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The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

by Walter Pater · English · Gutenberg #2398 · 362,800 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

Author: Walter Pater


        
Release date: November 1, 2000 [eBook #2398]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Bruce McClintock.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY ***




Produced by Bruce McClintock.  HTML version by Al Haines.









THE RENAISSANCE

STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY


by

Walter Pater



Sixth Edition




  Dedication
  To C.L.S.




PREFACE

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define
beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find
a universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often
been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such
discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art
or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less
excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry,
with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like
all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the
definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its
abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the
most concrete terms possible, to find, not a universal formula for it,
but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special
manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to
be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism
the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know
one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it
distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals--music,
poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life--are indeed
receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products
of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture,
this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to ME? What
effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if
so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its
presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are
the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in
the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary
data for oneself, or not at all. And he who experiences these
impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and
analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract
question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth
or experience--metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical
questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or
not, of no interest to him.

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to
do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as
powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or
less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to
explain, analysing it and reducing it to its elements. To him, the
picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book,
La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for
their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the
property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression
of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our
susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And
the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyse, and
separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape,
a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special
impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that
impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is
reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist
notes some natural element, for himself and others; and the rule for
those who would reach this end is stated with great exactness in the
words of a recent critic of Sainte-Beuve:--De se borner a connaitre de
pres les belles choses, et a s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en
humanistes accomplis.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct
abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of
temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of
beautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many
forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves
equal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and some
excellent work done. The question he asks is always:--In whom did the
stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself? where was the
receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are
all equal," says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."

Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the
commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few
artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all
debris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has
wholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the writings of
Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his
work, has crystallised a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great
mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But scattered
up and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions,
like the Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, and the Ode on the
Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing a
fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly search
through and transform, we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable
faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and
of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and
character from local influences, from the hills and streams, and from
natural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the active
principle in Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of
Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to
mark the degree in which it penetrates his verse.

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the
Renaissance, and touch what I think are the chief points in that
complex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of them what
I understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was
intended by those who originally used it to denote only that revival of
classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which was but one of many
results of a general excitement and enlightening of the human mind, of
which the great aim and achievements of what, as Christian art, is often
falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreak
of the human spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, with
its qualities already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty,
the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the
religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the
imagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this earlier
Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as an expression of its
qualities, two little compositions in early French; not because they
constitute the best possible expression of them, but because they help
the unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France,
in French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellay
are in many ways the most perfect illustration; the Renaissance thus
putting forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the
products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness
which belongs to a refined and comely decadence; just as its earliest
phases have the freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art,
the charm of ascesis, of the austere and serious girding of the loins in
youth.

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the
Renaissance mainly lies,--in that solemn fifteenth century which can
hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the
things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art,
its special and prominent personalities, with their profound aesthetic
charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical
qualities of which it is a consummate type.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the
culture of an age, move for the most part from different
starting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the same
generation they partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciously
illustrate each other; but of the producers themselves, each group is
solitary, gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be in
intellectual isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious
life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the open
places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle of
ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally little
curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time to
time, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of men
draw nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of the
intellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture. The
fifteenth century in Italy is one of these happier eras; and what is
sometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:--it is
an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete.
Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world
has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a
common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. There
is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which all alike
communicate. It is the unity of this spirit which gives unity to all the
various products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate alliance
with mind, this participation in the best thoughts which that age
produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much of
its grave dignity and influence.

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with the
studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth
century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm
for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake,
by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to the Greek spirit,
he is in sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is the
last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive
and tendencies.




CONTENTS

  TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
  PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
  SANDRO BOTTICELLI
  LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
  THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
  LEONARDO DA VINCI
  THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
  JOACHIM DU BELLAY
  WINCKELMANN
  CONCLUSION



TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

The history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us away from
Italy to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire. But it was in
France also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun;
and French writers, who are so fond of connecting the creations of
Italian genius with a French origin, who tell us how Francis of Assisi
took not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and romantic
love which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how
Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old French
fabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the origin of the art
of miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt on this
notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of
the thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of the middle
age itself--a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for human
life and the human mind what was afterwards done in the fifteenth. The
word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merely
that revival of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth
century, and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complex
movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but one
element or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided
but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the
intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more
liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make themselves felt, urging
those who experience this desire to search out first one and then
another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing
them not merely to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of this
enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources thereof--new
experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art. Of such feeling
there was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and the beginning
of the following century. Here and there, under rare and happy
conditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love,
in the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns to
sweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed
of the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after
the springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming after
a long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that true "dark
age," in which so many sources of intellectual and imaginative enjoyment
had actually disappeared, this outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance,
a revival.

Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of thought and
feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrowness
of men's minds constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a great
stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth understanding.
It is so with this theory of a Renaissance within the middle age, which
seeks to establish a continuity between the most characteristic work of
the middle age, the sculpture of Chartres and the windows of Le Mans,
and the work of the later Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin and
Germain Pilon, and thus heals that rupture between the middle age and
the Renaissance which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not so
much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture and
painting--work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's sake, in
which even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays itself--but
rather the profane poetry of the middle age, the poetry of Provence, and
the magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France, which
those French writers have in view, when they speak of this Renaissance
within the middle age. In that poetry, earthly passion, with its
intimacy, its freedom, its variety--the liberty of the heart--makes
itself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great clerk and the great
lover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with the free
play of human intelligence around all subjects presented to it, with the
liberty of the intellect, as that age understood it. Every one knows the
legend of Abelard, a legend hardly less passionate, certainly not less
characteristic of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhaeuser; how
the famous and comely clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed,
pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in the
house of a canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl
Heloise, believed to be the old priest's orphan niece, his love for whom
he had testified by giving her an education then unrivalled, so that
rumour even asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enabling
her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become a
sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloise
sat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature of
abstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them." You conceive
the temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid
the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of
something like shadows; and that for one who knew so well how to assign
its exact value to every abstract idea, those restraints which lie on
the consciences of other men had been relaxed. It appears that he
composed many verses in the vulgar tongue: already the young men sang
them on the quay below the house. Those songs, says M. de Remusat, were
probably in the taste of the Trouveres, of whom he was one of the first
in date, or, so to speak, the predecessor. It is the same spirit which
has moulded the famous "letters," written in the quaint Latin of the
middle age. At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the next
generation raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school, on the
"Mountain of Saint Genevieve," the historian Michelet sees in thought "a
terrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard alone, fifty bishops,
twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of scholastic philosophy;
not only the learned Heloise, the teaching of languages, and the
Renaissance; but Arnold of Brescia--that is to say, the revolution." And
so from the rooms of this shadowy house by the Seine side we see that
spirit going abroad, with its qualities already well defined, its
intimacy, its languid sweetness, its rebellion, its subtle skill in
dividing the elements of human passion, its care for physical beauty,
its worship of the body, which penetrated the early literature of Italy,
and finds an echo in Dante.

That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy may appear a singular
omission to the reader of Dante, who seems to have inwoven into the
texture of his work whatever had impressed him as either effective in
colour or spiritually significant among the recorded incidents of actual
life. Nowhere in his great poem do we find the name, nor so much as an
allusion to the story of one who had left so deep a mark on the
philosophy of which Dante was an eager student, of whom in the Latin
Quarter, and from the lips of scholar or teacher in the University of
Paris, during his sojourn among them, he can hardly have failed to hear.
We can only suppose that he had indeed considered the story and the man,
and had abstained from passing judgment as to his place in the scheme
of "eternal justice." In the famous legend of Tannhaeuser, the erring
knight makes his way to Rome, to seek absolution at what was then the
centre of Christian religion. "So soon," thought and said the Pope, "as
the staff in his hand should bud and blossom, so soon might the soul of
Tannhaeuser be saved, and no sooner; and it came to pass not long after
that the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had carried in his hand was
covered with leaves and flowers." So, in the cloister of Godstow a
petrified tree was shown, of which the nuns told that the fair Rosamond,
who had died among them, had declared that, the tree being then alive
and green, it would be changed into stone at the hour of her salvation.
When Abelard died, like Tannhaeuser, he was on his way to Rome: what
might have happened had he reached his journey's end is uncertain; and
it is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the general
beliefs of his age has always remained. In this, as in other things, he
prefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in which, in
various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling
and sensation and thought, not opposed to, but only beyond and
independent of the spiritual system then actually realised. The
opposition into which Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to his
career, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a no less subtle opposition
than that between the merely professional, official, hireling ministers
of that system, with their ignorant worship of system for its own sake,
and the true child of light, the humanist, with reason and heart and
senses quick, while theirs were almost dead. He reaches out towards, he
attains, modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribed limits of that
system, though possibly contained in essential germ within it. As always
happens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower culture had no
sympathy with, because no understanding of, a culture richer and more
ample than their own: after the discovery of wheat they would still live
upon acorns--apres l'invention du ble ils voulaient encore vivre du
gland; and would hear of no service to the higher needs of humanity with
instruments not of their forging.

But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong for them.
Abelard and Heloise write their letters--letters with a wonderful
outpouring of soul--in medieval Latin; and Abelard, though he composes
songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those treatises in
which he tries to find a ground of reality below the abstractions of
philosophy, as one bent on trying all things by their congruity with
human experience, who had felt the hand of Heloise, and looked into her
eyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her great and energetic
nature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century,
that French prose romance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes of
the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of the most striking fragments of it
may be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of these
thirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free play
of human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is an
assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great friendship, a
friendship pure and generous, pushed to a sort of passionate exaltation,
and more than faithful unto death. Such comradeship, though instances of
it are to be found everywhere, is still especially a classical motive;
Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so strongly in an antique tale,
that one knows not whether the love of both Palamon and Arcite for
Emelya, or of those two for each other, is the chiefer subject of the
Knight's Tale--

  He cast his eyen upon Emelya,
  And therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah!
  As that he stongen were unto the herte.

What reader does not refer part of the bitterness of that cry to the
spoiling, already foreseen, of that fair friendship, which had hitherto
made the prison of the two lads sweet with its daily offices--though the
friendship is saved at last?

The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by the romantic
circumstance of an entire personal resemblance between the two heroes,
so that they pass for each other again and again, and thereby into many
strange adventures; that curious interest of the Doppelgaenger, which
begins among the stars with the Dioscuri, being entwined in and out
through all the incidents of the story, like an outward token of the
inward similitude of their souls. With this, again, like a second
reflexion of that inward similitude, is connected the conceit of two
marvellously beautiful cups, also exactly like each other--children's
cups, of wood, but adorned with gold and precious stones. These two
cups, which by their resemblance help to bring the friends together at
critical moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he baptized them
at Rome, whither the parents had taken them for that purpose, in
thankfulness for their birth, and cross and recross in the narrative,
serving the two heroes almost like living things, and with that
well-known effect of a beautiful object kept constantly before the eye
in a story or poem, of keeping sensation well awake, and giving a
certain air of refinement to all the scenes into which it enters; with a
heightening also of that sense of fate, which hangs so much of the
shaping of human life on trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry
handkerchief; and witnessing to the enjoyment of beautiful handiwork by
primitive people, almost dazzled by it, so that they give it an oddly
significant place among the factors of a human history.

