The variety in these Annunciations depends, as I have remarked, not upon a new dramatic conception, producing, as in the case of Rossetti's, a new visible arrangement; but upon the particular kind of form preferred by the artist, and the particular kind of expression common in his pictures; the variety, I may add, is, with one or two exceptions, a variety in inertness. Let us look at a few, taking merely those in one gallery, the Uffizi. The Virgin, in that superb piece of gilding by Simone Martini (did those old painters ever think of the glorified evening sky when they devised such backgrounds?), is turning away from the angel in sheer loathing and anger, a great lady feeling sick at the sudden intrusion of a cad. In a picture by Angelo Gaddi, she is standing with her hand on her chest, just risen from her chair, like a prima donna going to answer an encore—a gracious, but not too eager recognition of an expected ovation. In one by Cosimo Rossetti she lifts both hands with shocked astonishment as the angel scuddles in; in the lovely one, with blue Alpine peaks and combed-out hair, now given to Verocchio, she raises one hand with a vacant smile, as if she were exclaiming, "Dear me! there's that angel again." The one slight deviation from the fixed type of Annunciation, Angelico's, in a cell at St. Mark's, where he has made the Virgin kneel and the angel stand, merely because he had painted another Annunciation with a kneeling angel a few doors off, is due to no dramatic inspiration. The angel standing upright with folded arms (how different from Rossetti's standing angel!) while the Virgin kneels, instead of kneeling to her as, according to etiquette, results merely in an impression that this silly, stolid, timid little Ancilla Domini (here again one thinks of Rossetti's cowering and dazed Virgin), has been waiting for some time in that kneeling attitude, and that the Archangel has come by appointment.
Among this crowd of unimpressive, nay brainless, representations of one of the grandest and sweetest of all stories, there stand out two—an Annunciation by Signorelli, a small oil painting in the Uffizi, and one by Botticelli,[6] a large tempera picture in the same room. But they stand out merely because the one is the work of the greatest early master of form and movement, or rather the master whose form and movement had a peculiar quality of the colossal; and the other is the work of the man, of all Renaissance painters, whose soul seems to have known most of human, or rather feminine wistfulness, and sorrow, and passion.
The little panel by Signorelli (the lowest compartment, divided into three, of an altar-piece) is perhaps, besides the Orvieto Resurrection, his most superb and poetical work. The figures, only three inches high, have his highest quality of powerful grandeur, solemnly rustic in the kneeling shepherds—solemn in the very swagger, hand on hip, of the parti-coloured bravoes of the Magi; the landscape, only a few centimetres across, is one of the amplest and most austere that ever has been painted: a valley, bounded by blue hills and dark green ilex groves, wide, silent, inhabited by a race larger and stronger than the human, with more than human passions, but without human speech. In it the Virgin is seated beneath a portico, breathing, as such creatures must breathe, the vast greenness, the deep evening breeze. And to her comes bounding, with waving draperies and loosened hair, the Archangel, like a rushing wind, the wind which the strong woman is quietly inhaling. There is no religious sentiment here, still less any human: the Madonna bows gravely as one who is never astonished; and, indeed, this race of giants, living in this green valley, look as if nothing could ever astonish them—walking miracles themselves, and in constant relation with the superhuman.
We must forget all such things in turning to that Annunciation of Botticelli. The angel has knelt down vehemently, but drawn himself back, frightened at his own message; moved overmuch and awed by what he has to say, and her to whom he must say it; lifting a hand which seems to beg patience, till the speech which is throbbing in his heart can pass his lips; eagerness defeating itself, passionate excitement turned into awe in this young, delicate, passionate, and imaginative creature. He has not said the word; but she has understood. She has seen him before; she knows what he means, this vehement, tongue-tied messenger; and at his sight she reels, her two hands up, the beating of her own blood too loud in her ears, a sudden mist of tears clouding her eyes. This is no simple damsel receiving the message, like Rossetti's terrified and awe-stricken girl, that she is the handmaid of the Lord. This is the nun who has been waiting for years to become Christ's own bride, and receives at length the summons to him, in a tragic overpowering ecstasy, like Catherine in Sodoma's fresco, sinking down at the touch of the rays from Christ's wounds. Nay, this is, in fact, the mere long-loving woman, suddenly overcome by the approach of bliss ever hungered for, but never expected, hearing that it is she who is the beloved; and the angel is the knight's squire, excited at the message he has to carry, but terrified at the sight of the woman to whom he must carry it, panting with the weight of another man's love, and learning, as he draws his breath to say those words, what love is himself.
