“Let me not be honored because I was a second Apelles,
But because I distributed all my gains among thy poor, O Christ!”
I leave it to others to decide with what justice that period styled itself the Renaissance when men passed from originality to an imitation of the classic schools—not by divining and catching their inspiration, but by following in their footsteps. And so we find in passing from Dante to Polizanio and Sannazzaro, from Giotto to Dello, the metamorphoses of Ovid accomplished! In this study of the classics, what they gained in form they lost in conception. The Medici mixed up portraits with Venuses and Pallases, mythological subjects with scenes drawn from nature. Lorenzo the Magnificent caused Pollajolo to represent the strong limbs of Hercules, Signorelli to paint nude divinities, and public beauties were taken as the models of saints. At such profanation, Fra Girolamo Savonarola was struck with grief and horror; and, as well to mend manners as to disinfect literature, he sought to regenerate art by restoring it to the bosom of God.
The spirit that he inspired outlived his funeral pyre: and Luca della Robbia, Lorenzo di Credi, Verocchio, Cronaca, Baccio della Porta, painted from chaste images and devout subjects. Ghirlandajo, Pinturicchio, the renowned Masaccio, held faith in the religious mission of art, as did that Umbrian school which spake to the heart rather than the senses, beneath the wing of the neighboring Assisi. From Gentile di Fabriano came Perugino and Raphael, and the first Venetians, among whom it is no longer a scandal to say that Gentile Bellino was not inferior to Titian.
Raphael has been called the most marvellous union of all the qualities which make the others severally great: design, color, power of chiaroscuro, perspective effect, imagination, style; above all, expression, and that grace which is the beautiful of beauties. Not only were his first essays, when still a faithful disciple of the Umbrian school, works of faith; but also those which he wrought in his zenith, such as the Attila, Heliodorus, and the miracle of Bolsena. His delight was in symbolic subjects, theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, poetry, representing ideas in his figures. When he preferred to follow his imagination and models to tradition, he strayed away, as in the commissions of Chigi, and the beautiful story of Psyche; but later on, when he fled from Rome, he turned himself to the grand Transfiguration, from the midst of which he passed to behold it in heaven.
And Michael Angelo? Others have been loud in their praises of the strength of his joints, the relief and play of his muscles, the foreshortening, the anatomic fidelity, the expression diffused through the whole person; but I can never cease wondering how in the Sistine Chapel he has portrayed the two extreme points of the life of the human race—the creation and the last judgment; and that indefinable of melancholy and veneration in the Moses which sought no model and has found no rival. It is natural; for, from the Bible, the Divine Comedy, and ascetic meditation, he drank in the inspiration wherewith to ennoble human nature.
Their school passed away in the conceits of the licentious age which came after—in the figures caught in the very act of standing to be copied; in flimsy drapery, substituted for the old garments majestically simple; the infinity of shallow conceptions, frivolous allegories, and wanderings from the practical road of Vasari; in the immense pictures of Cortona, Arpino, Lanfranco, the frenzies of Luca Giordano, and convulsed attitudes of Fiammingo, Spinazzi, and the genius, erratically great, of Lorenzo Bernini—such things as these they preferred, I will not say to nature, to which they shut their eyes, but to so many noble exemplars. They were seized with the mania of novelty, of surprises, with the idolatry of the form at the cost of the conception. So they turned from poetic beauty to what is so inferior—the merely symmetrical.
The most renowned works of the great masters were inspired by religion: the delicate cherubini of Angelico, the gates of Ghiberti, the Moses and the Pietà of Buonarotti, the Last Supper of Leonardo, the Assumption of Titian, the marvellous improvisations of Tintoretto. From religion Raphael drew those epics which compose the Vatican galleries and the library at Sienna. To it Correggio devoted his cupolas, with all their grace and force of chiaroscuro. Therein Annibale Caracci found his Communion of St. Jerome, and Domenichino his, which is one of the three great paintings in Rome, and that Madonna del Rosario where he more clearly displays his intention of contrasting the sorrows of earth with the joys of heaven. The Christ of Carlo Dolce and the Madonnas of Sassoferrato and Murillo are in every household. Maratta was called Carlo of the Madonnas. And in my own province[115] particularly, the paintings of Luino, Cesare da Sesto, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Andrea Solaro, Salaino, Marco d’Oggiono Moretto, the Procaccini, the Campi, and that Borgagnone, as great as he is little known, are marked by a religious unction and devout simplicity.
The churches are indeed galleries, or rather harbors from the vandalism of would-be restorers and the robbery which is according to law. In them we find the best models of architecture; and since the unknown authors of the greater cathedrals, and the whole families of the Campiani at Milan, Bregno and Lombardi at Venice, Pedoni at Cremona, Rodari at Coma, Pellegrini of Tibaldo, we have no design better than the sanctuaries of Rho and Caravaggio, the Fontana in the chapel of the Presepio, the Sanmicheli in the cathedral of Montefiascone, the Palladio in the Church of the Redeemer at Venice.
But besides the finish of the sculpture, the glass was stained with historic subjects, the pulpits and windows marvellously adorned, the goldsmith’s art was displayed in the ornamentation of candlesticks, lamps, busts, and canopies, which brought into play the art of engraving.
The care of recording on tombs the nothingness of human greatness makes them the truest portraits of the character of each age. In those of the middle ages the figures are austere, with hands crossed on the breast, awaiting the trumpet-call of the resurrection; in the sixteenth century they are pompous, inappropriate, even immodest.