony. In Uccello’s hands painting becomes almost as abstract, almost as pure an art as architecture. And as his feeling for the interplay of forms, the rhythmic disposition of planes, was of the rarest and finest, the most removed from anything trivial or merely decorative (in the vulgar sense), he passes by means of this power of formal organisation into a region of feeling entirely remote from that which is suggested if we regard his work as mere illustration. Judged as illustration the “S. George” is quaint, innocent and slightly childish; as design it must rank among the great masterpieces.
Two other pictures in the Jacquemart-André collection illustrate the same spirit of uncompromising æsthetic adventure which distinguishes one branch of the Florentine school of the fifteenth century, and lifts it above almost all that was being attempted elsewhere in Italy even at this period of creative exuberance.
Baldovinetti was at one time in close contact with Uccello, and of all his works the “Madonna and Child” in the Jacquemart-André collection is the most heroically uncompromising ([Plate IX]). No doubt he accepted more material directly from nature than Uccello did. He was beginning to explore the principles of atmospheric perspective which were destined ultimately to break up the unity of pictorial design, but everything that he takes is used with the same spirit of obedience to the laws of architectonic harmony. The spacing of this design, the relations of volume of the upright mass of the Virgin’s figure to the spaces of sky and landscape have the unmistakable interdependence of great design. Only a great creative artist could have discovered so definite a relationship. The great mass of the rocky hill in the landscape and the horizontal lines of the Child’s figure play into the central idea with splendid effect. Only in the somewhat rounded and insensitive modelling of the Virgin’s face does the weakness of Baldovinetti’s genius betray itself. The contours are everywhere magnificently plastic; only when he tries to create the illusion of plastic relief by modelling, Baldovinetti becomes literal and uninspired. In his profile portrait in the National Gallery he relies fortunately almost entirely on the plasticity of the contour—in his late “Trinità” at the Accademia in Florence the increasing desire for imitative realism has already gone far to destroy this quality.
The third picture (see Plate) which I have taken as illustrating my theme is not, it is true, Florentine, but its author, Signorelli, kept so constantly in touch with the scientific realists of Florence that he may be counted almost as one of them, nor indeed did any of them surpass him in uncompromising fidelity to the necessities of pure design. Certainly there is nothing of the flattering or seductive qualities of the common run of Umbrian art in this robust and audacious composition, in which everything is arranged as it were concentrically around the imposing mass of the Virgin’s figure. The gestures interpreted psychologically are not on the same imaginative plane as the design itself. Signorelli was ill at ease in interpreting any states but those of great tension, and here the gestures are meant to be playful and intimate. As in the Uccello, the illustrative pretext is at variance with the design which it serves; and as in the Uccello, the design itself, the scaffolding of the architectonic structure, is really what counts.
| Signorelli. Holy Family | Collection Jacquemart-André |
| Plate X. |
DÜRER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES[39]
IT is a habit of the human mind to make to itself symbols in order to abbreviate its admiration for a class. So Dürer has come to stand for German art somewhat as Raphael once stood for Italian. Such symbols attract to themselves much of the adoration which more careful worshippers would distribute over the Pantheon, and it becomes difficult to appreciate them justly without incurring the charge of iconoclasm. But this, in Dürer’s case, is the more difficult because, whatever one’s final estimate of his art, his personality is at once so imposing and so attractive, and has been so endeared to us by familiarity, that something of this personal attachment has transferred itself to our æsthetic judgment.