Amis and Amile, then, are true to their comradeship through all trials;
and in the end it comes to pass that at a moment of great need Amis
takes the place of Amile in a tournament for life or death. "After this
it happened that a leprosy fell upon Amis, so that his wife would not
approach him, and wrought to strangle him; and he departed from his
home, and at last prayed his servants to carry him to the house of
Amile"; and it is in what follows that the curious strength of the piece
shows itself:--

"His servants, willing to do as he commanded, carried him to the place
where Amile was: and they began to sound their rattles before the court
of Amile's house, as lepers are accustomed to do. And when Amile heard
the noise he commanded one of his servants to carry meat and bread to
the sick man, and the cup which was given to him at Rome filled with
good wine. And when the servant had done as he was commanded, he
returned and said, Sir, if I had not thy cup in my hand, I should
believe that the cup which the sick man has was thine, for they are
alike, the one to the other, in height and fashion. And Amile said, Go
quickly and bring him to me. And when Amis stood before his comrade
Amile demanded of him who he was, and how he had gotten that cup. I am
of Briquam le Chastel, answered Amis, and the cup was given to me by the
Bishop of Rome, who baptized me. And when Amile heard that, he knew that
it was his comrade Amis, who had delivered him from death, and won for
him the daughter of the King of France to be his wife. And straightway
he fell upon him, and began to weep greatly, and kissed him. And when
his wife heard that, she ran out with her hair in disarray, weeping and
distressed exceedingly, for she remembered that it was he who had slain
the false Ardres. And thereupon they placed him in a fair bed, and said
to him, Abide with us until God's will be accomplished in thee, for all
that we have is at thy service. So he and the two servants abode with
them.

"And it came to pass one night, when Amis and Amile lay in one chamber
without other companions, that God sent His angel Raphael to Amis, who
said to him, Amis, art thou asleep? And he, supposing that Amile had
called him, answered and said, I am not asleep, fair comrade! And the
angel said to him, Thou hast answered well, for thou art the comrade of
the heavenly citizens.--I am Raphael, the angel of our Lord, and am come
to tell thee how thou mayest be healed; for thy prayers are heard. Thou
shalt bid Amile, thy comrade, that he slay his two children and wash
thee in their blood, and so thy body shall be made whole. And Amis said
to him, Let not this thing be, that my comrade should become a murderer
for my sake. But the angel said, It is convenient that he do this. And
thereupon the angel departed.

"And Amile also, as if in sleep, heard those words; and he awoke and
said, Who is it, my comrade, that hath spoken with thee? And Amis
answered, No man; only I have prayed to our Lord, as I am accustomed.
And Amile said, Not so! but some one hath spoken with thee. Then he
arose and went to the door of the chamber; and finding it shut he said,
Tell me, my brother, who it was said those words to thee to-night. And
Amis began to weep greatly, and told him that it was Raphael, the angel
of the Lord, who had said to him, Amis, our Lord commands thee that thou
bid Amile slay his two children, and wash thee in their blood, and thou
shalt be healed of thy leprosy. And Amile was greatly disturbed at those
words, and said, I would have given to thee my man-servants and my
maid-servants and all my goods, and thou feignest that an angel hath
spoken to thee that I should slay my two children. And immediately Amis
began to weep, and said, I know that I have spoken to thee a terrible
thing, but constrained thereto; I pray thee cast me not away from the
shelter of thy house. And Amile answered that what he had covenanted
with him, that he would perform, unto the hour of his death: But I
conjure thee, said he, by the faith which there is between me and thee,
and by our comradeship, and by the baptism we received together at Rome,
that thou tell me whether it was man or angel said that to thee. And
Amis answered, So truly as an angel hath spoken to me this night, so may
God deliver me from my infirmity!

"Then Amile began to weep in secret, and thought within himself: If this
man was ready to die before the king for me, shall I not for him slay my
children? Shall I not keep faith with him who was faithful to me even
unto death? And Amile tarried no longer, but departed to the chamber of
his wife, and bade her go hear the Sacred Office. And he took a sword,
and went to the bed where the children were lying, and found them
asleep. And he lay down over them and began to weep bitterly and said,
Hath any man yet heard of a father who of his own will slew his
children? Alas, my children! I am no longer your father, but your cruel
murderer.

"And the children awoke at the tears of their father, which fell upon
them; and they looked up into his face and began to laugh. And as they
were of the age of about three years, he said, Your laughing will be
turned into tears, for your innocent blood must now be shed, and
therewith he cut off their heads. Then he laid them back in the bed, and
put the heads upon the bodies, and covered them as though they were
sleeping: and with the blood which he had taken he washed his comrade,
and said, Lord Jesus Christ! who hast commanded men to keep faith on
earth, and didst heal the leper by Thy word! cleanse now my comrade, for
whose love I have shed the blood of my children.

"Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy. And Amile clothed his companion
in his best robes; and as they went to the church to give thanks, the
bells, by the will of God, rang of their own accord. And when the people
of the city heard that, they ran together to see the marvel. And the
wife of Amile, when she saw Amis and Amile coming, began to ask which of
the twain was her husband, and said, I know well the vesture of them
both, but I know not which of them is Amile. And Amile said to her, I am
Amile, and my companion is Amis, who is healed of his sickness. And she
was full of wonder, and desired to know in what manner he was healed.
Give thanks to our Lord, answered Amile, but trouble not thyself as to
the manner of the healing.

"Now neither the father nor the mother had yet entered where the
children were; but the father sighed heavily because of their death, and
the mother asked for them, that they might rejoice together; but Amile
said, Dame! Let the children sleep. And it was already the hour of
Tierce. And going in alone to the children to weep over them, he found
them at play in the bed; only, in the place of the sword-cuts about
their throats was as it were a thread of crimson. And he took them in
his arms and carried them to his wife and said, Rejoice greatly, for thy
children whom I had slain by the commandment of the angel are alive, and
by their blood is Amis healed."

There, as I said, is the strength of the old French story. For the
Renaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from the
classical world, but also that curious strength of which there are great
resources in the true middle age. And as I have illustrated the early
strength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and Amile, a story
which comes from the North, in which even a certain racy Teutonic
flavour is perceptible, so I shall illustrate that other element of its
early sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even, by another story
printed in the same volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, and of
about the same date, a story which comes, characteristically, from the
South, and connects itself with the literature of Provence.

The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and the
Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few,
for the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below
this intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature, less
serious and elevated, reaching, by lightness of form and comparative
homeliness of interest, an audience which the concentrated passion of
those higher lyrics left untouched. This literature has long since
perished, or lives only in later French or Italian versions. One such
version, the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he
detected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French
of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a unique
manuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were reasons
which made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in it
of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early Arabian
Nights.* The little book loses none of its interest through the
criticism which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by one
people to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outline
is still clear, its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories,
books, literary and artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has come
to have in this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk
and adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls the
piece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its incidents and
sentiment helped forward by songs, inserted at irregular intervals. In
the junctions of the story itself there are signs of roughness and want
of skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only put together to
connect a series of songs--a series of songs so moving and attractive
that people wished to heighten and dignify their effect by a regular
framework or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the simplest kind,
not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty or
thirty lines apiece, all ending with a similar vowel sound. And here, as
elsewhere in that early poetry, much of the interest lies in the
spectacle of the formation of a new artistic sense. A new music is
arising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs of Aucassin and
Nicolette, which seem always on the point of passing into true rhyme,
but which halt somehow, and can never quite take flight, you see people
just growing aware of the elements of a new music in their possession,
and anticipating how pleasant such music might become. The piece was
probably intended to be recited by a company of trained performers, many
of whom, at least for the lesser parts, were probably children. The
songs are introduced by the rubric, Or se cante (ici on chante); and
each division of prose by the rubric, Or dient et content et fabloient
(ici on conte). The musical notes of part of the songs have been
preserved; and some of the details are so descriptive that they
suggested to M. Fauriel the notion that the words had been accompanied
throughout by dramatic action. That mixture of simplicity and refinement
which he was surprised to find in a composition of the thirteenth
century, is shown sometimes in the turn given to some passing expression
or remark; thus, "the Count de Garins was old and frail, his time was
over"--Li quens Garins de Beaucaire estoit vix et frales; si avoit son
tans trespasse. And then, all is so realised! One still sees the ancient
forest, with its disused roads grown deep with grass, and the place
where seven roads meet--u a forkeut set cemin qui s'en vont par le pais;
we hear the light-hearted country people calling each other by their
rustic names, and putting forward, as their spokesman, one among them
who is more eloquent and ready than the rest--li un qui plus fu enparles
des autres; for the little book has its burlesque element also, so that
one hears the faint, far-off laughter still. Rough as it is, the piece
certainly possesses this high quality of poetry, that it aims at a
purely artistic effect. Its subject is a great sorrow, yet it claims to
be a thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained not for its matter
only, but chiefly for its manner; it is cortois, it tells us, et bien
assis.

*Recently, Aucassin and Nicolette has been edited and translated into
English, with much graceful scholarship, by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon. More
recently still we have had a translation--a poet's translation--from the
ingenious and versatile pen of Mr. Andrew Lang. The reader should
consult also the chapter on "The Out-door Poetry," in Vernon Lee's most
interesting Euphorion; being Studies of the Antique and Mediaeval in the
Renaissance, a work abounding in knowledge and insight on the subjects
of which it treats.

For the student of manners, and of the old language and literature, it
has much interest of a purely antiquarian order. To say of an ancient
literary composition that it has an antiquarian interest, often means
that it has no distinct aesthetic interest for the reader of to-day.
Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting its object in
perspective, and setting the reader in a certain point of view, from
which what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable for him also, may
often add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. But
the first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, aesthetic charm
in the thing itself; unless it has that charm, unless some purely
artistic quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarian
effort can ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper subject
of aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it exists, it is always
pleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of borrowed interest
which an old play, or an old story, may very likely acquire through a
true antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette has something
of this quality. Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, is
passionately in love with Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown
parentage, bought of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him
to marry. The story turns on the adventures of these two lovers, until
at the end of the piece their mutual fidelity is rewarded. These
adventures are of the simplest sort, adventures which seem to be chosen
for the happy occasion they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy,
perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a garden, a ruined
tower, the little hut of flowers which Nicolette constructs in the
forest whither she has escaped from her enemies, as a token to Aucassin
that she has passed that way. All the charm of the piece is in its
details, in a turn of peculiar lightness and grace given to the
situations and traits of sentiment, especially in its quaint fragments
of early French prose.

