Chapter VI
, Fra Bartolommeo.
[257] The "Holy Family" at Munich, and the "Madonna del Baldacchino" in the Pitti, might be mentioned as experiments on Raphael's part to perfect the Frate's scheme of composition.
[258] See Vasari, vol. viii. p. 60, for a description of the concord that reigned in this vast workshop. The genius and the gentle nature of Raphael penetrated the whole group of artists, and seemed to give them a single soul.
[259] The fresco of "Alexander" in the Palazzo Borghese is by an imitator.
[260] The "Madonna di San Sisto" was painted for a banner to be borne in processions. It is a subtle observation of Rio that the banner, an invention of the Umbrian school, corresponds in painting to the hymn in poetry.
[261] See Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, p. 316, for Raphael's letter on this subject to Leo X.
[262] "La Spasimo di Sicilia" is the single Passion picture of Raphael's maturity. The predella of "Christ carrying the Cross" at Leigh Court, and the "Christ showing His Wounds" in the Tosi Gallery at Brescia, are both early works painted under Umbrian influence. The Borghese "Entombment," painted for Atalanta Baglioni, a pen-and-ink drawing of the "Pietà" in the Louvre collection, Marc Antonio's engraving of the "Massacre of the Innocents," and an early picture of the "Agony in the Garden," are all the other painful subjects I can now remember.
[263] For a fuller working out of this analysis I must refer to my _Sketches in Italy_, article "Parma." Much that follows is a quotation from that essay.
[264] Much of the controversy about Michael Angelo, which is continually being waged between his admirers and his detractors, might be set at rest if it were acknowledged that there are two distinct ways of judging works of art. We may regard them simply as appealing to our sense of beauty, and affording harmonious intellectual pleasure. Or we may regard them as expressing the thought and spirit of their age, and as utterances made by men whose hearts burned within them. Critics trained in the study of good Greek sculpture, or inclined by temperament to admire the earlier products of Italian painting, are apt to pursue the former path exclusively. They demand serenity and simplicity. Perturbation and violence they denounce as blemishes. It does not occur to them that, though the phenomenon is certainly rare, it does occasionally happen that a man arises whose art is for him the language of his soul, and who lives in sympathetic relation to the sternest interests of his age. If such an artist be born when tranquil thought and serene emotions are impossible for one who feels the meaning of his times with depth, he must either paint and carve lies, or he must abandon the serenity that was both natural and easy to the Greek and the earlier Italian. Michael Angelo was one of these select artistic natures. He used his chisel and his pencil to express, not merely beautiful artistic motives, but what he felt and thought about the world in which he had to live: and this world was full of the ruin of republics, the corruption and humiliation of society, the subjection of Italy to strangers. In Michael Angelo the student of both art and history finds an inestimably precious and rare point of contact between the inner spirit of an age, and its external expression in sculpture and painting.
##