CHAPTER VI

A CONTEMPORARY LIST OF GREAT ARTISTS, BEFORE 1510

In an offhand mention in _The Courtier_ Baldasarre Castiglione tells us who seemed to be great artists to a cultured and well-informed gentleman about the year 1508. Titian had not yet emerged and of the older men only Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna are remembered. As seniors, they are the first mentioned.

“Again various things give equal pleasure to the eyes, so that we can with difficulty decide what are more pleasing to them. You know that in painting Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgio da Castelfranco are very excellent, yet they are all unlike in their work; so that no one of them seems to lack anything in his own manner, since each is known as the most perfect in his style.”

_The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldesar Castiglione_, translated by Leonard Ekstein Opdycke, New York, 1903, p. 50.

MICHELANGELO ON RENAISSANCE COUNTERPOISE

It is said then that Michelangelo once gave his advice to Marcoda Siena, his pupil, that “one should make the figure pyramidal, spiral, (_serpentinata_) and multiplied by one, two, and three.” Lomazzo _Trattato_, Milan, 1484, p. 23. The pose, that is, should be contained geometrically, should display opposing thrusts, and should be mathematically proportioned within the inclosing geometrical form.

VASARI ON THE “MODERN STYLE”

Vasari’s account of the Grand Style or “Third Manner,” in the Preface to Part III (De Vere’s translation, Vol. IV, pp. 79–85) is still authoritative. He praises the artists before Leonardo, but finds in them a certain hardness, lack of finish and uncertainty of proportions. The change to the perfect manner was caused by the discovery of ancient marbles.

“After them [the predecessors of Leonardo], their successors were able to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others, which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure but only a movement of certain parts, which are revealed with a most perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness, hardness, and sharpness of manner....

[He mentions the contemporary admiration of such precursors as Francia and Perugino.]

“But their error was afterwards clearly proved by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, who, giving a beginning to that third manner which we propose to call the modern—besides the force and boldness of his drawing, and the extreme subtlety wherewith he counterfeited all the minutenesses of nature exactly as they are—with good rule, better order, right proportion, perfect drawing, and divine grace, abounding in resources and having a most profound knowledge of art, may be truly said to have endowed his figures with motion and breath.

“There followed after him, although at some distance, Giorgione da Castelfranco, who obtained a beautiful gradation of colour in his pictures ...; and not inferior to him in giving force, relief, sweetness, and grace to his pictures, with his colouring, was Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco. But more than all did the most gracious Rafaello da Urbino, who, studying the labours of the old masters and those of the Moderns, took the best from them, and, having gathered it together, enriched the art of painting with that complete perfection which was shown in ancient times by the figures of Apelles and Zeuxis, nay, even more, if we may make bold to say it, as might be proved if we could compare their works with his. Wherefore nature was left vanquished by his colours....

“In the same manner, but sweeter in colouring and not so bold, there followed Andrea del Sarto, who may be called a rare painter, for his works are free from errors.

* * * * *

“But he who bears the palm from both the living and the dead, transcending and eclipsing all others, is the divine Michelangelo Buonarotti, who holds the sovereignty not merely of one of these arts, but of all three together. This master surpasses and excels not only all those moderns who have almost vanquished nature, but even those most famous ancients who without a doubt did so gloriously surpass her; and in his own self he triumphs over moderns, ancients, and nature, who could scarcely conceive anything so strange and so difficult that he would not be able, by the force of his most divine intellect and by means of his industry, draughtsmanship, art, judgment and grace, to excel it by a great measure; and that not only in painting and in the use of colours under which title are comprised all forms, and all bodies upright or not upright, palpable or impalpable, visible or invisible, but also in the highest perfection of bodies in the round, with the point of his chisel.”

UNITY OF DESIGN IN THE RENAISSANCE

The humanist Benedetto Varchi, renewing the debate which Leonardo da Vinci had started concerning the relative rank of sculpture and painting, sent the text of his lecture to Michelangelo and asked for his opinion. The sculptor writes in 1549:

“In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad as it approaches the effect of painting. I used to consider that sculpture was the lantern of painting and that between the two things there was the same difference as that between the sun and the moon. But now that I have read your book, in which, speaking as a philosopher, you say that things which have the same end are themselves the same, I have changed my opinion; and I now consider that painting and sculpture are one and the same thing, unless greater nobility be imparted by the necessity for a keener judgment, greater difficulties of execution, stricter limitations and harder work. And if this be the case, no painter ought to think less of sculpture than of painting and no sculptor less of painting than of sculpture. By sculpture I mean the sort that is executed by cutting away from the block: the sort that is executed by building up resembles painting. That is enough, for as one and the other, that is to say, both painting and sculpture proceed from the same faculty, it would be an easy matter to establish harmony between them and to let such disputes alone, for they occupy more time than the execution of the figures themselves. As to that man [Leonardo da Vinci] who wrote saying that painting was more noble than sculpture, as though he knew as much about it as he did of the other subjects on which he has written, why my serving-maid would have written better!”