All through it one feels the influence of that faint air of overwrought
delicacy, almost of wantonness, which was so strong a characteristic of
the poetry of the Troubadours. The Troubadours themselves were often men
of great rank; they wrote for an exclusive audience, people of much
leisure and great refinement, and they came to value a type of personal
beauty which has in it but little of the influence of the open air and
sunshine. There is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very scenery
of the story, the full-blown roses, the chamber painted in some
mysterious manner where Nicolette is imprisoned, the cool brown marble,
the almost nameless colours, the odour of plucked grass and flowers.
Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery, and is the best
illustration of the quality I mean--the beautiful, weird, foreign girl,
whom the shepherds take for a fay, who has the knowledge of simples, the
healing and beautifying qualities of leaves and flowers, whose skilful
touch heals Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly leaps from
the ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh, as she passed the place
where he lay, healed a pilgrim stricken with sore disease, so that he
rose up, and returned to his own country. With this girl Aucassin is so
deeply in love that he forgets all his knightly duties. At last
Nicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and perhaps the
prettiest passage in the whole piece is the fragment of prose which
describes her escape from this place:--

"Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and Nicolette remained
shut up in her chamber. It was summer-time, in the month of May, when
the days are warm and long and clear, and the nights coy and serene.

"One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon shine clear through
the little window, and heard the nightingale sing in the garden, and
then came the memory of Aucassin, whom she so much loved. She thought of
the Count Garins of Beaucaire, who so mortally hated her, and, to be rid
of her, might at any moment cause her to be burned or drowned. She
perceived that the old woman who kept her company was asleep; she rose
and put on the fairest gown she had; she took the bed-clothes and the
towels, and knotted them together like a cord, as far as they would go.
Then she tied the end to a pillar of the window, and let herself slip
down quite softly into the garden, and passed straight across it, to
reach the town.

"Her hair was yellow in small curls, her smiling eyes blue-green, her
face clear and feat, the little lips very red, the teeth small and
white; and the daisies which she crushed in passing, holding her skirt
high behind and before, looked dark against her feet; the girl was so
white!

"She came to the garden-gate and opened it, and walked through the
streets of Beaucaire, keeping on the dark side of the way to avoid the
light of the moon, which shone quietly in the sky. She walked as fast as
she could, until she came to the tower where Aucassin was. The tower was
set about with pillars, here and there. She pressed herself against one
of the pillars, wrapped herself closely in her mantle, and putting her
face to a chink of the tower, which was old and ruined, she heard
Aucassin crying bitterly within, and when she had listened awhile she
began to speak."

But scattered up and down through this lighter matter, always tinged
with humour and often passing into burlesque, which makes up the general
substance of the piece, there are morsels of a different quality,
touches of some intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from the
profound and energetic spirit of the Provencal poetry itself, to which
the inspiration of the book has been referred. Let me gather up these
morsels of deeper colour, these expressions of the ideal intensity of
love, the motive which really unites together the fragments of the
little composition. Dante, the perfect flower of ideal love, has
recorded how the tyranny of that "Lord of terrible aspect" became
actually physical, blinding his senses, and suspending his bodily
forces. In this Dante is but the central expression and type of
experiences known well enough to the initiated, in that passionate age.
Aucassin represents this ideal intensity of passion--

  Aucassin, li biax, li blons,
  Li gentix, li amorous;

the slim, tall, debonair figure, dansellon, as the singers call him,
with curled yellow hair, and eyes of vair, who faints with love, as
Dante fainted, who rides all day through the forest in search of
Nicolette, while the thorns tear his flesh, so that one night have
traced him by the blood upon the grass, and who weeps at evening because
he has not found her--who has the malady of his love, so that he
neglects all knightly duties. Once he is induced to put himself at the
head of his people, that they, seeing him before them, might have more
heart to defend themselves; then a song relates how the sweet, grave
figure goes forth to battle, in dainty, tight-laced armour. It is the
very image of the Provencal love-god, no longer a child, but grown to
pensive youth, as Pierre Vidal met him, riding on a white horse, fair as
the morning, his vestment embroidered with flowers. He rode on through
the gates into the open plain beyond. But as he went, that great malady
of his love came upon him, so that the bridle fell from his hands; and
like one who sleeps walking, he was carried on into the midst of his
enemies, and heard them talking together how they might most
conveniently kill him.

One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason and
the imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in the
middle age, which I have termed a medieval Renaissance, was its
antinomianism, its spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and
religious ideas of the time. In their search after the pleasures of the
senses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worship
of the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian
ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange
rival religion. It was the return of that ancient Venus, not dead, but
only hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan
gods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises.
And this element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by those
writers who have treated it pre-eminently as the "Age of Faith"--this
rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which has made the
delineation of the middle age by the writers of the Romantic school in
France, by Victor Hugo for instance in Notre-Dame de Paris, so
suggestive and exciting, is found alike in the history of Abelard and
the legend of Tannhaeuser. More and more, as we come to mark changes and
distinctions of temper in what is often in one all-embracing confusion
called the middle age, this rebellious element, this sinister claim for
liberty of heart and thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian
movement, connected so strangely with the history of Provencal poetry,
is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order, with
its poetry, its mysticism, its "illumination," from the point of view of
religious authority, justly suspect. It influences the thoughts of those
obscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of Flora, strange dreamers in
a world of flowery rhetoric of that third and final dispensation of a
"spirit of freedom," in which law shall have passed away. Of this spirit
Aucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the most famous expression: it
is the answer Aucassin gives when he is threatened with the pains of
hell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of affection
and the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a feeble company of
aged priests, "clinging day and night to the chapel altars," barefoot or
in patched sandals. With or even without Nicolette, "his sweet mistress
whom he so much loves," he, for his part, is ready to start on the way
to hell, along with "the good scholars," as he says, and the actors, and
the fine horsemen dead in battle, and the men of fashion,* and "the fair
courteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers apiece beside their own
true lords," all gay with music, in their gold and silver and beautiful
furs--"the vair and the grey."

*Parage, peerage--which came to signify all that ambitious youth
affected most on the outside of life, in that old world of the
Troubadours, with whom this term is of frequent recurrence.

But in the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and the
student of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of the
emancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the French
Revolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels,
he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and antagonisms of
some well-recognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites,
exhausting the intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. The
opposition of the professional defenders of a mere system to that more
sincere and general play of the forces of human mind and character,
which I have noted as the secret of Abelard's struggle, is indeed always
powerful. But the incompatibility of souls really "fair" is not
essential; and within the enchanted region of the Renaissance, one needs
not be for ever on one's guard: here there are no fixed parties, no
exclusions: all breathes of that unity of culture in which "whatsoever
things are comely" are reconciled, for the elevation and adorning of our
spirits. And just in proportion as those who took part in the
Renaissance become centrally representative of it, just so much the more
is this condition realised in them. The wicked popes, and the loveless
tyrants, who from time to time became its patrons, or mere speculators
in its fortunes, lend themselves easily to disputations, and, from this
side or that, the spirit of controversy lays just hold upon them. But
the painter of the Last Supper, with his kindred, live in a land where
controversy has no breathing-place, and refuse to be classified. In the
story of Aucassin and Nicolette, in the literature which it represents,
the note of defiance, of the opposition of one system to another, is
sometimes harsh: let me conclude with a morsel from Amis and Amile, in
which the harmony of human interests is still entire. For the story of
the great traditional friendship, in which, as I said, the liberty of
the heart makes itself felt, seems, as we have it, to have been written
by a monk--La vie des saints martyrs Amis et Amile. It was not till the
end of the seventeenth century that their names were finally excluded
from the martyrology; and their story ends with this monkish miracle of
earthly comradeship, more than faithful unto death:--

"For, as God had united them in their lives in one accord, so they were
not divided in their death, falling together side by side, with a host
of other brave men, in battle for King Charles at Mortara, so called
from that great slaughter. And the bishops gave counsel to the king and
queen that they should bury the dead, and build a church in that place;
and their counsel pleased the king greatly; and there were built there
two churches, the one by commandment of the king in honour of Saint
Oseige, and the other by commandment of the queen in honour of Saint
Peter.

"And the king caused the two chests of stone to be brought in the which
the bodies of Amis and Amile lay; and Amile was carried to the church of
Saint Peter, and Amis to the church of Saint Oseige; and the other
corpses were buried, some in one place and some in the other. But lo!
next morning, the body of Amile in his coffin was found lying in the
church of Saint Oseige, beside the coffin of Amis his comrade. Behold
then this wondrous amity, which by death could not be dissevered!

"This miracle God did, who gave to His disciples power to remove
mountains. And by reason of this miracle the king and queen remained in
that place for a space of thirty days, and performed the offices of the
dead who were slain, and honoured the said churches with great gifts:
and the bishop ordained many clerks to serve in the church of Saint
Oseige, and commanded them that they should guard duly, with great
devotion, the bodies of the two companions, Amis and Amile."

1872.



PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the
attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to
reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcile
forms of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to adjust the
various products of the human mind to each other in one many-sided type
of intellectual culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination to
feed upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to the
generous instincts of that age. An earlier and simpler generation had
seen in the gods of Greece so many malignant spirits, the defeated but
still living centres of the religion of darkness, struggling, not always
in vain, against the kingdom of light. Little by little, as the natural
charm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds emerging out of
barbarism, the religious significance which had once belonged to it was
lost sight of, and it came to be regarded as the subject of a purely
artistic or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that from time to
time minds should arise, deeply enough impressed by its beauty and power
to ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival of
the religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves,
and men's allegiance was divided. And the fifteenth century was an
impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it
consecrated everything with which art had to do as a religious object.
The restored Greek literature had made it familiar, at least in Plato,
with a style of expression concerning the earlier gods, which had about
it much of the warmth and unction of a Christian hymn. It was too
familiar with such language to regard mythology as a mere story; and it
was too serious to play with a religion.

