Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3

Art in Italy and Greece-The Leading Phase of Culture-?sthetic Type of Literature-Painting the Supreme Italian Art-Its Task in the Renaissance-Christian and Classical Traditions-Sculpture for the Ancients-Painting for the Romance Nations-Medi?val Faith and Superstition-The Promise of Painting-How far can the Figurative Arts express Christian Ideas?-Greek and Christian Religion-Plastic Art incapable of solving the Problem-A more Emotional Art needed-Place of Sculpture in the Renaissance-Painting and Christian Story-Humanization of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art-Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety

to Art-Compromises effected by the Church-Fra Bartolommeo's S. Sebastian-Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and Philosophy-Recapitulation-Art in the end Paganises-Music-The Future of Painting after the Renaissance.

It has been granted only to two nations, the Greeks and the Italians, and to the latter only at the time of the Renaissance, to invest every phase and variety of intellectual energy with the form of art. Nothing notable was produced in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art. If the methods of science may be truly said to regulate our modes of thinking at the present time, it is no less true that, during the Renaissance, art exercised a like controlling influence. Not only was each department of the fine arts practised with singular success; not only was the national genius to a very large extent absorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture; but the ?sthetic impulse was more subtly and widely diffused than this alone would imply. It possessed the Italians in the very centre of their intellectual vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifestations of their thought and feeling, so that even their shortcomings may be ascribed in a great measure to their inability to quit the ?sthetic point of view.

We see this in their literature. It is probable that none but artistic natures will ever render full justice to the poetry of the Renaissance. Critics endowed with a less lively sensibility to beauty of outline and to harmony of form than the Italians, complain that their poetry lacks substantial qualities; nor is it except by long familiarity with the plastic arts of their contemporaries that we come to understand the ground assumed by Ariosto and Poliziano. We then perceive that these poets were not so much unable as instinctively unwilling to go beyond a certain circle of effects. They subordinated their work to the ideal of their age, and that ideal was one to which a painter rather than a poet might successfully aspire. A succession of pictures, harmoniously composed and delicately toned to please the mental eye, satisfied the taste of the Italians. But, however exquisite in design, rich in colour, and complete in execution this literary work may be, it strikes a Northern student as wanting in the highest elements of genius-sublimity of imagination, dramatic passion, energy and earnestness of purpose. In like manner, he finds it hard to appreciate those didactic compositions on trifling or prosaic themes, which delighted the Italians for the very reason that their workmanship surpassed their matter. These defects, as we judge them, are still more apparent in the graver branches of literature. In an essay or a treatise we do not so much care for well-balanced disposition of parts or beautifully rounded periods, though elegance may be thought essential to classic masterpieces, as for weighty matter and trenchant observations. Having the latter, we can dispense at need with the former. The Italians of the Renaissance, under the sway of the fine arts, sought after form, and satisfied themselves with rhetoric. Therefore we condemn their moral disquisitions and their criticisms as the flimsy playthings of intellectual voluptuaries. Yet the right way of doing justice to these stylistic trifles is to regard them as products of an all-embracing genius for art, in a people whose most serious enthusiasms were ?sthetic.

The speech of the Italians at that epoch, their social habits, their ideal of manners, their standard of morality, the estimate they formed of men, were alike conditioned and qualified by art. It was an age of splendid ceremonies and magnificent parade, when the furniture of houses, the armour of soldiers, the dress of citizens, the pomp of war, and the pageantry of festival were invariably and inevitably beautiful. On the meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and platters, door-panels and chimney-pieces, coverlets for beds and lids of linen-chests, a wealth of artistic invention was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less skilled in technical details than distinguished by rare taste. From the Pope upon S. Peter's chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every Italian was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, without which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied. During that period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for producing it in every conceivable form. As we travel through Italy at the present day, when "time, war, pillage, and purchase" have done their worst to denude the country of its treasures, we still marvel at the incomparable and countless beauties stored in every burgh and hamlet. Pacing the picture galleries of Northern Europe, the country seats of English nobles, and the palaces of Spain, the same reflection is still forced upon us: how could Italy have done what she achieved within so short a space of time? What must the houses and the churches once have been, from which these spoils were taken, but which still remain so rich in masterpieces? Psychologically to explain this universal capacity for the fine arts in the nation at this epoch, is perhaps impossible. Yet the fact remains, that he who would comprehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the labyrinthine windings of national character. He must learn to recognise that herein lay the sources of their intellectual strength as well as the secret of their intellectual weakness.

It lies beyond the scope of this work to embrace in one inquiry the different forms of art in Italy, or to analyse the connection of the ?sthetic instinct with the manifold manifestations of the Renaissance. Even the narrower task to which I must confine myself, is too vast for the limits I am forced to impose upon its treatment. I intend to deal with Italian painting as the one complete product which remains from the achievements of this period, touching upon sculpture and architecture more superficially. Not only is painting the art in which the Italians among all the nations of the modern world stand unapproachably alone, but it is also the one that best enables us to gauge their genius at the time when they impressed their culture on the rest of Europe. In the history of the Italian intellect painting takes the same rank as that of sculpture in the Greek. Before beginning, however, to trace the course of Italian art, it will be necessary to discuss some preliminary questions, important for a right understanding of the relations assumed by painting to the thoughts of the Renaissance, and for explaining its superiority over the sister art of sculpture in that age. This I feel the more bound to do because it is my object in this volume to treat of art with special reference to the general culture of the nation.

What, let us ask in the first place, was the task appointed for the fine arts on the threshold of the modern world? They had, before all things, to give form to the ideas evolved by Christianity, and to embody a class of emotions unknown to the ancients.[2] The inheritance of the Middle Ages had to be appropriated and expressed. In the course of performing this work, the painters helped to humanise religion, and revealed the dignity and beauty of the body of man. Next, in the fifteenth century, the riches of classic culture were discovered, and art was called upon to aid in the interpretation of the ancient to the modern mind. The problem was no longer simple. Christian and pagan traditions came into close contact, and contended for the empire of the newly liberated intellect. During this struggle the arts, true to their own principles, eliminated from both traditions the more strictly human elements, and expressed them in beautiful form to the imagination and the senses. The brush of the same painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of Calvary. Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and undeterred by the dread of encouraging pagan sensuality, the artists wrought out their modern ideal of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hellenic legend. Before the force of painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed the whole cycle of thoughts and feelings that form the content of the modern mind. Throughout this performance, art proved itself a powerful co-agent in the emancipation of the intellect; the impartiality wherewith its methods were applied to subjects sacred and profane, the emphasis laid upon physical strength and beauty as good things and desirable, the subordination of classical and medi?val myths to one ?sthetic law of loveliness, all tended to withdraw attention from the differences between paganism and Christianity, and to fix it on the goodliness of that humanity wherein both find their harmony.

This being in general the task assigned to art in the Renaissance, we may next inquire what constituted the specific quality of modern as distinguished from antique feeling, and why painting could not fail to take the first place among modern arts. In other words, how was it that, while sculpture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, painting became the distinguishing fine art of the modern era? No true form of figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting. The latter took up the work of investing thought with sensible shape from the dead hands of the former. Nor had the tradition that connected art with religion been interrupted, although a new cycle of religious ideas had been substituted for the old ones. The late Roman and Byzantine manners, through which the vital energies of the Athenian genius dwindled into barren formalism, still lingered, giving crude and lifeless form to Christian conceptions. But the thinking and feeling subject, meanwhile, had undergone a change so all-important that it now imperatively required fresh channels for its self-expression. It was destined to find these, not as of old in sculpture, but in painting.

During the interval between the closing of the ancient and the opening of the modern age, the faith of Christians had attached itself to symbols and material objects little better than fetishes. The host, the relic, the wonder-working shrine, things endowed with a mysterious potency, evoked the yearning and the awe of medieval multitudes. To such concrete actualities the worshippers referred their sense of the invisible divinity. The earth of Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre, the House of Loreto, the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, aroused their deepest sentiments of aweful adoration. Like Thomas, they could not be contented with believing; they must also touch and handle. At the same time, in apparent contradistinction to this demand for things of sense as signs of super-sensual power, the claims of dogma on the intellect grew more imperious, and mysticism opened for the dreaming soul a realm of spiritual rapture. For the figurative arts there was no true place in either of these regions. Painting and sculpture were alike alien to the grosser superstitions, the scholastic subtleties, and the ecstatic trances of the Middle Ages; nor had they anything in common with the logic of theology. Votaries who kissed a fragment of the cross with passion, could have found but little to satisfy their ardour in pictures painted by a man of genius. A formless wooden idol, endowed with the virtue of curing disease, charmed the pilgrim more than a statue noticeable only for its beauty or its truth to life. We all know that wunderth?tige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gem?lde. In architecture alone, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, their vague but potent feelings of infinity, their yearning towards a deity invisible, but localised in holy things and places, found artistic outlet. Therefore architecture was essentially a medieval art. The rise of sculpture and painting indicated the quickening to life of new faculties, fresh intellectual interests, and a novel way of apprehending the old substance of religious feeling; for comprehension of these arts implies delight in things of beauty for their own sake, a sympathetic attitude towards the world of sense, a new freedom of the mind produced by the regeneration of society through love.

The medi?val faiths were still vivid when the first Italian painters began their work, and the sincere endeavour of these men was to set forth in beautiful and worthy form the truths of Christianity. The eyes of the worshipper should no longer have a mere stock or stone to contemplate: his imagination should be helped by the dramatic presentation of the scenes of sacred history, and his devotion be quickened by lively images of the passion of our Lord. Spirit should converse with spirit, through no veil of symbol, but through the transparent medium of art, itself instinct with inbreathed life and radiant with ideal beauty. The body and the soul, moreover, should be reconciled; and God's likeness should be once more acknowledged in the features and the limbs of man. Such was the promise of art; and this promise was in a great measure fulfilled by the painting of the fourteenth century. Men ceased to worship their God in the holiness of ugliness; and a great city called its street Glad on the birthday-festival of the first picture investing religious emotion with ?sthetic charm. But in making good the promise they had given, it was needful for the arts on the one hand to enter a region not wholly their own-the region of abstractions and of mystical conceptions; and on the other to create a world of sensuous delightfulness, wherein the spiritual element was materialised to the injury of its own essential quality. Spirit, indeed, spake to spirit, so far as the religious content was concerned; but flesh spake also to flesh in the ?sthetic form. The incarnation promised by the arts involved a corresponding sensuousness. Heaven was brought down to earth, but at the cost of making men believe that earth itself was heavenly.

At this point the subject of our inquiry naturally divides into two main questions. The first concerns the form of figurative art specially adapted to the requirements of religious thought in the fourteenth century. The second treats of the effect resulting both to art and religion from the expression of mystical and theological conceptions in plastic form.

When we consider the nature of the ideas assimilated in the Middle Ages by the human mind, it is clear that art, in order to set them forth, demanded a language the Greeks had never greatly needed, and had therefore never fully learned. To over-estimate the difference from an ?sthetic point of view between the religious notions of the Greeks and those which Christianity had made essential, would be difficult. Faith, hope, and charity; humility, endurance, suffering; the Resurrection and the Judgment; the Pall and the Redemption; Heaven and Hell; the height and depth of man's mixed nature; the drama of human destiny before the throne of God: into the sphere of thoughts like these, vivid and solemn, transcending the region of sense and corporeity, carrying the mind away to an ideal world, where the things of this earth obtained a new reality by virtue of their relation to an invisible and infinite Beyond, the modern arts in their infancy were thrust. There was nothing finite here or tangible, no gladness in the beauty of girlish foreheads or the swiftness of a young man's limbs, no simple idealisation of natural delightfulness. The human body, which the figurative arts must needs use as the vehicle of their expression, had ceased to have a value in and for itself, had ceased to be the true and adequate investiture of thoughts demanded from the artist. At best it could be taken only as the symbol of some inner meaning, the shrine of an indwelling spirit nobler than itself; just as a lamp of alabaster owes its beauty and its worth to the flame it more than half conceals, the light transmitted through its scarce transparent walls.

In ancient art those moral and spiritual qualities which the Greeks recognised as truly human and therefore divine, allowed themselves to be incarnated in well-selected types of physical perfection. The deities of the Greek mythology were limited to the conditions of natural existence: they were men and women of a larger mould and freer personality; less complex, inasmuch as each completed some one attribute; less thwarted in activity, inasmuch as no limit was assigned to exercise of power. The passions and the faculties of man, analysed by unconscious psychology, and deified by religious fancy, were invested by sculpture with appropriate forms, the tact of the artist selecting corporeal qualities fitted to impersonate the special character of each divinity. Nor was it possible that, the gods and goddesses being what they were, exact analogues should not be found for them in idealised humanity. In a Greek statue there was enough soul to characterise the beauty of the body, to render her due meed of wisdom to Pallas, to distinguish the swiftness of Hermes from the strength of Heracles, or to contrast the virginal grace of Artemis with the abundance of Aphrodite's charms. At the same time the spirituality that gave its character to each Greek deity, was not such that, even in thought, it could be dissociated from corporeal form. The Greeks thought their gods as incarnate persons; and all the artist had to see to, was that this incarnate personality should be impressive in his marble.

Christianity, on the other hand, made the moral and spiritual nature of man all-essential. It sprang from an earlier religion, that judged it impious to give any form to God. The body and its terrestrial activity occupied but a subordinate position in its system. It was the life of the soul, separable from this frame of flesh, and destined to endure when earth and all that it contains had ended-a life that upon this planet was continued conflict and aspiring struggle-which the arts, insofar as they became its instrument, were called upon to illustrate. It was the worship of a Deity, all spirit, to be sought on no one sacred hill, to be adored in no transcendent shape, that they were bound to heighten. The most highly prized among the Christian virtues had no necessary connection with beauty of feature or strength of limb. Such beauty and such strength at any rate were accidental, not essential. A Greek faun could not but be graceful; a Greek hero was of necessity vigorous. But S. Stephen might be steadfast to the death without physical charm; S. Anthony might put to flight the devils of the flesh without muscular force. It is clear that the radiant physical perfection proper to the deities of Greek sculpture was not sufficient in this sphere.

Again, the most stirring episodes of the Christian mythology involved pain and perturbation of the spirit; the victories of the Christian athletes were won in conflicts carried on within their hearts and souls-"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers," demoniac leaders of spiritual legions. It is, therefore, no less clear that the tranquillity and serenity of the Hellenic ideal, so necessary to consummate sculpture, was here out of place. How could the Last Judgment, that day of wrath, when every soul, however insignificant on earth, will play the first part for one moment in an awful tragedy, be properly expressed in plastic form, harmonious and pleasing? And supposing that the artist should abandon the attempt to exclude ugliness and discord, pain and confusion, from his representation of the Dies Ir?, how could he succeed in setting forth by the sole medium of the human body the anxiety and anguish of the soul at such a time? The physical form, instead of being adequate to the ideas expressed, and therefore helpful to the artist, is a positive embarrassment, a source of weakness. The most powerful pictorial or sculpturesque delineation of the Judgment, when compared with the pangs inflicted on the spirit by a guilty conscience, pangs whereof words may render some account, but which can find no analogue in writhings of the limbs or face, must of necessity be found a failure. Still more impossible, if we pursue this train of thought into another region, is it for the figurative arts to approach the Christian conception of God in His omnipotence and unity. Christ Himself, the central figure of the Christian universe, the desired of all nations, in whom the Deity assumed a human form and dwelt with men, is no fit subject for such art at any rate as the Greeks had perfected. The fact of His incarnation brought Him indeed within the proper sphere of the fine arts; but the religious idea which He represents removed Him beyond the reach of sculpture. This is an all-important consideration. It is to this that our whole argument is tending. Therefore to enlarge upon this point will not be useless.

Christ is specially adored in His last act of love on Calvary; and how impossible it is to set that forth consistently with the requirements of strictly plastic art, may be gathered by comparing the passion of S. Bernard's Hymn to our Lord upon the Cross with all that Winckelmann and Hegel have so truly said about the restrained expression, dignified generality, and harmonious beauty essential to sculpture. It is the negation of tranquillity, the excess of feeling, the absence of comeliness, the contrast between visible weakness and invisible omnipotence, the physical humiliation voluntarily suffered by Him that "ruled over all the angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven, whose feet were clothed with stars"-it is all this that gives their force and pathos to these stanzas:

Omnis vigor atque viror

Hinc recessit; non admiror:

Mors apparet in inspectu,

Totus pendens in defectu,

Attritus ?gra macie.

Sic affectus, sic despectus,

Propter me sic interfectus,

Peccatori tam indigno

Cum amoris in te signo

Appare clara facie[3].

We have never heard that Pheidias or Praxiteles chose Prometheus upon Caucasus for the supreme display of his artistic skill; and even the anguish expressed in the group of the Laocoon is justly thought to violate the laws of antique sculpture. Yet here was a greater than Prometheus-one who had suffered more, and on whose suffering the salvation of the human race depended, to exclude whom from the sphere of representation in art was the same as confessing the utter impotence of art to grasp the vital thought of modern faith. It is clear that the muses of the new age had to haunt Calvary instead of Helicon, slaking their thirst at no Castalian spring, but at the fount of tears outpoured by all creation for a stricken God. What Hellas had achieved supplied no norm or method for the arts in this new service.

From what has hitherto been advanced, we may assert with confidence that, if the arts were to play an important part in Christian culture, an art was imperatively demanded that should be at home in the sphere of intense feeling, that should treat the body as the interpreter and symbol of the soul, and should not shrink from pain and passion. How far the fine arts were at all qualified to express the essential thoughts of Christianity-a doubt suggested in the foregoing paragraphs-and how far, through their proved inadequacy to perform this task completely, they weakened the hold of medi?val faiths upon the modern mind, are questions to be raised hereafter. For the present it is enough to affirm that, least of all the arts, could sculpture, with its essential repose and its dependence on corporeal conditions, solve the problem. Sculpture had suited the requirements of Greek thought. It belonged by right to men who not unwillingly accepted the life of this world as final, and who worshipped in their deities the incarnate personality of man made perfect. But it could not express the cycle of Christian ideas. The desire of a better world, the fear of a worse; the sense of sin referred to physical appetites, and the corresponding mortification of the flesh; hope, ecstasy, and penitence and prayer; all these imply contempt or hatred for the body, suggest notions too spiritual to be conveyed by the rounded contours of beautiful limbs, too full of struggle for statuesque tranquillity. The new element needed a more elastic medium of expression. Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had somehow to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its supremacy. Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from dependence on the body in the fulness of its physical proportions. It touches our sensibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, and more multiform. Colour and shadow, a?rial perspective and complicated grouping, denied to sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, have their own significance, their real relation to feelings vaguer, but not less potent, than those which find expression in the simple human form. To painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensible by sculpture. All that drapery by its partial concealment of the form it clothes, and landscape by its sympathies with human sentiment, may supply to enhance the passion of the spectator, pertains to painting. This art, therefore, owing to the greater variety of means at its disposal, and its greater adequacy to express emotion, became the paramount Italian art.

To sculpture in the Renaissance, shorn of the divine right to create gods and heroes, was left the narrower field of decoration, portraiture, and sepulchral monuments. In the last of these departments it found the noblest scope for its activity; for beyond the grave, according to Christian belief, the account of the striving, hoping, and resisting soul is settled. The corpse upon the bier may bear the stamp of spiritual character impressed on it in life; but the spirit, with its struggle and its passion, has escaped as from a prison-house, and flown else-whither. The body of the dead man, for whom this world is over, and who sleeps in peace, awaiting resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around whose tomb watch sympathising angels or contemplative genii, was, therefore, the proper subject for the highest Christian sculpture. Here, if anywhere, the right emotion could be adequately expressed in stone, and the moulded form be made the symbol of repose, expectant of restored activity. The greatest sculptor of the modern age was essentially a poet of Death.

Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned and insisted on, was the art demanded by the modern intellect upon its emergence from the stillness of the Middle Ages. The problem, however, even for the art of painting was not simple. The painters, following the masters of mosaic, began by setting forth the history, mythology, and legends of the Christian Church in imagery freer and more beautiful than lay within the scope of treatment by Romanesque or Byzantine art. So far their task was comparatively easy; for the idyllic grace of maternal love in the Madonna, the pathetic incidents of martyrdom, the courage of confessors, the ecstasies of celestial joy in redeemed souls, the loveliness of a pure life in modest virgins, and the dramatic episodes of sacred story, furnish a multitude of motives admirably pictorial. There was, therefore, no great obstacle upon the threshold, so long as artists gave their willing service to the Church. Yet, looking back upon this phase of painting, we are able to perceive that already the adaptation of art to Christian dogma entailed concessions on both sides. Much, on the one hand, had to be omitted from the programme offered to artistic treatment, for the reason that the fine arts could not deal with it at all. Much, on the other hand, had to be expressed by means which painting in a state of perfect freedom would repudiate. Allegorical symbols, like Prudence with two faces, and painful episodes of agony and anguish, marred her work of beauty. There was consequently a double compromise, involving a double sacrifice of something precious. The faith suffered by having its mysteries brought into the light of day, incarnated in form, and humanised. Art suffered by being forced to render intellectual abstractions to the eye through figured symbols.

As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the proper end of art, became more rightly understood, the painters found that their craft was worthy of being made an end in itself, and that the actualities of life observed around them had claims upon their genius no less weighty than dogmatic mysteries. The subjects they had striven at first to realise with all simplicity now became little better than vehicles for the display of sensuous beauty, science, and mundane pageantry. The human body received separate and independent study, as a thing in itself incomparably beautiful, commanding more powerful emotions by its magic than aught else that sways the soul. At the same time the external world, with all its wealth of animal and vegetable life, together with the works of human ingenuity in costly clothing and superb buildings, was seen to be in every detail worthy of most patient imitation. Anatomy and perspective taxed the understanding of the artist, whose whole force was no longer devoted to the task of bringing religious ideas within the limits of the representable. Next, when the classical revival came into play, the arts, in obedience to the spirit of the age, left the sphere of sacred subjects, and employed their full-grown faculties in the domain of myths and Pagan fancies. In this way painting may truly be said to have opened the new era of culture, and to have first manifested the freedom of the modern mind. When Luca Signorelli drew naked young men for a background to his picture of Madonna and the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of the attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the whole range of human interests. Standing before this picture in the Uffizzi, we feel that the Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas with ?sthetic beauty, had encouraged a power antagonistic to her own, a power that liberated the spirit she sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the earthly paradise from which monasticism had expelled it.

Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult problem of the relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would be to shrink from the most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the Renaissance. On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages-the Jews, the iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors-were justified in their mistrust of plastic art. The spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral, but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations[4]. It is always bringing us back to the dear life of earth, from which the faith would sever us. It is always reminding us of the body which piety bids us to forget. Painters and sculptors glorify that which saints and ascetics have mortified. The masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example, lead the soul away from compunction, away from penitence, away from worship even, to dwell on the delight of youthful faces, blooming colour, graceful movement, delicate emotion[5]. Nor is this all: religious motives may be misused for what is worse than merely sensuous suggestiveness. The masterpieces of the Bolognese and Neapolitan painters, while they pretend to quicken compassion for martyrs in their agony, pander to a bestial blood-lust lurking in the darkest chambers of the soul[6]. Therefore it is that piety, whether the piety of monastic Italy or of Puritan England, turns from these ?sthetic triumphs as from something alien to itself. When the worshipper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite, ineffable, unrealised, how can he endure the contact of those splendid forms, in which the lust of the eye and the pride of life, professing to subserve devotion, remind him rudely of the goodliness of sensual existence? Art, by magnifying human beauty, contradicts these Pauline maxims: "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain;" "Set your affections on things above, not on things on earth;" "Your life is hid with Christ in God." The sublimity and elevation it gives to carnal loveliness are themselves hostile to the spirit that holds no truce or compromise of traffic with the flesh. As displayed in its most perfect phases, in Greek sculpture and Venetian painting, art dignifies the actual mundane life of man; but Christ, in the language of uncompromising piety, means everything most alien to this mundane life-self-denial, abstinence from fleshly pleasure, the waiting for true bliss beyond the grave, seclusion even from social and domestic ties. "He that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me," "He that taketh not his cross and followeth me, is not worthy of me." It is needful to insist upon these extremest sentences of the New Testament, because upon them was based the religious practice of the Middle Ages, more sincere in their determination to fulfil the letter and embrace the spirit of the Gospel than any succeeding age has been.[7]

If, then, there really exists this antagonism between fine art glorifying human life and piety contemning it, how came it, we may ask, that even in the Middle Ages the Church hailed art as her coadjutor? The answer lies in this, that the Church has always compromised. The movement of the modern world, upon the close of the Middle Ages, offered the Church a compromise, which it would have been difficult to refuse, and in which she perceived art first no peril to her dogmas. When the conflict of the first few centuries of Christianity had ended in her triumph, she began to mediate between asceticism and the world. Intent on absorbing all existent elements of life and power, she conformed her system to the Roman type, established her service in basilicas and Pagan temples, adopted portions of the antique ritual, and converted local genii into saints. At the same time she utilised the spiritual forces of monasticism, and turned the mystic impulse of ecstatics to account. The Orders of the Preachers and the Begging Friars became her militia and police; the mystery of Christ's presence in the Eucharist was made an engine of the priesthood; the dreams of Paradise and Purgatory gave value to her pardons, interdictions, jubilees, indulgences, and curses. In the Church the spirit of the cloister and the spirit of the world found neutral ground, and to the practical accommodation between these hostile elements she owed her wide supremacy. The Christianity she formed and propagated was different from that of the New Testament, inasmuch as it had taken up into itself a mass of mythological anthropomorphic elements. Thus transmuted and materialised, thus accepted by the vivid faith of an unquestioning populace, Christianity offered a proper medium for artistic activity. The whole first period of Italian painting was occupied with the endeavour to set forth in form and colour the popular conceptions of a faith at once unphilosophical and unspiritual, beautiful and fit for art by reason of the human elements it had assumed into its substance. It was natural, therefore, that the Church should show herself indulgent to the arts, which were effecting in their own sphere what she had previously accomplished, though purists and ascetics, holding fast by the original spirit of their creed, might remain irreconcilably antagonistic to their influence. The Reformation, on the contrary, rejecting the whole mass of compromises sanctioned by the Church, and returning to the elemental principles of the faith, was no less naturally opposed to fine arts, which, after giving sensuous form to Catholic mythology, had recently attained to liberty and brought again the gods of Greece.