The absence of individual invention, implying the absence of individual dramatic realisation, strikes one more than anywhere in the works of Angelico; and most of all in his frescoes of the cells of St. Mark's. For, while these are evidently less cared for as art, indeed scarcely intended, in their hasty execution, to be considered as paintings at all, they are more strictly religious in intention than any other of Angelico's works; indeed, perhaps, of all paintings in the world, the most exclusively devoted to a religious object. They are, in fact, so many pages of Scripture stuck up, like texts in a waiting-room, in the cells of the convent: an adjunct to the actual written or printed Bible of each monk. For this reason we expect them to possess what belongs so completely to the German engravers of Dürer's school, the very essential of illustrative art—imaginative realisation of the scenes, an attempt to seize the attention and fill it with the subject. This is by no means the case: for Angelico, although a saint, was a man of the fifteenth century, and, despite all his obvious efforts, he was not a real follower of Giotto. What impressiveness of actual artistic arrangement these frescoes really possess, is due, I think, to no imaginative effort of the artist, but to the exigencies of the place; as any similar impressiveness is due in Signorelli's Annunciation to the quality of his form, and in Botticelli's Annunciation to the pervading character of his heads and gestures. These pale angels and St. Dominicks and Magdalens, these diaphanous, dazzling Christs and Virgins of Angelico's, shining out of the dark corner of the cell made darker, deeper, by the dark green or inky purple ground on which they are painted, are less the spiritual conception of the painter than the accidental result of the darkness of the place, where lines must be simple and colours light, if anything is to be visible. For in the more important frescoes in the corridors and chapter-room, where the light is better, there is a return to Angelico's hackneyed vapid pinks and blues and lilacs, and a return also to his niminy-piminy lines, to all the wax-doll world of the missal painter. The fine fresco of St. Dominick at the foot of the cross, which seems to constitute an exception to this rule, really goes to prove it, since it is intended to be seen very much like the cell frescoes: white and black on a blue ground at the end of the first corridor, a thing to be looked at from a great distance, to impress the lay world that sees it at the cloister and from outside the convent railing. The cell frescoes are, I have said, the most exclusively religious paintings in the world, since they are to the highest degree, what all absolutely pious art must be, aids to devotion. Their use is to assist the monk in that conjuring up of the actual momentary feelings, nay, sensations, of the life of Christ which is part of his daily duty. They are such stimuli as the Church has given sometimes in an artistic, sometimes in a literary form, to an imagination jaded by the monotonous contemplation of one subject, or overexcited to the extent of rambling easily to another: they are what we fondly imagine will be the portraits of the dear dead which we place before us, forgetting that after a while we look without seeing, or see without feeling. That this is so, that these painted Gospel leaves stuck on the cell walls are merely such mechanical aids to devotion, explains the curious and startling treatment of some of the subjects, which are yet, despite the seeming novelty and impressiveness, very cold, undramatic, and unimaginative. Thus, there is the fresco of Christ enthroned, blindfold, with alongside of Him a bodiless scoffing head, with hat raised, and in the act of spitting; buffeting hands, equally detached from any body, floating also on the blue background. There is a Christ standing at the foot of the cross, but with his feet in a sarcophagus, the column of the flagellation monumentally or heraldically on one side, the lance of Longinus on the other; and above, to the right, the floating face of Christ being kissed by that of Judas; to the left the blindfold floating head of Christ again, with the floating head of a soldier spitting at Him; and all round buffeting and jibing hands, hands holding the sceptre of reed, and hands counting out money; all arranged very much like the nails, hammer, tweezers and cock on roadside crosses; each a thing whereon to fix the mind, so as to realise that kiss of Judas, that spitting of the soldiers, those slaps; and to hear, if possible, the chink of the pieces of silver that sold our Lord. How different, these two pictorial dodges of the purely mechanical Catholicism of the fifteenth century from the tender or harrowing gospel illustrations, where every detail is conceived as happening in the artist's own town and to his own kinsfolk, of the Lutheran engravers of the school of Dürer!