"Let me briefly remind the reader"--says Heine, in the Gods in Exile, an
essay full of that strange blending of sentiment which is characteristic
of the traditions of the middle age concerning the pagan religions--"how
the gods of the older world, at the time of the definite triumph of
Christianity, that is, in the third century, fell into painful
embarrassments, which greatly resembled certain tragical situations of
their earlier life. They now found themselves beset by the same
troublesome necessities to which they had once before been exposed
during the primitive ages, in that revolutionary epoch when the Titans
broke out of the custody of Orcus, and, piling Pelion on Ossa, scaled
Olympus. Unfortunate Gods! They had then to take flight ignominiously,
and hide themselves among us here on earth, under all sorts of
disguises. The larger number betook themselves to Egypt, where for
greater security they assumed the forms of animals, as is generally
known. Just in the same way, they had to take flight again, and seek
entertainment in remote hiding-places, when those iconoclastic zealots,
the black brood of monks, broke down all the temples, and pursued the
gods with fire and curses. Many of these unfortunate emigrants, now
entirely deprived of shelter and ambrosia, must needs take to vulgar
handicrafts, as a means of earning their bread. Under these
circumstances, many whose sacred groves had been confiscated, let
themselves out for hire as wood-cutters in Germany, and were forced to
drink beer instead of nectar. Apollo seems to have been content to take
service under graziers, and as he had once kept the cows of Admetus, so
he lived now as a shepherd in Lower Austria. Here, however, having
become suspected on account of his beautiful singing, he was recognised
by a learned monk as one of the old pagan gods, and handed over to the
spiritual tribunal. On the rack he confessed that he was the god Apollo;
and before his execution he begged that he might be suffered to play
once more upon the lyre, and to sing a song. And he played so
touchingly, and sang with such magic, and was withal so beautiful in
form and feature, that all the women wept, and many of them were so
deeply impressed that they shortly afterwards fell sick. And some time
afterwards the people wished to drag him from the grave again, so that a
stake might be driven through his body, in the belief that he had been a
vampire, and that the sick women would by this means recover. But they
found the grave empty."

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great
rather by what it designed than by what it achieved. Much which it
aspired to do, and did but imperfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished
in what is called the eclaircissement of the eighteenth century, or in
our own generation; and what really belongs to the rival of the
fifteenth century is but the leading instinct, the curiosity, the
initiatory idea. It is so with this very question of the reconciliation
of the religion of antiquity with the religion of Christ. A modern
scholar occupied by this problem might observe that all religions may be
regarded as natural products; that, at least in their origin, their
growth, and decay, they have common laws, and are not to be isolated
from the other movements of the human mind in the periods in which they
respectively prevailed; that they arise spontaneously out of the human
mind, as expressions of the varying phases of its sentiment concerning
the unseen world; that every intellectual product must be judged from
the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.
He might go on to observe that each has contributed something to the
development of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stages
in the gradual education of the human mind, justify the existence of
each. The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the world
would thus be the inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the human
mind itself, in which all religions alike have their root, and in
which all alike are reconciled; just as the fancies of childhood and the
thoughts of old age meet and are laid to rest, in the experience of the
individual. Far different was the method followed by the scholars of the
fifteenth century. They lacked the very rudiments of the historic sense,
which, by an imaginative act, throws itself back into a world unlike
one's own, and estimates every intellectual creation in its connexion
with the age from which it proceeded; they had no idea of development,
of the differences of ages, of the gradual education of the human race.
In their attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they were
thus thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation. The
religions of the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages,
in a gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting side
by side, and substantially in agreement with each other. And here the
first necessity was to misrepresent the language, the conceptions, the
sentiments, it was proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homer
must be made to speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the mere
surfaces could never unite in any harmony of design. Therefore one must
go below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more
remote meaning, that diviner signification held in reserve, in recessu
divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or figure of
speech in the books of Moses.

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you
will, into which we  peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving
strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century
has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits,
its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element in
the local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of that
age in all oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief
that nothing which had ever interested the human mind could wholly lose
its vitality. It is the counterpart, though certainly the feebler
counterpart, of that practical truce and reconciliation of the gods of
Greece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of the
time; and it is for his share in this work, and because his own story is
a sort of analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of this
purpose in his writings, that something of a general interest still
belongs to the name of Pico della Mirandola, whose life, written by his
nephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be
translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that great
lover of Italian culture, among whose works this life of Pico, Earl
of Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls him, may still be
read, in its quaint, antiquated English.

Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. It was the very
day--some day probably in the year 1482--on which Ficino had finished
his famous translation of Plato into Latin, the work to which he had
been dedicated from childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in furtherance of his
desire to resuscitate the knowledge of Plato among his fellow-citizens.
Florence indeed, as M. Renan has pointed out, had always had an affinity
for the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and more
practical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua, and other
cities of the north; and the Florentines, though they knew perhaps very
little about him, had had the name of the great idealist often on their
lips. To increase this knowledge, Cosmo had founded the Platonic
academy, with periodical discussions at the villa of Careggi. The fall
of Constantinople in 1453, and the council in 1438 for the
reconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches, had brought to Florence
many a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was completed, the door of
the mystical temple lay open to all who could construe Latin, and the
scholar rested from his labour; when there was introduced into his
study, where a lamp burned continually before the bust of Plato, as
other men burned lamps before their favourite saints, a young man fresh
from a journey, "of feature and shape seemly and beauteous, of stature
goodly and high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair,
his colour white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes grey, and
quick of look, his teeth white and even, his hair yellow and abundant,"
and trimmed with more than the usual artifice of the time. It is thus
that Sir Thomas More translates the words of the biographer of Pico,
who, even in outward form and appearance, seems an image of that inward
harmony and completeness, of which he is so perfect an example. The word
mystic has been usually derived from a Greek word which signifies to
shut, as if one shut one's lips, brooding on what cannot be uttered; but
the Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting the
eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly. Perhaps the eyes of the
mystic Ficino, now long past the midway of life, had come to be thus
half-closed; but when a young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael, as
the Florentines of that age depicted him in his wonderful walk with
Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have appeared in a painting by Sandro
Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo, entered his chamber, he seems to have
thought there was something not wholly earthly about him; at least, he
ever afterwards believed that it was not without the co-operation of the
stars that the stranger had arrived on that day. For it happened that
they fell into a conversation, deeper and more intimate than men usually
fall into at first sight. During this conversation Ficino formed the
design of devoting his remaining years to the translation of Plotinus,
that new Plato, in whom the mystical element in the Platonic philosophy
had been worked out to the utmost limit of vision and ecstasy; and it is
in dedicating this translation to Lorenzo de' Medici that Ficino has
recorded these incidents.

It was after many wanderings, wanderings of the intellect as well as
physical journeys, that Pico came to rest at Florence. He was then about
twenty years old, having been born in 1463. He was called Giovanni at
baptism; Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the Emperor
Constantine, from whom they claimed to be descended; and Mirandola, from
the place of his birth, a little town afterwards part of the duchy of
Modena, of which small territory his family had long been the feudal
lords. Pico was the youngest of the family, and his mother, delighting
in his wonderful memory, sent him at the age of fourteen to the famous
school of law at Bologna. From the first, indeed, she seems to have had
some presentiment of his future fame, for, with a faith in omens
characteristic of her time, she believed that a strange circumstance had
happened at the time of Pico's birth--the appearance of a circular flame
which suddenly vanished away, on the wall of the chamber where she lay.
He remained two years at Bologna; and then, with an inexhaustible,
unrivalled thirst for knowledge, the strange, confused, uncritical
learning of that age, passed through the principal schools of Italy and
France, penetrating, as he thought, into the secrets of all ancient
philosophies, and many eastern languages. And with this flood of
erudition came the generous hope, so often disabused, of reconciling the
philosophers with each other, and all alike with the Church. At last he
came to Rome. There, like some knight-errant of philosophy, he offered
to defend nine hundred bold paradoxes, drawn from the most opposite
sources, against all comers. But the pontifical court was led to suspect
the orthodoxy of some of these propositions, and even the reading of the
book which contained them was forbidden by the Pope. It was not until
1493 that Pico was finally absolved, by a brief of Alexander the Sixth.
Ten years before that date he had arrived at Florence; an early instance
of those who, after following the vain hope of an impossible
reconciliation from system to system, have at last fallen back
unsatisfied on the simplicities of their childhood's belief.

The oration which Pico composed for the opening of this philosophical
tournament still remains; its subject is the dignity of human nature,
the greatness of man. In common with nearly all medieval speculation,
much of Pico's writing has this for its drift; and in common also with
it, Pico's theory of that dignity is founded on a misconception of the
place in nature both of the earth and of man. For Pico the earth is the
centre of the universe: and around it, as a fixed and motionless point,
the sun and moon and stars revolve, like diligent servants or ministers.
And in the midst of all is placed man, nodus et vinculum mundi, the bond
or copula of the world, and the "interpreter of nature": that famous
expression of Bacon's really belongs to Pico. Tritum est in scholis, he
says, esse hominem minorem mundum, in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus et
spiritus coelestis et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus et
ratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur.--"It is a
commonplace of the schools that man is a little world, in which we may
discern a body mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and the
vegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and
reason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God."--A
commonplace of the schools! But perhaps it had some new significance and
authority, when men heard one like Pico reiterate it; and, false as its
basis was, the theory had its use. For this high dignity of man, thus
bringing the dust under his feet into sensible communion with the
thoughts and affections of the angels, was supposed to belong to him,
not as renewed by a religious system, but by his own natural right. The
proclamation of it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency of
medieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice this or that
element in it, to make it ashamed of itself, to keep the degrading or
painful accidents of it always in view. It helped man onward to that
reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body,
the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils.
And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glance
into one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in
classical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments
and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them. That
whole conception of nature is so different from our own. For Pico the
world is a limited place, bounded by actual crystal walls, and a
material firmament; it is like a painted toy, like that map or system of
the world, held, as a great target or shield, in the hands of the
grey-headed father of all things, in one of the earlier frescoes of the
Campo Santo at Pisa. How different from this childish dream is our own
conception of nature, with its unlimited space, its innumerable suns,
and the earth but a mote in the beam; how different the strange new awe,
or superstition, with which it fills our minds! "The silence of those
infinite spaces," says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, "the
silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me"--Le silence eternel de
ces espaces infinis m'effraie.

He was already almost wearied out when he came to Florence. He had loved
much and been beloved by women, "wandering over the crooked hills of
delicious pleasure"; but their reign over him was over, and long before
Savonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities," he had destroyed those
love-songs in the vulgar tongue, which would have been such a relief to
us, after the scholastic prolixity of his Latin writings. It was in
another spirit that he composed a Platonic commentary, the only work of
his in Italian which has come down to us, on the "Song of Divine
Love"--secondo la mente ed opinione dei Platonici--"according to the
mind and opinion of the Platonists," by his friend Hieronymo Beniveni,
in which, with an ambitious array of every sort of learning, and a
profusion of imagery borrowed indifferently from the astrologers, the
Cabala, and Homer, and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite, he
attempts to define the stages by which the soul passes from the earthly
to the unseen beauty. A change indeed had passed over him, as if the
chilling touch of the abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess
to long for was already upon him; and perhaps it was a sense of this,
coupled with that over-brightness which in the popular imagination
always betokens an early death, that made Camilla Rucellai, one of those
prophetic women whom the preaching of Savonarola had raised up in
Florence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that he would depart
in the time of lilies--prematurely, that is, like the field-flowers
which are withered by the scorching sun almost as soon as they are
sprung up. It was now that he wrote down those thoughts on the religious
life which Sir Thomas More turned into English, and which another
English translator thought worthy to be added to the books of the
Imitation. "It is not hard to know God, provided one will not force
oneself to define Him":--has been thought a great saying of Joubert's.
"Love God," Pico writes to Angelo Politian, "we rather may, than either
know Him, or by speech utter Him. And yet had men liefer by knowledge
never find that which they seek, than by love possess that thing, which
also without love were in vain found."