A single illustration might be selected from the annals of Italian painting to prove how difficult even the holiest-minded and most earnest painter found it to effect the proper junction between plastic beauty and pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo, the disciple of Savonarola, painted a Sebastian in the cloister of S. Marco, where it remained until the Dominican confessors became aware, through the avowals of female penitents, that this picture was a stumbling-block and snare to souls. It was then removed, and what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra Bartolommeo undoubtedly intended this ideal portrait of the martyr to be edifying. S. Sebastian was to stand before the world as the young man, strong and beautiful, who endured to the end and won the crown of martyrdom. No other ideas but those of heroism, constancy, or faith were meant to be expressed; but the painter's art demanded that their expression should be eminently beautiful, and the beautiful body of the young man distracted attention from his spiritual virtues to his physical perfections. A similar maladjustment of the means of plastic art to the purposes of religion would have been impossible in Hellas, where the temples of Eros and of Phoebus stood side by side; but in Christian Florence the craftsman's skill sowed seeds of discord in the souls of the devout[8].

This story is but a coarse instance of the separation between piety and plastic art. In truth, the difficulty of uniting them in such a way that the latter shall enforce the former, lies far deeper than its powers of illustration reach. Religion has its proper end in contemplation and in conduct. Art aims at presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and feelings with a view to intellectual enjoyment. Now, many thoughts are incapable of sensuous embodiment; they appear as abstractions to the philosophical intellect or as dogmas to the theological understanding. To effect an alliance between art and philosophy or art and theology in the specific region of either religion or speculation is, therefore, an impossibility. In like manner there are many feelings which cannot properly assume a sensuous form; and these are precisely religious feelings, in which the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual world behind, to seek her freedom in a spiritual region.[9] Yet, while we recognise the truth of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to maintain that, until they are brought into close and inconvenient contact, there is direct hostility between religion and the arts. The sphere of the two is separate; their aims are distinct; they must be allowed to perfect themselves, each after its own fashion. In the large philosophy of human nature, represented by Goethe's famous motto, there is room for both, because those who embrace it bend their natures neither wholly to the pietism of the cloister nor to the sensuality of art. They find the meeting-point of art and of religion in their own humanity, and perceive that the antagonism of the two begins when art is set to do work alien to its nature, and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.

At the risk of repetition I must now resume the points I have attempted to establish in this chapter. As in ancient Greece, so also in Renaissance Italy, the fine arts assumed the first place in the intellectual culture of the nation. But the thought and feeling of the modern world required an ?sthetic medium more capable of expressing emotion in its intensity, variety, and subtlety than sculpture. Therefore painting was the art of arts for Italy. Yet even painting, notwithstanding the range and wealth of its resources, could not deal with the motives of Christianity so successfully as sculpture with the myths of Paganism. The religion it interpreted transcended the actual conditions of humanity, while art is bound down by its nature to the limitations of the world we live in. The Church imagined art would help her; and within a certain sphere of subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and the lives of saints, by creating new types of serene beauty and pure joy, by giving form to angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion, painting lent efficient aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very pith and kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising purists. Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, it really restored to humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty, and helped to proved the untenability of the medi?val standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and, what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty of contemplation.

The first step in the emancipation of the modern mind was taken thus by art, proclaiming to men the glad tidings of their goodliness and greatness in a world of manifold enjoyment created for their use. Whatever painting touched, became by that touch human; piety, at the lure of art, folded her soaring wings and rested on the genial earth. This the Church had not foreseen. Because the freedom of the human spirit expressed itself in painting only under visible images, and not, like heresy, in abstract sentences; because this art sufficed for Mariolatry and confirmed the cult of local saints; because its sensuousness was not at variance with a creed that had been deeply sensualised-the painters were allowed to run their course unchecked. Then came a second stage in their development of art. By placing the end of their endeavour in technical excellence and anatomical accuracy, they began to make representation an object in itself, independently of its spiritual significance. Next, under the influence of the classical revival, they brought home again the old powers of the earth-Aphrodite and Galatea and the Loves, Adonis and Narcissus and the Graces, Phoebus and Daphne and Aurora, Pan and the Fauns, and the Nymphs of the woods and the waves.

When these dead deities rose from their sepulchres to sway the hearts of men in the new age, it was found that something had been taken from their ancient bloom of innocence, something had been added of emotional intensity. Italian art recognised their claim to stand beside Madonna and the Saints in the Pantheon of humane culture; but the painters re-made them in accordance with the modern spirit. This slight touch of transformation proved that, though they were no longer objects of religious devotion, they still preserved a vital meaning for an altered age. Having personified for the antique world qualities which, though suppressed and ignored by militant and medi?val Christianity, were strictly human, the Hellenic deities still signified those qualities for modern Europe, now at length re-fortified by contact with the ancient mind. For it is needful to remember that in all movements of the Renaissance we ever find a return in all sincerity and faith to the glory and gladness of nature, whether in the world without or in the soul of man. To apprehend that glory and that gladness with the pure and primitive perceptions of the early mythopoets, was not given to the men of the new world. Yet they did what in them lay, with senses sophisticated by many centuries of subtlest warping, to replace the first, free joy of kinship with primeval things. For the painters, far more than for the poets of the sixteenth century, it was possible to reproduce a thousand forms of beauty, each attesting to the delightfulness of physical existence, to the inalienable rights of natural desire, and to the participation of mankind in pleasures held in common by us with the powers of earth and sea and air.

It is wonderful to watch the blending of elder and of younger forces in this process. The old gods lent a portion of their charm even to Christian mythology, and showered their beauty-bloom on saints who died renouncing them. Sodoma's Sebastian is but Hyacinth or Hylas, transpierced with arrows, so that pain and martyrdom add pathos to his poetry of youthfulness. Lionardo's S. John is a Faun of the forest, ivy-crowned and laughing, on whose lips the word "Repent" would be a gleeful paradox. For the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman martyrs and Olympian deities-the heroes of the Acta Sanctorum, and the heroes of Greek romance-were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the beautiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent fragrance was educed from these apparently diverse blossoms by their interminglement and fusion-how the high-wrought sensibilities of the Christian were added to the clear and radiant fancies of the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic faith-remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art of the Renaissance.

Having co-ordinated the Christian and Pagan traditions in its work of beauty, painting could advance no farther. The stock of its sustaining motives was exhausted. A problem that preoccupied the minds of thinking men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical. Without being as conscious of their hostility as we are, men felt that the Pagan ideal was opposed to the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be effected. Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for the modern synthesis. All that ?sthetic handling, in this region more precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts. Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony than philosophy in the writings of Pico and Ficino. A new Catholicity, a cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was manifested in his pictures. It lay outside his power, or that of any other artist, to do more than to extract from both revelations the elements of plastic beauty they contained, and to show how freely he could use them for a common purpose. Nothing but the scientific method can in the long run enable us to reach that further point, outside both Christianity and Paganism, at which the classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored to the conscience educated by the Gospel. This, perchance, is the religion, still unborn or undeveloped, whereof Joachim of Flora dimly prophesied when he said that the kingdom of the Father was past, the kingdom of the Son was passing, and the kingdom of the Spirit was to be. The essence of it is contained in the whole growth to usward of the human mind; and though a creed so highly intellectualised as that will be, can never receive adequate expression from the figurative arts, still the painting of the sixteenth century forms for it, as it were, a not unworthy vestibule. It does so, because it first succeeded in humanising the religion of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming the true value of antique paganism for the modern mind, and in making both subserve the purposes of free and unimpeded art.

Meanwhile, at the moment when painting was about to be exhausted, a new art had arisen, for which it remained, within the ?sthetic sphere, to achieve much that painting could not do. When the cycle of Christian ideas had been accomplished by the painters, and when the first passion for antiquity had been satisfied, it was given at last to Music to express the soul in all its manifold feeling and complexity of movement. In music we see the point of departure where art leaves the domain of myths, Christian as well as Pagan, and occupies itself with the emotional activity of man alone, and for its own sake. Melody and harmony, disconnected from words, are capable of receiving most varied interpretations, so that the same combinations of sound express the ecstasies of earthly and of heavenly love, conveying to the mind of the hearer only that element of pure passion which is the primitive and natural ground-material of either. They give distinct form to moods of feeling as yet undetermined; or, as the Italians put it, la musica è il lamento dell' amore o la preghiera a gli dei. This, combined with its independence of all corporeal conditions, fenders music the true exponent of the spirit in its freedom, and therefore the essentially modern art.

For Painting, after the great work accomplished during the Renaissance, when the painters ran through the whole domain of thought within the scope of that age, there only remained portraiture, history, dramatic incident, landscape, genre, still life, and animals. In these spheres the art is still exercised, and much good work, undoubtedly, is annually produced by European painters. But painting has lost its hold upon the centre of our intellectual activity. It can no longer give form to the ideas that at the present epoch rule the modern world. These ideas are too abstract, too much a matter of the understanding, to be successfully handled by the figurative arts; and it cannot be too often or too emphatically stated that these arts produce nothing really great and universal in relation to the spirit of their century, except by a process analogous to the mythopoetic. With conceptions incapable of being sensuously apprehended, with ideas that lose their value when they are incarnated, they have no power to deal. As meteors become luminous by traversing the grosser element of our terrestrial atmosphere, so the thoughts that art employs must needs immerse themselves in sensuousness. They must be of a nature to gain rather than to suffer by such immersion; and they must make a direct appeal to minds habitually apt to think in metaphors and myths. Of this sort are all religious ideas at a certain stage of their development, and this attitude at certain moments of history is adopted by the popular consciousness. We have so far outgrown it, have so completely exchanged mythology for curiosity, and metaphor for science, that the necessary conditions for great art are wanting. Our deepest thoughts about the world and God are incapable of personification by any ?sthetic process; they never enter that atmosphere wherein alone they could become through fine art luminous. For the painter, who is the form-giver, they have ceased to be shining stars, and are seen as opaque stones; and though divinity be in them, it is a deity that refuses the investiture of form.

FOOTNOTES:

[2]

It may fairly be questioned whether that necessary connection between art and religion, which is commonly taken for granted, does in truth exist; in other words, whether great art might not flourish without any religious content. This, however, is a speculative problem, for present and the future rather than the past. Historically, it has always been found that the arts in their origin are dependent on religion. Nor is the reason far to seek. Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt and apprehended by the imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing glorification of humanity only exists for simple and unsophisticated societies in the form of religion. Religion is the universal poetry which all possess; and the artist, dealing with the mythology of his national belief, feels himself in vital sympathy with the imagination of the men for whom he works. More than the painter is required for the creation of great painting, and more than the poet for the exhibition of immortal verse. Painters are but the hands, and poets but the voices, whereby peoples express their accumulated thoughts and permanent emotions. Behind them crowd the generations of the myth-makers; and around them floats the vital atmosphere of enthusiasms on which their own souls and the souls of their brethren have been nourished.

[3]

All Thy strength and bloom are faded:

Who hath thus Thy state degraded?

Death upon Thy form is written;

See the wan worn limbs, the smitten

Breast upon the cruel tree!

Thus despised and desecrated,

Thus in dying desolated,

Slain for me, of sinners vilest,

Loving Lord, on me Thou smilest:

Shine, bright face, and strengthen me!

[4]

I am aware that many of my readers will demur that I am confounding Christianity with ascetic or monastic Christianity; yet I cannot read the New Testament, the Imitatio Christi, the Confessions of S. Augustine, and the Pilgrim's Progress without feeling that Christianity in its origin, and as understood by its chief champions, was and is ascetic. Of this Christianity I therefore speak, not of the philosophised Christianity, which is reasonably regarded with suspicion by the orthodox and the uncompromising. It was, moreover, with Christianity of this primitive type that the arts came first into collision.

[5]

Titian's "Assumption of the Virgin" at Venice, Correggio's "Coronation of the Virgin" at Parma.

[6]

Domenichino, Guido, Ribera, Salvator Rosa.

[7]

Not to quote again the Imitatio Christi, it is enough to allude to S. Francis as shown in the Fioretti.

[8]

The difficulty of combining the true spirit of piety with the ideal of natural beauty in art was strongly felt by Savonarola. Rio (L'Art chrétien, vol. ii. pp. 422-426) has written eloquently on this subject, but without making it plain how Savonarola's condemnation of life studies from the nude could possibly have been other than an obstacle to the liberal and scientific prosecution of the art of painting.

[9]

See Rio, L'Art chrétien, vol. ii. chap. xi. pp. 319-327, for an ingenious defence of mystic art. The tales he tells of Bernardino da Siena and the blessed Umiliana will not win the sympathy of Teutonic Christians, who must believe that semi-sensuous, semi-pious raptures, like those described by S. Catherine of Siena and S. Theresa, have something in them psychologically morbid.

* * *

Architecture of Medi?val Italy-Milan, Genoa, Venice-The Despots as Builders-Diversity of Styles-Local Influences-Lombard, Tuscan, Romanesque, Gothic-Italian want of feeling for Gothic-Cathedrals of Siena and Orvieto-Secular Buildings of the Middle Ages-Florence and Venice-Private Palaces-Public Halls-Palazzo della Signoria at Florence-Arnolfo di Cambio-S.

Maria del Fiore-Brunelleschi's Dome-Classical Revival in Architecture-Roman Ruins-Three Periods in Renaissance Architecture-Their Characteristics-Brunelleschi -Alberti-Palace-building-Michellozzo-Decorative Work of the Revival-Bramante-Vitoni's Church of the Umiltà at Pistoja-Palazzo del Te-Villa Farnesina-Sansovino at Venice-Michael Angelo-The Building of S. Peter's-Palladio-The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza-Lombard Architects-Theorists and Students of Vitruvius-Vignola and Scamozzi-European Influence of the Palladian Style-Comparison of Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.

Architecture is always the first of the fine arts to emerge from barbarism in the service of religion and of civic life. A house, as Hegel says, must be built for the god, before the image of the god, carved in stone or figured in mosaic, can be placed there. Council chambers must be prepared for the senate of a State before the national achievements can be painted on the walls. Thus Italy, before the age of the Renaissance proper, found herself provided with churches and palaces, which were destined in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to be adorned with frescoes and statues.

It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, during the long struggle for independence carried on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany against the Empire and the nobles, that some of the most durable and splendid public works were executed. The domes and towers of Florence and of Pisa were rising above the city walls, while the burghers who subscribed for their erection were staining the waves of Meloria and the cane-brakes of the Arbia with their blood. Lombardy, at the end of her duel with Frederick Barbarossa, completed a vast undertaking, by which the fields of Milan are still rendered more productive than any other pastureland in Europe. The Naviglio Grande, bringing the waters of the Ticino through a plain of thirty miles to Milan, was begun in 1179, and was finished in 1258. The torrents of S. Gothard and the Simplon, which, after filling the Lago Maggiore, seemed destined to run wasteful through a wilderness of pebbles to the sea, were thus turned to account; and to this great engineering work, as bold as it was simple, Milan owed the wealth that placed her princes on a level with the sovereigns of Europe. At the same period she built her walls, and closed their circuit with the sixteen gates that showed she loved magnificence combined with strength. Genoa, between 1276 and 1283, protected her harbours by a gigantic mole, and in 1295 brought the streams of the Ligurian Alps into the city by an aqueduct worthy of old Rome. Venice had to win her very footing from the sea and sand. So firmly did she drive her piles, so vigilantly watch their preservation, that palaces and cathedrals of marble might be safely reared upon the bosom of the deep. Meanwhile, stone bridges began to span the rivers of Italy; the streets and squares of towns were everywhere paved with flags. Before the first years of the fourteenth century the Italian cities presented a spectacle of solid and substantial comfort, very startling to northerners who travelled from the unpaved lanes of London and the muddy labyrinths of Paris.

Sismondi remarks with just pride that these great works were Republican. They were set on foot for the public use, and were constructed at the expense of the commonwealths. It is, however, right to add that what the communes had begun the princes continued. To the splendid taste of the Visconti dynasty, for instance, Milan owed her wonderful Duomo and the octagon bell-tower of S. Gottardo. The Certosas of Pavia and Chiaravalle, the palace of Pavia, and a host of minor monuments remain in Milan and its neighbourhood to prove how much a single family performed for the adornment of the cities they had subjugated. And what is true of Milan applies to Italy throughout its length and breadth. The Despots held their power at the price of magnificence in schemes of public utility. So much at least of the free spirit of the communes survived in them, that they were always rivalling each other in great works of architecture. Italian tyranny implied ?sthetic taste and liberality of expenditure.

In no way is the characteristic diversity of the Italian communities so noticeable as in their buildings. Each district, each town, has a well-defined peculiarity, reflecting the specific qualities of the inhabitants and the conditions under which they grew in culture. In some cases we may refer this local character to nationality and geographical position. Thus the name of the Lombards has been given to a style of Romanesque, which prevailed through Northern and Central Italy during the period of Lombard ascendency.[10] The Tuscans never forgot the domes of their remote ancestors; the Romans adhered closely to Latin traditions; the Southerners were affected by Byzantine and Saracenic models. In many instances the geology of the neighbourhood determined the picturesque features of its architecture. The clay-fields of the valley of the Po produced the brickwork of Cremona, Pavia, Crema, Chiaravalle, and Vercelli. To their quarries of mandorlato the Veronese builders owed the peach-bloom colours of their columned aisles. Carrara provided the Pisans with mellow marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral; Monte Ferrato supplied Pistoja and Prato with green serpentine; while the pietra serena of the Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine buildings. Again, in other instances, we detect the influence of commerce or of conquest. The intercourse of Venice with Alexandria determined the unique architecture of S. Mark's. The Arabs and the Normans left ineffaceable traces of their sojourn on Palermo. Naples and Messina still bear marks upon their churches of French workmen. All along the coasts we here and there find evidences of Oriental style imported into medi?val Italy, while the impress of the Spaniard is no less manifest in edifices of a later period.

Existing thus in the midst of many potent influences, and surrounded by the ruins of past civilisations, the Italians recombined and mingled styles of marked variety. The Roman, Byzantine, Saracenic, Lombard, and German traditions were blended in their architecture, as the presiding genius of each place determined. It followed that master-works of rare and subtle invention were produced, while no one type was fully perfected, nor can we point to any paramount Italian manner. In Italy what was gained in richness and individuality was lost in uniformity and might. Yet we may well wonder at the versatile appreciation of all types of beauty that these monuments evince. How strange, for example, it is to think of the Venetians borrowing the form and structure of their temple from the mosques of Alexandria, decking its fa?ade with the horses of Lysippus, and panelling the sanctuary with marbles from the harem-floors of Eastern emperors; while at the other end of Italy, at Palermo, close beside the ruined colonnades of Greek Segesta, Norman kings were embroidering their massive churches with Saracenic arabesques and Byzantine mosaics, interspersing delicate Arabian tracery with rope-patterns and monsters of the deep, and linking Cuphic sentences with Scandinavian runes. Meanwhile, at Rome, tombs, baths, and theatres had been turned into fortresses. The Orsini held the Mole of Hadrian; the Savelli ensconced themselves in the Theatre of Marcellus, and the Colonnesi in the Mausoleum of Augustus; the Colosseum and the Arches of Constantine and Titus harboured the Frangipani; the Baths of Trajan housed the Capocci; while the Gaetani made a castle of C?cilia Metella's tomb. Under those vast resounding vaults swarmed a brood of medi?val bravi-like the wasps that hang their pear-shaped combs along the cloisters of Pavia. There the ghost of the dead empire still sat throned and sceptred. The rites of Christianity were carried on beneath Agrippa's dome, in Diocletian's baths, in the Basilicas. No other style but that of the imperial people struck root near the Eternal City. Among her three hundred churches, Rome can only show one Gothic building. Further to the north, where German influences were more potent, the cathedrals still displayed, each after its own kind, a sunny southern waywardness. Glowing with marbles and mosaics, glittering with ornaments, where the foliage of the Corinthian acanthus hides the symbols of the Passion, and where birds and Cupids peep from tangled fruits beneath grave brows of saints and martyrs; leaning now to the long low colonnades of the Basilica, now to the high-built arches of the purely Pointed style; surmounting the meeting point of nave and transept with Etruscan domes; covering the fa?ade with bas-reliefs, the roof with statues; raising the porch-pillars upon lions and winged griffins; flanking the nave with bell-towers, or planting them apart like flowers in isolation on the open square-these wonderful buildings, the delight and joy of all who love to trace variety in beauty, and to note the impress of a nation's genius upon its art, seem, like Italy herself, to feel all influences and to assimilate all nationalities.

Amid the many styles of architecture contending for mastery in Italy, three, before the age of the Revival, bid fair to win the battle. These were the Lombard, the Tuscan Romanesque, and the Gothic. Chronologically the two former flourished nearly during the same centuries, while Gothic, coming from without, suspended their development. But chronology is of little help in the history of Italian architecture; its main features being, not uniformity of progression, but synchronous diversity and salience of local type. What remained fixed through all changes in Italy was a bias toward the forms of Roman building, which eventually in the Renaissance, becoming scientifically apprehended, determined the taste of the whole nation.

It is, perhaps, not wholly fanciful to say that, as the Lombards just failed to mould the Italians by conquest into an united people, so their architecture fell short of creating one type for the peninsula.[11] From some points of view the historian might regret that Italy did not receive that thorough subjugation in the eighth century, which would have broken down local distinctions. Such regrets, however, are singularly idle; for the main currents of the world's history move not by chance; and how, moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers forms of political existence that made her what she was? Yet, standing before some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians which the Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over France and England?[12] The pyramidal fa?ade common in these buildings, the campanili that suspend a?rial lanterns upon plain square towers, the domes rising tier over tier from the intersection of nave and transept to end in minarets and pinnacles, the low long colonnades of marble pilasters, the open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious blending of baked clay and rosy-tinted stone, the bold combination of round and pointed arches, and the weird invention whereby every string-course and capital has been carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour-all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style. As it is, the churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful. Their peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue hills and snowy Alps that constitute the charm of Lombard landscape.

If Lombard architecture, properly so-called, was partial in its influence and confined to a comparatively narrow local sphere, the same is true of the Tuscan Romanesque. The church of Samminiato, near Florence [about 1013], and the cathedral of Pisa [begun 1063], not to mention other less eminent examples at Lucca and Pistoja, are sufficient evidences that in the darkest period of the Middle Ages the Italians were aiming at an architectural Renaissance. The influence of classical models is apparent both in the construction and the detail of these basilicas; while the deeply grounded preference of the Italian genius for round arches, for colonnades of pillars and pilasters, and for large rectangular spaces, with low roofs and shallow tribunes, finds full satisfaction in these original and noble buildings. It is impossible to refrain from deploring that the Romanesque of Tuscany should have been checked in its development by the intrusion of the German Gothic. Had it run its course unthwarted, a national style suited to the temperament of the people might have been formed, and much that was pedantic in the revival of the fifteenth century have been obviated.

The place of Gothic architecture in Italy demands fuller treatment. It was due partly to the direct influence of German emperors, partly to the imperial sympathies of the great nobles, partly to the Franciscan friars, who aimed at building large churches cheaply, and partly to the admiration excited by the grandeur of the Pointed style as it prevailed in Northern Europe, that Gothic-so alien to the Italian genius and climate-took root, spread widely, and flourished freely for a season. In thus enumerating the conditions favourable to the spread of Gottico-Tedesco, I am far from wishing to assert that this style was purely foreign. Italy, in common with the rest of Europe, passed by a natural process of evolution from the Romanesque to the Pointed manner, and treated the latter with an originality that proves a certain natural assimilation. Yet the first Gothic church, that of S. Francis at Assisi, was designed by a German; the most splendid, that of Our Lady at Milan, is emphatically German.[13] During the comparatively brief period of Gothic ascendency the Italians never forgot their Latin and Lombard sympathies. The mood of mind in which they Gothicised was partial and transient. The evolution of this style was, therefore, neither so spontaneous and simple, nor yet so uninterrupted and complete, in Italy as in the North. While it produced the church of S. Francesco at Assisi and the cathedrals of Siena, Orvieto, Lucca, Bologna, Florence, and Milan, together with the town-halls of Perugia, Siena, and Florence, it failed to take firm hold upon the national taste, and died away before the growing passion for antiquity that restored the Italians to a sense of their own intellectual greatness. It is clear that, as soon as they were conscious of their vocation to revive the culture of the classic age, they at once and for ever abandoned the style appropriate to northern feudalism. They seem to have adopted it half-unwillingly and to have understood it only in the imperfect way in which they comprehended chivalry.

