Part 2

In the Gallery of St. Luke[5] and in the possession of Count Andreozzi in Rome[6] are portraits of him in his last years, and a very fine pencil drawing by himself in the Brandegee Collection (Plate I). All his works were completed, his visits to the courts of Europe were over, he is the “Michael Angelo of the seicento,” and yet he is just as simple in his dress and pose as ever. Obviously a great man whose ideals were so much greater to him than what he had accomplished that no possible flattery could disturb the balance of his mental poise. One change there is in the face more to be remarked than the higher forehead and the fuller chin. The eyes are still bright and level, the mouth still as soft and strong, but the sadness of expression has gone. Had he realized, I wonder, that soon all the sorrows of life would be hidden and lost under the gray church floor? Though the glad light of the sun no longer shone upon his life his face is bright with a mystical light as of the ranging stars which for countless thousands of years have guided the feet of man.[7]

[Illustration: PLATE IV.]

It may be thought that I have given a fanciful interpretation to the change that came in his face from youth to old age, but it can be shown that some such thoughts as I have suggested moved him. About 1650, at a time when his enemies had attacked his work in St. Peter’s and caused him great financial damage and still greater hurt to his natural and proper pride, the idea came to him to carve an allegory that should show the ages what his feeling towards his critics, towards art and towards life truly was. Allegories in painting or sculpture are usually, owing to the fixed limitations of these arts, unintelligible, but no artist ever lived who could have done as well as Bernini in making clear his idea with the material he used. Even if we did not have his own words about this group his thought would be seen, for his amazing command of technique and his knowledge of statics made it possible for him to combine figures with a freedom rarely equalled, and thereby to express himself with an ease and fulness beyond the powers of most sculptors of any time. Only one of the two figures which were to form the group was ever finished, but there is a sepia sketch showing the whole composition.

In it we see the winged figure of Time hovering above a beautiful woman from whose nude body he lifts a mantle. She is Truth; in her hand she holds an image of the Sun darting bright rays in all directions. This group meant much to him; was perhaps the most personal and truly expressive work he ever made, and till his death he kept it by him. In his will he says that not without reason has he kept this statue of Truth unveiled by Time which he wishes to remain for ever in the possession of his descendants who, as they look on it, may remember that the most lovely of the virtues is Truth and that if one works under her guidance Time in the end reveals her. Are the “severe laws” of the ancients any more severe than this rule Bernini held before himself and wished his descendants never to forget, and is it sensible because at first sight his work seems strange and unaccountable to damn it with such words as “fantastic” or “baroque”?

The group was never finished, but in a dirty courtyard off the Corso in Rome, neglected as only the Italians know how to neglect such things till some outsider stirs their jaded appreciation to new interest, is the Discovered Truth. Time on hasty wings flies by, but as Bernini knew, Truth stays always, heedless of neglect, the fixed pole for all those who set their aim beyond the bounds within which their earthly eyes would prison them. And knowing this, it came to pass that his old face was lit with a peaceful smile as he came to the evening of life.

Bernini’s work is of unusual variety, but the best of it falls into four classes. There are the wonderful groups illustrating old world myths that he produced in the full joy of life in his youth; there are the amazing religious monuments in which he embodied with unrivalled skill the mystical intensity of the religion whose chief priests he served; there are the superbly joyous settings for fountains which though the waters might dry up and cease to flow will still, so long as the stone lasts, echo their murmuring music; and there are the long series of magnificent busts on which he was employed from his very earliest days to his latest. He was besides author, painter, illustrator, and architect. I have no intention of cataloguing the long series of work his never idle hand produced, but wish merely to point out some of the forgotten beauties that he brought into being. In a measure, it is possible to trace the source of his inspiration and in lesser degree to foresee its outcome.

His father, Pietro, a Florentine, was a sculptor of no mean power before him. His mother was of Naples, and in that southern, passionate city Gian Lorenzo was born in 1598 and there he passed his first years. Some day another Mendel may be able to establish what were the forces of Florentine and Neapolitan blood that lay dormant in his young brain, but for us is no such certainty, and we can only guess at the effect of the father’s artistic occupations and the mother’s quick blood. In 1604, when the boy was but six years old, his father moved to Rome, the city his son was destined to impress with his genius as no city but Athens has ever been impressed by a single artist. Working at first for his father, he was only fourteen years old when he drew to himself the attention of all the _connoscenti_ by two busts which, as Annibale Carracci said, any artist after years of work might have been proud to make. The admiration Bernini won for these works, to which I shall return, led, as was the good habit of those days, to the patronage of the Borghese pope, Paul V.