Yet he who had this fine touch for spiritual things did not--and in this
is the enduring interest of his story--even after his conversion, forget
the old gods. He is one of the last who seriously and sincerely
entertained the claims on men's faith of the pagan religions; he is
anxious to ascertain the true significance of the obscurest legend, the
lightest tradition concerning them. With many thoughts and many
influences which led him in that direction, he did not become a monk;
only he became gentle and patient in disputation; retaining "somewhat of
the old plenty, in dainty viand and silver vessel," he gave over the
greater part of his property to his friend, the mystical poet Beniveni,
to be spent by him in works of charity, chiefly in the sweet charity of
providing marriage-dowries for the peasant girls of Florence. His end
came in 1494, when, amid the prayers and sacraments of Savonarola, he
died of fever, on the very day on which Charles the Eighth entered
Florence, the seventeenth of November, yet in the time of lilies--the
lilies of the shield of France, as the people now said, remembering
Camilla's prophecy. He was buried in the cloister at Saint Mark's, in
the hood and white frock of the Dominican order.

It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in the
Dominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older gods, himself like one
of those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to the new religion, but
still with a tenderness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to
"bind the ages each to each by natural piety"--it is because this life
is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in his writings to
reconcile Christianity with the ideas of paganism, that Pico, in spite
of the scholastic character of those writings, is really interesting.
Thus, in the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation,
he endeavours to reconcile the accounts which pagan philosophy had given
of the origin of the world with the account given in the books of
Moses--the Timaeus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The Heptaplus is
dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose interest, the preface tells
us, in the secret wisdom of Moses is well known. If Moses seems in his
writings simple and even popular, rather than either a philosopher or a
theologian, that is because it was an institution with the ancient
philosophers, either not to speak of divine things at all, or to speak
of them dissemblingly: hence their doctrines were called mysteries.
Taught by them, Pythagoras became so great a "master of silence," and
wrote almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God in his heart, and
speaking wisdom only among the perfect. In explaining the harmony
between Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold on every sort of figure and
analogy, on the double meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewish
ritual, the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the later Greek
mythologists. Everywhere there is an unbroken system of correspondences.
Every object in the terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol or
counterpart, of some higher reality in the starry heavens, and this
again of some law of the angelic life in the world beyond the stars.
There is the element of fire in the material world; the sun is the fire
of heaven; and in the super-celestial world there is the fire of the
seraphic intelligence. "But behold how they differ! The elementary fire
burns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the super-celestial fire loves." In
this way, every natural object, every combination of natural forces,
every accident in the lives of men, is filled with higher meanings.
Omens, prophecies, supernatural coincidences, accompany Pico himself all
through life. There are oracles in every tree and mountain-top, and a
significance in every accidental combination of the events of life.

This constant tendency to symbolism and imagery gives Pico's work a
figured style, by which it has some real resemblance to Plato's, and he
differs from other mystical writers of his time by a real desire to know
his authorities at first hand. He reads Plato in Greek, Moses in Hebrew,
and by this his work really belongs to the higher culture. Above all, we
have a constant sense in reading him, that his thoughts, however little
their positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them of
deep and passionate emotion; and when he explains the grades or steps by
which the soul passes from the love of a physical object to the love of
unseen beauty, and unfolds the analogies between this process and other
movements upward of human thought, there is a glow and vehemence in his
words which remind one of the manner in which his own brief existence
flamed itself away.

I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many things
great, rather by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what it
actually achieved. It remained for a later age to conceive the true
method of effecting a scientific reconciliation of Christian sentiment
with the imagery, the legends, the theories about the world, of pagan
poetry and philosophy. For that age the only possible reconciliation was
an imaginative one, and resulted from the efforts of artists, trained in
Christian schools, to handle pagan subjects; and of this artistic
reconciliation work like Pico's was but the feebler counterpart.
Whatever philosophers had to say on one side or the other, whether they
were successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the old to the
new, and to justify the expenditure of so much care and thought on the
dreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek religion, the direct
charm of its story, were by artists valued and cultivated for their own
sake. Hence a new sort of mythology, with a tone and qualities of its
own. When the ship-load of sacred earth from the soil of Jerusalem was
mingled with the common clay in the Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower
grew up from it, unlike any flower men had seen before, the anemone with
its concentric rings of strangely blended colour, still to be found by
those who search long enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma.
Just such a strange flower was that mythology of the Italian
Renaissance, which grew up from the mixture of two traditions, two
sentiments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story was regarded as
so much imaginative material to be received and assimilated. It did not
come into men's minds to ask curiously of science concerning its origin,
its primary form and import, its meaning for those who projected it. It
sank into their minds, to issue forth again with all the tangle about it
of medieval sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the Tribune of
the Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the pagan religion, and with
it the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking fauns of a Dionysiac
revel, into the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters had
introduced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers; and he
has given to that Madonna herself much of the uncouth energy of the
older and more primitive "Mighty Mother."

It is because this picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly to
the art of the close of the fifteenth century, pervades, in Pico della
Mirandola, an actual person, that the figure of Pico is so attractive.
He will not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of oneself, to turn
again to the pages of his forgotten books, although we know already that
the actual solution proposed in them will satisfy us as little as
perhaps it satisfied him. It is said that in his eagerness for
mysterious learning he once paid a great sum for a collection of
cabalistic manuscripts, which turned out to be forgeries; and the story
might well stand as a parable of all he ever seemed to gain in the way
of actual knowledge. He had sought knowledge, and passed from system to
system, and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledge
than because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty in
knowledge, which would come down and unite what men's ignorance had
divided, and renew what time had made dim. And so, while his actual work
has passed away, yet his own qualities are still active, and he himself
remains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis et vigilibus oculis, as his
biographer describes him, and with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti
rubore interspersa, as with the light of morning upon it; and he has a
true place in that group of great Italians who fill the end of the
fifteenth century with their names, he is a true HUMANIST. For the
essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to have
doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can
wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle
beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been
entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever
been passionate, or expended time and zeal.

1871.



SANDRO BOTTICELLI

In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned by
Name--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance only,
but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for
people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and his
name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important.
In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much
of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the
great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion
which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple
naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only,
he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the
writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of
classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, painted them
with an under-current of original sentiment, which touches you as the
real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject.
What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of
pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us, and which
we cannot get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak of a
comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which a
critic has to answer.

In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life is
almost colourless. Criticism indeed has cleared away much of the gossip
which Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia,
and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno; but in
Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate. He did not even go by
his true name: Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi,
Botticelli being only the name of the goldsmith who first taught him
art. Only two things happened to him, two things which he shared with
other artists:--he was invited to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel,
and he fell in later life under the influence of Savonarola, passing
apparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of religious melancholy,
which lasted till his death in 1515, according to the received date.
Vasari says that he plunged into the study of Dante, and even wrote a
comment on the Divine Comedy. But it seems strange that he should have
lived on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some document
might come to light, which, fixing the date of his death earlier, might
relieve one, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age.

He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story
and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line
and colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes the
illustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, the
blank spaces, left at the beginning of every canto for the hand of the
illuminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto of the
Inferno, with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by way of
experiment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the three
impressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much awry, in
the midst of the luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the followers of
Giotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to put
that weight of meaning into outward things, light, colour, everyday
gesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, and before the
fifteenth century Dante could hardly have found an illustrator.
Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending, with a
naive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of the same
scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to
painters who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present
an image to the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into form,
make one regret that he has not rather chosen for illustration the more
subdued imagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the scene of those who "go
down quick into hell," there is an invention about the fire taking hold
on the upturned soles of the feet, which proves that the design is no
mere translation of Dante's words, but a true painter's vision; while
the scene of the Centaurs wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual
circumstances of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight
on the thought of the Centaurs themselves, bright, small creatures of
the woodland, with arch baby face and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows.

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have been
a mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in his work of
that alert sense of outward things, which, in the pictures of that
period, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the
hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering
reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and
in his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of
Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or less
refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary painters;
they are almost impassive spectators of the action before them. But the
genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the
exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this interest it plays
fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and isolating others, and
always combining them anew. To him as to Dante, the scene, the colour,
the outward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive and
importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by some subtle law of
his own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it is
the double or repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share it,
with sensuous circumstance.

But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante
which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory,
heaven and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of
Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor,
Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some
shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri--two dim figures
move under that name in contemporary history--was the reputed author of
a poem, still unedited, La Citta Divina, which represented the human
race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer,
were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlier
Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect in that
century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one of
those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has recorded its
impressions of the various forms of beatified existence--Glorias, as
they were called, like that in which Giotto painted the portrait of
Dante; but somehow it was suspected of embodying in a picture the
wayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed.
Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless about philosophical
theories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine of the fifteenth
century, and his work a poem in terza rima. But Botticelli, who wrote a
commentary on Dante, and became the disciple of Savonarola, may well
have let such theories come and go across him. True or false, the story
interprets much of the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his
profane and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels,
but with a sense of displacement or loss about them--the wistfulness of
exiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue
of them explains, which runs through all his varied work with a
sentiment of ineffable melancholy.

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,
Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in great
conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. He thus
sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral
ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is neither
in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil
of Orcagna's Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and
uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion
with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by
the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His
morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his
work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity,
which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.

It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and
charm. He has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definite
enough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again,
sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during that
dark period when his thoughts were so heavy upon him. Hardly any
collection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into which
the attendant angels depress their heads so naively. Perhaps you have
sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed to no
acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and more, and
often come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins of Fra
Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them with those, you may
have thought that there was something in them mean or abject even, for
the abstract lines of the face have little nobleness, and the colour is
wan. For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the
"Desire of all nations," is one of those who are neither for Jehovah nor
for His enemies; and her choice is on her face. The white light on it is
cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon the
ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness
of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious
child, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has already that sweet
look of devotion which men have never been able altogether to love, and
which still makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to his
earthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in a
book the words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the Magnificat, and the
Gaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from
Her dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and to support the book;
but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words have no
meaning for her, and her true children are those others, among whom in
her rude home, the intolerable honour came to her, with that look of
wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in startled
animals--gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages, still
hold out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays become
enfants du choeur, with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fair
white linen on their sunburnt throats.