The Italians never rightly apprehended the specific nature of Gothic architecture. They could not forget the horizontal lines, flat roofs, and blank walls of the Basilica. Like their Roman ancestors, they aimed at covering the ground with the smallest possible expenditure of construction; to enclose large spaces within simple limits was their first object, and the effect of beauty or sublimity was gained by the proportions given to the total area. When, therefore, they adopted the Gothic style, they failed to perceive that its true merit consists in the negation of nearly all that the Latin style holds precious. Horizontal lines are as far as possible annihilated; walls are lost in windows; aisles and columns, apses and chapels, are multiplied with a view to complexity of architectonic effect; flat roofs become intolerable. The whole force employed in the construction has an upward tendency, and the spire is the completion of the edifice; for to the spire its countless soaring lines-lines not of stationary strength, but of ascendent growth-converge. All this the Italians were slow to comprehend. The campanile, for example, never became an integral part of their buildings. It stood alone, and was reserved for its original purpose of keeping the bells. The windows, for a reason very natural in Italy, where there is rather too much than too little sunlight, were curtailed; and instead of the multiplied bays and clustered columns of a northern Gothic aisle, the nave of so vast a church as S. Petronio at Bologna is measured by six arches raised on simple piers. The fa?ade of an Italian cathedral was studied as a screen, quite independently of its relation to the interior; in the beautiful church of Crema, for example, the moon at night looks through the upper windows of a frontispiece raised far above the low roof of the nave. For the total effect of the exterior, as will be apparent to anyone who observes the Duomo of Orvieto from behind, no thought was taken. In this way the Italians missed the point and failed to perceive the poetry of Gothic architecture. Its symbolical significance was lost upon them; perhaps we ought to say that the Italian temperament, in art as in religion, was incapable of assimilating the vague yet powerful mysticism of the Teutonic races.

On the other hand, what they sacrificed of genuine Gothic character, was made good after their own fashion. Surface decoration, whether of fresco or mosaic, bronze-work or bas-relief, wood-carving or panelling in marble, baked clay or enamelled earthenware was never carried to such perfection in Gothic buildings of the purer type; nor had sculpture in the North an equal chance of detaching itself from the niche and tabernacle, which forced it to remain the slave of architecture. Thus the comparative defects of Italian Gothic were directly helpful in promoting those very arts for which the people had a genius unrivalled among modern nations.

It is only necessary to contrast the two finest cathedrals of this style, those of Siena and Orvieto, with two such buildings as the cathedrals of Rheims and Salisbury, in order to perceive the structural inferiority of the former, as well as their superiority for all subordinate artistic purposes. Long straight lines, low roofs, narrow windows, a fa?ade of surprising splendour but without a strict relation to the structure of the nave and aisles, a cupola surmounting the intersection of nave, choir, and transepts; simple tribunes at the east end, a detached campanile, round columns instead of clustered piers, a mixture of semicircular and pointed arches; these are some of the most salient features of the Sienese Duomo. But the material is all magnificent; and the hand, obedient to the dictates of an artist's brain, has made itself felt on every square foot of the building. Alternate courses of white and black marble, cornices loaded with grave or animated portraits of the Popes, sculptured shrines, altars, pulpits, reliquaries, fonts and holy-water vases, panels of inlaid wood and pictured pavements, bronze candelabra and wrought-iron screens, gilding and colour and precious work of agate and lapis lazuli-the masterpieces of men famous each in his own line-delight the eye in all directions. The whole church is a miracle of richness, a radiant and glowing triumph of inventive genius, the product of a hundred master-craftsmen toiling through successive centuries to do their best. All its countless details are so harmonised by the controlling taste, so brought together piece by piece in obedience to artistic instinct, that the total effect is ravishingly beautiful. Yet it is clear that no one paramount idea, determining and organising all these marvels, existed in the mind of the first architect. In true Gothic work the details that make up the charm of this cathedral would have been subordinated to one architectonic thought; they would not have been suffered to assert their individuality, or to contribute, except as servants, to the whole effect. The northern Gothic church is like a body with several members; the southern Gothic church is an accretion of beautiful atoms. The northern Gothic style corresponds to the national unity of federalised races, organised by a social hierarchy of mutually dependent classes. In the southern Gothic style we find a mirror of political diversity, independent personality, burgher-like equality, despotic will. Thus the specific qualities of Italy on her emergence from the Middle Ages may be traced by no undue exercise of the fancy in her monuments. They are emphatically the creation of citizens-of men, to use Giannotti's phrase, distinguished by alternating obedience and command, not ranked beneath a monarchy, but capable themselves of sovereign power.[14]

What has been said of Siena is no less true of the Duomo of Orvieto. Though it seems to aim at a severer Gothic, and though the fa?ade is more architecturally planned, a single glance at the exterior of the edifice shows that the builders had no lively sense of the requirements of the style they used. What can be more melancholy than those blank walls, broken by small round recesses protruding from the side chapels of the nave, those gaunt and barren angles at the east end, and those few pinnacles appended at a venture? It is clear that the spirit of the northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived. On the other hand, the interior is noble. The feeling for space possessed by the architect has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed, though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive by its severe harmony. But the real attractions of the church are isolated details. Wherever the individual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge, there our gaze is riveted, our criticism challenged, our admiration won. The frescoes of Signorelli, the bas-reliefs of the Pisani, the statuary of Lo Scalza and Mosca, the tarsia of the choir stalls, the Alexandrine work and mosaics of the fa?ade, the bronzes placed upon its brackets, and the wrought acanthus scrolls of its superb pilasters-these are the objects for inexhaustible wonder in the cathedral of Orvieto. On approaching a building of this type, we must abandon our conceptions of organic architecture: only the Greek and northern Gothic styles deserve that epithet. We must not seek for severe discipline and architectonic design. Instead of one presiding, all-determining idea, we must be prepared to welcome a wealth of separate beauties, wrought out by men of independent genius, whereby each part is made a masterpiece, and many diverse elements become a whole of picturesque rather than architectural impressiveness.

It would not be difficult to extend this kind of criticism to the Duomo of Milan. Speaking strictly, a more unlucky combination of different styles-the pyramidal fa?ade of Lombard architecture and the long thin lights of German Gothic, for example-a clumsier misuse of ill-appropriated details in the heavy piers of the nave, or a more disastrous adjustment of the monster windows to the main lines of the nave and aisles, could scarcely be imagined. Yet no other church, perhaps, in Europe leaves the same impression of the marvellous upon the fancy. The splendour of its pure white marble, blushing with the rose of evening or of dawn, radiant in noonday sunlight, and fabulously fairy-like beneath the moon and stars, the multitudes of statues sharply cut against a clear blue sky, and gazing at the Alps across that memorable tract of plain, the immense space and light-irradiated gloom of the interior, the deep tone of the bells above at a vast distance, and the gorgeous colours of the painted glass, contribute to a scenical effect unparalleled in Christendom.

The two styles, Lombard and Gothic, of which I have been speaking, were both in a certain sense exotic. Within the great cities the pith of the population was Latin; and no style of building that did not continue the tradition of the Romans, in the spirit of the Roman manner, and with strict observance of its details, satisfied them. It was a main feature of the Renaissance that, when the Italians undertook the task of reuniting themselves by study with the past, they abandoned all other forms of architecture, and did their best to create one in harmony with the relics of Latin monuments. To trace the history of this revived classic architecture will occupy me later in this chapter; but for the moment it is necessary to turn aside and consider briefly the secular buildings of Italy before the date of the Renaissance proper.

About the same time that the cathedrals were being built, the nobles filled the towns with fortresses. These at first were gaunt and unsightly; how overcrowded with tall bare towers a medi?val Italian city could be, is still shown by San Gemignano, the only existing instance where the torroni have been left untouched.[15] In course of time, when the aristocracy came to be fused with the burghers, and public order was maintained by law in the great cities, these forts made way for spacious palaces. The temper of the citizens in each place and the local character of artistic taste determined the specific features of domestic as of ecclesiastical architecture. Though it is hard to define what are the social differences expressed by the large quadrangles of Francesco Sforza's hospital at Milan, and the heavy cube of the Riccardi palace at Florence, we feel that the genius loci has in each case controlled the architect. The sunny spaces of the one building, with its terra-cotta traceries of birds and grapes and Cupids, contrast with the stern brown mouldings and impenetrable solidity of the other. That the one was raised by the munificence of a sovereign in his capital, while the other was the dwelling of a burgher in a city proud of its antique sobriety, goes some way to explain the difference. In like manner the court-life of a dynastic principality produced the castle of Urbino, so diverse in its style and adaptation from the ostentatious mansions of the Genoese merchants. It is not fanciful to say that the civic life of a free and factious republic is represented by the heavy walls and narrow windows of Florentine dwelling-places. In their rings of iron, welded between rock and rock about the basement, as though for the beginning of a barricade-in their torch-rests of wrought metal, gloomy portals and dimly-lighted courts, we trace the habits of caution and reserve that marked the men who led the parties of Uberti and Albizzi. The Sienese palaces are lighter and more elegant in style, as belonging to a people proverbially pleasure-loving; while a still more sumptuous and secure mode of life finds expression in the open loggie and spacious staircases of Venice. The graceful buildings which overhang the Grand Canal are exactly fitted for an oligarchy, sure of its own authority and loved of the people. Feudal despotism, on the contrary, reigns in the heart of Ferrara, where the Este's stronghold, moated, draw-bridged, and portcullised, casting dense shadow over the water that protects the dungeons, still seems to threaten the public square and overawe the homes of men.

To the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, again, we owe the town halls and public palaces that form so prominent a feature in the city architecture of Italy. The central vitality of once powerful States is symbolised in the broletti of the Lombard cities, dusty and abandoned now in spite of their clear-cut terra-cotta traceries. There is something strangely melancholy in their desolation. Wandering through the vast hall of the Ragione at Padua, where the very shadows seem asleep as they glide over the wide unpeopled floor, it is not easy to remember that this was once the theatre of eager intrigues, ere the busy stir of the old burgh was utterly extinguished. Few of these public palaces have the good fortune to be distinguished, like that of the Doge at Venice, by world-historical memories and by works of art as yet unrivalled. The spirit of the Venetian Republic still lives in that unique building. Architects may tell us that its Gothic arcades are melodramatic; sculptors may depreciate the decorative work of Sansovino; painters may assert that the genius of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese shines elsewhere with greater lustre. Yet the poet clings with ever-deepening admiration to the sea-born palace of the ancient mistress of the sea, and the historian feels that here, as at Athens, art has made the past towards which he looks eternal.

Two other great Italian houses of the Commonwealth, rearing their towers above the town for tocsin and for ward, owe immortality to their intrinsic beauty. These are the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Few buildings in Europe are more picturesquely fascinating than the palace of Siena, with its outlook over hill and dale to cloud-capped Monte Amiata. Yet, in spite of its unparalleled position on the curved and sloping piazza, where the contrade of Siena have run their palio for centuries, this palace lacks the vivid interest attaching to the home Arnolfo raised at Florence for the rulers of his native city. During their term of office the Priors never quitted the Palace of the Signory. All deliberations on state affairs took place within its walls, and its bell was the pulse that told how the heart of Florence throbbed. The architect of this huge mass of masonry was Arnolfo del Cambio, one of the greatest builders of the Middle Ages, a man who may be called the Michael Angelo of the thirteenth century[16]. In 1298 he was ordered to erect a dwelling-place for the Commonwealth, to the end that the people might be protected in their fortress from the violence of the nobles. The building of the palace and the levelling of the square around it were attended with circumstances that bring forcibly before our minds the stern conditions of republican life in medi?val Italy. A block of houses had to be bought from the family of Foraboschi; and their tower, called Torre della Vacca, was raised and turned into the belfry of the Priors. There was not room enough, however, to construct the palace itself with right angles, unless it were extended into the open space where once had stood the houses of the Uberti, "traitors to Florence and Ghibellines." In destroying these, the burghers had decreed that thenceforth for ever the feet of men should pass where the hearths of the proscribed nobles once had blazed. Arnolfo begged that he might trespass on this site; but the people refused permission. Where the traitors' nest had been, there the sacred foundations of the public house should not be laid. Consequently the Florentine Palazzo is, was, and will be cramped of its correct proportions[17].

No Italian architect has enjoyed the proud privilege of stamping his own individuality more strongly on his native city than Arnolfo; and for this reason it may be permitted to enlarge upon his labours here. When we take our stand upon the hill of Samminiato, the Florence at our feet owes her physiognomy in a great measure to this man. The tall tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the bulk of the Duomo, and the long low oblong mass of Santa Croce are all his. His too are the walls that define the city of flowers from the gardens round about her.[18] Even the master-works of his successors subordinate their beauty to his first conception. Giotto's campanile, Brunelleschi's cupola, and Orcagna's church of Orsammichele, in spite of their undoubted and authentic originality, are placed where he had planned.

In 1294 the Florentines determined to rebuild their mother-church upon a scale of unexampled grandeur. The commission given to their architect displays so strikingly the lordly spirit in which these burghers set about the work, that, though it has been often quoted, a portion of the document shall be recited here. "Since the highest mark of prudence in a people of noble origin is to proceed in the management of their affairs so that their magnanimity and wisdom may be evinced in their outward acts, we order Arnolfo, head-master of our commune, to make a design for the renovation of Santa Reparata in a style of magnificence which neither the industry nor the power of man can surpass, that it may harmonise with the opinion of many wise persons in this city and state, who think that this commune should not engage in any enterprise unless its intention be to make the result correspond with that noblest sort of heart which is composed of the united will of many citizens."[19] From Giovanni Villani we learn what taxes were levied by the Wool-Guild, and set apart in 1331 for the completion of the building. They were raised upon all goods bought or sold within the city in two separate rates, the net produce amounting in the first year to 2,000 lire.[20] The cathedral designed by Arnolfo was of vast dimensions: it covers 84,802 feet, while that of Cologne covers 81,461 feet; and, says Fergusson, "as far as mere conception of plan goes, there can be little doubt but that the Florentine cathedral far surpasses its German rival."[21] Nothing, indeed, can be imagined more noble than the scheme of this huge edifice. Studying its ground-plan, and noting how the nave unfolds into a mighty octagon, which in its turn displays three well-proportioned apses, we are induced to think that a sublimer thought has never been expressed in stone. At this point, however, our admiration receives a check. In the execution of the parts the builder dwarfed what had been conceived on so magnificent a scale; aiming at colossal simplicity, he failed to secure the multiplicity of subordinated members essential to the total effect of size. "Like all inexperienced architects, he seems to have thought that greatness of parts would add to the greatness of the whole, and in consequence used only four great arches in the whole length of his nave, giving the central aisle a width of fifty-five feet clear. The whole width is within ten feet of that of Cologne, and the height about the same; and yet, in appearance, the height is about half, and the breadth less than half, owing to the better proportion of the parts and to the superior appropriateness in the details on the part of the German cathedral."[22] The truth of these remarks will be felt by every one on whom the ponderous vacuity of the interior has weighed. Other notable defects there are too in this building, proceeding chiefly from the Italian misconception of Gothic style. The windows are few and narrow, so that little light even at noonday struggles through them; and broad barren spaces of grey walls oppress the eye. Externally the whole church is panelled with parti-coloured marbles, according to Florentine custom; but this panelling bears no relation to the structure: it is so much surface decoration possessing value chiefly for the colourist. Arnolfo died before the dome, as he designed it, could be placed upon the octagon, and nothing is known for certain about the form he meant it to assume. It seems, however, probable that he intended to adopt something similar to the dome of Chiaravalle, which ends, after a succession of narrowing octagons, in a slender conical pyramid.[23] Subordinate spires would then have been placed at each of the four angles where the nave and transepts intersect; and the whole external effect, for richness and variety, would have outrivalled that of any European building. It is well known that the erection of the dome was finally entrusted to Brunelleschi in 1420. Arnolfo's church now sustains in air an octagonal cupola of the simplest possible design, in height and size rivalling that of S. Peter's. It was thus that the genius of the Renaissance completed what the genius of the Middle Ages had begun. But in Italy there was no real break between the two periods. Though Arnolfo employed the Pointed style in his design, we find nothing genuinely Gothic in the church. It has no pinnacles, flying buttresses, side chapels, or subordinate supports. To use the phrase of Michelet, who has chosen the dramatic episode of Brunelleschi's intervention in the rearing of the dome for a parable of the Renaissance, "the colossal church stood up simply, naturally, as a strong man in the morning rises from his bed without the need of staff or crutch."[24] This indeed is the glory of Italian as compared with Northern architecture. The Italians valued the strength of simple perspicuity: all the best works of their builders are geometrical ideas of the purest kind translated into stone. It is, however, true that the gain of vast a?rial space was hardly sufficient to compensate for the impression of emptiness they leave upon the senses. We feel this very strongly when we study the model prepared by Bramante's pupil, Cristoforo Rocchi, for the cathedral of Pavia; yet here we see the neo-Latin genius of the Italian artist working freely in an element exactly suited to his powers. When the same order of genius sought to express its conception through the language of the Gothic style, the result was invariably defective.[25]

The classical revival of the fifteenth century made itself immediately felt in architecture; and Brunelleschi's visit to Rome in 1403 may be fixed as the date of the Renaissance in this art. Gothic, as we have already seen, was an alien in Italy. Its importation from the North had checked the free development of national architecture, which in the eleventh century began at Pisa by a conscious return to classic details. But the reign of Gothic was destined to be brief. Petrarch and Boccaccio, as I showed in my last volume, turned the whole intellectual energy of the Florentines into the channels of Latin and Greek scholarship.[26] The ancient world absorbed all interests, and the Italians with one will shook themselves free of the medieval style they never rightly understood, and which they henceforth stigmatised as barbarous.[27]

The problem that occupied all the Renaissance architects was how to restore the manner of ancient Rome as far as possible, adapting it to the modern requirements of ecclesiastical, civic, and domestic buildings. Of Greek art they knew comparatively nothing: nor indeed could Greek architecture have offered for their purpose the same plastic elements as Roman-itself a derived style, admitting of easier adjustment to modern uses than the inflexibly pure art of Greece. At the same time they possessed but imperfect fragments of Roman work. The ruins of baths, theatres, tombs, temple-fronts, and triumphal arches, were of little immediate assistance in the labour of designing churches and palaces. All that the architects could do, after familiarising themselves with the remains of ancient Rome, and assimilating the spirit of Roman art, was to clothe their own inventions with classic details. The form and structure of their edifices were modern; the parts were copied from antique models. A want of organic unity and structural sincerity is always the result of those necessities under which a secondary and adapted style must labour; and thus the pseudo-Roman buildings even of the best Renaissance period display faults similar to those of the Italian Gothic. While they are remarkable for grandeur of effect in all that concerns the distribution of light and shade, the covering and enclosing of space, and the disposition of masses, they show at best but a superficial correspondence between the borrowed forms and the construction these are used to mask.[28] The edifices of this period abound in more or less successful shams, in surface decoration more or less pleasing to the eye; their real greatness, meanwhile, consists in the feeling for spatial proportions and for linear harmonies possessed by their architects.

Three periods in the development of Renaissance architecture may be roughly marked.[29] The first, extending from 1420 to 1500, is the age of experiment and of luxuriant inventiveness. The second embraces the first forty years of the sixteenth century. The most perfect buildings of the Italian Renaissance were produced within this short space of time. The third, again comprising about forty years, from 1540 to 1580, leads onward to the reign of mannerism and exaggeration, called by the Italians barocco. In itself the third period is distinguished by a scrupulous purism bordering upon pedantry, strict adherence to theoretical rules, and sacrifice of inventive qualities to established canons. To do more than briefly indicate the masterpieces of these three periods, would be impossible in a work that does not pretend to treat of architecture exhaustively: and yet to omit all notice of the builders of this age and of their styles, would be to neglect the most important art-phase of the time I have undertaken to illustrate.

In the first period we are bewildered by the luxuriance of creative powers and by the rioting of the fancy in all forms of beauty indiscriminately mingled. In general we detect a striving after effects not fully realised, and a tendency to indulge in superfluous ornament without regard for strictness of design. The imperfect comprehension of classical models and the exuberant vivacity of the imagination in the fifteenth century account for the florid work of this time. Something too is left of medi?val fancy; the details borrowed from the antique undergo fantastic transmutation at the hands of men accustomed to the vehement emotion of the romantic ages. Whatever the Renaissance took from antique art, it was at first unable to assimilate either the moderation of the Greeks or the practical sobriety of the Romans. Christianity had deepened and intensified the sources of imaginative life; and just as reminiscences of classic style impaired Italian Gothic, so now a trace of Gothic is perceptible in the would-be classic work of the Revival. The result of these combined influences was a wonderful and many-featured hybrid, best represented in one monument by the fa?ade of the Certosa at Pavia. While characterising the work of the earlier Renaissance as fused of divers manners, we must not forget that it was truly living, full of purpose, and according to its own standard sincere. It was a new birth; no mere repetition of something dead and gone, but the product of vivid forces stirred to original creativeness by admiration for the past. It corresponded, moreover, with exquisite exactitude to the halting of the conscience between Christianity and Paganism, and to the blent beauty that the poets loved. On reeds dropped from the hands of dead Pan the artists of this period, each in his, own sphere, piped ditties of romance.

To these general remarks upon the style of the first period the Florentine architects offer an exception; and yet the first marked sign of a new era in the art of building was given at Florence. Purity of taste and firmness of judgment, combined with scientific accuracy, were always distinctive of Florentines. To such an extent did these qualities determine their treatment of the arts that acute critics have been found to tax them-and in my opinion justly-with hardness and frigidity.[30] Brunelleschi in 1425 designed the basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and correctness. What he had learned from the ruins of Rome he here applied in obedience to his own artistic instinct. S. Lorenzo is a columnar edifice with round arches and semicircular apses. Not a form or detail in the whole church is strictly speaking at variance with Roman precedent; and yet the general effect resembles nothing we possess of antique work. It is a masterpiece of intelligent Renaissance adaptation. The same is true of S. Spirito, built in 1470, after Brunelleschi's death, according to his plans. The extraordinary capacity of this great architect will, however, win more homage from ordinary observers when they contemplate the Pitti Palace and the cupola of the cathedral. Both of these are master-works of personal originality. What is Roman in the Pitti Palace, is the robust simplicity of massive strength; but it is certain that no patrician of the republic or the empire inhabited a house at all resembling this. The domestic habits of the Middle Ages, armed for self-defence, and on guard against invasion from without, still find expression in the solid bulk of this forbidding dwelling-place, although its majesty and largeness show that the reign of milder and more courtly manners has begun. To speak of the cupola of the Duomo in connection with a simple revival of Roman taste, would be equally inappropriate. It remains a tour de force of individual genius, cultivated by the experience of Gothic vault-building, and penetrated with the greatness of imperial Rome. Its spirit of dauntless audacity and severe concentration alone is antique.

Almost contemporary with Brunelleschi was Leo Battista Alberti, a Florentine, who, working upon somewhat different principles, sought more closely to reproduce the actual elements of Roman architecture.[31] In his remodelling of S. Francesco at Rimini the type he followed was that of the triumphal arch, and what was finished of that wonderful fa?ade, remains to prove how much might have been made of well-proportioned pilasters and nobly curved arcades.[32] The same principle is carried out in S. Andrea at Mantua. The frontispiece of this church is a gigantic arch of triumph; the interior is noticeable for its simple harmony of parts, adopted from the vaulted baths of Rome. The combination of these antique details in an imposing structure implied a high imaginative faculty at a moment when the rules of classic architecture had not been as yet reduced to method. Yet the weakness of Alberti's principle is revealed when we consider that here the lofty central arch of the fa?ade serves only for a decoration. Too high and spacious even for the chariots of a Roman triumph, it forms an inappropriate entrance to the modest vestibule of a Christian church.

Like Brunelleschi, Alberti applied his talents to the building of a palace in Florence that became a model to subsequent architects. The Palazzo Rucellai retains many details of the medi?val Tuscan style, especially in the windows divided by slender pilasters. But the three orders introduced by way of surface decoration, the doorways, and the cornices, are transcripts from Roman ruins. This building, one of the most beautiful in Italy, was copied by Francesco di Giorgio and Bernardo Fiorentino for the palaces they constructed at Pienza.