In the Borghese villa, the ruined grandeur of which is still the chief pride of Rome, the young Bernini was surrounded by beautiful antique marbles, some of which he was called upon to restore. This familiarity with ancient sculpture, and this subjection in the task of restoration of his own spirit to that of classic masters, had a very marked effect on him—an effect which in its deepest sense lasted throughout his long life, though its more obvious and visible manifestation soon waned and faded away. That is to say, while his work at all times showed a perfect comprehension of some of the fundamental laws of the material out of which sculpture is formed, laws that were first clearly expounded by the Greeks, it is only in a few of his earliest, and for a youth miraculous, works that he shows a tendency to imitate classic form.

Four wonderful works were produced for the Borghese family. The Æneas and Anchises (Plate III), the David (Plate IV), the Rape of Proserpina (Plate V), and the exquisite group of Apollo and Daphne (Plate VI). All these were finished when he was only twenty-seven. Realizing this, the comparison of him with Michael Angelo no longer seems exaggerated, but one sees further that no such comparison can perform the ordinary service of all such juxtapositions, which is to afford a scale of better or worse, for the two masters are supreme, each in his own individual and original way, and incomparable.

[Illustration: PLATE V.]

Opinion may easily differ in regard to the first three of the works just mentioned. To me the Æneas is the least pleasing and the David the least successful artistically. The faults of both may be in part due to the fact that in each case Bernini’s imagination was to a certain degree hampered by work of other men which he seems to have set himself to surpass, and even though it may be granted that he did surpass his models, he would have done better, as in the Proserpina and Daphne, to let his own genius lead him whither it would and ignore other suggestion. The models I refer to are, in the case of the Æneas, the Christ by Michael Angelo in Santa Maria sopra Minerva and for the David the Borghese Warrior now in the Louvre, both works of small merit.[8] The reason the Æneas seems to me unpleasing is because of the weakness and unheroic look of the faces and figures, but others may not feel this, and the skill of the group is undoubted. The lack of success in the David is due to a slight failure in understanding the Greek motive that Bernini was copying. Whether or not he had in mind the Borghese Warrior as he carved this figure is a matter of slight importance. He was in any case representing a single figure in a position of strongly marked action, a problem that Myron magnificently solved in the Discobolus. The Borghese Warrior is by no means so successful. The David would rival the Discobolus had Bernini not made one mistake. The figure is turned to the wrong side. As he stands, the right arm drawn back, the left hand holding the stone in the sling in front of the body, the sling must fall loose and dead, the body must again be flung forward and the right arm swung upwards before the youth can get the momentum to hurl the stone at his enemy. Had Bernini turned the figure the other way with the left hand behind and the right in front of the body, this sense of ineffectiveness in the pose would not have existed, and the whole body would have been tensely set at the moment of rest between the action of drawing back for the aim and the instantaneously following motion of the cast.[9]

Though such slight criticism may be passed on these two works, the other two, the Proserpina and Daphne are not open to any similar attack. They are magnificent, and compel admiration even from those whose training would tend to limit their preferences to work of another type. Never was the spirit of the two stories more fully understood or more adequately rendered. Never was marble managed in more masterful fashion and given such flux and flow of life. One’s breath catches as one looks, for it seems no longer a work of art before one’s eyes, but life itself. There is the dark, passionate rape of Proserpine, her splendid soft body shrinking and twisting in the grasp of the undeniable, compelling God of the underworld. There is the sweet, sad loss of Daphne, her exquisite springtime figure fading and changing into the rustling silver leaves in fright at the too hasty claim of her lover. Her face is still lovely, though the wide eyes and open mouth show her fear, but is there nothing in her fear of loss of her dear pursuer? And what of him? Not to be thought of as Olympian brother to the cruel, forceful Pluto. His face and action betoken the tenderness that would save the woman he loves from the heartless folly she would thoughtlessly commit. In the one group the storm and rush of passion; in the other the tender restraint of love. Both purely Greek and classic, and both carved with such consummate mastery that we forget the marble and see only the dark Tartarean glow and hear only the whispering of the sad leaves.