From Robert W. Carden, _Michelangelo, a Record of his Life_, Boston and New York, 1913, a book which from Michelangelo’s letters gives a very intimate view of the sculptor’s character.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS ON THE GRAND STYLE

No critic of art has better expressed the ideal of the Grand Style than Sir Joshua Reynolds. I quote from the third of his _Discourses_, in the admirable edition of Roger E. Fry, New York, 1906. pp. 51 ff.

“Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The _gusto grande_ of the Italians, the _beau idéal_ of the French and the _great style_, _genius_ and _taste_ among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing. It is this intellectual dignity, they say, that ennobles the Painter’s Art; that lays the line between him and the mere mechanic: and produces those great effects in an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts, are scarcely able to retain....” [The grand style is seen to rest upon a sort of generalizing tendency.] “The whole beauty and grandeur of the Art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every kind.” [The artist] “being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and, what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object.” [Sir Joshua advocates the study of the antique, not to imitate any single work, but to master the principle that underlies them all.] “Beauty and simplicity have so great a share in the composition of the great style, that he who has acquired them has little else to learn. It must not, indeed, be forgotten that there is a nobleness of conception, which goes beyond any thing in the mere exhibition of perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of philosophic wisdom, or heroic virtue. This can only be acquired by him that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of ancient and modern poetry.”

KENYON COX ON THE CLASSIC SPIRIT

The ideals of the High Renaissance are eloquently, if incidentally, defined by the late Kenyon Cox in _The Classic Point of View_, New York, 1911. pp. 3–5.

“The Classic spirit is the disinterested search for perfection; it is the love of clearness and reasonableness and self-control; it is, above all, the love of permanence and of continuity. It asks of a work of art, not that it shall be novel or effective, but that it shall be fine and noble. It seeks not merely to express individuality or emotion, but to express disciplined emotion and individuality restrained by law. It strives for the essential rather than the accidental, the eternal rather than the momentary—loves impersonality more than personality, and feels more power in the orderly succession of the hours and the seasons than in the violence of earthquake or of storm. And it loves to steep itself in tradition. It would have each new work connect itself in the mind of him who sees it with all the noble and lively works of the past, bringing them to his memory and making their beauty and charm a part of the beauty and charm of the work before him. It does not deny originality and individuality—they are as welcome as inevitable. It does not consider tradition as immutable or set rigid bounds to invention. But it desires that each new presentation of truth and beauty shall show us the old truth and the old beauty, seen only from a different angle and colored by a different medium. It wishes to add link by link to the chain of tradition, but it does not wish to break the chain.”

THE END OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE COMING OF FEAR

An artistic collapse whether in an artist or a nation is usually due to a prior collapse in morale. Florence suffered such loss of face when the Imperialists stormed the city and crushed the Republic. We may study the disaster in Michelangelo’s personal case and in its effect on the citizenry at large. Michelangelo was military engineer. Writing from Venice, Sept. 25, 1529, he describes his desertion with singular objectivity:

“I had intended to remain in Florence to the end of the war, having no fears for my own safety. But on Tuesday morning, the 21st of September, a certain person came out by the Porta a San Nicolò while I was engaged in inspecting the bastions, and whispered in my ear that I must remain there no longer if I valued my life. He accompanied me to my house, dined there, brought me horses, and never left my side until he had carried me out of Florence, declaring that it was for my good that he so acted. Whether it were God or the devil I cannot say.”

From Robert W. Carden, _Michelangelo, a Record of his Life_, Boston and New York, 1913, p. 168.

Florence suffered not from hallucinations, as this seems to have been, but from the humiliation and confusion incident upon defeat and foreign occupation. I translate from Benedetto Varchi’s _Storia_, the extract in Ancona and Bacci’s _Manuele della Letteratura Italiana_, Vol. II, p. 506.

“The city of Florence when her liberty was lost was full of such sorrow, of such terror, of such confusion, that it can hardly be described or even imagined.... The nobles were indignant among themselves and inwardly resented being scorned and vilified by the lowest classes; the plebeians in extreme need, would not refrain at least from relieving their minds about the nobility; the rich, how they could manage not to lose their property; the poor, day and night, what they should do not to die utterly and of famine; the citizens were dismayed and desperate, because they had spent and lost a lot: the peasants, much more, because there remained for them nothing at all; the priests were ashamed of having deceived the laity; the laity grieved at having believed the priests; men had become extraordinarily suspicious and covetous; women immeasurably incredulous and distrustful: finally, every one with lowered face and staring eyes, seemed beside himself, and all without exception pallid and bewildered feared at all times every sort of ill.”

From such a shell-shocked community as this, no serene or noble art was to be expected. It was much that Florence in bondage still could nurture the exquisitely morbid art of a Pontormo and the aristocratic detachment and _finesse_ of a Bronzino.

[Illustration:

FIG. 207. Giovanni Bellini. St. Francis receiving the Stigmata.—_H. C. Frick Coll., New York._ ]

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