This was the age of sumptuous palace-building; and for no purpose was the early Renaissance style better adapted than for the erection of dwelling-houses that should match the free and worldly splendour of those times. The just medium between medi?val massiveness and classic simplicity was attained in countless buildings beautiful and various beyond description. Bologna is full of them; and Urbino, in the Ducal Palace, contains one specimen unexampled in extent and unique in interest. Yet here, as in all departments of fine art, Florence takes the lead. After Brunelleschi and Alberti came Michellozzo, the favourite architect of Cosimo de' Medici; Benedetto da Majano; Giuliano and Antonio di San Gallo; and Il Cronaca. Cosimo de' Medici, having said that "envy is a plant no man should water," denied himself the monumental house designed by Brunelleschi, and chose instead the modest plan of Michellozzo. Brunelleschi had meant to build the Casa Medici along one side of the Piazza di S. Lorenzo; but when Cosimo refused his project, he broke up the model he had made, to the great loss of students of this age of architecture. Michellozzo was then commissioned to raise the mighty, but comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace at the corner of the Via Larga, which continued to be the residence of the Medici through all their chequered history, until at last they took possession of the Palazzo Pitti.[33] The most beautiful of all Florentine dwelling-houses designed at this period is that which Benedetto da Majano built for Filippo Strozzi. Combining the burgher-like austerity of antecedent ages with a grandeur and a breadth of style peculiar to the Renaissance, the Palazzo Strozzi may be chosen as the perfect type of Florentine domestic architecture.[34] Other cities were supplied by Florence with builders, and Milan owed her fanciful Ospedale Maggiore at this epoch to Antonio Filarete, a Florentine. This great edifice illustrates the emancipation from fixed rule that distinguishes much of the architecture of the earlier Renaissance. The detail is not unfrequently Gothic, especially in the pointed windows; but the feeling of the whole structure, in its airy space and lightness, delicate terra-cotta mouldings, and open loggie, is truly Cinque Cento.[35]

In no other style than this of the earlier Renaissance is the builder more inseparably connected with the decorator. The labours of the stone-carver, who provided altars chased with Scripture histories in high relief, pulpits hung against a column of the nave, tombs with canopies and floral garlands, organ galleries enriched with bas-reliefs of singing boys, ciboria with kneeling and adoring angels, marble tabernacles for relics, vases for holy water, fonts and fountains, and all the indescribable wealth of scrolls and friezes around doors and screens and balustrades that fence the choir, are added to those of the bronze-founder, with his mighty doors and pendent lamps, his candelabra sustained by angels, torch-rests and rings, embossed basements for banners of state, and portraits of recumbent senators or prelates.[36] The wood carver contributes tarsia like that of Fra Giovanni da Verona.[37] The worker in wrought iron welds such screens as guard the chapel of the Sacra Cintola at Prato. The Robbias prepare their delicately-toned reliefs for the lunettes above the doorways. Modellers in clay produce the terra-cotta work of the Certosa, or the carola of angels who surround the little cupola behind the church of S. Eustorgio at Milan.[38] Meanwhile mosaics are provided for the dome or let into the floor;[39] agates and marbles and lapis lazuli are pieced together for altar fronts and panellings;[40] stalls are carved into fantastic patterns, and heavy roofs are embossed with figures of the saints and armorial emblems.[41] Tapestry is woven from the designs of excellent masters;[42] great painters contribute arabesques of fresco or of stucco mixed with gilding, and glass is coloured from the outlines of such draughtsmen as Ghiberti.

Some of the decorative elements I have hastily enumerated, will be treated in connection with the respective arts of sculpture and painting. The fact, meanwhile, deserves notice that they received a new development in relation to architecture during the first period of the Renaissance, and that they formed, as it were, an integral part of its main ?sthetical purpose. Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of ornamental adjuncts, and an uninteresting shell is left: what, for instance, would the fa?ades of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without their sculptured and inlaid marbles? The genius of the age found scope in subordinate details, and the most successful architect was the man who combined in himself a feeling for the capacities of the greatest number of associated arts. As the consequence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on every detail, the monuments of architecture belonging to the earlier Renaissance have a poetry that compensates for structural defects; just as its wildest literary extravagances-the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, for instance-have a charm of wanton fancy and young joy that atones to sympathetic students for intolerable pedantries.

In the second period the faults of the first group of Renaissance builders were in a large measure overcome, and their striving after the production of new yet classic form was more completely realised. The reckless employment of luxuriant decoration yielded to a chastened taste, without the sacrifice of beauty or magnificence. Style was refined; the construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more true.

To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place among the architects of the golden age.[43] Though little of his work survives entire and unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest influence over both successors and contemporaries. What they chiefly owed to him, was the proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity and to unity of effect. He came at a moment when constructive problems had been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister arts had reached their highest point. His early training in Lombardy accustomed him to the adoption of clustered piers instead of single columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to the free use of minor cupolas-elements of design introduced neither by Brunelleschi nor by Alberti into the Renaissance style of Florence, but which were destined to determine the future of architecture for all Italy. Nature had gifted Bramante with calm judgment and refined taste; his sense of the right limitations of the pseudo-Roman style was exquisite, and his feeling for structural symmetry was just. If his manner strikes us as somewhat cold and abstract when compared with the more genial audacities of the earlier Renaissance, we must remember how salutary was the example of a rigorous and modest manner in an age which required above all things to be preserved from its own luxuriant waywardness of fancy. It is hard to say how much of the work ascribed to Bramante in Northern Italy is genuine; most of it, at any rate, belongs to the manner of his youth. The Church of S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi, the palace of the Cancelleria at Rome, and the unfinished cathedral of Pavia, enable us to comprehend the general character of this great architect's refined and noble manner. S. Peter's, it may be said in passing, retains, in spite of all subsequent modifications, many essentially Bramantesque features-especially in the distribution of the piers and rounded niches.

Bramante formed no school strictly so called, though his pupils, Cristoforo Rocchi and Ventura Vitoni, carried out his principles of building at Pavia and Pistoja. Vitoni's church of the Umiltà in the latter city is a pure example of conscientious neo-Roman architecture. It consists of a large octagon surmounted by a dome and preceded by a lofty vaulted atrium or vestibule. The single round arch of this vestibule repeats the testudo of a Roman bath, and the decorative details are accurately reproduced from similar monuments. Unfortunately, Giorgio Vasari, who was employed to finish the cupola, spoiled its effect by raising it upon an ugly attic; it is probable that the church, as designed by Vitoni, would have presented the appearance of a miniature Pantheon. At Rome the influence of Bramante was propagated through Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Baldassare Peruzzi. Raphael's claim to consideration as an architect rests upon the Palazzi Vidoni and Pandolfini, the Cappella Chigi in S. Maria del Popolo, and the Villa Madama. The last-named building, executed by Giulio Romano after Raphael's design, is carried out in a style so forcible as to make us fancy that the pupil had a larger share in its creation than his teacher. These works, however, sink into insignificance before the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, the masterpiece of Giulio's genius. This most noble of Italian pleasure-houses remains to show what the imagination of a poet-artist could recover from the splendour of old Rome and adapt to the use of his own age. The vaults of the Therm? of Titus, with their cameos of stucco and frescoed arabesques, are here repeated on a scale and with an exuberance of invention that surpass the model. Open loggie yield fair prospect over what were once trim gardens; spacious halls, adorned with frescoes in the vehement and gorgeous style of the Roman school, form a fit theatre for the grand parade-life of an Italian prince. The whole is Pagan in its pride and sensuality, its prodigality of strength and insolence of freedom. Having seen this palace, we do not wonder that the fame of Giulio flew across the Alps and lived upon the lips of Shakspere: for in his master-work at Mantua he collected, as it were, and epitomised in one building all that enthralled the fancy of the Northern nations when they thought of Italy.

A pendant to the Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on the banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow townsman Agostino Chigi of Siena. It is an idyll placed beside a lyric ode, gentler and quieter in style, yet full of grace, breathing the large and liberal spirit of enjoyment that characterised the age of Leo. The frescoes of Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael and his pupils, have made this villa famous in the annals of Italian painting. The memory of the Roman banker's splendid style of living marks it out as no less noteworthy in the history of Renaissance manners.[44]

Among the great edifices of this second period we may reckon Jacopo Sansovino's buildings at Venice, though they approximate rather to the style of the earlier Renaissance in all that concerns exuberance of decorative detail. The Venetians, somewhat behind the rest of Italy in the development of the fine arts, were at the height of prosperity and wealth during the middle period of the Renaissance; and no city is more rich in monuments of the florid style. Something of their own delight in sensuous magnificence they communicated even to the foreigners who dwelt among them. The court of the Ducal Palace, the Scuola di S. Rocco, the Palazzo Corner, and the Palazzo Vendramini-Calergi, illustrate the, strong yet fanciful bravura style that pleased the aristocracy of Venice. Nowhere else does the architecture of the Middle Ages melt by more imperceptible degrees into that of the Revival, retaining through all changes the impress of a people splendour-loving in the highest sense. The Library of S. Mark, built by Sansovino in 1536, remains, however, the crowning triumph of Venetian art. It is impossible to contemplate its noble double row of open arches without feeling the eloquence of rhetoric so brilliant, without echoing the judgment of Palladio, that nothing more sumptuous or beautiful had been invented since the age of ancient Rome.

Time would fail to tell of all the architects who crowd the first half of the sixteenth century-of Antonio di San Gallo, famous for fortifications; of Baccio d'Agnolo, who raised the Campanile of S. Spirito at Florence; of Giovanni Maria Falconetto, to whose genius Padua owed so many princely edifices; of Michele Sanmicheli, the military architect of Verona, and the builder of five mighty palaces for the nobles of his native city. Yet the greatest name of all this period cannot be omitted: Michael Angelo must be added to the list of builders in the golden age. In architecture, as in sculpture, he not only bequeathed to posterity masterpieces of individual energy and original invention, in their kind unrivalled; but he also prepared for his successors a false way of working, and justified by his example the extravagances of the decadence. Without noticing the fa?ade designed for S. Lorenzo at Florence, the transformation of the Baths of Diocletian into a church, the remodelling of the Capitoline buildings, and the continuation of the Palazzo Farnese-works that either exist only in drawings or have been confused by later alterations-it is enough here to mention the Sagrestia Nuova of S. Lorenzo and the cupola of S. Peter's. The sacristy may be looked on either as the masterpiece of a sculptor who required fit setting for his statues, or of an architect who designed statues to enhance the structure he had planned. Both arts are used with equal ease, nor has the genius of Michael Angelo dealt more masterfully with the human frame than with the forms of Roman architecture in this chapel. He seems to have paid no heed to classic precedent, and to have taken no pains to adapt the parts to the structural purpose of the building. It was enough for him to create a wholly novel framework for the modern miracle of sculpture it enshrines, attending to such rules of composition as determine light and shade, and seeking by the slightness of mouldings and pilasters to enhance the terrible and massive forms that brood above the Medicean tombs. The result is a product of picturesque and plastic art, as true to the Michaelangelesque spirit as the Temple of the Wingless Victory to that of Pheidias. But where Michael Angelo achieved a triumph of boldness, lesser natures were betrayed into bizarrerie; and this chapel of the Medici, in spite of its grandiose simplicity, proved a stumbling-block to subsequent architects by encouraging them to despise propriety and violate the laws of structure. The same may be said with even greater truth of the Laurentian Library and its staircase. The false windows, repeated pillars, and barefaced aiming at effect, that mark the insincerity of the barocco style, are found here almost for the first time.

What S. Peter's would have been, if Michael Angelo had lived to finish it, can be imagined from his plans and elevations still preserved. It must always remain a matter of profound regret that his project was so far altered as to sacrifice the effect of the dome from the piazza. This dome is Michael Angelo's supreme achievement as an architect. It not only preserves all that is majestic in the cupola of Brunelleschi; but it also avoids the defects of its avowed model, by securing the entrance of abundant light, and dilating the imagination with the sense of space to soar and float in. It is the dome that makes S. Peter's what it is-the adequate symbol of the Church in an age that had abandoned medi?valism and produced a new type of civility for the modern nations. On the connection between the building of S. Peter's and the Reformation I have touched already.[45] This mighty temple is the shrine of Catholicity, no longer cosmopolitan by right of spiritual empire, but secularised and limited to Latin races. At the same time it represents the spirit of a period when the Popes still led the world as intellectual chiefs. As the decree for its erection was the last act of the Papacy before the schism of the North had driven it into blind conflict with advancing culture, so S. Peter's remains the monument to after ages of a moment when the Roman Church, unterrified as yet by German rebels, dared to share the mundane impulse of the classical revival. She had forgotten the catacombs and ruthlessly destroyed the Basilica of Constantine. By rebuilding the mother church of Western Christianity upon a new plan, she broke with tradition; and if Rome has not ceased to be the Eternal City, if all ways are still leading to Rome, we may even hazard a conjecture that in the last days of their universal monarchy the Popes reared this fane to be the temple of a spirit alien to their own. It is at any rate certain that S. Peter's produces an impression less ecclesiastical, and less strictly Christian, than almost any of the elder and far humbler churches of Europe. Raised by proud and secular pontiffs in the heyday of renascent humanism, it seems to wait the time when the high priests of a religion no longer hostile to science or antagonistic to the inevitable force of progress will chaunt their hymns beneath its spacious dome.

The building of S. Peter's was so momentous in modern history, and so decisive for Italian architecture, that it may be permitted me to describe the vicissitudes through which the structure passed before reaching completion. Nicholas V., founder of the secular papacy and chief patron of the humanistic movement in Rome, had approved a scheme for thoroughly rebuilding and refortifying the pontifical city.[46] Part of this plan involved the reconstruction of S. Peter's. The old basilica was to be removed, and on its site was to rise a mighty church, shaped like a Latin cross, with a central dome and two high towers flanking the vestibule. Nicholas died before his project could be carried into effect. Beyond destroying the old temple of Probus and marking out foundations for the tribune of the new church, nothing had been accomplished;[47] nor did his successors until the reign of Julius think of continuing what he had begun. In 1506, on the 18th of April, Julius laid the first stone of S. Peter's according to the plans provided by Bramante. The basilica was designed in the shape of a Greek cross, surmounted by a colossal dome, and approached by a vestibule fronted with six columns. As in all the works of Bramante, simplicity and dignity distinguished this first scheme.[48] For eight years, until his death in 1514, Bramante laboured on the building. Julius, the most impatient of masters, urged him to work rapidly. In consequence of this haste, the substructures of the new church proved insecure, and the huge piers raised to support the cupola were imperfect, while the venerable monuments contained in the old church were ruthlessly destroyed.[49] After Bramante's death Giuliano di S. Gallo, Fra Giocondo, and Raphael successively superintended the construction, each for a short period. Raphael, under Leo X., was appointed sole architect, and went so far as to alter the design of Bramante by substituting the Latin for the Greek cross. Upon his death, Baldassare Peruzzi continued the work, and supplied a series of new designs, restoring the ground-plan of the church to its original shape. He was succeeded in the reign of Paul III. by Antonio di S. Gallo, who once more reverted to the Latin cross, and proposed a novel form of cupola with flanking towers for the fa?ade, of bizarre rather than beautiful proportions. After a short interregnum, during which Giulio Romano superintended the building and did nothing remarkable, Michael Angelo was called in 1535 to undertake the sole charge of the edifice. He declared that wherever subsequent architects had departed from Bramante's project, they had erred. "It is impossible to deny that Bramante was as great in architecture as any man has been since the days of the ancients. When he first laid the plan of S. Peter's, he made it not a mass of confusion, but clear and simple, well lighted, and so thoroughly detached that it in no way interfered with any portion of the palace."[50] Having thus pronounced himself in general for Bramante's scheme, Michael Angelo proceeded to develop it in accordance with his own canons of taste. He retained the Greek cross; but the dome, as he conceived it, and the details designed for each section of the building, differed essentially from what the earlier master would have sanctioned. Not the placid and pure taste of Bramante, but the masterful and fiery genius of Buonarroti, is responsible for the colossal scale of the subordinate parts and variously broken lineaments of the existing church. In spite of all changes of direction, the fabric of S. Peter's had been steadily advancing. Michael Angelo was, therefore, able to raise the central structure as far as the drum of the cupola before his death. His plans and models were carefully preserved, and a special papal ordinance decreed that henceforth there should be no deviation from the scheme he had laid down. Unhappily this rule was not observed. Under Pius V., Vignola and Piero Ligorio did indeed continue his tradition; under Gregory XIII., Sixtus V., and Clement VIII., Giacomo della Porta made no substantial alterations; and in 1590 Domenico Fontana finished the dome. But during the pontificate of Paul V., Carlo Maderno resumed the form of the Latin cross, and completed the nave and vestibule, as they now stand, upon this altered plan (1614). The consequence is what has been already noted-at a moderate distance from the church the dome is lost to view; it only takes its true position of predominance when seen from far. In the year 1626, S. Peter's was consecrated by Urban VIII., and the mighty work was finished. It remained for Bernini to add the colonnades of the piazza, no less picturesque in their effect than admirably fitted for the pageantry of world-important ceremonial. At the end of the eighteenth century it was reckoned that the church had cost but little less than fifty million scudi.

Michael Angelo forms the link between the second and third periods of the Renaissance. Among the architects of the latter age we have to reckon those who based their practice upon minute study of antique writers, and who, more than any of their predecessors, realised the long-sought restitution of the classic style according to precise scholastic canons.[51] A new age had now begun for Italy. The glory and the grace of the Renaissance, its blooming time of beauty, and its springtide of young strength, were over. Strangers held the reins of power, and the Reformation had begun to make itself felt in the Northern provinces of Christendom. A colder and more formal spirit everywhere prevailed. The sources of invention in the art of painting were dried up. Scholarship had pined away into pedantic purism. Correct taste was coming to be prized more highly than originality of genius in literature. Nor did architecture fail to manifest the operation of this change. The greatest builder of the period was Andrea Palladio of Vicenza, who combined a more complete analytical knowledge of antiquity with a firmer adherence to rule and precedent than even the most imitative of his forerunners. It is useless to seek for decorative fancy, wealth of detail, or sallies of inventive genius in the Palladian style. All is cold and calculated in the many palaces and churches of this master which adorn both Venice and Vicenza; they make us feel that creative inspiration has been superseded by the labour of the calculating reason. One great public building of Palladio's, however-the Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza-may be cited as, perhaps, the culminating point of pure Renaissance architecture. In its simple and heroical arcades, its solid columns, and noble open spaces, the strength of Rome is realised to the eyes of those who do not penetrate too far inside the building.[52] Here, and here only, the architectural problem of the epoch-how to bring the art of the ancients back to life and use again-was solved according to the spirit and the letter of the past. Palladio never equalled this, the earliest of all his many works.

In the first half of the sixteenth century the dictatorship of art had been already transferred from Florence and Rome to Lombardy.[53] The painters who carried on the great traditions were Venetian. Among the architects, Palladio was a native of Vicenza; Giacomo Barozzi, the author of the "Treatise on the Orders," took the name by which he is known from his birthplace, Vignola; Vincenzo Scamozzi was a fellow-townsman of Palladio; Galeazzo Alessi, though born at Perugia, spent his life and developed his talents in Genoa; Andrea Formigine, the palace-builder, was a Bolognese; Bartolommeo Ammanati alone at Florence exercised the arts of sculpture and architecture in their old conjunction. Vignola, Palladio's elder by a few years, displays in his work even more of the scholastically frigid spirit of the late Renaissance, the narrowing of poetic impulse, and the dwindling of vitality, that sadden the second half of the sixteenth century in Italy. Scamozzi, labouring at Venice on works that Sansovino left unfinished, caught the genial spirit of the old Venetian style. Alessi, in like manner, at Genoa, felt the influences of a rich and splendour-loving aristocracy. His church of S. Maria di Carignano is one of the most successful ecclesiastical buildings of the late Renaissance, combining the principles of Bramante and Michael Angelo in close imitation of S. Peter's, and adhering in detail to the canons of the new taste.

These canons were based upon a close study of Vitruvius. Palladio, Vignola, and Scamozzi were no less ambitious as authors than as architects;[54] their minute analysis of antique treatises on the art of construction led to the formation of exact rules for the treatment of the five classic orders, the proportions of the chief parts used in building, and the correct method of designing theatres and palaces, church-fronts and cupolas. Thus architecture in its third Renaissance period passed into scholasticism.

The masters of this age, chiefly through the weight of their authority as writers, exercised a wider European influence than any of their predecessors. We English, for example, have given Palladio's name to the Italian style adopted by us in the seventeenth century. This selection of one man to represent an epoch was due partly no doubt to the prestige of Palladio's great buildings in the South, but more, I think, to the facility with which his principles could be assimilated. Depending but little for effect upon the arts of decoration, his style was easily imitated in countries where painting and sculpture were unknown, and where a genius like Jean Goujon, the Sansovino of the French, has never been developed. To have rivalled the fa?ade of the Certosa would have been impossible in London. Yet here Wren produced a cathedral worthy of comparison with the proudest of the late Italian edifices. Moreover, the principles of taste that governed Europe in the seventeenth century were such as found fitter architectural expression in this style than in the more genial and capricious manner of the earlier periods.

After reviewing the rise and development of Renaissance architecture, it is almost irresistible to compare the process whereby the builders of this age learned to use dead forms for the expression of their thoughts, with the similar process by which the scholars accustomed themselves to Latin metres and the cadences of Ciceronian periods.[55] The object in each case was the same-to be as true to the antique as possible, and without actually sacrificing the independence of the modern mind, to impose upon it the limitations of a bygone civilisation. At first the enthusiasm for antiquity inspired architects and scholars alike with a desire to imitate per saltum, and many works of fervid sympathy and pure artistic intuition were produced. In course of time the laws both of language and construction were more accurately studied; invention was superseded by pedantry; after Poliziano and Alberti came Bembo and Palladio. In proportion as architects learned more about Vitruvius, and scholars narrowed their taste to Virgil, the style of both became more cramped and formal. It ceased at last to be possible to express modern ideas freely in the correct Latinity required by cultivated ears, while no room for originality, no scope for poetry of invention, remained in the elaborated method of the architects. Neo-Latin literature dwindled away to nothing, and Palladio was followed by the violent reactionaries of the barocco mannerism.

In one all-important respect this parallel breaks down. While the labours of the Latinists subserved the simple process of instruction, by purifying literary taste and familiarising the modern mind with the masterpieces of the classic authors, the architects created a new common style for Europe. With all its defects, it is not likely that the neo-Roman architecture, so profoundly studied by the Italians, and so anxiously refined by their chief masters, will ever wholly cease to be employed. In all cases where a grand and massive edifice, no less suited to purposes of practical utility than imposing by its splendour, is required, this style of building will be found the best. Changes of taste and fashion, local circumstances, and the personal proclivities of modern architects may determine the choice of one type rather than another among the numerous examples furnished by Italian masters. But it is not possible that either Greek or Gothic should permanently take the place assigned to neo-Roman architecture in the public buildings of European capitals.

FOOTNOTES:

[10]

The question of the genesis of the Lombard style is one of the most difficult in Italian art-history. I would not willingly be understood to speak of Lombard architecture in any sense different from that in which it is usual to speak of Norman. To suppose that either the Lombards or the Normans had a style of their own, prior to their occupation of districts from the monuments of which they learned rudely to use the decayed Roman manner, would be incorrect. Yet it seems impossible to deny that both Normans and Lombards in adapting antecedent models added something of their own, specific to themselves as Northerners. The Lombard, like the Norman or the Rhenish Romanesque, is the first stage in the progressive medi?val architecture of its own district.

[11]

I use the term Lombard architecture here, as defined above (p. 31, note), for the style of building prevalent in Italy during the Lombard occupation, or just after.

[12]

The essential difference between Italy and either Northern France or England, was that in Italy there existed monuments of Roman greatness, which could never be forgotten by her architects. They always worked with at least half of their attention turned to the past: nor had they the exhilarating sense of free, spontaneous, and progressive invention. This point has been well worked out by Mr. Street in the last chapter of his hook on the Architecture of North Italy.

[13]

Even though it be now proved that not Heinrich von Gmunden, but Marco Frisone da Campione, not a German, but a Milanese, was the first architect, this is none the less true about its style.

[14]

See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 153.

[15]

Pavia, it may be mentioned, has still many towers standing, and the two at Bologna are famous.

[16]

Arnolfo was born in 1232 at Colle, in the Val d'Elsa. He was a sculptor as well as architect, the assistant of Niccola Pisano at Siena, and the maker of the tomb of Cardinal de Braye at Orvieto. This tomb is remarkable as the earliest instance of the canopy withdrawn by attendant angels from the dead man's form, afterwards so frequently adopted by the Pisan school.

[17]

Giov. Villani, viii. 26.

[18]

See Milizia, vol. i. p. 135. These walls were not finished till some, time after Arnolfo's death. They lost their ornament of towers in the siege of 1529, and they are now being rapidly destroyed.

[19]

From Perkins's Tuscan Sculptors, vol. i. p. 54. A recent work by Signor G.J. Cavallucci, entitled S. Maria del Fiore, Firenze, 1881, has created a revolution in our knowledge regarding this church.

[20]

Giov. Villani, x. 192.

[21]

Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, book vi. chap. i.

[22]

Ib.

[23]

See Grüner's Terra Cotta Architecture of North Italy, plates 3 and 4.

[24]

Compare what Alberti says in his preface to the Treatise on Painting, Opere, vol. iv. p. 12. "Chi mai sì duro e sì invido non lodasse Pippo architetto vedendo quì struttura si grande, erta sopra i cieli, ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti i popoli toscani, fatta sanza alcuno aiuto di travamenti o di copia di legname, quale artificio certo, se io ben giudico, come a questi tempi era incredibile potersi, così forse appresso gli antiqui fu non saputo nè conosciuto?"

[25]

What the church of S. Petronio at Bologna would have been, if it had been completed on the scale contemplated, can hardly be imagined. As it stands, it is immense, and coldly bare in its immensity. Yet the present church is but the nave of a temple designed with transepts and choir. The length was to have been 800 feet, the width of the transepts 625, the dome 183 feet in diameter. A building so colossal in extent, and so monotonously meagre in conception, could not but have been a failure.

[26]

Vol. II., Revival of Learning, chap, 1.