[Illustration: PLATE VI.]

The perfection of technique displayed in the works of Bernini’s youthful years is obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of sculpture. His knowledge of anatomy must have been almost instinctive, while he used the chisel with an ease that few painters could rival with a brush. His understanding, too, of balance and composition and of the forms the marble could be given was a revelation, and infinitely enlarged the field of sculpture. As a mere group, the Daphne has never been surpassed, and Bernini himself recognised that, at least from the point of view of technique, none of his later works were any more marvellous. The spirit and character, however, of the later work are very different. It is worth noting that his method of production differs greatly from that of his predecessors. Hundreds of sepia drawings by him still exist which show the fertility of his invention and the labour he spent in getting the best design for his works. There are also many terra cotta models for his statues, and in all of these we see a directness in the way he approached his subject that differentiates him from the forerunners in the art. Among the Greeks, among the painters at least, it was not uncommon to think of the body and the drapery as separate and to draw or model the first entirely nude and then afterwards to put drapery over it. This habit was common enough during the Renaissance, and the studies of such men as Dürer and Leonardo show that it was not confined to the lesser men whose lack of skill and knowledge was helped by such double process.

But among all the hundreds of sketches on paper and models in terra-cotta that are left us of Bernini’s work there is scarcely a trace of this method of procedure. He visualized each work in endless different ways, making rapid but most skilful studies of them all, but he saw the figure each time completed. The figures and drapery and setting were one indivisible whole to him, and his uncommon knowledge of anatomy, and the rare clearness of his mental vision, made it possible for him when the final form of the work was fixed upon to work at it from the outside inwards, and not, as in something built of blocks, from the inside outwards. And while his sketches differ in this regard from those of most other artists, the variety of them, especially the very numerous ones for the same monument, show the pitch of excellence to which art had arrived, for these sketches are no longer the record of the artist’s search to learn _how_, but of his eager search _how best_. Not that Bernini was unique in this. The fertility of invention of such men as Domenico Tiepolo is as that of a tree putting forth leaves, but no other artist illustrates these qualities and methods more completely and masterfully than our Gian Lorenzo.

I have mentioned above the originality displayed by men such as Michael Angelo and Bernini. Many another name could be added to these two, but it is not of men I wish to speak, but of this quality of originality, this crucible from which the old is drawn forth new, this Spring season of the mind which clothes the old, dry stumps with fresh life. The word is so often misused about the artists of to-day that its real significance is lost and true originality is too often imitated by a cheaper, rottener stuff. Every one of us is original in some degree. No one, unless he be mentally dead, sees or feels or believes as his father or grandfathers did before him. It may be the old belief was more correct and the old eyes were sharper than the new. Only the purblind and myopic think that all the early stages were wrong and that the solitary Present is alone right. Were this so, how hopelessly wrong this same Present would soon be! What a hideous precipice of error would this life’s painful course appear! As in life, so it is in Art, and all artists are original who are genuine and honest, who are spurred on only by their ideals and their love for their work—who give up worshipping the xoana and idols of a past day. It may be suggested that there is little difference, or perhaps even none, between one’s own ideal and any other suggested to us by some wrought image, whether in stone or verse is no matter. But there is. There is the difference of life. The light of one is of the dying embers, but the light of the other is of the rising Sun which shows the path we follow till our feet grow slower and slower, till at the last they halt and stop fixed. While the idol remains but the symbol of the ideal it is right. When it becomes the God it is wrong, or when doubt has cut its roots and sapped its strength and we pay it service merely because to do so has become an easy habit. So it is we come to see that the originality of these artists was not mere novelty, but was truthfulness. It represents their beliefs, and what you believe you believe for yourself alone. It shows us what their real, sure-founded and enduring hopes and aims were. Mere novelty cannot be believed in because it is accidental. It has neither root nor promise of flower. It is the mirage of the salt desert, and it is this mere queerness, mere strain, mere novelty which is too often mistaken for originality. It is the paradox masquerading as the True Word. Just as this world whirls like a “fretful midge” through space, ever in the same track, a recurring course, but gradually unperceived moves elsewhither, so do the great artists revolve, and impelled not by their own wilfulness but by the power of the divine spark within them, slowly move forward. And among that splendid company is Bernini.