What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical
subjects, its most complete expression being a picture in the Uffizii,
of Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the
middle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its
strange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint
conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless
nude studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a
quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you
have read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may think
that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the
colour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet, the more you come to
understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no
mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by
which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like
this peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design of
Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of
the Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of the Greeks as they
really were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their
outward life, we know far more than Botticelli, or his most learned
contemporaries; but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge of
the lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenic
spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a record of
the first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it, in
almost painful aspiration, from a world in which it had been ignored so
long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realisation, with
which Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the
legitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system of
which this is the central myth. The light is indeed cold--mere sunless
dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you
can see the better for that quietness in the morning air each long
promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their
labours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might
think that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long
day of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard
across the grey water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which
she sails, the sea "showing his teeth" as it moves in thin lines of
foam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in
outline, plucked off short at the stalk but embrowned a little, as
Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all that imagery to be
altogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness of
resources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and
chilled it; but his predilection for minor tones counts also; and what
is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess
of pleasure, as the depositary of a great power over the lives of men.

I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is the result of a
blending in him of a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain condition,
its attractiveness, its investiture at rarer moments in a character of
loveliness and energy, with his consciousness of the shadow upon it of
the great things from which it shrinks, and that this conveys into his
work somewhat more than painting usually attains of the true complexion
of humanity. He paints the story of the goddess of pleasure in other
episodes besides that of her birth from the sea, but never without some
shadow of death in the grey flesh and wan flowers. He paints Madonnas,
but they shrink from the pressure of the divine child, and plead in
unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity. The same
figure--tradition connects it with Simonetta, the Mistress of Giuliano
de' Medici--appears again as Judith, returning home across the hill
country, when the great deed is over, and the moment of revulsion come,
when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a burthen; as Justice,
sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look of self-hatred which makes
the sword in her hand seem that of a suicide; and again as Veritas, in
the allegorical picture of Calumnia, where one may note in passing the
suggestiveness of an accident which identifies the image of Truth with
the person of Venus. We might trace the same sentiment through his
engravings; but his share in them is doubtful, and the object of this
brief study has been attained, if I have defined aright the temper in
which he worked.

But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botticelli--a
secondary painter--a proper subject for general criticism? There are a
few great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has become
a force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they have
absorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli; and,
over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism, general
criticism may be very well employed in that sort of interpretation which
adjusts the position of these men to general culture, whereas smaller
men can be the proper subjects only of technical or antiquarian
treatment. But, besides those great men, there is a certain number of
artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to
us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and
these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be interpreted
to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often the
objects of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate,
just because there is not about them the stress of a great name and
authority. Of this select number Botticelli is one; he has the
freshness, the uncertain and diffident promise which belongs to the
earlier Renaissance itself, and makes it perhaps the most interesting
period in the history of the mind: in studying his work one begins to
understand to how great a place in human culture the art of Italy had
been called.

1870.



LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

The Italian sculptors of the earlier half of the fifteenth century are
more than mere forerunners of the great masters of its close, and often
reach perfection, within the narrow limits which they chose to impose on
their work. Their sculpture shares with the paintings of Botticelli and
the churches of Brunelleschi that profound expressiveness, that intimate
impress of an indwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of the
art of Italy in that century. Their works have been much neglected, and
often almost hidden away amid the frippery of modern decoration, and we
come with some surprise on the places where their fire still smoulders.
One longs to penetrate into the lives of the men who have given
expression to so much power and sweetness; but it is part of the
reserve, the austere dignity and simplicity of their existence, that
their histories are for the most part lost, or told but briefly. From
their lives, as from their work, all tumult of sound and colour has
passed away. Mino, the Raffaelle of sculpture, Maso del Rodario, whose
works add a new grace to the church of Como, Donatello even--one asks in
vain for more than a shadowy outline of their actual days.

Something more remains of Luca della Robbia; something more of a
history, of outward changes and fortunes, is expressed through his work.
I suppose nothing brings the real air of a Tuscan town so vividly to
mind as those pieces of pale blue and white earthenware, by which he is
best known, like fragments of the milky sky itself, fallen into the cool
streets, and breaking into the darkened churches. And no work is less
imitable; like Tuscan wine, it loses its savour when moved from its
birthplace, from the crumbling walls where it was first placed. Part of
the charm of this work, its grace and purity and finish of expression,
is common to all the Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century; for Luca
was first of all a worker in marble, and his works in earthenware only
transfer to a different material the principles of his sculpture.

These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century worked for the most part
in low relief, giving even to their monumental effigies something of its
depression of surface, getting into them by this means a pathetic
suggestion of the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are haters
of all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly-opposed light and shade, and
seek their means of expression among those last refinements of shadow,
which are almost invisible except in a strong light, and which the
finest pencil can hardly follow. The whole essence of their work is
EXPRESSION, the passing of a smile over the face of a child, the ripple
of the air on a still day over the curtain of a window ajar.

What is the precise value of this system of sculpture, this low relief?
Luca della Robbia, and the other sculptors of the school to which he
belongs, have before them the universal problem of their art; and this
system of low relief is the means by which they meet and overcome the
special limitation of sculpture--a limitation resulting from the
material and the essential conditions of all sculptured work, and which
consists in the tendency of this work to a hard realism, a one-sided
presentment of mere form, that solid material frame which only motion
can relieve, a thing of heavy shadows, and an individuality of
expression pushed to caricature. Against this tendency to the hard
presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality of
nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles: each great
system of sculpture resisting it in its own way, etherealising,
spiritualising, relieving its hardness, its heaviness and death. The use
of colour in sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by
borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture effects by
strictly appropriate means. To get not colour, but the equivalent of
colour; to secure the expression and the play of life; to expand the too
fixed individuality of pure, unrelieved, uncoloured form--this is the
problem which the three great styles in sculpture have solved in three
different ways.

Allgemeinheit--breadth, generality, universality--is the word chosen by
Winckelmann, and after him by Goethe and many German critics, to express
that law of the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Pheidias and his
pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type in the
individual, to abstract and express only what is structural and
permanent, to purge from the individual all that belongs only to him,
all the accidents, the feelings, and actions of the special moment, all
that (because in its own nature it endures but for a moment) is apt to
look like a frozen thing if one arrests it.

In this way their works came to be like some subtle extract or essence,
or almost like pure thoughts or ideas: and hence the breadth of humanity
in them, that detachment from the conditions of a particular place or
people, which has carried their influence far beyond the age which
produced them, and insured them universal acceptance.

That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness and unspirituality of
pure form. But it involved to a certain degree the sacrifice of what we
call expression; and a system of abstraction which aimed always at the
broad and general type, at the purging away from the individual of what
belonged only to him, and of the mere accidents of a particular time
and place, imposed upon the range of effects open to the Greek sculptor
limits somewhat narrowly defined; and when Michelangelo came, with a
genius spiritualised by the reverie of the middle age, penetrated by its
spirit of inwardness and introspection, living not a mere outward life
like the Greek, but a life full of inward experiences, sorrows,
consolations, a system which sacrificed so much of what was inward and
unseen could not satisfy him. To him, lover and student of Greek
sculpture as he was, work which did not bring what was inward to the
surface, which was not concerned with individual expression, with
individual character and feeling, the special history of the special
soul, was not worth doing at all.

And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to himself, which often is,
and always seems, the effect of accident, he secured for his work
individuality and intensity of expression, while he avoided a too hard
realism, that tendency to harden into caricature which the
representation of feeling in sculpture must always have. What time and
accident, its centuries of darkness under the furrows of the "little
Melian farm," have done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus of
Melos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so that some spirit
in the thing seems always on the point of breaking out, as though in it
classical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mystical
Christian age, its expression being in the whole range of ancient work
most like that of Michelangelo's own:--this effect Michelangelo gains by
leaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness,
which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something of the
wasting of that snow-image which he moulded at the command of Piero de'
Medici, when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti palace,
almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make the
quality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all
his work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting,
however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, and
feeling at the same time that they too would lose something if the
half-realised form ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough hewn
here, so delicately finished there; and they have wished to fathom the
charm of this incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness is
Michelangelo's equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way of
etherealising pure form, of relieving its hard realism, and
communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a
characteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of
life, his disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfect
finish. In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion and
intensity with the sense of a yielding and flexible life: he gets not
vitality merely, but a wonderful force of expression.

Midway between these two systems--the system of the Greek sculptors and
the system of Michelangelo--comes the system of Luca della Robbia. And
the other Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century, partaking both of
the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of extracting certain select
elements only of pure form and sacrificing all the rest, and the studied
incompleteness of Michelangelo, relieving that expression of intensity,
passion, energy, which might otherwise have hardened into caricature.
Like Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their works with intense and
individualised expression: their noblest works are the studied
sepulchral portraits of particular persons--the monument of Conte Ugo in
the Badia of Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with the
wonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool north side of the
Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo--monuments which abound in the
churches of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subdued
Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and refinement:--and they unite
these elements of tranquillity, of repose, to that intense and
individual expression by a system of conventionalism as skilful and
subtle as that of the Greeks, subduing all such curves as indicate solid
form, and throwing the whole into lower relief.

The life of Luca, a life of labour and frugality, with no adventure and
no excitement except what belongs to the trial of new artistic
processes, the struggle with new artistic difficulties, the solution of
purely artistic problems, fills the first seventy years of the fifteenth
century. After producing many works in marble for the Duomo and the
Campanile of Florence, which place him among the foremost sculptors of
that age, he became desirous to realise the spirit and manner of that
sculpture, in a humbler material, to unite its science, its exquisite
and expressive system of low relief, to the homely art of pottery, to
introduce those high qualities into common things, to adorn and
cultivate daily household life. In this he is profoundly characteristic
of the Florence of that century, of that in it which lay below its
superficial vanity and caprice, a certain old-world modesty and
seriousness and simplicity. People had not yet begun to think that what
was good art for churches was not so good, or less fitted, for their own
houses. Luca's new work was in plain white earthenware at first, a mere
rough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in a
few hours. But on this humble path he found his way to a fresh success,
to another artistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery, with its
strange, bright colours--colours of art, colours not to be attained in
the natural stone--mingled with the tradition of the old Roman pottery
of the neighbourhood. The little red, coral-like jars of Arezzo, dug up
in that district from time to time, are still famous. These colours
haunted Luca's fancy. "He still continued seeking something more," his
biographer says of him; "and instead of making his figures of baked
earth simply white, he added the further invention of giving them
colour, to the astonishment and delight of all who beheld them"--Cosa
singolare, e multo utile per la state!--a curious thing, and very useful
for summertime, full of coolness and repose for hand and eye. Luca loved
the forms of various fruits, and wrought them into all sorts of
marvellous frames and garlands, giving them their natural colours, only
subdued a little, a little paler than nature. But in his nobler
terra-cotta work he never introduces colour into the flesh, keeping
mostly to blue and white, the colours of the Virgin Mary.