[27]

The following passage quoted from Milizia, Memorie degli Architetti, Parma, 1781, vol. i. p. 135, illustrates the contemptuous attitude of Italian critics to Gothic architecture. After describing Arnolfo's building of the Florentine Duomo, he proceeds: "In questo Architetto si vide qualche leggiero barlume di buona Architettura, come di Pittura in Cimabue suo contemporaneo. Ma in tutte le cose e fisiche e morali i passaggi si fanno per insensibili gradagioni; onde per lungo tempo ancora si mantenne il corrotto gusto, che si può chiamare Arabo-Tedesco."

[28]

Observe, for example, the casing of a Gothic church at Rimini by Alberti with a series of Roman arches; or the fa?ade of S. Andrea at Mantua, where the vast and lofty central arch leads, not into the nave itself, but into a shallow vestibule.

[29]

See Burckhardt, Cicerone, vol. i. p. 167.

[30]

See De Stendhal, Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, p. 122.

[31]

For a notice of his life, see Vol. II., Revival of Learning, p. 247.

[32]

The Arch of Augustus at Rimini was the model followed by Alberti in this fa?ade. He intended to cover the church with a cupola, as may be seen from the design on a medal of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. See too the letter written by him to Matteo da Bastia, Alberti, Opere, vol. iv. p. 397.

[33]

This ancestral palace of the Medici passed in 1659 to the Marchese Gabriele Riccardi, from the Duke Francesco II.

[34]

Von Reumont, Lorenzo de' Medici, vol. ii. pp. 187-191, may be consulted for an interesting account of the building of this Casa Grande by Filippo Strozzi. The preparations were made with great caution, lest it should seem that a work too magnificent for a simple citizen was being undertaken; in particular, Filippo so contrived that the costly opus rusticum employed in the construction of the basement should appear to have been forced upon him. This is characteristic of Florence in the days of Cosimo. The foundation stone was laid in the morning of August 16, 1489, at the moment when the sun arose above the summits of the Casentino. The hour, prescribed by astrologers as propitious, had been settled by the horoscope; masses meanwhile were said in several churches, and alms distributed.

[35]

Antonio Filarete, or Averulino, architect and sculptor, was author of a treatise on the building of the ideal city, one of the most curious specimens of Renaissance fancy, to judge from the account rendered of the manuscript by Rio, vol. iii. pp. 321-328.

[36]

Matteo Civitale, Benedetto da Majano, Mino da Fiesole, Luca della Robbia, Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, Lo Scalza, Omodeo, and the Sansovini, not to mention less illustrious sculptors, filled the churches of Italy with this elaborate stone-work. Among the bronze-founders it is enough to name Ghiberti, Antonio Filarete, Antonio Pollajuolo, Donatello and his pupil Bertoldo, Andrea Riccio, the master of the candelabrum in S. Antonio at Padua, Jacopo Sansovino, the master of the door of the sacristy in S. Mark's at Venice, Alessandro Leopardi, the master of the standard-pedestals of the Piazza of S. Mark's. I do not mean these lists to be in any sense exhaustive, but simply to remind the reader of the rare and many-sided men of genius who devoted their abilities to this kind of work. Some of their masterpieces will be noticed in detail in the chapter on Sculpture.

[37]

Especially his work at Monte Oliveto, near Siena, and in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples. The Sala del Cambio at Perugia may also be cited as rich in tarsia-work designed by Perugino, while the church of S. Pietro de' Cassinensi outside the city is a museum of masterpieces executed by Fra Damiano da Bergamo and Stefano da Bergamo from designs of Raphael. Not less beautiful are the inlaid wood panels in the Palace of Urbino, by Maestro Giacomo of Florence.

[38]

The churches and palaces of Lombardy are peculiarly rich in this kind of decoration. The fa?ade of the Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia, designed and executed by Agostino di Duccio, is a masterpiece of rare beauty in this style.

[39]

Not to mention the Renaissance mosaics of S. Mark's at Venice, the cupola of S. Maria del Popolo at Rome, executed in mosaic by Raphael, deserves special mention. A work illustrative of this cupola is one of Ludwig Grüner's best publications.

[40]

South Italy and Florence are distinguished by two marked styles in this decoration of inlaid marbles or opera di commesso. Compare the Medicean chapel in S. Lorenzo, for instance, with the high altar of the cathedral of Messina.

[41]

The roof of the Duomo at Volterra is a fine specimen.

[42]

It will not be forgotten that Raphael's cartoons were made for tapestry.

[43]

Bramante Lazzari was born at Castel Durante, near Urbino, in 1444. He spent the early years of his architect's life in Lombardy, in the service of Lodovico Sforza, and came probably to Rome upon his patron's downfall in 1499.

[44]

See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 342.

[45]

See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 344. See Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, vol. viii. p. 127, and the quotation there translated from Pallavicini's History of the Council of Trent.

[46]

See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, pp. 296-298. Vol. II., Revival of Learning, pp. 161-166. For his architectural designs see his Life, by Manetti, book ii., in Muratori, vol. iii. part ii.

[47]

Gregorovius, vol. vii. p. 638.

[48]

Besides the great work of Bonanni, Templi Vaticani Historia, I may refer my readers to the atlas volume of Illustrations, Architectural and Pictorial, of the Genius of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, compiled by Mr. Harford (Colnaghi, 1857). Plates 1 to 7 of that work are devoted to the plans of S. Peter's. Plate 4 is specially interesting, since it represents in one view the old basilica and the design of Bramante, together with those of Antonio di S. Gallo and Michael Angelo.

[49]

The subterranean vaults of S. Peter's contain mere fragments of tombs, some precious as historical records, some valuable as works of art, swept together pell-mell from the ruins of the old basilica.

[50]

See the original letter to Ammanati, published from the Archivio Buonarroti, by Signor Milanesi, p. 535.

[51]

I am far from meaning that the earlier architects had not been guided by ancient authors. Alberti's Treatise on the Art of Building is a sufficient proof of their study of Vitruvius, and we know that Fabio Calvi translated that writer into Italian for Raphael. In the later Renaissance this study passed into purism.

[52]

It must be confessed that this grandiose and picturesque structure is but a shell to mask an earlier Gothic edifice.

[53]

Compare Vol. II., Revival of Learning, p. 370, for the same transference of power in literature from Central to Northern Italy at this time.

[54]

Palladio's Four Books of Architecture, first published at Venice in 1570, and Vignola's Treatise on the Five Orders, have been translated into all the modern languages. Scamozzi projected, and partly finished, a comprehensive work on Universal Architecture, which was printed in 1685 at Venice.

[55]

See Vol. II., Revival of Learning, chap. viii.

* * *

Niccola Pisano-Obscurity of the Sources for a History of Early Italian Sculpture-Vasari's Legend of Pisano-Deposition from the Cross at Lucca-Study of Nature and the Antique-Sarcophagus at Pisa-Pisan Pulpit-Niccola's School-Giovanni Pisano-Pulpit in S. Andrea at Pistoja-Fragments of his work at Pisa-Tomb of Benedict XI.

at Perugia-Bas-reliefs at Orvieto-Andrea Pisano-Relation of Sculpture to Painting-Giotto-Subordination of Sculpture to Architecture in Italy-Pisano's Influence in Venice-Balduccio of Pisa-Orcagna-The Tabernacle of Orsammichele-The Gates of the Florentine Baptistery -Competition of Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Della Quercia-Comparison of Ghiberti's and Brunelleschi's Trial-pieces-Comparison of Ghiberti and Della Quercia-The Bas-reliefs of S. Petronio-Ghiberti's Education-His Pictorial Style in Bas-relief-His Feeling for the Antique-Donatello-Early Visit to Rome-Christian Subjects-Realistic Treatment-S. George and David-Judith-Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata-Influence of Donatello's Naturalism-Andrea Verocchio-His David-Statue of Colleoni-Alessandro Leopardi-Lionardo's Statue of Francesco Sforza-The Pollajuoli-Tombs of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII.-Luca della Robbia-His Treatment of Glazed Earthenware-Agostino di Duccio-The Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia-Antonio Rossellino-Matteo Civitali-Mino da Fiesole-Benedetto da Majano-Characteristics and Masterpieces of this Group-Sepulchral Monuments-Andrea Contucci's Tombs in S. Maria del Popolo-Desiderio da Settignano-Sculpture in S. Francesco at Rimini-Venetian Sculpture-Verona-Guido Mazzoni of Modena-Certosa of Pavia-Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo-Sansovino at Venice-Pagan Sculpture-Michael Angelo's Scholars-Baccio Bandinelli-Bartolommeo Ammanati-Cellini-Gian Bologna-Survey of the History of Renaissance Sculpture.

In the procession of the fine arts, sculpture always follows close upon the steps of architecture, and at first appears in some sense as her handmaid. Medi?val Italy found her Pheidias in a great man of Pisan origin, born during the first decade of the thirteenth century. It was Niccola Pisano, architect and sculptor, who first breathed with the breath of genius life into the dead forms of plastic art. From him we date the dawn of the ?sthetical Renaissance with the same certainty as from Petrarch that of humanism; for he determined the direction not only of sculpture but also of painting in Italy. To quote the language of Lord Lindsay's panegyric: "Neither Dante nor Shakspere can boast such extent and durability of influence; for whatever of highest excellence has been achieved in sculpture and painting, not in Italy only but throughout Europe, has been in obedience to the impulse he primarily gave, and in following up the principle which he first struck out."[56] In truth, Niccola Pisano put the artist on the right track of combining the study of antiquity with the study of nature; and to him belongs the credit not merely of his own achievement, considerable as that may be, but also of the work of his immediate scholars and of all who learned from him to portray life. From Niccola Pisano onward to Michael Angelo and Cellini we trace one genealogy of sculptors, who, though they carried art beyond the sphere of his invention, looked back to him as their progenitor. The man who first emancipated sculpture from servile bondage, and opened a way for the attainment of true beauty, would by the Greeks have been honoured with a special cultas as the Hero Eponym of art. It remains for us after our own fashion to pay some such homage to Pisano.

The chief difficulty with which the student of early art and literature has to deal, is the insufficiency of positive information. Instead of accurate dates and well-established facts he finds a legend, rich apparently in detail, but liable at every point to doubt, and subject to attack by plausible conjecture. In the absence of contemporary documents and other trustworthy sources of instruction, he is tempted to substitute his own hypotheses for tradition and to reconstruct the faulty outlines of forgotten history according to his own ideas of fitness. The Germans have been our masters in this species of destructive, dubitative, restorative criticism; and it is undoubtedly flattering to the historian's vanity to constitute himself a judge and arbiter in cases where tact and ingenuity may claim to sift the scattered fragment of confused narration. Yet to resist this temptation is in many cases a plain and simple duty. Tradition, when not positively disproved, should be allowed to have its full value; and a sounder historic sense is exercised in adopting its testimony with due caution, than in recklessly rejecting it and substituting guesses which the lack of knowledge renders unsubstantial. Tradition may err about dates, details, and names. It is just here that antiquarian research can render valuable help. But there are occasions when the perusal of documents and the exercise of what is called the higher criticism afford no surer basis for opinion. If in such cases a legend has been formed and recorded, the student will advance further toward comprehending the spirit of his subject by patiently considering what he knows to be in part perhaps a mythus, than by starting with the foregone conclusion that the legend must of necessity be worthless, and that his cunning will suffice to supply the missing clue.[57]

Thus much I have said by way of preface to what follows upon Niccola Pisano. Almost all we know about him is derived from a couple of inscriptions, a few contracts, and his Life by Giorgio Vasari. It is clear that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places, and taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions. Much of Niccola's biography reads like a legend in his pages-the popular and oral tradition of a great man, whose panegyric it was more easy in the sixteenth century to adorn with rhetoric than to chronicle the details of his life with scrupulous fidelity. A well-founded conviction of Vasari's frequent inaccuracy has induced recent critics to call in question many hitherto accepted points about the nationality and training of Pisano. The discussion, of their arguments I leave for the appendix, contenting myself at present with relating so much of Vasari's legend as cannot, I think, reasonably be rejected.[58]

Before the sculptor appeared in Niccola Pisano, he was already a famous architect; and it must always be remembered that he and his school subordinated the plastic to the constructive arts. It was not until the year 1233, or 1237, according to different modern calculations, that he executed his first masterpiece in sculpture.[59] This was a "Deposition from the Cross," in high relief, placed in a lunette over one of the side doors of S. Martino at Lucca. The noble forms of this group, the largeness of its style, the breadth of drapery and freedom of action it displays, but, above all, the unity of its design, proclaimed that a new era had begun for art. In order to appreciate the importance of this relief, it is only necessary to compare it with the processional treatment of similar subjects upon early Christian sarcophagi, where each figure stands up stiff and separate, nor can the controlling and combining artist's thought be traced in any effort after composition. Ever since the silver age of Hadrian, when a Bithynian slave by his beauty gave a final impulse to the Genius of Greece, sculpture had been gradually declining until nothing was left but a formal repetition of conventional outlines. The so-called Romanesque and Byzantine styles were but the dotage of second childhood, fumbling with the methods and materials of an irrecoverable past. It is true, indeed, that unknown medi?val carvers had shown an instinct for the beautiful as well as great fertility of grotesque invention. The fa?ades of Lombard churches are covered with fanciful and sometimes forcibly dramatic groups of animals and men in combat; and contemporaneously with Niccola Pisano, many Gothic sculptors of the North were adorning the fa?ades and porches of cathedrals with statuary unrivalled in one style of loveliness.[60] Yet the founder of a line of progressive artists had not arisen, and, except in Italy, the conditions were still wanting under which alone the plastic arts could attain to independence. A fresh start, at once conscious and scientific, was imperatively demanded. This new beginning sculpture took in the brain of Niccola Pisano, who returned from the bye-paths of his predecessors to the free field of nature, and who learned precious lessons from the fragments of classical sculpture existing in his native town. As though to prove the essential dependence of the modern revival upon the recovery of antique culture, we find that his genius, in spite of its powerful originality and profoundly Christian bias, required the confirmation which could only be derived from Gr?co-Roman precedent. In the Campo Santo at Pisa may still be seen a sarcophagus representing the story of Hippolytus and Ph?dra, where once reposed the dust of Beatrice, the mother of the pious Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Studying the heroic nudities and noble attitudes of this bas-relief, Niccola rediscovered the right way of art-not by merely copying his model, but by divining the secret of the grand style. His work at Pisa contains abundant evidence that, while he could not wholly free himself from the defects of the later Romanesque manner, betrayed by his choice of short and square-set types, he nevertheless learned from the antique how to aim at beauty and freedom in his imitation of the living human form. A marble vase, sculptured with Indian Bacchus and his train of M?nads, gave him further help. From these grave or graceful classic forms, satisfied with their own goodliness, and void of inner symbolism, the Christian sculptor drank the inspiration of Renaissance art. In the "Adoration of the Magi," carved upon his Pisan pulpit, Madonna assumes the haughty pose of Theseus' wife; while the high priest, in the "Circumcision," displays the majesty of Dionysus leaning on the neck of Ampelus. Nor again is the naked vigour of Hippolytus without its echo in the figure of the young man-Hercules or Fortitude-upon a bracket of the same pulpit. These sculptures of Pisano are thus for us a symbol of what happened in the age of the Revival. The old world and the new shook hands; Christianity and Hellenism kissed each other. And yet they still remained antagonistic-fused externally by art, but severed in the consciousness that, during those strange years of dubious impulse, felt the might of both. Monks leaning from Pisano's pulpit preached the sinfulness of natural pleasure to women whose eyes were fixed on the adolescent beauty of an athlete. Not far off was the time when Filarete should cast in bronze the legends of Ganymede and Leda for the portals of S. Peter's, when Raphael should mingle a carnival of more than pagan sensuality with Bible subjects in Leo's Loggie, when Guglielmo della Porta should place the naked portrait of Giulia Bella in marble at the feet of Paul III. upon his sepulchre.[61]

Niccola, meanwhile, did not follow his Roman models in any slavish spirit. They were neither numerous nor excellent enough to compel blind imitation or to paralyse inventive impulse. The thoughts to be expressed in marble by the first modern artist were not Greek. This in itself saved him from that tendency to idle reproduction which proved the ruin of the later neo-pagan sculptors. Yet the fragments of antique work he found within his reach, helped him to struggle after a higher quality of style, and established standards of successful treatment. For the rest, his choice of form and the proportions of his figures show that Niccola resorted to native Tuscan models. If nothing of his handiwork were left but the bas-relief of the "Inferno" on the Pisan pulpit, the torsos of the men struggling with demons in that composition would prove this point. It remains his crowning merit to have first expressed the mythology of Christianity and the sentiment of the Middle Ages with the conscious aim of a real artist. And here it may be noticed that, a true Italian, he infused but little of intense or mystical emotion into his art. Niccola is more of a humanist, if this word may be applied to a sculptor, than some of his immediate successors. The hexagonal pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa, the octagonal pulpit in the cathedral of Siena, the fountain in the marketplace of Perugia, and the shrine of S. Dominic at Bologna, all of them designed and partly finished between 1260 and 1274 by Niccola and his scholars, display his mastery over the art of sculpture in the maturity of his genius. So highly did the Pisans prize their fellow-townsman's pulpit that a law was passed and guardians were appointed for its preservation-much in the same way as the Zeus of Pheidias was consigned to the care of the Phaidruntai.

Niccola Pisano founded a school. His son Giovanni, and the numerous pupils employed upon the monuments just mentioned at Siena, Bologna, and Perugia, carried on the tradition of their master, and spread his style abroad through Italy. Giovanni Pisano, to whom we owe the Spina Chapel and the Campo Santo at Pisa, the fa?ade of the Sienese Duomo, and the altar-shrine of S. Donato at Arezzo-four of the purest works of Gothic art in Italy-showed a very decided leaning to the vehement and mystic style of the Transalpine sculptors. We trace a dramatic intensity in Giovanni's work, not derived from his father, not caught from study of the antique, and curiously blended with the general characteristics of the Pisan school. In spite of the Gothic cusps introduced by Niccola into his pulpits, the spirit of his work remained classical. The young Hercules holding the lion's cub in his right hand upon his shoulder, while with his left he tames the raging lioness, has the true Italian instinct for a return to Latin style. The same sympathy with the past is observable in the self-restraint and comparative coldness of the bas-reliefs at Pisa. The Junonian attitude of Madonna, the senatorial dignity of Simeon, the ponderous folding of the drapery, and the massive carriage of the neck throughout, denote an effort to revivify an antique manner. What, therefore, Niccola effected for sculpture was a classical revival in the very depth of the Middle Ages. The case is different with his son Giovanni. Profiting by the labours of his father, and following in his footsteps, he carried the new art into another region, and brought a genius of more picturesque and forcible temper into play. The value of this new direction given to sculpture for the arts of Italy, especially for painting, cannot be exaggerated. Without Giovanni's intervention, the achievement of Niccola might possibly have been as unproductive of immediate results as the Tuscan Romanesque, that medi?val effort after the Renaissance, was in architecture.[62]

The Gothic element, so cautiously adopted by Niccola, is used with sympathy and freedom by his son, whose masterpiece, the pulpit of S. Andrea at Pistoja, might be selected as the supreme triumph of Italian Gothic sculpture. The superiority of that complex and consummate work of plastic art over the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery, in all the most important qualities of style and composition, can scarcely be called in question. Its only serious fault is an exaggeration of the height of the pillars in proportion to the size of the hexagon they support. Like the pulpits of the Baptistery, of the Duomo of Pisa, and of the Duomo of Siena, it combines bas-reliefs and detached statues, carved capitals, and sculptured lions, in a maze of marvellous invention; but it has no rival in the architectonic effect of harmony, and the masterly feeling for balanced masses it displays. The five subjects chosen by Giovanni for his bas-reliefs are the "Nativity," the "Adoration of the Magi," the "Massacre of the Innocents," the "Crucifixion," and the "Last Judgment." In the "Nativity" our Lady is no longer the Roman matron of Niccola's conception, but a graceful mother, young in years, and bending with the weakness of childbirth. Her attitude, exquisite by the suggestion of tenderness and delicacy, is one that often reappears in the later work of the Pisan school-for example, in the rough abozzamento in the Campo Santo at Pisa, above the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, and at Orvieto on the fa?ade of the cathedral; but it has nowhere else been treated with the same sense of beauty. The "Massacre of the Innocents," compared with this relief, is a tragedy beside an idyll. Here the whole force of Giovanni's eminently dramatic genius comes into full play. Not only has he treated the usual incidents of mothers struggling with soldiers and bewailing their dead darlings, but he has also introduced a motive, which might well have been used by subsequent artists in dealing with the same subjects. Herod is throned in one corner of the composition; before him stand a group of men and women, some imploring the tyrant for mercy, some defying him in impotent despair, and some invoking the curse of God upon his head. In the "Adoration of the Magi," again, Giovanni shows originality by the double action he has chosen to develop. On one side the kings are sleeping, while an angel comes to wake them, pointing out the star. On the other side they fall at the feet of the Madonna. It will be gathered even from these bare descriptions that Giovanni introduced a stir of life and movement, and felt his subjects with a poetic intensity, alien to the ideal of Gr?co-Roman sculpture. He effected a fusion between the grand style revived by Niccola and the romantic fervour of the modern imagination. It was in this way that the tradition handed down by him proved inestimably serviceable to the painters.

The bas-reliefs, however, by no means form the chief attraction of this pulpit. At each of its six angles stand saints, evangelists, and angels, whose symbolism it is not now so easy to decipher. The most beautiful groups are a company of angels blowing the judgment trumpets, and a winged youth standing above a winged lion and bull. These groups separate the several compartments of the bas-reliefs, and help to form the body of the pulpit. Beneath, on capital's of the supporting pillars, stand the Sibyls, each with her attendant genius, while prophets lean or crouch within the spandrils of the arches. Thus every portion of this master-work is crowded with figures-some detached, some executed in relief; and yet, amid so great a multitude, the eye is not confused; the total effect is nowhere dissipated. The whole seems governed by one constructive thought, projected as a perfect unity of composition.[63]

A later work of Giovanni Pisano was the pulpit executed for the cathedral of Pisa, now unfortunately broken up. An interesting fragment, one of the supporting columns of the octagon which formed the body of this structure, still exists in the museum of the Campo Santo. It is an allegorical statue of Pisa. The Ghibelline city is personified as a crowned woman, suckling children at her breast, and standing on a pedestal supported by the eagle of the Empire. She wears a girdle of rope seven times knotted, to betoken the rule of Pisa over seven subject islands. At the four corners of her throne stand the four human virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude, distinguished less by beauty of shape than by determined energy of symbolism. Temperance is a naked woman, with hair twisted in the knots and curls of a Greek Aphrodite. Justice is old and wrinkled, clothed with massive drapery, and holding in her hand the scales. Throughout this group there is no attempt to realise forms pleasing to the eye; the sculptor has aimed at suggesting to the mind as many points of intellectual significance as possible. In spite of ugliness and hardness, the "Allegory of Pisa" commands respect by vigour of conception, and rivets attention by force of execution.

A more popular and pleasing monument by Giovanni Pisano is the tomb of Benedict XI. in the church of S. Domenico at Perugia. The Pope, whose life was so obnoxious to the ambition of Philip le Bel that his timely death aroused suspicion of poison, lies asleep upon his marble bier with hands crossed in an attitude of peaceful expectation.[64] At his head and feet stand angels drawing back the curtains that would else have shrouded this last slumber of a good man from the eyes of the living.[65] A contrast is thus established between the repose of the dead and the ever-watchful activity of celestial ministers. Sleep so guarded, the sculptor seeks to tell us, must have glorious waking; and when those hands unfold upon the Resurrection morning, the hushed sympathy of the attendant angels will break into smiles and singing, as they lead the just man to the Lord he served in life.

Whether Giovanni Pisano had any share in the sculpture on the fa?ade of the cathedral at Orvieto, is not known for certain. Vasari asserts that Niccola and his pupils worked upon this series of bas-reliefs, setting forth the whole Biblical history and the cycle of Christian beliefs from the creation of the world to the last judgment. Yet we know that Niccola himself died at least twelve years before the foundation of the church in 1290; nor is there any proof that his immediate scholars were engaged upon the fabric. The Orvietan archives are singularly silent with regard to a monument of so large extent and vast importance, which must have taxed to the uttermost the resources of the ablest stone-carvers in Italy.[66] Meanwhile, what Vasari says is valuable only as a witness to the fame of Niccola Pisano. His manner, as continued and developed by his school, is unmistakable at Orvieto: but in the absence of direct information, we are left to conjecture the conditions under which this, the closing if not the crowning achievement of thirteenth-century sculpture, was produced.