Thus things go on throughout the fifteenth century, and, indeed, deep into the sixteenth, where traditional arrangement and individual conception overlap, according as a new artistic power does or does not call forth a new dramatic idea. I have already alluded to the fact that the Presentation of the Virgin remains the same, so far as arrangement is concerned, in the pictures of Titian and Tintoret as in the frescoes of Giotto and Gaddi. Michelangelo's Creation of Adam seems still inherited from an obscure painter in the "Green Cloister," who inherited it from the Pisan sculptors. On the other hand, the Resurrection and Last Judgment of Signorelli at Orvieto, painted some years earlier, constitutes in many of its dramatic details a perfectly original work. Be this as it may, and however frequent the recurrence of old themes, with the sixteenth century commences the era of new individual dramatic invention. Michelangelo's Dividing of the Light from the Darkness, where the Creator broods still in chaos, and commands the world to exist; and Raphael's Liberation of St. Peter, with its triple illumination from the moon, the soldier's torches and the glory of the liberating angel, are witnesses that henceforward each man may invent for himself, because each man is in possession of those artistic means which the Giottesques had indicated and the artists of the fifteenth century had laboriously acquired. And now, the Giottesque programme being fulfilled, art may go abroad and seek for new methods and effects, for new dramatic conceptions.
III
The other day, walking along the river near Careggi (with its memories of Lorenzo dei Medici and his Platonists), close to the little cupola and loggia built by Ghirlandaio, I came upon a strip of new grass, thickly whitened with daisies, beneath the poplars beginning to yellow with pale sprouting leaves. And immediately there arose in my mind, by the side of this real grass and real budding of trees, the remembrance of certain early Renaissance pictures: the rusty, green, stencilled grass and flowers of Botticelli, the faded tapestry work of Angelico; making, as it were, the greenness greener, the freshness fresher, of that real grass and those real trees. And not by the force of contrast, but rather by the sense that as all this appears to me green and fresh in the present, so likewise did it appear to those men of four centuries ago: the fact of their having seen and felt, making me, all the more, see and feel.
This is one of the peculiarities of rudimentary art—of the art of the early Renaissance as well as of that of Persia and India, of Constantinople, of every peasant potter all through the world: that, not knowing very well its own aims, it fills its imperfect work with suggestion of all manner of things which it loves, and tries to gain in general pleasurableness what it loses in actual achievement; and lays hold of us, like fragments of verse, by suggestiveness, quite as much as by pictorial realisation. And upon this depends the other half of the imaginative art of the Renaissance, the school of intellectual decoration, of arabesques formed, not of lines and of colours, but of associations and suggestions.
The desire which lies at the bottom of it—a desire masked as religious symbolism in the old mosaicists and carvers and embroiderers—is the desire to paint nice things, in default of painting a fine picture. The beginning of such attempts is naturally connected with the use of gilding; whether those gold grounds of the panel pictures of the fourteenth century represented to the painters only a certain expenditure of gold foil, or whether (as I have suggested, but I fear fantastically) their streakings and veinings of coppery or silvery splendour, their stencillings of rays and dots and fretwork, their magnificent inequality and variety of brown or yellow or greenish effulgence, were vaguely connected in the minds of those men with the splendour of the heaven in which the Virgin and the Saints really dwell. It is the cunning use of this gilding, of tools for ribbing and stencilling and damascening, which give half of their marvellous exotic loveliness to Simone Martini's frescoes at Assisi and his Annunciation of the Florentine Gallery; this, and the feeling for wonderful gold woven and embroidered stuffs, like that white cloth of gold of the kneeling angel, fit, in its purity and splendour, for the robe of Grail king. The want of mechanical dexterity, however, prevented the Giottesques from doing very much in the decorative line except in conjunction with the art—perhaps quite separate from that of the painter, and exercised by a different individual—of the embosser and gilder.