I said that the work of Luca della Robbia possessed in an unusual
measure that special characteristic which belongs to all the workmen of
his school, a characteristic which, even in the absence of much positive
information about their actual history, seems to bring those workmen
themselves very near to us--the impress of a personal quality, a
profound expressiveness, what the French call intimite, by which is
meant some subtler sense of originality--the seal on a man's work of
what is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner of
apprehension: it is what we call expression, carried to its highest
intensity of degree. That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still
in art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture; yet essentially,
perhaps, it is the quality which alone makes works in the imaginative
and moral order really worth having at all. It is because the works of
the artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality in an
unmistakable way that one is anxious to know all that can be known about
them, and explain to oneself the secret of their charm.

1872.



THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO

Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if the only
characteristic of his genius were a wonderful strength, verging, as in
the things of the imagination great strength always does, on what is
singular or strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming
of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art; that they
shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give
pleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and this
strangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness. And to the true
admirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of the
Michelangelesque--sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, an
energy of conception which seems at every moment about to break through
all the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a
loveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things--ex forti
dulcedo.

In this way he sums up for them the whole character of medieval art
itself in that which distinguishes it most clearly from classical work,
the presence of a convulsive energy in it, becoming in lower hands
merely monstrous or forbidding, but felt, even in its most graceful
products, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those who feel this
grace or sweetness in Michelangelo might at the first moment be puzzled
if they were asked wherein precisely the quality resided. Men of
inventive temperament--Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as in
Michelangelo, people have for the most part been attracted or repelled
by the strength, while few have understood his sweetness--have sometimes
relieved conceptions of merely moral or spiritual greatness, but with
little aesthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents or accessories,
like the butterfly which alights on the blood-stained barricade in Les
Miserables, or those sea-birds for which the monstrous Gilliatt comes to
be as some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid of him,
in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But the austere genius of Michelangelo
will not depend for its sweetness on any mere accessories like these.
The world of natural things has almost no existence for him; "When one
speaks of him," says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and mountains
disappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains behind";
and he quotes a few slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as the
single expression in all he has left of a feeling for nature. He has
traced no flowers, like those with which Leonardo stars over his
gloomiest rocks; nothing like the fretwork of wings and flames in which
Blake frames his most startling conceptions; no forest-scenery like
Titian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of rock, and dim
vegetable forms as blank as they, as in a world before the creation of
the first five days.

Of the whole story of the creation he has painted only the creation of
the first man and woman, and, for him at least, feebly, the creation of
light. It belongs to the quality of his genius thus to concern itself
almost exclusively with the creation of man. For him it is not, as in
the story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of developments,
but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme
form, off-hand and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. With him
the beginning of life has all the characteristics of resurrection; it is
like the recovery of suspended health or animation, with its gratitude,
its effusion, and eloquence. Fair as the young men of the Elgin marbles,
the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a total absence of that
balance and completeness which express so well the sentiment of a
self-contained, independent life. In that languid figure there is
something rude and satyr-like, something akin to the rugged hillside on
which it lies. His whole form is gathered into an expression of mere
expectation and reception; he has hardly strength enough to lift his
finger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a touch of the
finger-tips will suffice.

This creation of life--life coming always as relief or recovery, and
always in strong contrast with the rough-hewn mass in which it is
kindled--is in various ways the motive of all his work, whether its
immediate subject be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this,
although at least one-half of his work was designed for the adornment of
tombs--the tomb of Julius, the tombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment but
the Resurrection is the real subject of his last work in the Sistine
Chapel; and his favourite Pagan subject is the legend of Leda, the
delight of the world breaking from the egg of a bird. As I have already
pointed out, he secures that ideality of expression which in Greek
sculpture depends on a delicate system of abstraction, and in early
Italian sculpture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness, which is
surely not always undesigned, and which I suppose no one regrets, and
trusts to the spectator to complete the half-emergent form. And as his
persons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so, as if to
realise the expression by which the old Florentine records describe a
sculptor--master of live stone--with him the very rocks seem to have
life; they have but to cast away the dust and scurf that they may rise
and stand on their feet. He loved the very quarries of Carrara, those
strange grey peaks which even at mid-day convey into any scene from
which they are visible something of the solemnity and stillness of
evening, sometimes wandering among them month after month, till at last
their pale ashen colours seem to have passed into his painting; and on
the crown of the head of the David there still remains a morsel of uncut
stone, as if by one touch to maintain its connexion with the place from
which it was hewn.

And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life that the secret of that
sweetness of his is to be found. He gives us indeed no lovely natural
objects like Leonardo or Titian, but only the coldest, most elementary
shadowing of rock or tree; no lovely draperies and comely gestures of
life, but only the austere truths of human nature; "simple persons"--as
he replied in his rough way to the querulous criticism of Julius the
Second, that there was no gold on the figures of the Sistine
Chapel--"simple persons, who wore no gold on their garments"; but he
penetrates us with a sense of that power which we associate with all the
warmth and fulness of the world, and the sense of which brings into
one's thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers and insects. The brooding
spirit of life itself is there; and the summer may burst out in a
moment.

He was born in an interval of a rapid midnight journey in March, at a
place in the neighbourhood of Arezzo, the thin, clear air of which, as
was then thought, being favourable to the birth of children of great
parts. He came of a race of grave and dignified men, who, claiming
kinship with the family of Canossa, and some colour of imperial blood in
their veins, had, generation after generation, received honourable
employment under the government of Florence. His mother, a girl of
nineteen years, put him out to nurse at a country house among the hills
of Settignano, where every other inhabitant is a worker in the marble
quarries, and the child early became familiar with that strange first
stage in the sculptor's art. To this succeeded the influence of the
sweetest and most placid master Florence had yet seen, Domenico
Ghirlandajo. At fifteen he was at work among the curiosities of the
garden of the Medici, copying and restoring antiques, winning the
condescending notice of the great Lorenzo. He knew too how to excite
strong hatreds; and it was at this time that in a quarrel with a
fellow-student he received a blow on the face which deprived him for
ever of the comeliness of outward form. It was through an accident that
he came to study those works of the early Italian sculptors which
suggested much of his own grandest work, and impressed it with so deep a
sweetness. He believed in dreams and omens. One of his friends dreamed
twice that Lorenzo, then lately dead, appeared to him in grey and dusty
apparel. To Michelangelo this dream seemed to portend the troubles which
afterwards really came, and with the suddenness which was characteristic
of all his movements, he left Florence. Having occasion to pass through
Bologna, he neglected to procure the little seal of red wax which the
stranger entering Bologna must carry on the thumb of his right hand. He
had no money to pay the fine, and would have been thrown into prison had
not one of the magistrates interposed. He remained in this man's house a
whole year, rewarding his hospitality by readings from the Italian poets
whom he loved. Bologna, with its endless colonnades and fantastic
leaning towers, can never have been one of the lovelier cities of Italy.
But about the portals of its vast unfinished churches and its dark
shrines, half hidden by votive flowers and candles, lie some of the
sweetest works of the early Tuscan sculptors, Giovanni da Pisa and
Jacopo della Quercia, things as winsome as flowers; and the year which
Michelangelo spent in copying these works was not a lost year. It was
now, on returning to Florence, that he put forth that unique presentment
of Bacchus, which expresses, not the mirthfulness of the god of wine,
but his sleepy seriousness, his enthusiasm, his capacity for profound
dreaming. No one ever expressed more truly than Michelangelo the notion
of inspired sleep, of faces charged with dreams. A vast fragment of
marble had long lain below the Loggia of Orcagna, and many a sculptor
had had his thoughts of a design which should just fill this famous
block of stone, cutting the diamond, as it were, without loss. Under
Michelangelo's hand it became the David which stood till lately on the
steps of the Palazzo Vecchio, when it was replaced below the Loggia.
Michelangelo was now thirty years old, and his reputation was
established. Three great works fill the remainder of his life--three
works often interrupted, carried on through a thousand hesitations, a
thousand disappointments, quarrels with his patrons, quarrels with his
family, quarrels perhaps most of all with himself--the Sistine Chapel,
the Mausoleum of Julius the Second, and the Sacristy of San Lorenzo.

In the story of Michelangelo's life the strength, often turning to
bitterness, is not far to seek; a discordant note sounds throughout it
which almost spoils the music. He "treats the Pope as the King of France
himself would not dare to treat him"; he goes along the streets of Rome
"like an executioner," Raffaelle says of him. Once he seems to have shut
himself up with the intention of starving himself to death. As we come
in reading his life on its harsh, untempered incidents, the thought
again and again arises that he is one of those who incur the judgment of
Dante, as having "wilfully lived in sadness." Even his tenderness and
pity are embittered by their strength. What passionate weeping in that
mysterious figure which, in the Creation of Adam, crouches below the
image of the Almighty, as he comes with the forms of things to be, woman
and her progeny, in the fold of his garment! What a sense of wrong in
those two captive youths, who feel the chains like scalding water on
their proud and delicate flesh! The idealist who became a reformer with
Savonarola, and a republican superintending the fortification of
Florence--the nest where he was born, il nido ove naqqu'io, as he calls
it once, in a sudden throb of affection--in its last struggle for
liberty, yet believed always that he had imperial blood in his veins and
was of the kindred of the great Matilda, had within the depths of his
nature some secret spring of indignation or sorrow. We know little of
his youth, but all tends to make one believe in the vehemence of its
passions. Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets there is latent a
deep delight in carnal form and colour. There, and still more in the
madrigals, he often falls into the language of less tranquil affections;
while some of them have the colour of penitence, as from a wanderer
returning home. He who spoke so decisively of the supremacy in the
imaginative world of the unveiled human form had not been always, we may
think, a mere Platonic lover. Vague and wayward his loves may have been;
but they partook of the strength of his nature, and sometimes, it may
be, would by no means become music, so that the comely order of his days
was quite put out: par che amaro ogni mio dolce io senta.