When the great founder of Italian art visited Siena in 1266 for the completion of his pulpit in the Duomo, he found a guild of sculptors, or taglia-pietri, in that city, numbering some sixty members, and governed by a rector and three chamberlains. Instead of regarding Niccola with jealousy, these craftsmen only sought to learn his method. Accordingly it seems that a new impulse was given to sculpture in Siena; and famous workmen arose who combined this art with that of building. The chief of these was Lorenzo Maitani, who died in 1330, having designed and carried to completion the Duomo of Orvieto during his lifetime.[67] While engaged in this great undertaking, Maitani directed a body of architects, stone-carvers, bronze-founders, mosaists, and painters, gathered together into a guild from the chief cities of Tuscany. It cannot be proved that any of the Pisani, properly so called, were among their number. Lacking evidence to the contrary, we must give to Maitani, the master-spirit of the company, full credit for the sculpture carried out in obedience to his general plan. As the church of S. Francis at Assisi formed an epoch in the history of painting, by concentrating the genius of Giotto on a series of masterpieces, so the Duomo of Orvieto, by giving free scope to the school of Pisa, marked a point in the history of sculpture. It would be difficult to find elsewhere even separate works of greater force and beauty belonging to this, the first or architectural, period of Italian sculpture; and nowhere has the whole body of Christian belief been set forth with method more earnest and with vigour more sustained.[68] The subjects selected by these unknown craftsmen for illustration in marble, are in many instances the same as those afterwards painted in fresco by Michael Angelo and Raphael at Borne. Their treatment, for example, of the creation of Adam and Eve, adopted in all probability from still earlier and ruder workmen, after being refined by the improvements of successive generations, may still be observed in the triumphs of the Sistine Chapel and the Loggie.[69] It was the practice of Italian artists not to seek originality by diverging from the traditional modes of presentation, but to prove their mastery by rendering these as perfect and effective as the maturity of art could make them. For the Italians, as before them for the Greeks, plagiarism was a word unknown, in all cases where it was possible to improve upon the invention of less fortunate predecessors. The student of art may, therefore, now enjoy the pleasure of tracing sculpturesque or pictorial motives from their genesis in some rude fragment to their final development in the master-works of a Lionardo or a Raphael, where scientific grouping of figures, higher idealisation of style, the suggestion of freer movement, and more varied dramatic expression yield at last the full flower that the simple germ enfolded.

Among the most distinguished scholars of Niccola Pisano's tradition must now be mentioned Andrea da Pontadera, called Andrea Pisano, who carried the manner of his master to Florence, and helped to fulfil the destiny of Italian sculpture by submitting it to the rising art of painting. Under the direction of Giotto he carved statues for the Campanile and the fa?ade of S. Maria del Fiore; and in the first gate of the Baptistery, he bequeathed a model of bas-relief in bronze, which largely influenced the style of masters in the fifteenth century. To overpraise the simplicity and beauty of design, the purity of feeling, and the technical excellence of Andrea's bronze-work, would be difficult. Many students will always be found to prefer his self-restraint and delicacy to the more florid manner of Ghiberti.[70] What we chiefly observe in this gate is the control exercised by the sister art of painting over his mode of conception and treatment. If Giovanni Pisano developed the dramatic and emphatic qualities of Gothic sculpture, Andrea was attracted to its allegories; if Giovanni infused romantic vehemence of feeling into the frigid classicism of his father, Andrea diverged upon another track of picturesque delineation. A new sun had now arisen in the heavens of art. This was the sun of Giotto, whose genius, eminently pictorial, brought the Italians to a true sense of their ?sthetical vocation, illuminating with its brightness the elder and more technically finished craft of the stone-carver. Sculpture, which in the school of Niccola Pisano had been subordinate to architecture, became a sub-species of painting in the hands of Andrea.

It was thus, as I have elsewhere stated, that the twofold doom of plastic art in Italy was accomplished. In order to embody the ideas of Christianity, art had to think more of expression than of pure form. Expression is the special sphere of painting; and therefore sculpture followed the lead of the sister art, as soon as painting was strong enough to give that lead, instead of remaining, as in Greece, the mistress of her own domain. On the deeper reasons for this subordination of sculpture to painting I have dwelt already, while showing that a large class of subjects, where physical qualities are comparatively indifferent and of no account, were forced upon the artist by Christianity.[71] Humility and charity may be found alike in blooming youth or in ascetic age; nor is it possible to characterize saints and martyrs by those corporeal characteristics which distinguish a runner from a boxer, or a chaste huntress from a voluptuous queen of love. Italian sculpture abandoned the presentation of the naked human body as useless. The emotions written on the face became of more importance than the modelling of the limbs, and recourse was had to allegorical symbols or emblematic attitudes for the interpretation of the artist's thought. Andrea Pisano's figure of Hope, raising hands and eyes toward an offered crown, seems but a repetition of the motive expressed by Giotto in the chiaroscuro frescoes of the Arena chapel.[72] Owing to similar causes, drapery, which in Greece had served to illustrate the structure or the movement of the body it clothed, was used by the Italian sculptors to conceal the limbs, and to enhance by flowing skirt or sinuous fold or agitated scarf some quality of the emotions. The result was that sculpture assumed a place subordinate to painting, and that the masterpieces of the early Italian carvers are chiefly bas-reliefs-pictures in bronze or marble.[73]

In a like degree, though not for the same reason, sculpture in Italy remained subordinate to architecture, until such time as the neo-Hellenism of the full Renaissance produced a crowd of pseudo-classic statues, destined to take their places-not in churches, but in the courtyards of palaces and on the open squares of cities. The cause of this fact is not far to seek. In ancient Greece the temple had been erected for the god, and the statue dwelt within the cella like a master in his house. Christianity forbade an image of the living God; consequently the Church had another object than to roof the statue of a deity. It was the meeting-place of a congregation bent on worshipping Him who dwells not in houses made with hands, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. The vast spaces and a?rial arcades of medi?val architecture had their meaning in relation to the mystic apprehension of an unseen power. It followed of necessity that the carved work destined to decorate a Christian temple could never be the main feature of the building. It existed for the Church, and not the Church for it.[74]

Through Andrea Pisano the style of Niccola was extended to Venice. There is reason to believe that he instructed Filippo Calendario, to whom we should ascribe the sculptured corners of the Ducal Palace. Venice, however, invariably exercised her own controlling influence over the arts of aliens; so we find a larger, freer, richer, and more mundane treatment in these splendid carvings than in aught produced by Pisan workmen for their native towns of Tuscany.

Nino, the sculptor of the "Madonna della Rosa," the chief ornament of the Spina chapel, and Tommaso, both sons of Andrea da Pontadera, together with Giovanni Balduccio of Pisa, continued the traditions of the school founded by Niccola. Balduccio, invited by Azzo Visconti to Milan, carved the shrine of S. Peter Martyr in the church of S. Eustorgio, and impressed his style on Matteo da Campione, the sculptor of the shrine of S. Augustine at Pavia.[75] These facts, though briefly stated, are not without significance. Travellers who have visited the churches of Pavia and Milan, after studying the shrine, or arca as Italians call it, of S. Dominic at Bologna, must have noticed the ascendency of Pisan style in these three Lombard towns, and have felt how widely Niccola's creative genius was exercised. Traces of the same influence may perhaps be observed in the tombs of the Scaligers at Verona.[76]

The most eminent pupil of Andrea Pisano, however, was a Florentine-the great Andrea Arcagnuolo di Cione, commonly known as Orcagna. This man, like the more illustrious Giotto, was one among the earliest of those comprehensive, many-sided natures produced by Florence for her everlasting glory. He studied the goldsmith's craft under his father, Cione, passing the years of his apprenticeship, like other Tuscan artists, in the technical details of an industry that then supplied the strictest method of design. With his brother, Bernardo, he practised painting. Like Giotto, he was no mean poet;[77] and like all the higher craftsmen of his age, he was an architect. Though the church of Orsammichele owes its present form to Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna, as capo ma?stro after Gaddi's death, completed the structure; and though the Loggia de' Lanzi, long ascribed to him by writers upon architecture, is now known to be the work of Benci di Cione, yet Orcagna's Loggia del Bigallo, more modest but not less beautiful, prepared the way for its construction. Of his genius as a painter, proved by the frescoes in the Strozzi chapel, I shall have to speak hereafter. As a sculptor he is best known through the tabernacle of Orsammichele, built to enshrine the picture of the Madonna by Ugolino da Siena.[78]

In this monument Orcagna employed carved bas-reliefs and statuettes, intaglios and mosaics, incrustations of agates, enamels, and gilded glass patterns, with a sense of harmony so refined, and a mastery over each kind of workmanship so perfect, that the whole tabernacle is an epitome of the minor arts of medi?val Italy. The subordination of sculpture to architectural effect is noticeable; and the Giottesque influence appears even more strongly here than in the gate of Andrea Pisano. This influence Orcagna received indirectly through his master in stone carving; it formed, indeed, the motive force of figurative art during his lifetime. The subjects of the "Annunciation," the "Nativity," the "Marriage of the Virgin," and the "Adoration of the Three Kings," framed in octagonal mouldings at the base of the tabernacle, illustrate the domination of a spirit distinct both from the neo-Romanism of Niccola and the Gothicism of Giovanni Pisano. That spirit is Florentine in a general sense, and specifically Giottesque. Charity, again, with a flaming heart in her hand, crowned with a flaming brazier, and suckling a child, is Giottesque not only in allegorical conception but also in choice of type and treatment of drapery.

While admiring the tabernacle of Orsammichele, we are reminded that Orcagna was a goldsmith to begin with, and a painter. Sculpture he practised as an accessory. What the artists of Florence gained in delicacy of execution, accuracy of modelling, and precision of design by their apprenticeship to the goldsmith's trade, was hardly perhaps sufficient to compensate for loss of training in a larger style. It was difficult, we fancy, for men so educated to conceive the higher purposes of sculpture. Contented with elaborate workmanship and beauty of detail, they failed to attain to such independence of treatment as may be reached by sculptors who do not carry to their work the preconceptions of a narrower handicraft. Thus even Orcagna's masterpiece may strike us not as the plaything of a Pheidian genius condescending for once to "breathe through silver," but of a consummate goldsmith taxing the resources of his craft to form a monumental jewel.[79]

The fa?ade of Orvieto was the final achievement of the first or architectural period of Italian sculpture. Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Orcagna, formed the transition to the second period. To find one characteristic title for the style of the fifteenth century is not easy, since it was marked by many distinct peculiarities. If, however, we choose to call it pictorial, we shall sufficiently mark the quality of some eminent masters, and keep in view the supremacy of painting at this epoch. A great public enterprise at Florence brings together in honourable rivalry the chief craftsmen of the new age, and marks the advent of the Renaissance. When the Signory, in concert with the Arte de' Mercanti, decided to complete the bronze gates of the Baptistery in the first year of the fifteenth century, they issued a manifesto inviting the sculptors of Italy to prepare designs for competition. Their call was answered by Giacomo della Quercia of Siena, by Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo di Cino Ghiberti of Florence, and by two other Tuscan artists of less note. The young Donatello, aged sixteen, is said to have been consulted as to the rival merits of the proofs submitted to the judges. Thus the four great masters of Tuscan art in its prime met before the Florentine Baptistery.[80] Giacomo della Quercia was excluded from the competition at an early stage; but the umpires wavered long between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, until the latter, with notable generosity, feeling the superiority of his rival, and conscious perhaps that his own laurels were to be gathered in the field of architecture, withdrew his claim. In 1403, Ghiberti received the commission for the first of the two remaining gates. He afterwards obtained the second; and as they were not finished until 1452, the better part of his lifetime was spent upon them. He received in all a sum of 30,798 golden florins for his labour and the cost of the material employed.

The trial-pieces prepared by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti are now preserved in the Bargello.[81] Their subject is the "Sacrifice of Isaac;" and a comparison of the two leaves no doubt of Ghiberti's superiority. The faults of Brunelleschi's model are want of repose and absence of composition. Abraham rushes in a frenzy of murderous agitation at his son, who writhes beneath the knife already at his throat. The angel swoops from heaven with extended arms, reaching forth one hand to show the ram to Abraham, and clasping the patriarch's wrist with the other. The ram meanwhile is scratching his nose with his near hind leg; one of the servants is taking a thorn from his foot, while the other fills a cup from the stream at which the ass is drinking. Thus each figure has a separate uneasy action. Those critics who contend that the unrest of sixteenth-century sculpture was due to changes in artistic and religious feeling wrought by the Renaissance, would do well to examine this plate, and see how much account must be taken of the artist's temperament in forming their opinion. Brunelleschi adhered to the style and taste of the fifteenth century at its commencement; but the too fervid quality of his character impaired his work as a sculptor. Ghiberti, on the other hand, translated the calm of his harmonious nature into his composition. The angel leans from heaven and points to the ram, which is seated quietly and out of sight of the main actors. Isaac kneels in the attitude of a submissive victim, though his head is turned aside, as if attracted by the rush of pinions through the air; while Abraham has but just lifted his hand, and the sacrifice is only suggested as a possibility by the naked knife. The two servants are grouped below in conversation, one on each side of the browsing ass. This power of telling a story plainly, but without dramatic vehemence; of eliminating the painful details of the subject, and combining its chief motives into one agreeable whole, gave peculiar charm to Ghiberti's manner. It marked him as an artist distinguished by good taste.

How Delia Quercia treated the "Sacrifice of Isaac" we do not know. His bas-reliefs upon the fa?ade of S. Petronio at Bologna, and round the font of S. John's Chapel in the cathedral of Siena, enable us, however, to compare his style with that of Ghiberti in the handling of a subject common to both, the "Creation of Eve."[82] There is no doubt but that Della Quercia was a formidable rival. Had the gates of the Baptistery been entrusted to his execution, we might have possessed a masterpiece of more heroic style. While smoothness and an almost voluptuous suavity of outline distinguish Ghiberti's naked Eve, gliding upheld by angels from the side of Adam at her Maker's bidding, Della Quercia's group, by the concentration of robust and rugged power, anticipates the style of Michael Angelo. Ghiberti treats the subject pictorially, placing his figures in a landscape, and lavishing attendant angels. Della Quercia, in obedience to the stricter laws of sculpture, restrains his composition to the three chief persons, and brings them into close connection. While Adam reclines asleep in a beautiful and highly studied attitude, Eve has just stepped forth behind him, and God stands robed in massive drapery, raising His hand as though to draw her into life. There is, perhaps, an excess of dramatic action in the lifted right leg of Eve, and too much of pantomimic language in the expressive hands of Eve and her Creator. The robe, again, in its voluminous and snaky coils, and the triangular nimbus of the Deity, convey an effect of heaviness rather than of majesty. Yet we feel, while studying this composition, that it is a noble and original attempt, falling but little short of supreme accomplishment. Without this antecedent sketch, Michael Angelo might not have matured the most complete of all his designs in the Sistine Chapel. The similarity between Delia Quercia's bas-relief and Buonarroti's fresco of Eve is incontestable. The young Florentine, while an exile in Bologna, and engaged upon the shrine of S. Dominic, must have spent hours of study before the sculptures of S. Petronio; so that this seed of Della Quercia's sowing bore after many years the fruit of world-renowned achievement in Rome.

Two other memorable works of Della Quercia must be parenthetically mentioned. These are the Fonte Gaja on the public square of Siena, now unhappily restored, and the portrait of Ilaria del Carretto on her tomb in the cathedral of Lucca. The latter has long been dear to English students of Italian art through words inimitable for their strength of sympathetic criticism.[83]

Ghiberti was brought up as a goldsmith by his stepfather, and it is said that while a youth he spent much of his leisure in modelling portraits and casting imitations of antique gems and coins for his friends. At the same time he practised painting. We find him employed in decorating a palace at Rimini for Carlo Malatesta, when his stepfather recalled him to Florence, in order that he might compete for the gate of the Baptistery. It is probable that from this early training Ghiberti derived the delicacy of style and smoothness of execution that are reckoned among the chief merits of his work. He also developed a manner more pictorial than sculpturesque, which justifies our calling him a painter in bronze. When Sir Joshua Reynolds remarked, "Ghiberti's landscape and buildings occupied so large a portion of the compartments, that the figures remained but secondary objects,"[84] his criticism might fairly have been taxed with some injustice even to the second of the two gates. Yet, though exaggerated in severity, his words convey a truth important for the understanding of this period of Italian art.

The first gate may be cited as the supreme achievement of bronze-casting in the Tuscan prime. In the second, by the introduction of elaborate landscapes and the massing together of figures arranged in multitudes at three and sometimes four distances, Ghiberti overstepped the limits that separate sculpture from painting. Having learned perspective from Brunelleschi, he was eager to apply this new science to his own craft, not discerning that it has no place in noble bas-relief. He therefore abandoned the classical and the early Tuscan tradition, whereby reliefs, whether high or low, are strictly restrained to figures arranged in line or grouped together without accessories. Instead of painting frescoes, he set himself to model in bronze whole compositions that might have been expressed with propriety in colour. The point of Sir Joshua's criticism, therefore, is that Ghiberti's practice of distributing figures on a small scale in spacious landscape framework was at variance with the severity of sculptural treatment. The pernicious effect of his example may be traced in much Florentine work of the mid Renaissance period which passed for supremely clever when it was produced. What the unique genius of Ghiberti made not merely pardonable but even admirable, became under other hands no less repulsive than the transference of pictorial effects to painted glass.[85]

That Ghiberti was not a great sculptor of statues is proved by his work at Orsammichele. He was no architect, as we know from his incompetence to do more than impede Brunelleschi in the building of the dome. He came into the world to create a new and inimitable style of hybrid beauty in those gates of Paradise. His susceptibility to the first influences of the classical revival deserves notice here, since it shows to what an extent a devotee of Greek art in the fifteenth century could worship the relics of antiquity without passing over into imitation. When the "Hermaphrodite" was discovered in the vineyard of S. Celso, Ghiberti's admiration found vent in exclamations like the following: "No tongue could describe the learning and art displayed in it, or do justice to its masterly style." Another antique, found near Florence, must, he conjectures, have been hidden out of harm's way by "some gentle spirit in the early days of Christianity." "The touch only," he adds, "can discover its beauties, which escape the sense of sight in any light."[86] It would be impossible to express a reverential love of ancient art more tenderly than is done in these sentences. So intense was Ghiberti's passion for the Greeks, that he rejected Christian chronology and reckoned by Olympiads-a system that has thrown obscurity over his otherwise precious notes of Tuscan artists. In spite of this devotion, he never appears to have set himself consciously to reproduce the style of Greek sculpture, or to have set forth Hellenic ideas. He remained unaffectedly natural, and in a true sense Christian. The paganism of the Renaissance is a phrase with no more meaning for him than for that still more delicate Florentine spirit, Luca della Robbia; and if his works are classical, they are so only in Goethe's sense, when he pronounced, "the point is for a work to be thoroughly good, and then it is sure to be classical."

One great advantage of the early days of the Renaissance over the latter was this, that pseudo-paganism and pedantry had not as yet distorted the judgment or misdirected the aims of artists. Contact with the antique world served only to stimulate original endeavour, by leading the student back to the fountain of all excellence in nature, and by exhibiting types of perfection in technical processes. To ape the sculptors of Antinous, or to bring to life again the gods who died with Pan, was not yet longed for. Of the impunity with which a sculptor in that period could submit his genius to the service and the study of ancient art without sacrificing individuality, Donatello furnishes a still more illustrious example than Ghiberti. Early in his youth Donatello journeyed with Brunelleschi to Rome, in order to acquaint himself with the monuments then extant. How thoroughly he comprehended the classic spirit is proved by the bronze patera wrought for his patron Ruberto Martelli, and by the frieze of the triumphant Bacchus.[87] Yet the great achievements of his genius were Christian in their sentiment and realistic in their style. The bronze "Magdalen" of the Florentine Baptistery and the bronze "Baptist" of the Duomo at Siena[88] are executed with an unrelenting materialism, not alien indeed to the sincerity of classic art, but divergent from antique tradition, inasmuch as the ideas of repentant and prophetic asceticism had no place in Greek mythology.

Donatello, with the uncompromising candour of an artist bent on marking character, felt that he was bound to seize the very pith and kernel of his subject. If a Magdalen were demanded of him, he would not condescend to model a Venus and then place a book and skull upon a rock beside her; nor did he imagine that the bloom and beauty of a laughing Faun were fitting attributes for the preacher of repentance. It remained for later artists, intoxicated with antique loveliness and corroded with worldly scepticism, to reproduce the outward semblance of Greek deities under the pretence of setting forth the myths of Christianity. Such compromise had not occurred to Donatello. The motive of his art was clearly apprehended, his method was sincere; certain phases of profound emotion had to be represented with the physical characteristics proper to them. The result, ugly and painful as it may sometimes be, was really more concordant with the spirit of Greek method than Lionardo's "John" or Correggio's "Magdalen." That is to say, it was straightforward and truthful; whereas the strange caprices of the later Renaissance too often betrayed a double mind, disloyal alike to paganism and to Christianity, in their effort to combine divergent forces. It may still be argued that such conceptions as sorrow for sin and mortification of the flesh, unflinchingly portrayed by haggard gauntness in the saints of Donatello, are unfit for sculpturesque expression.

A more felicitous embodiment of modern feeling was achieved by Donatello in "S. George" and "David." The former is a marble statue placed upon the north wall of Orsammichele; the latter is a bronze, cast for Cosimo de' Medici, and now exhibited in the Bargello.[89] Without striving to idealise his models, the sculptor has expressed in both the Christian conception of heroism, fearless in the face of danger, and sustained by faith. The naked beauty of the boy David and the mailed manhood of S. George are raised to a spiritual region by the type of feature and the pose of body selected to interpret their animating impulse. These are no mere portraits of wrestlers, such, as peopled the groves of Altis at Olympia, no ideals of physical strength translated into brass and marble, like the "Hercules" of Naples or the Vatican. The one is a Christian soldier ready to engage Apollyon in battle to the death; the other the boy-hero of a marvellous romance. The body in both is but the shrine of an indwelling soul, the instrument and agent of a faith-directed will; and the crown of their conflict is no wreath of laurel or of parsley. In other words, the value of S. George and David to the sculptor lay not in their strength and youthful beauty-though he has endowed them with these excellent gifts-so much as in their significance for the eternal struggle of the soul with evil. The same power of expressing Christian sentiment in a form of perfect beauty, transcending the Greek type by profounder suggestion of feeling, is illustrated in the well-known low-relief of an angel's head in profile, technically one of Donatello's most masterly productions.[90]

It is no part of my present purpose to enumerate the many works of Donatello in marble and bronze; yet some allusion to their number and variety is necessary in order to show how widely his influence was diffused through Italy. In the monuments of Pope John XXIII., of Cardinal Brancacci, and of Bartolommeo Aragazzi, he subordinated his genius to the treatment of sepulchral and biographical subjects according to time-honoured Tuscan usage. They were severally placed in Florence, Naples, and Montepulciano. For the cathedral of Prato he executed bas-reliefs of dancing boys; a similar series, intended for the balustrades of the organ in S. Maria del Fiore, is now preserved in the Bargello museum. The exultation of movement has never been expressed in stone with more fidelity to the strict rules of plastic art. For his friend and patron, Cosimo de' Medici, he cast in bronze the group of "Judith and Holofernes"-a work that illustrates the clumsiness of realistic treatment, and deserves to be remembered chiefly for its strange fortunes. When the Medici fled from Florence in 1494, their palace was sacked; the new republic took possession of Donatello's "Judith," and placed it on a pedestal before the gate of the Palazzo Vecchio, with this inscription, ominous to would-be despots: Exemplum salutis public? cives posuere. MCCCCXCV. It now stands near Cellini's "Perseus" under the Loggia de' Lanzi. For the pulpits of S. Lorenzo, Donatello made designs of intricate bronze bas-reliefs, which were afterwards completed by his pupil Bertoldo. These, though better known to travellers, are less excellent than the reliefs in bronze wrought by Donatello's own hand for the church of S. Anthony at Padua.[91] To that city he was called in 1451, in order that he might model the equestrian statue of Gattamelata. It still stands on the Piazza, a masterpiece of scientific bronze-founding, the first great portrait of a general on horseback since the days of Rome.[92] At Padua, in the hall of the Palazzo della Ragione, is also preserved the wooden horse, which is said to have been constructed by the sculptor for the noble house of Capodilista. These two examples of equestrian modelling marked an epoch in Italian statuary.

When Donato di Nicolo di Betto Bardi, called Donatello because men loved his sweet and cheerful temper, died in 1466 at the age of eighty, the brightest light of Italian sculpture in its most promising period was extinguished. Donatello's influence, felt far and wide through Italy, was of inestimable value in correcting the false direction toward pictorial sculpture which Ghiberti, had he flourished alone at Florence, might have given to the art. His style was always eminently masculine. However tastes may differ about the positive merits of his several works, there can be no doubt that the principles of sincerity, truth to nature, and technical accuracy they illustrate, were all-important in an age that lent itself too readily to the caprices of the fancy and the puerilities of florid taste. To regret that Donatello lacked Ghiberti's exquisite sense of beauty, is tantamount to wishing that two of the greatest artists of the world had made one man between them.

Donatello did not, in the strict sense of the term, found a school.[93] Andrea Verocchio, goldsmith, painter, and worker in bronze, was the most distinguished of his pupils. To all the arts he practised, Verocchio applied limited powers, a meagre manner, and a prosaic mind. Yet few men have exercised at a very critical moment a more decided influence. The mere fact that he numbered Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and Pietro Perugino among his scholars, proves the esteem of his contemporaries; and when we have observed that the type of face selected by Lionardo and transmitted to his followers, appears also in the pictures of Lorenzo di Credi and is first found in the "David" of Verocchio, we have a right to affirm that the master of these men was an artist of creative genius as well as a careful workman. Florence still points with pride to the "Incredulity of Thomas" on the eastern wall of Orsammichele, to the "Boy and Dolphin" in the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, and to the "David" of this sculptor: but the first is spoiled by heaviness and angularity of drapery; the second, though fanciful and marked by fluttering movement, is but a caprice; the third outdoes the hardest work of Donatello by its realism. Verocchio's "David," a lad of some seventeen years, has the lean, veined arms of a stone-hewer or gold-beater. As a faithful portrait of the first Florentine prentice who came to hand, this statue might have merit but for the awkward cuirass and kilt that partly drape the figure.