The terra cotta studies in the Brandegee Collection[10] illustrate clearly Bernini’s originality and the power to which I have referred above, of seeing his visions in their completeness without having to painfully build them up. I do not mean to imply that each separate detail of his works was the same in his first vision of them as in their finished form. He worked at them assiduously, and perfected them with the greatest patience and care, but when they came into his mind they rose before him like ghosts from the tomb—vague but entire.

It is noteworthy that most of these models are of angels, and as such represent the religious work by which Bernini is best known, and on which he was most often employed after his youth was past. By the time he was twenty-five years old he had been employed by three Popes, and before his death five others sought his aid and depended largely on his genius in their endeavours to beautify Rome and to render their own fame imperishable. These undertakings were of very various character, but the greater number of them, such as statues of Saints, decoration of chapels, altars and tabernacles, grave monuments of Popes and prelates, were done with religious purpose and may be called his ecclesiastical work. It is superb in its mastery, magnificent in effect, and while utterly different from anything that had been done before, gives the impression of complete and perfect sincerity. Though unlike earlier work and though the religion that inspired and made it possible has changed so that never again will an artist be able to give similar expression to his ideals, still there is no ground for considering it merely curious and the expression of insincerity or passing error. Anything that affected so many thousands of men, which they found beautiful and satisfying to their souls, must be in a measure true, must have in it some portion of ultimate wisdom. Silence or contempt towards it, any feeling but of sympathy with it, shows not a better knowledge but a duller understanding.

[Illustration: PLATE VII.]

During the sixteenth century a great change had come about in the way men looked at life. Discoveries were made of all sorts; on land for men’s feet to follow or in mathematics and philosophy for their souls to reach up to. Old dogmas became untenable and the roofs with which men had sheltered their heads became scaffolding on which they planted their feet. It was a time of revolution—the revolution of the wheel of life which advances as it turns. I have called attention to the fact that the artists in their search for the fullest possible expression of their thought often threw off dozens of designs for a single work before finding the one most adequate. Technique no longer hampered them in the slightest way, and they readily changed their mode in accordance with new views, no longer blindly following the old guides. The work of Titian is one of the most obvious illustrations of this. In his youth he followed, like the Indian, the steps of his leaders, but as he aged, he broke from them more and more, till at the end he arrived in a world his teachers could never have imagined. Bernini had a similar experience.

One of the commonest complaints brought against Bernini is that he introduced the habit of decorating the archivolts or domed roofs of the churches with figures of angels fluttering about like great white birds, and in this complaint no distinction is made between the idea that underlay this scheme of decoration and the inappropriate and exaggerated use of it made often by his imitators. From the earliest times of the Renaissance, this scheme had been used. Bernini did not invent it. The Gothic portals and towers of France are crowded with figures of saints and kings, of angels and demons. In orderly ranks they guard the gates or singly spring into mid air from the balconies. In Italy the shepherds of the people stood in pulpits which rested on the strong shoulders of Christ’s soldiers or on the steady wings of the heavenly host, while high o’erhead (as in the Portinari Chapel in S. Eustorgio, Milan), a ring of winged figures, hand holding hand, danced and sang, and down the long aisles and in the dark chapels every sleeper in his stony bed was guarded by the faithful spirits.

Why then find fault with Bernini and think he erred in doing what all the world found good? If Bernini is mistaken in putting marble figures above our heads, why excuse Correggio for the circling swarms with which he covered the church domes, or Michael Angelo for the cataract of figures with which he covered the Sistine Chapel? All such work must be considered for its suggestion, not from the point of view of its actual substance. Why, if the conventional and halting work of the nameless early artists is good, should the masterly work of Bernini be considered bad? Only because the modern world thinks it foolish to believe in anthropomorphic angels and having no belief, has lost the power of understanding symbols. And also the antagonism Bernini’s work arouses is due to the fad for the primitive and incomplete. The very lack of power that every early artist tried to rid himself of is now thought to be his chief value and grace, and as in the daily press a missing word puzzle attracts more attention than a sonnet so the halting early work finds more admirers than the later perfect art.

[Illustration: PLATE VIII.]