The name of Verocchio is best known to the world through the equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni. When this great Condottiere, the last surviving general trained by Braccio da Montone, died in 1475, he bequeathed a large portion of his wealth to Venice, on condition that his statue on horseback should be erected in the Piazza di S. Marco. Colleoni, having long held the baton of the Republic, desired that after death his portrait, in his habit as he lived, should continue to look down on the scene of his old splendour. By an ingenious quibble the Senators adhered to the letter of his will without infringing a law that forbade them to charge the square of S. Mark with monuments. They ruled that the piazza in front of the Scuola di S. Marco, better known as the Campo di S. Zanipolo, might be chosen as the site of Colleoni's statue, and to Andrea Verocchio was given the commission for its erection.

Andrea died in 1488 before the model for the horse was finished. The work was completed, and the pedestal was supplied by Alessandro Leopardi. To Verocchio, profiting by the example of Donatello's "Gattamelata," must be assigned the general conception of this statue; but the breath of life that animates both horse and rider, the richness of detail that enhances the massive grandeur of the group, and the fiery spirit of its style of execution were due to the Venetian genius of Leopardi. Verocchio alone produced nothing so truly magnificent. This joint creation of Florentine science and Venetian fervour is one of the most precious monuments of the Renaissance. From it we learn what the men who fought the bloodless battles of the commonwealths, and who aspired to principality, were like. "He was tall," writes a biographer of Colleoni,[94] "of erect and well-knit figure, and of well-proportioned limbs. His complexion tended rather to brown, marked withal by bright and sanguine flesh-tints. He had black eyes; their brilliancy was vivid, their gaze terrible and penetrating. In the outline of his nose and in all his features he displayed a manly nobleness combined with goodness and prudence." Better phrases cannot be chosen to describe his statue.

While admiring this masterpiece and dwelling on its royal style, we are led to deplore most bitterly the loss of the third equestrian statue of the Renaissance. Nothing now remains but a few technical studies made by Lionardo da Vinci for his portrait of Francesco Sforza. The two elaborate models he constructed and the majority of his minute designs have been destroyed. He intended, we are told, to represent the first Duke of the Sforza dynasty on his charger, trampling the body of a prostrate and just conquered enemy. Rubens' transcript from the "Battle of the Standard," enables us to comprehend to some extent how Lionardo might have treated this motive. The severe and cautious style of Donatello, after gaining freedom and fervour from Leopardi, was adapted to the ideal presentation of dramatic passion by Lionardo. Thus Gattamelata, Colleoni, and Francesco Sforza would, through their statues, have marked three distinct phases in the growth of art. The final effort of Italian sculpture to express human activity in the person of a mounted warrior has perished. In this sphere we possess nothing which, like the tombs of S. Lorenzo in relation to sepulchral statuary, completes a series of development.

If Donatello founded no school, this was far more the case with Ghiberti. His supposed pupil, Antonio del Pollajuolo, showed no sign of Ghiberti's influence, but struck out for himself a style distinguished by almost brutal energy and bizarre realism-characteristics the very opposite to those of his master. If the bronze relief of the "Crucifixion" in the Bargello be really Pollajuolo's, we may even trace a leaning to Verocchio in his manner. The emphatic passion of the women recalls the group of mourners round the death-bed of Selvaggia Tornabuoni in Verocchio's celebrated bas-relief. Pollajuolo, like so many Florentine artists, was a goldsmith, a painter, and a worker in niello, before he took to sculpture. As a goldsmith he is said to have surpassed all his contemporaries, and his mastery over this art influenced his style in general. What we chiefly notice, however, in his choice of subjects is a frenzy of murderous enthusiasm, a grimness of imagination, rare among Italian artists. The picture in the Uffizzi of "Hercules and Ant?us" and the well-known engraving of naked men fighting a series of savage duels in a wood, might be chosen as emphatic illustrations of his favourite motives. The fiercest emotions of the Renaissance find expression in the clenched teeth, strained muscles, knotted brows, and tense nerves, depicted by Pollajuolo with eccentric energy. We seem to be assisting at some of those combats a steccato chiuso wherein Sixtus IV. delighted, or to have before our eyes a fray between Crocensi and Vallensi in the streets of Rome.[95] The same remarks apply to the terra-cotta relief by Pollajuolo in the South Kensington Museum. This piece displays the struggles of twelve naked men, divided into six pairs of combatants. Two of the couples hold short chains with the left hand, and seek to stab each other with the right. In the case of another two couples the fight is over, and the victor is insulting his fallen foe. In each of the remaining pairs one gladiator is on the point of yielding to his adversary. There are thus three several moments of duel to the death, each illustrated by two couples. The mathematical distribution of these dreadful groups gives an effect of frozen passion; while the vigorous workmanship displays not only an enthusiasm for muscular anatomy, but a real sympathy with blood-fury in the artist.

There was, therefore, a certain propriety in the choice of Pollajuolo to cast the sepulchre of Sixtus IV. in bronze at Rome. The best judges complain, not without reason, that the allegories surrounding this tomb are exaggerated and affected in style; yet the dead Pope, stretched in pomp upon his bier, commands more than merely historical interest; while the figures, seated as guardians round the old man, terrible in death, communicate an impression of monumental majesty. Criticised in detail, each separate figure may be faulty. The composition, as a whole, is picturesque and grandiose. The same can scarcely be said about the tomb of Innocent VIII., erected by Antonio and his brother Piero del Pollajuolo. While it perpetuates the memory of an uninteresting Pontiff, it has but little, as a work of art, to recommend it. The Pollajuoli were not great sculptors. In the history of Italian art they deserve a place, because of the vivid personality impressed upon some portions of their work. Few draughtsmen carried the study of muscular anatomy so far as Antonio.[96]

Luca della Robbia, whose life embraced the first eighty years of the fifteenth century, offers in many important respects a contrast to his contemporaries Ghiberti and Donatello, and still more to their immediate followers. He made his art as true to life as it is possible to be, without the rugged realism of Donatello or the somewhat effeminate graces of Ghiberti. The charm of his work is never impaired by scientific mannerism-that stumbling-block to critics like De Stendhal in the art of Florence; nor does it suffer from the picturesqueness of a sentimental style. How to render the beauty of nature in her most delightful moments-taking us with him into the holiest of holies, and handling the sacred vessels with a child's confiding boldness-was a secret known to Luca della Robbia alone. We may well find food for meditation in the innocent and cheerful inspiration of this man, whose lifetime coincided with a period of sordid passions and debased ambition in the Church and States of Italy.

Luca was apprenticed in his youth to a goldsmith; but of what he wrought before the age of forty-five, we know but little.[97] At that time his faculty had attained full maturity, and he produced the groups of dancing children and choristers intended for the organ gallery of the Duomo. Wholly free from affectation, and depending for effect upon no merely decorative detail, these bas-reliefs deserve the praise bestowed by Dante on the sculpture seen in Purgatory:[98]-

Dinanzi a noi pareva si verace,

Quivi intagliato in un atto soave,

Che non sembrava immagine che tace.

Movement has never been suggested in stone with less exaggeration, nor have marble lips been made to utter sweeter and more varied music. Luca's true perception of the limits to be observed in sculpture, appears most eminently in the glazed terra-cotta work by which he is best known. An ordinary artist might have found the temptation to aim at showy and pictorial effects in this material overwhelming. Luca restrained himself to pure white on pale blue, and preserved an exquisite simplicity of line in all his compositions. There is an almost unearthly beauty in the profiles of his Madonnas, a tempered sweetness in the modulation of their drapery and attitude, that prove complete mastery in the art of rendering evanescent moments of expression, the most fragile subtleties of the emotions that can stir a tranquil spirit. Andrea della Robbia, the nephew of Luca, with his four sons, Giovanni, Luca, Ambrogio, and Girolamo, continued to manufacture the glazed earthenware of Luca's invention. These men, though excellent artificers, lacked the fine taste of their teacher. Coarser colours were introduced; the eye was dazzled with variety; but the power of speaking to the soul as Luca spoke was lost.[99]

After the Della Robbias, this is the place to mention Agostino di Gucci or di Duccio,[100] a sculptor who handled terra-cotta somewhat in the manner of Donatello's flat-relief, introducing more richness of detail and aiming at more passion than Luca's taste permitted. For the oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia he designed the fa?ade partly in stone and partly in baked clay-crowded with figures, flying, singing, playing upon instruments of music, with waving draperies and windy hair and the ecstasy of movement in their delicately modelled limbs. If nothing else remained of Agostino's workmanship, this fa?ade alone would place him in the first rank of contemporary artists. He owed something, perhaps, to his material; for terra-cotta has the charm of improvisation. The hand, obedient to the brain, has made it in one moment what it is, and no slow hours of labour at the stone have dulled the first caprice of the creative fancy. Work, therefore, which, if translated into marble, might have left our sympathy unstirred, affects us with keen pleasure in the mould of plastic clay. What prodigality of thought and invention has been lavished on the terra-cotta models of unknown Italian artists! What forms and faces, beautiful as shapes of dreams, and, like dreams, so airy that we think they will take flight and vanish, lean to greet us from cloisters and palace fronts in Lombardy! To catalogue their multitude would be impossible. It is enough to select one instance out of many; this shall be taken from the chapel of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio at Milan. High up around the cupola runs a frieze of angels, singing together and dancing with joined hands, while bells composed of fruits and flowers hang down between them. Each angel is an individual shape of joy; the soul in each moves to its own deep melody, but the music made of all is one. Their raiment flutters, the bells chime; the chorus of their gladness falls like voices through a star-lit heaven, half-heard in dreams and everlastingly remembered.

Four sculptors, the younger contemporaries of Luca della Robbia, and marked by certain common qualities, demand attention next. All the work of Antonio Rossellino, Matteo Civitali, Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da Majano, is distinguished by sweetness, grace, tranquillity, and self-restraint-as though these artists had voluntarily imposed limits on their genius, refusing to trespass beyond a traced circle of religious subjects, or to aim at effects unrealisable by purity of outline, suavity of expression, delicacy of feeling, and urbanity of style. The charm of manner they possess in common, can scarcely he defined except by similes. The innocence of childhood, the melody of a lute or song-bird as distinguished from the music of an orchestra, the rathe tints of early dawn, cheerful light on shallow streams, the serenity of a simple and untainted nature that has never known the world-many such images occur to the mind while thinking of the sculpture of these men. To charge them with insipidity, immaturity, and monotony, would be to mistake the force of genius and skill displayed by them. We should rather assume that they confined themselves to certain types of tranquil beauty, without caring to realise more obviously striking effects, and that this was their way of meeting the requirements of sculpture considered as a Christian art. The melody of their design, meanwhile, is like the purest song-music of Pergolese or Salvator Rosa, unapproachably perfect in simple outline, and inexhaustibly refreshing.

Though it is possible to characterise the style of these sculptors by some common qualities observable in their work, it should rather be the aim of criticism to point out their differences. Antonio Rossellino, for example, might be distinguished by his leaning toward the manner of Ghiberti, whose landscape backgrounds he has adopted in the circular medallions of his monumental sculpture. A fine perception of the poetic capabilities of Christian art is displayed in Rossellino's idyllic treatment of the Nativity-the adoration of the shepherds, the hush of reverential stillness in the worship Mary pays her infant son.[101] To the qualities of sweetness and tranquillity rare dignity is added in the monument of the young Cardinal di Portogallo.[102] The sublimity of the slumber that is death has never been more nobly and feelingly portrayed than in the supine figure and sleeping features of this most beautiful young man, who lies watched by angels beneath a heavy-curtained canopy. The genii of eternal repose modelled by Greek sculptors are twin-brothers of Love, on whom perpetual slumber has descended amid poppy-fields by Lethe's stream. The turmoil of the world is over for them; they will never wake again; they do not even dream. Sleep is the only power that still has life in them. But the Christian cannot thus conceive the mystery of the soul "fallen on sleep." His art must suggest a time of waiting and a time of waking; and this it does partly through the ministration of attendant angels, who would not be standing there on guard if the clay-cold corpse had no futurity, partly by breathing upon the limbs and visage of the dead a spirit as of life suspended for a while. Thus the soul herself is imaged in the marble "most sweetly slumbering in the gates of dreams."

What Vespasiano tells us of this cardinal, born of the royal house of Portugal, adds the virtue of sincerity to Rossellino's work, proving there is no flattery of the dead man in his sculpture.[103] "Among his other admirable virtues," says the biographer, "Messer Jacopo di Portogallo determined to preserve his virginity, though he was beautiful above all others of his age. Consequently he avoided all things that might prove impediments to his vow, such as free discourse, the society of women, balls, and songs. In this mortal flesh he lived as though he had been free from it-the life, we may say, rather of an angel than a man. And if his biography were written from his childhood to his death, it would be not only an ensample, but confusion to the world. Upon his monument the hand was modelled from his own, and the face is very like him, for he was most lovely in his person, but still more in his soul."

While contemplating this monument of the young cardinal, we feel that the Italians of that age understood sepulchral sculpture far better than their immediate successors. They knew how to carve the very soul, according to the lines which our Webster, a keen observer of all things relating to the grave and death, has put into Jolenta's lips:-

But indeed,

If ever I would have mine drawn to the life,

I would have a painter steal it at such time

I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers;

There is then a heavenly beauty in't; the soul

Moves in the superficies.

The same Webster condemns that evil custom of aping life and movement on the monuments of dead men, which began to obtain when the motives of pure repose had been exhausted. "Why," asks the Duchess of Malfi, "do we grow fantastical in our death-bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?" "Most ambitiously," answers Bosola; "princes' images on their tombs do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks (as if they died of the toothache): they are not carved with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but, as their minds were wholly bent upon the world, the self-same way they seem to turn their faces." A more trenchant criticism than this could hardly have been pronounced upon Andrea Contucci di Monte Sansavino's tombs of Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo della Rovere, if Bosola had been standing before them in the church of S. Maria del Popolo when he spoke. Were it the function of monumental sculpture to satirise the dead, or to point out their characteristic faults for the warning of posterity, then the sepulchres of these worldly cardinals of Sixtus IV.'s creation would be artistically justified. But the object of art is not this. The idea of death, as conceived by Christians, has to be portrayed. The repose of the just, the resurrection of the body, and the coming judgment, afford sufficient scope for treatment of good men and bad alike. Or if the sculptor have sublime imagination, he may, like Michael Angelo, suggest the alternations of the day and night, slumber and waking, whereby "our little life is rounded with a sleep."

This digression will hardly be thought superfluous when we reflect how large a part of the sculptor's energy was spent on tombs in Italy. Matteo Civitali of Lucca was at least Rossellino's equal in the sculpturesque delineation of spiritual qualities; but the motives he chose for treatment were more varied. All his work is penetrated with deep, prayerful, intense feeling; as though the artist's soul, poured forth in ecstasy and adoration, had been given to the marble. This is especially true of two angels kneeling upon the altar of the Chapel of the Sacrament in Lucca Cathedral. Civitali, by singular good fortune, was chosen in the best years of his life to adorn the cathedral of his native city; and it is here, rather than at Genoa, where much of his sculpture may also be seen, that he deserves to be studied. For the people of Lucca he designed the Chapel of the Santo Volto-a gem of the purest Renaissance architecture-and a pulpit in the same style. His most remarkable sculpture is to be found in three monuments: the tombs of Domenico Bertini and Pietro da Noceto, and the altar of S. Regulus. The last might be chosen as an epitome of all that is most characteristic in Tuscan sculpture of the earlier Renaissance. It is built against the wall, and architecturally designed so as to comprehend a full-length figure of the bishop stretched upon his bier and watched by angels, a group of Madonna and her child seated above him, a row of standing saints below, and a predella composed of four delicately finished bas-reliefs. Every part of this complex work is conceived with spirit and executed with care; and the various elements are so combined as to make one composition, the body of the saint on his sarcophagus forming the central object of the whole.

To do more than briefly mention the minor sculptors of this group would be impossible. Mino di Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterised by grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The tombs in the Abbey of Florence have an almost infantine sweetness of style, which might be extremely piquant, were it not that Mino pushed this quality in other works to the verge of mannerism.[104] Their architectural features are the same as those of similar monuments in Tuscany:-a shallow recess, flanked by Renaissance pilasters, and roofed with a semicircular arch; within the recess, the full-length figure of the dead man on a marble coffin of antique design; in the lunette above, a Madonna carved in low relief.[105] Mino's bust of Bishop Salutati in the cathedral church of Fiesole is a powerful portrait, no less distinguished for vigorous individuality than consummate workmanship. The waxlike finish of the finely chiselled marble alone betrays that delicacy which with Mino verged on insipidity. The same faculty of character delineation is seen in three profiles, now in the Bargello Museum, attributed to Mino. They represent Frederick Duke of Urbino, Battista Sforza, and Galeazzo Sforza. The relief is very low, rising at no point more than half an inch above the surface of the ground, but so carefully modulated as to present a wonderful variety of light and shade, and to render the facial expression with great vividness.

Desiderio da Settignano, one of Donatello's few scholars, was endowed with the same gift of exquisite taste as his friend Mino da Fiesole;[106] but his inventive faculty was bolder, and his genius more robust, in spite of the profuse ornamentation and elaborate finish of his masterpiece, the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce. The bust he made of Marietta di Palla degli Strozzi enables us to compare his style in portraiture with that of Mino.[107] It would be hard to find elsewhere a more captivating combination of womanly sweetness and dignity. We feel, in looking at these products of the best age of Italian sculpture, that the artists who conceived them were, in the truest sense of the word, gentle. None but men courteous and unaffected could have carved a face like that of Marietta Strozzi, breathing the very spirit of urbanity. To express the most amiable qualities of a living person in a work of art that should suggest emotional tranquillity by harmonious treatment, and indicate the temperance of a disciplined nature by self-restraint and moderation of style, and to do this with the highest technical perfection, was the triumph of fifteenth-century sculpture.

An artist who claims a third place beside Mino and his friend, "il bravo Desider si dolce e bello,"[108] is Benedetto da Majano. In Benedetto's bas-reliefs at San Gemignano, carved for the altars of those unlovely Tuscan worthies, S. Fina and S. Bartolo, we find a pictorial treatment of legendary subjects, proving that he had studied Ghirlandajo's frescoes. The same is true about his pulpit in S. Croce at Florence, his treatment of the story of S. Savino at Faenza, and his "Annunciation" in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples. Benedetto, indeed, may be said to illustrate the working of Ghiberti's influence by his liberal use of landscape and architectural backgrounds; but the style is rather Ghirlandajo's than Ghiberti's. If it was a mistake in the sculptors of that period to subordinate their art to painting, the error, we feel, was aggravated by the imitation of a manner so prosaic as that of Ghirlandajo. That Benedetto began life as a tarsiatore may perhaps help to account for his pictorial style in bas-relief.[109] In estimating his total claim as an artist, we must not forget that he designed the formidable and splendid Strozzi Palace.

It will be observed that all the sculptors hitherto mentioned have been Tuscans; and this is due to no mere accident-nor yet to caprice on the part of their historian. Though the other districts of Italy produced admirable workmen, the direction given to this art proceeded from Tuscany. Florence, the metropolis of modern culture, determined the course of the ?sthetical Renaissance. Even at Rimini we cannot account for the carvings in low relief, so fanciful, so delicately wrought, and so profusely scattered over the side chapels of S. Francesco, without the intervention of two Florentines, Bernardo Ciuffagni and Donatello's pupil Simone; while in the palace of Urbino we trace some hand not unlike that of Mino da Fiesole at work upon the mouldings of door and architrave, cornice and high-built chimney.[110] Not only do we thus find Tuscan craftsmen or their scholars employed on all the great public buildings throughout Italy; but it also happens that, except in Tuscany, the decoration of churches and palaces is not unfrequently anonymous.

This does not, however, interfere with the truth that sculpture, like all the arts, assumed a somewhat different character in each Italian city. The Venetian stone-carvers leaned from the first to a richer and more passionate style than the Florentine, reproducing the types of Cima's and Bellini's paintings.[111] Whole families, like the Bregni-classes, like the Lombardi-schools, like that of Alessandro Leopardi, worked together on the monumental sculpture of S. Zanipolo. In the tombs of the Doges the old Pisan motive of the curtains (first used by Arnolfo di Cambio at Orvieto, and afterwards with grand effect by Giovanni Pisano at Perugia) is expanded into a sumptuous tent-canopy. Pages and genii and mailed heroes take the place of angels, and the marine details of Roman reliefs are copied in the subordinate decoration. At Verona the medi?val tombs of the Scaligers, with their vast chest-like sarcophagi and mounted warriors, exhibit features markedly different from the monuments of Tuscany; while the mixture of fresco with sculpture, in monuments like that of the Cavalli in S. Anastasia, and in many altar-pieces, is at variance with Florentine usage. On the terra-cotta mouldings, so frequent in Lombard cities, I have already had occasion to touch briefly. They almost invariably display a feeling for beauty more sensuous, with less of scientific purpose in their naturalism, than is common in the Tuscan style. Guido Mazzoni of Modena, called Il Modanino, may be mentioned as the sculptor who freed terra-cotta from its dependence upon architecture, and who modelled groups of overpowering dramatic realism. His "Pietà," in the Church of Monte Oliveto at Naples, is valuable, less for its passionate intensity of expression than for the portraits of Pontano, Sannazzaro, and Alfonso of Aragon.[112] This sub-species of sculpture was freely employed in North Italy to stimulate devotion, and to impress the people with lively pictures of the Passion. The Sacro Monte at Varallo, for example, is covered with a multitude of chapels, each one of which presents some chapter of Bible history dramatically rendered by life-size groups of terra-cotta figures. Some of these were designed by eminent painters, and executed by clever modellers in clay. Even now they are scarcely less stirring to the mind of a devout spectator than the scenes of a medi?val Mystery may have been.

The Certosa of Pavia, lastly, is the centre of a school of sculpture that has little in common with the Florentine tradition. Antonio Amadeo[113] and Andrea Fusina, acting in concert with Ambrogio Borgognone the painter, gave it in the fifteenth century that character of rich and complex decorative beauty which many generations of artists were destined to continue and complete. Among the countless sculptors employed upon its marvellous fa?ade Amadeo asserts an individuality above the rest, which is further manifested in his work in the Cappella Colleoni at Bergamo. We there learn to know him, not only as an enthusiastic cultivator of the mingled Christian and pagan manner of the quattrocento, but as an artist in the truest sense of the word sympathetic. The sepulchral portrait of Medea, daughter of the great Condottiere, has a grace almost beyond that of Della Quercia's "Ilaria."[114] Much, no doubt, is due to the peculiarly fragile beauty of the girl herself, who lies asleep with little crisp curls clustering upon her forehead, and with a string of pearls around her slender throat. But the sensibility to loveliness so delicate, and the power to render it in marble with so ethereal a touch upon the rigid stone, belong to the sculptor, and win for him our worship.

The list of fifteenth-century sculptors is almost ended; and already, on the threshold of the sixteenth, stands the mighty form of Michael Angelo. Andrea Contucci da Sansavino and his pupil Jacopo Tatti, called also Sansovino, after his master, must, however, next be mentioned as continuing the Florentine tradition without subservience to the style of Buonarroti. Andrea da Sansavino was a sculptor in whom for the first time the faults of the mid-Renaissance period are glaringly apparent. He persistently sacrificed simplicity of composition to decorative ostentation, and tranquillity of feeling to theatrical effect. The truth of this will be acknowledged by all who have studied the tombs of the cardinals in S. Maria del Popolo already mentioned,[115] and the bas-reliefs upon the Santa Casa at Loreto. In technical workmanship Andrea proved himself an able craftsman, modelling marble with the plasticity of wax, and lavishing patterns of the most refined invention. Yet the decorative prodigality of this master corresponded to the frigid and stylistic graces of the neo-Latin poets. It was so much mannerism-adopted without real passion from the antique, and applied with a rhetorical intention. Those acanthus scrolls and honeysuckle borders, in spite of their consummate finish, fail to arrest attention, leaving the soul as unstirred as the Ovidian cadences of Bembo.

Jacopo Tatti was a genius of more distinction. Together with San Gallo and Bramante he studied the science of architecture in Rome, where he also worked at the restoration of newly discovered antiques, and cast in bronze a copy of the "Laocoon." Thus equipped with the artistic learning of his age, he was called in 1523 by the Doge, Andrea Gritti, to Venice. The material pomp of Venice at this epoch, and the pride of her unrivalled luxury, affected his imagination so powerfully that his genius, tutored by Florentine and Umbrian masters among the ruins of old Rome, became at once Venetian. In the history of the Renaissance the names of Titian and Aretino, themselves acclimatised aliens, are inseparably connected with that of their friend Sansovino. At Venice he lived until his death in 1570, building the Zecca, the Library, the Scala d'Oro in the Ducal Palace, and the Loggietta beneath the bell-tower of S. Mark. In all his work he subordinated sculpture to architecture, and his statuary is conceived in the bravura, manner of Renaissance paganism. Whatever may be the faults of Sansovino in both arts, it cannot be denied that he expressed, in a style peculiar to himself, the large voluptuous external life of Venice at a moment when this city was the Paris or the Corinth of Renaissance Europe. At the same time, the shallowness of Sansovino's inspiration as a sculptor is patent in his masterpieces of parade-the "Neptune" and the "Mars," guarding the Scala d'Oro. Separated from the architecture of the court and staircase, they are insignificant in spite of their colossal scale. In their place they add a haughty grandeur, by the contrast which their flowing forms and arrogant attitudes present to the severer lines of the construction. But they are devoid of artistic sincerity, and occupy the same relation to true sculpture as flourishes of rhetoric, however brilliant, to poetry embodying deep thought or passion. At first sight they impose: on further acquaintance we find them chiefly interesting as illustrations of a potent civic life upon the wane, gorgeous in its decay.

Sansovino was a first-rate craftsman. The most finished specimen of his skill is the bronze door of the Sacristy of S. Marco, upon which he is said to have worked through twenty years. Portraits of the sculptor, Titian, and Pietro Aretino are introduced into the decorative border. These heads start from the surface of the gate with astonishing vivacity. That Aretino should thus daily assist in effigy at the procession of priests bearing the sacred emblems from the sacristy to the high altar of S. Mark, is one of the most characteristic proofs of sixteenth-century indifference to things holy and things profane.

Jacopo Sansovino marks the final intrusion of paganism into modern art. The classical revival had worked but partially and indirectly upon Ghiberti and Donatello-not because they did not feel it most intensely, but because they clung to nature far more closely than to antique precedent. This enthusiasm inspired Sansovino with the best and strongest qualities that he can boast; and if his genius had been powerful enough to resist the fascination of merely rhetorical effects, he might have produced a perfect restoration of the classic style. His was no lifeless or pedantic imitation of antique fragments, but a real expression of the fervour with which the modern world hailed the discoveries revealed to it by scholarship. This is said advisedly. The most beautiful and spirited pagan statue of the Renaissance period, justifying the estimate here made of Sansovino's genius, is the "Bacchus" exhibited in the Bargello Museum. Both the Bacchus and the Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism, irradiated and idealised by the sculptor's vivid sense of natural gladness. Considered as a restitution of the antique manner, this statue is decidedly superior to the "Bacchus" of Michael Angelo. While the mundane splendour of Venice gave body and fulness to Sansovino's paganism, he missed the self-restraint and purity of taste peculiar to the studious shades of Florence. In his style, both architectural and sculptural, the neo-pagan sensuality of Italy expanded all its bloom.

For the artist at this period a Greek myth and a Christian legend were all one. Both afforded the occasion for displaying technical skill in fluent forms, devoid of any but voluptuous feeling; while both might be subordinated to rich effects of decoration.[116] To this point the intellectual culture of the fifteenth century had brought the plastic arts of Italy, by a process similar to that which ended in the "Partus Virginis" of Sannazzaro. They were still indisputably vigorous, and working in accordance with the movement of the modern spirit. Yet the synthesis they attempted to effect between heathenism and Christianity, by a sheer effort of style, and by indifferentism, strikes us from the point of view of art alone, not reckoning religion or morality, as unsuccessful. Still, if it be childish on the one hand to deplore that the Christian earnestness of the earlier masters had failed, it would be even more ridiculous to complain that paganism had not been more entirely recovered. The double-mind of the Renaissance, the source of its weakness in art as in thought, could not be avoided, because humanity at this moment had to lose the medi?val sincerity of faith, and to assimilate the spirit of a bygone civilisation. This, for better or for worse, was the phase through which the intellect of modern Europe was obliged to pass; and those who have confidence in the destinies of the human race, will not spend their strength in moaning over such shortcomings as the periods of transition bring inevitably with them. The student of Italian history may indeed more reasonably be allowed to question whether the arts, if left to follow their own development unchecked, might not have recovered from the confusion of the Renaissance and have entered on a stage of nobler activity through earnest and unaffected study of nature. But the enslavement of the country, together with the counter-Reformation, suspended the Renaissance in mid-career; and what remains of Italian art is incomplete. Besides, it must be borne in mind that the confusion of opinions consequent upon the clash of the modern with the ancient world, left no body of generally accepted beliefs to express; nor has the time even yet arrived for a settlement and synthesis that shall be favourable to the activity of the figurative arts.

Sansovino himself was neither original nor powerful enough, to elevate the mixed motives of Renaissance sculpture by any lofty idealisation. To do that remained for Michael Angelo. The greatness of Michael Angelo consists in this-that while literature was sinking into the frivolity of Academies and the filth of the Bernesque "Capitoli," while the barefaced villanies of Aretino won him credit, while sensual magnificence formed the ideal of artists who were neither Greeks nor Christians, while Ariosto found no subject fitter for his genius than a glittering romance, he and he alone maintained the Dantesque dignity of the Italian intellect in his sculpture. Michael Angelo stands so far apart from other men, and is so gigantic a force for good and evil in the history of art, that to estimate his life and labour in relation to the Renaissance must form the subject of a separate chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that his immediate scholars, Raffaello da Montelupo, and Gian Angelo Montorsoli, caught little from their master but the mannerism of contorted form and agitated action. This mannerism, a blemish even in the strong work of Buonarroti, became ridiculous when adopted by men of feeble powers and passionless imagination. By straining the art of sculpture to its utmost limits, Michael Angelo expressed vehement emotions in marble; and the forced attitudes affected in his work had their value as significant of spiritual struggle. His imitators showed none of their master's sublime force, none of that terribilità which made him unapproachable in social intercourse and inimitable in art. They merely fancied that dignity and beauty were to be achieved by placing figures in difficult postures, exaggerated muscular anatomy, and twisting the limbs of their models upon sections of ellipses in uncomfortable attitudes, till the whole of their work was writhen into uncouth lines. Buonarroti himself was not responsible for these results. He wrought out his own ideal with the firmness of a genius that obeys the law of its own nature, doing always what it must. That the decadence of sculpture into truculent bravado was independent of his direct influence, is further proved by the inefficiency of his contemporaries.

Baccio Bandinelli and Bartolommeo Ammanati filled the squares of the Italian cities with statues of Hercules and Satyrs, Neptune and River-gods. We know not whether to select the vulgarity, the feebleness, or the pretentiousness of these pseudo-classical colossi for condemnation. They have nothing Greek about them but their names, their nakedness, and their association with myths, the significance whereof was never really felt by the sculptors. Some of Bandinelli's designs, it is true, are vigorous; but they are mere drawings from undraped peasants, life studies depicting the human animal. His "Hercules and Cacus," while it deserves all the sarcasm hurled at it by Cellini, proves that Bandinelli could not rise above the wrestling bout of a porter and a coal-heaver. Nor would it be possible to invent a motive less in accordance with Greek taste than the conceit of Ammanati's fountain at Castello, where Hercules by squeezing the body of Ant?us makes the drinking water of a city spout from a giant's mouth. Such pitiful misapplications of an art which is designed to elevate the commonplace of human form, and to render permanent the nobler qualities of physical existence, show how superficially and wrongly the antique spirit had been apprehended.

Some years before his death Ammanati expressed in public his regret that he had made so many giants and satyrs, feeling that, by exhibiting forms of lust, brutality, and animalism to the gaze of his fellow-countrymen, he had sinned against the higher law revealed by Christianity. For a Greek artist to have spoken thus would have been impossible. The Faun, the Titan, and the Satyr had a meaning for him, which he sought to set forth in accordance with the semi-religious, semi-poetical traditions of his race; and when he was at work upon a myth of nature-forces, he well knew that at the other end of the scale, separated by no spiritual barrier, but removed to an almost infinite distance of refinement, Zeus, Phoebus, and Pallas claimed his loftier artistic inspiration. Ammanati's confession, on the contrary, betrays that schism between the conscience of Christianity and the lusts let loose by ill-assimilated sympathy with antique heathenism, which was a marked characteristic of the Renaissance. The coarser passions, held in check by ecclesiastical discipline, dared to emerge into the light of day under the supposed sanction of classical examples. What the Visconti and the Borgias practised in their secret chambers, the sculptors exposed in marble and the poets in verse. All alike, however, were mistaken in supposing that antique precedent sanctioned this efflorescence of immorality. No amount of Greek epigrams by Strato and Meleager, nor all the Hermaphrodites and Priapi of Rome, had power to annul the law of conduct established by the founders of Christianity, and ratified by the higher instincts of the Middle Ages. Nor again were artists justified before the bar of conscience in selecting the baser elements of Paganism for imitation, instead of aiming at Greek self-restraint and Roman strength of character. All this the men of the Renaissance felt when they listened to the voice within them. Their work, therefore, in so far as it pretended to be a reconstruction of the antique was false. The sensuality it shared in common with many Greek and Roman masterpieces, had ceased to be frank and in the true sense pagan. To shake off Christianity, and to revert with an untroubled conscience to the manners of a bygone age, was what they could not do.

The errors I have attempted to characterise did not, however, prevent the better and more careful works of sculpture, executed in illustration of classical mythology, from having a true value. The "Perseus" of Cellini and some of Gian Bologna's statues belong to a class of ?sthetic productions which show how much that is both original and excellent may be raised in the hotbed of culture.[117] They express a genuine moment of the Renaissance with vigour, and deserve to be ranked with the Latin poetry of Poliziano, Bembo, and Pontano. The worst that can be said of them is that their inspiration was factitious, and that their motives had been handled better in the age of Greek sincerity.

Gian Bologna, born at Douai, but a Florentine by education, devoted himself almost exclusively to mythological sculpture. That he was a greater sculptor than his immediate predecessors will be affirmed by all who have studied his bronze "Mercury," the "Venus of Petraja," and the "Neptune" on the fountain of Bologna. Something of the genuine classic feeling had passed into his nature. The "Mercury" is not a reminiscence of any antique statue. It gives in bronze a faithful and spirited reading of Virgil's lines, and is conceived with artistic purity not unworthy of a good Greek period. The "Neptune" is something more than a muscular old man; and, in its place, it forms one of the most striking ornaments of Italy. It is worthy of remark that sculpture, in this stage, continued to be decorative. Fountains are among the most successful monuments of the late Renaissance. Even Montorsoli's fountain at Messina is in a high sense picturesquely beautiful.

Casting a glance backward over the foregoing sketch of Italian sculpture, it will be seen that three distinct stages were traversed in the evolution of this art. The first may be called architectural, the second pictorial, the third neo-pagan. Defined by their artistic purposes, the first idealises Christian motives; the second is naturalistic; the third attempts an idealisation inspired by revived paganism. As far as the Renaissance is concerned, all three are moments in its history; though it was only during the third that the influences of the classical revival made themselves overwhelmingly felt. Niccola Pisano in the first stage marked a fresh point of departure for his art by a return to Gr?co-Roman standards of the purest type then attainable, in combination with the study of nature. Giovanni Pisano effected a fusion between his father's manner and the Gothic style. The Pisan sculpture was wholly Christian; nor did it attempt to free itself from the service of architecture. Giotto opened the second stage by introducing new motives, employed by him with paramount mastery in painting. Under his influence the sculptors inclined to picturesque effects, and the direction thus given to sculpture lasted through the fifteenth century. For the rest, the style of these masters was distinguished by a fresh and charming naturalism and by rapid growth in technical processes. While assimilating much of the classical spirit, they remained on the whole Christian; and herein they were confirmed by the subjects they were chiefly called upon to treat, in the decoration of altars, pulpits, church fa?ades, and tombs. The revived interest in antique literature widened their sympathies and supplied their fancy with new material; but there is no imitative formalism in their work. Its beauty consists in a certain immature blending of motives chosen almost indiscriminately from Christian and pagan mythology, vitalised by the imagination of the artist, and presented with the originality of true creative instinct. During the third stage the results of prolonged and almost exclusive attention to the classics, on the part of the Italians as a people, make themselves manifest. Collections of antiquities and libraries had been formed in the fifteenth century; the literary energies of the nation were devoted to the interpretation of Greek and Latin texts, and the manners of society affected paganism. At the same time a worldly Church and a corrupt hierarchy had done their utmost to enfeeble the spirit of Christianity. That art should prove itself sensitive to this phase of intellectual and social life was natural. Religious subjects were now treated by the sculptors with superficial formalism and cynical indifference, while all their ingenuity was bestowed upon providing pagan myths with new forms. How far they succeeded has been already made the matter of inquiry. The most serious condemnation of art in this third period is that it halted between two opinions, that it could not be sincere. But this double-mindedness, as I have tried to show, was necessary; and therefore to lament over it is weak. What the Renaissance achieved for the modern world was the liberation of the reason, the power of starting on a new career of progress. The false direction given to the art of sculpture at one moment of this intellectual revival may be deplored; and still more deplorable is the corresponding sensual debasement of the race who won for us the possibility of freedom. But the life of humanity is long and vigorous, and the philosopher of history knows well that the sum total of accomplishment at any time must be diminished by an unavoidable discount. The Renaissance, like a man of genius, had the defects of its qualities.

FOOTNOTES:

[56]

Sketches of the History of Christian Art, vol. ii. p. 102.

[57]

Since I wrote the paragraph above, I have chanced to read Mr. Buskin's eloquent tirade against the modern sceptical school of critics in his "Mornings in Florence," The Vaulted Book, pp. 105, 106. With the spirit of it I thoroughly agree; feeling that, in the absence of solid evidence to the contrary, I would always rather accept sixteenth-century Italian tradition with Vasari, than reject it with German or English speculators of to-day. This does not mean that I wish to swear by Vasari, when he can be proved to have been wrong, but that I regard the present tendency to mistrust tradition, only because it is tradition, as in the highest sense uncritical.

[58]

See Appendix I., on the Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello.

[59]

The data is extremely doubtful. Were we to trust internal evidence-the evidence of style and handling-we should be inclined to name this not the earliest but the latest and ripest of Pisano's works. It may be suggested in passing that the form of the lunette was favourable to the composition by forcing a gradation in the figures from the centre to either side. There is an engraving of this bas-relief in Ottley's Italian School of Design.

[60]

Rheims Cathedral, for example, was begun in 1211. Upon its western portals is the loveliest of Northern Gothic sculpture.

[61]

Antonio Filarete was commissioned, soon after 1431, by Eugenius IV., to make the great gates of S. Peter's. The decorative framework represents a multitude of living creatures-snails, snakes, lizards, mice, butterflies, and birds-half hidden in foliage, together with the best known among Greek myths, the Rape of Proserpine, Diana and Act?on, Europa and the Bull, the Labours of Hercules, &c.c. Such fables as the Fox and the Stork, the Fox and the Crow, and old stories like that of the death of ?schylus, are included in this medley. The monument of Paul III. is placed in the choir of S. Peter's. Giulia Bella was the mistress of Alexander VI., and a sister of the Farnese, who owed his cardinal's hat to her influence. To represent her as an allegory of Truth upon her brother's tomb might well pass for a grim satire. The Prudence opposite is said to be a portrait of the Pope's mother, Giovanna Ga?tani. She resembles nothing more than a duenna of the type of Martha in Goethe's Faust. Here, again, the allegory would point a scathing sarcasm, if we did not remember the na?veté of the Renaissance.

[62]

See above, p. 36.

[63]

Having said so much about this pulpit of S. Andrea, I am sorry that I cannot refer the English reader to any accessible representation of it. For its sake alone, if for no other purpose, Pistoja is well worth a visit.

[64]

It was long believed that he died of eating poisoned figs.

[65]

See above, p. 45, note, for the original conception of this motive at Orvieto.

[66]

See Il Duomo di Orvieto, descritto ed illustrato per Lodovico Luzi, pp. 330-339.

[67]

See Luzi, pp. 317-328, and the first extant commission given in 1310 to Maitani, which follows, pp. 328-330.

[68]

The whole series has been admirably engraved under the superintendence of Ludwig Grüner. Special attention may be directed to the groups of angels attendant on the Creator in His last day's work; to the "Adoration of the Shepherds," distinguished by tender and idyllic grace: and to the "Adoration of the Magi," marked no less by majesty. The dead breaking open the lids of their sarcophagi and rising to judgment are justly famous for spirited action.

[69]

In Gothic sculpture of an early date the Bible narrative is literally represented. God draws Eve from the open side of sleeping Adam. On the fa?ade of Orvieto this motive is less altered than refined. The wound in Adam's side is visible, but Eve is coming from behind his sleeping body in obedience to the beckoning hand of her Creator. Ghiberti in the bronze gate of the Florentine Baptistery still further develops the poetic beauty of the motive. Angels lift Eve in the air above Adam, in whose side there is now no open wound, and sustain her face to face with God, who calls her into life. Della Quercia, on the fa?ade of S. Petronio, confines himself to the creative act, expressed by the raised hand of the Maker, and the answering attitude of Eve; and this conception receives final treatment from Michael Angelo in the frescoes of the Sistine.

[70]

Le Tre Porte del Battistero di San Giovanni di Firenze, incise ed illustrate (Firenze, 1821), contains outlines of all Andrea Pisano's and Ghiberti's work.

[71]

See above, pp. 9-13.

[72]

See above, pp. 9-13.

[73]

What Giotto himself was, as a designer for sculpture, is shown in the little reliefs upon the basement of his campanile.

[74]

What has previously been noted in the chapter upon architecture deserves repetition here-that the Italian style of building gave more scope to independent sculpture, owing to its preference for flat walls, and its rejection of multiplied niches, canopies, and so forth, than the Northern Gothic. Thus, however subordinated to architecture, sculpture in Italy still had more scope for self-assertion than in Germany or France.

[75]

See Perkins, Italian Sculptors, p. 109, for a description of the Arca di S. Agostino, which he assigns to Matteo and Bonino da Campione. This shrine, now in the Duomo, was made for the sacristy of S. Pietro in Cielo d'Oro, where it stood until the year 1832.

[76]

Bonino da Campione, the Milanese, who may have had a hand in the Arca di S. Agostino, carved the tomb of Can Signorio. That of Mastino II. was executed by another Milanese, Perino.

[77]

See Trucchi, Poesie Italiane inedite, vol. ii.

[78]

See the Illustrated work, Il Tabernacolo della Madonna d'Or sammichele, Firenze, 1851.

[79]

The weighty chapter in Alberti's Treatise on Painting, lib. iii. cap. 5, might be used to support this paragraph.

[80]

Quercia, born 1374; Ghiberti, 1378; Brunelleschi, 1379; Donatello, 1386.

[81]

They are engraved in the work cited above, Le Tre Porte, seconda Porta, Tavole i. ii.

[82]

The bas-reliefs of S. Petronio were executed between 1425 and 1435. Those of the font in the chapel of S. John (not the lower church of S. John), at Siena, are ascribed to Quercia, and are in his manner; but when they were finished I do not know. They set forth six subjects from the story of Adam and Eve, with a compartment devoted to Hercules killing the Centaur Nessus, and another to Samson or Hercules and the Lion. The choice of subjects, affording scope for treatment of the nude, is characteristic; so is the energy of handling, though rude in detail. It may be worth while to notice here a similar series of reliefs upon the fa?ade of the Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo, representing scenes from the story of Adam in conjunction with the labours of Hercules.

[83]

Ruskin's Modern Painters, vol. ii. chap, vii., Repose.

[84]

See Flaxman's Lectures on Sculpture, p. 310.

[85]

This criticism of the "Gate of Paradise" sounds even to the writer of it profane, and demands a palinode. Who, indeed, can affirm that he would wish the floating figure of Eve, or the three angels at Abraham's tent-door, other than they are?

[86]

See the Commentaries of Ghiberti, printed in vol. i. of Vasari (Lemonnier, 1846).

[87]

The patera is at South Kensington, the frieze at Florence.

[88]

As also the wooden Baptist in the Frari at Venice.

[89]

There is another "David," by Donatello, in marble; also in the Bargello, scarcely less stiff and ugly than the "Baptist."

[90]

The cast was published by the Arundel Society. The original belongs to Lord Elcho.

[91]

It has been suggested, with good show of reason, that Mantegna was largely indebted to these bas-reliefs for his lofty style.

[92]

This omits the statues of the Scaligers: but no medi?val work aimed at equal animation. The antique bronze horses at Venice and the statue of Marcus Aurelius must have been in Donatello's mind.

[93]

The sculptor of a beautiful tomb erected for the Countess of Montorio and her infant daughter in the church of S. Bernardino at Aquila was probably Andrea dell' Aquila, a pupil of Donatello. See Perkins's Italian Sculptors, pp. 46, 47.

[94]

Istoria della Vita e Fatti dell' eccellentissimo Capitano di guerra Bartolommeo Colleoni, scritta per Pietro Spino. Republished, 1859.

[95]

See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 310, note 2.

[96]

Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. chap, xvi., may be consulted as to the several claims of the two brothers.

[97]

His bas-reliefs on Giotto's campanile of Grammar, Astronomy, Geometry, Plato, Aristotle, &c.c., are anterior to 1445; and even about this date there is uncertainty, some authorities fixing it at 1435.

[98]

Purg. x. 37, and xi. 68.

[99]

Among the very best works of the later Robbian school may be cited the frieze upon the fa?ade of the Ospedale del Ceppo at Pistoja, representing in varied colour, and with graceful vivacity, the Seven Acts of Mercy. Date about 1525.

[100]

He calls himself Agostinus Florentine Lapicida on his fa?ade of the Oratory of S. Bernardino.

[101]

See especially a roundel in the Bargello, and the altar-piece in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples. Those who wish to understand Rossellino should study him in the latter place.

[102]

In the church of Samminiato, near Florence.

[103]

Vite di Uomini Illustri, pp. 152-157.

[104]

These tombs in the Badia were erected for Count Ugo, Governor of Tuscany under Otho II., and for Messer Bernardo Giugni. Mino also made the tomb for Pope Paul II., parts of which are preserved in the Grotte of S. Peter's. At Rome he carved a tabernacle for S. Maria in Trastevere, and at Volterra a ciborium for the Baptistery-one of his most sympathetic productions. The altars in the Baglioni Chapel of S. Pietro Cassinense at Perugia, in S. Ambrogio at Florence, and in the cathedral of Fiesole, and the pulpit in the Duomo at Prato, may be mentioned among his best works.

[105]

Besides Civitali's altar of S. Regulus, and the tomb of Pietro da Noceto already mentioned, Bernardo Rossellino's monument to Lionardo Bruni, and Desiderio's monument to Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce at Florence, may be cited as eminent examples of Tuscan sepulchres.

[106]

The wooden statue of the Magdalen in Santa Trinità at Florence shows Desiderio's approximation to the style of his master. She is a careworn and ascetic saint, with the pathetic traces of great beauty in her emaciated face.

[107]

This bust is in the Palazzo Strozzi at Florence.

[108]

So Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father, described Desiderio da Settignano.

[109]

The following story is told about Benedetto's youth. He made two large inlaid chests or cassoni, adorned with all the skill of a worker in tarsia, or wood-mosaic, and carried these with him to King Matthias Corvinus, of Hungary. Part of his journey was performed by sea. On arriving and unpacking his chests, he found that the sea-damp had unglued the fragile wood-mosaic, and all his work was spoiled. This determined him to practise the more permanent art of sculpture. See Perkins, vol. i. p. 228.

[110]

For further description of the sculpture at Rimini, I may refer to my Sketches in Italy and Greece, pp. 250-252. For the student of Italian art, who has no opportunity of visiting Rimini, it is greatly to be regretted that these reliefs have never yet even in photography been reproduced. The palace of Duke Frederick at Urbino was designed by Luziano, a Dalmatian architect, and continued by Baccio Pontelli, a Florentine. The reliefs of dancing Cupids, white on blue ground, with wings and hair gilt, and the children holding pots of roses and gilly-flowers, in one of its great rooms, may be selected for special mention. Ambrogio or Ambrogino da Milano, none of whose handiwork is found in his native district, and who may therefore be supposed to have learned and practised his art elsewhere, was the sculptor of these truly genial reliefs.

[111]

See, for example, the remarkable bas-relief of the Doge Lionardo Loredano engraved by Perkins, Italian Sculptors, p. 201.

[112]

Another Modenese, Antonio Begarelli, born in 1479, developed this art of the plasticatore, with quite as much pictorial impressiveness, and in a style of stricter science, than his predecessor Il Modanino. His masterpieces are the "Deposition from the Cross" in S. Francesco, and the "Pietà" in S. Pietro, of his native city.

[113]

The name of this great master is variously written-Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, or Omodeo, or degli Amadei, or de' Madeo, or a Madeo-pointing possibly to the town Madeo as his native place. Through a long life he worked upon the fabric of the Milanese Duomo, the Certosa of Pavia, and the Chapel of Colleoni at Bergamo. To him we owe the general design of the fa?ade of the Certosa and the cupola of the Duomo of Milan. For the details of his work and an estimate of his capacity, see Perkins, Italian Sculptors, pp. 127-137.

[114]

This statue was originally intended for a chapel built and endowed by Colleoni at Basella, near Bergamo. When he determined to erect his chapel in S. Maria Maggiore at Bergamo, he entrusted the execution of this new work to Amadeo, and the monument of Medea was subsequently placed there.

[115]

See above, p. 113. I have spelt the name Sansovino, when applied to Jacopo Tatti, in accordance with time-honoured usage.

[116]

To multiply instances is tedious; but notice in this connection the Hermaphroditic statue of S. Sebastian at Orvieto, near the western door. It is a fair work of Lo Scalza.

[117]

This brief allusion to Cellini must suffice for the moment, as I intend to treat of him in a separate chapter.

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