But his genius is in harmony with itself; and just as in the products of
his art we find resources of sweetness within their exceeding strength,
so in his own story also, bitter as the ordinary sense of it may be,
there are select pages shut in among the rest--pages one might easily
turn over too lightly, but which yet sweeten the whole volume. The
interest of Michelangelo's poems is that they make us spectators of this
struggle; the struggle of a strong nature to adorn and attune itself;
the struggle of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned and
sweet and pensive, as Dante's was. It is a consequence of the occasional
and informal character of his poetry, that it brings us nearer to
himself, his own mind and temper, than any work done only to support a
literary reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us little that
is worth knowing about him--a few poor quarrels about money and
commissions. But it is quite otherwise with these songs and sonnets,
written down at odd moments, sometimes on the margins of his sketches,
themselves often unfinished sketches, arresting some salient feeling or
unpremeditated idea as it passed. And it happens that a true study of
these has become within the last few years for the first time possible.
A few of the sonnets circulated widely in manuscript, and became almost
within Michelangelo's own lifetime a subject of academical discourses.
But they were first collected in a volume in 1623 by the great-nephew of
Michelangelo, Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted much,
re-wrote the sonnets in part, and sometimes compressed two or more
compositions into one, always losing something of the force and
incisiveness of the original. So the book remained, neglected even by
Italians themselves in the last century, through the influence of that
French taste which despised all compositions of the kind, as it despised
and neglected Dante. "His reputation will ever be on the increase,
because he is so little read," says Voltaire of Dante.--But in 1858 the
last of the Buonarroti bequeathed to the municipality of Florence the
curiosities of his family. Among them was a precious volume containing
the autograph of the sonnets. A learned Italian, Signor Cesare Guasti,
undertook to collate this autograph with other manuscripts at the
Vatican and elsewhere, and in 1863 published a true version of
Michelangelo's poems, with dissertations and a paraphrase.*

*The sonnets have been translated into English, with much poetic taste
and skill, by Mr. J. A. Symonds.

People have often spoken of these poems as if they were a mere cry of
distress, a lover's complaint over the obduracy of Vittoria Colonna. But
those who speak thus forget that though it is quite possible that
Michelangelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure, as early
as 1537, yet their closer intimacy did not begin till about the year
1542, when Michelangelo was nearly seventy years old. Vittoria herself,
an ardent neo-catholic, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news had
reached her, seventeen years before, that her husband, the youthful and
princely Marquess of Pescara, lay dead of the wounds he had received in
the battle of Pavia, was then no longer an object of great passion. In a
dialogue written by the painter, Francesco d'Ollanda, we catch a glimpse
of them together in an empty church at Rome, one Sunday afternoon,
discussing indeed the characteristics of various schools of art, but
still more the writings of Saint Paul, already following the ways and
tasting the sunless pleasures of weary people, whose hold on outward
things is slackening. In a letter still extant he regrets that when he
visited her after death he had kissed her hands only. He made, or set to
work to make, a crucifix for her use, and two drawings, perhaps in
preparation for it, are now in Oxford. From allusions in the sonnets, we
may divine that when they first approached each other he had debated
much with himself whether this last passion would be the most
unsoftening, the most desolating of all--un dolce amaro, un si e no mi
muovi; is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino stato (Plato's
ante-natal state) il raggio ardente? The older, conventional criticism,
dealing with the text of 1623, had lightly assumed that all or nearly
all the sonnets were actually addressed to Vittoria herself; but Signor
Guasti finds only four, or at most five, which can be so attributed on
genuine authority. Still, there are reasons which make him assign the
majority of them to the period between 1542 and 1547, and we may regard
the volume as a record of this resting-place in Michelangelo's story. We
know how Goethe escaped from the stress of sentiments too strong for him
by making a book about them; and for Michelangelo, to write down his
passionate thoughts at all, to make sonnets about them, was already in
some measure to command, and have his way with them--

  La vita del mia amor non e il cor mio,
  Ch'amor, di quel ch'io t'amo, e senza core.

It was just because Vittoria raised no great passion that the space in
his life where she reigns has such peculiar suavity; and the spirit of
the sonnets is lost if we once take them out of that dreamy atmosphere
in which men have things as they will, because the hold of all outward
things upon them is faint and thin. Their prevailing tone is a calm and
meditative sweetness. The cry of distress is indeed there, but as a mere
residue, a trace of bracing chalybeate salt, just discernible in the
song which rises as a clear, sweet spring from a charmed space in his
life.

This charmed and temperate space in Michelangelo's life, without which
its excessive strength would have been so imperfect, which saves him
from the judgment of Dante on those who "wilfully lived in sadness," is
then a well-defined period there, reaching from the year 1542 to the
year 1547, the year of Vittoria's death. In it the lifelong effort to
tranquillise his vehement emotions by withdrawing them into the region
of ideal sentiment, becomes successful; and the significance of Vittoria
there is, that she realises for him a type of affection which even in
disappointment may charm and sweeten his spirit. In this effort to
tranquillise and sweeten life by idealising its vehement sentiments,
there were two great traditional types, either of which an Italian of
the sixteenth century might have followed. There was Dante, whose little
book of the Vita Nuova had early become a pattern of imaginative love,
maintained somewhat feebly by the later followers of Petrarch; and since
Plato had become something more than a name in Italy by the publication
of the Latin translation of his works by Marsilio Ficino, there was the
Platonic tradition also. Dante's belief in the resurrection of the body,
through which, even in heaven, Beatrice loses for him no tinge of
flesh-colour, or fold of raiment even--and the Platonic dream of the
passage of the soul through one form of life after another, with its
passionate haste to escape from the burden of bodily form
altogether--are, for all effects of art or poetry, principles
diametrically opposite; and it is the Platonic tradition rather than
Dante's that has moulded Michelangelo's verse. In many ways no sentiment
could have been less like Dante's love for Beatrice than Michelangelo's
for Vittoria Colonna. Dante's comes in early youth: Beatrice is a child,
with the wistful, ambiguous vision of a child, with a character still
unaccentuated by the influence of outward circumstances, almost
expressionless. Vittoria is a woman already weary, in advanced age, of
grave intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece of figured wood,
inlaid with lovely incidents. In Michelangelo's poems, frost and fire
are almost the only images--the refining fire of the goldsmith; once or
twice the phoenix; ice melting at the fire; fire struck from the rock
which it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful allusion to a journey,
there are almost no incidents. But there is much of the bright, sharp,
unerring skill, with which in boyhood he gave the look of age to the
head of a faun by chipping a tooth from its jaw with a single stroke of
the hammer. For Dante, the amiable and devout materialism of the middle
age sanctifies all that is presented by hand and eye. Michelangelo is
always pressing forward from the outward beauty--il bel del fuor che
agli occhi piace--to apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella forma
universale--that abstract form of beauty, about which the Platonists
reason. And this gives the impression in him of something flitting and
unfixed, of the houseless and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyant
through the frail and yielding flesh. He accounts for love at first
sight by a previous state of existence--la dove io t'amai prima.

And yet there are many points in which he is really like Dante, and
comes very near to the original image, beyond those later and feebler
followers of Petrarch. He learns from Dante rather than from Plato, that
for lovers, the surfeiting of desire--ove gran desir gran copia affrena,
is a state less happy than misery full of hope--una miseria di speranza
piena. He recalls him in the repetition of the words gentile and
cortesia, in the personification of Amor, in the tendency to dwell
minutely on the physical effects of the presence of a beloved object on
the pulses and the heart. Above all, he resembles Dante in the warmth
and intensity of his political utterances, for the lady of one of his
noblest sonnets was from the first understood to be the city of
Florence; and he avers that all must be asleep in heaven, if she, who
was created "of angelic form," for a thousand lovers, is appropriated by
one alone, some Piero, or Alessandro de' Medici. Once and again he
introduces Love and Death, who dispute concerning him; for, like Dante
and all the nobler souls of Italy, he is much occupied with thoughts of
the grave, and his true mistress is death; death at first as the worst
of all sorrows and disgraces, with a clod of the field for its brain;
afterwards, death in its high distinction, its detachment from vulgar
needs, the angry stains of life and action escaping fast.

Some of those whom the gods love die young. This man, because the gods
loved him, lingered on to be of immense, patriarchal age, till the
sweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out
of the strong came forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo. The world had
changed around him. The New-catholicism had taken the place of the
Renaissance. The spirit of the Roman Church had changed: in the vast
world's cathedral which his skill had helped to raise for it, it looked
stronger than ever. Some of the first members of the Oratory were among
his intimate associates. They were of a spirit as unlike as possible
from that of Lorenzo, or Savonarola even. The opposition of the
Reformation to art has been often enlarged upon; far greater was that of
the Catholic revival. But in thus fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy,
the Roman Catholic Church has passed beyond him, and he was a stranger
to it. In earlier days, when its beliefs had been in a fluid state, he
too might have been drawn into the controversy; he might have been for
spiritualising the papal sovereignty, like Savonarola; or for adjusting
the dreams of Plato and Homer with the words of Christ, like Pico of
Mirandola. But things had moved onward, and such adjustments were no
longer possible. For himself, he had long since fallen back on that
divine ideal, which above the wear and tear of creeds has been forming
itself for ages as the possession of nobler souls. And now he began to
feel the soothing influence which since that time the Roman Church has
often exerted over spirits too independent to be its subjects, yet
brought within the neighbourhood of its action; consoled and
tranquillised, as a traveller might be, resting for one evening in a
strange city, by its stately aspect, and the sentiment of its many
fortunes, just because with those fortunes he has nothing to do. So he
lingers on; a revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of another age,
in a world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities too closely;
dreaming, in a worn-out society, theatrical in its life, theatrical in
its art, theatrical even in its devotion, on the morning of the world's
history, on the primitive form of man, on the images under which that
primitive world had conceived of spiritual forces.

I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo as thus lingering beyond his
time in a world not his own, because, if one is to distinguish the
peculiar savour of his work, he must be approached, not through his
followers, but through his predecessors; not through the marbles of
Saint Peter's, but through the work of the sculptors of the fifteenth
century over the tombs and altars of Tuscany. He is the last of the
Florentines, of those on whom the peculiar sentiment of the Florence of
Dante and Giotto descended: he is the consummate representative of the
form that sentiment took in the fifteenth century with men like Luca
Signorelli and Mino da Fiesole. Up to him the tradition of sentiment is
unbroken, the progress towards surer and more mature methods of
expressing that sentiment continuous. But his professed disciples did
not share this temper; they are in love with his strength only, and seem
not to feel his grave and temperate sweetness. Theatricality is their
chief characteristic; and that is a quality as little attributable to
Michelangelo as to Mino or Luca Signorelli. With him, as with them, all
Is serious, passionate, impulsive.

This discipleship of Michelangelo, this dependence of his on the
tradition of the Florentine schools, is nowhere seen more clearly than
in his treatment of the Creation. The Creation of Man had haunted the
mind of the middle age like a dream; and weaving it into a hundred
carved ornaments of capital or doorway, the Italian sculptors had early
impressed upon it that pregnancy of expression which seems to give it
many veiled meanings. As with other artistic conceptions of the middle
age, its treatment became almost conventional, handed on from artist to
artist, with slight changes, till it came to have almost an independent,
abstract existence of its own. It was characteristic of the medieval
mind thus to give an independent traditional existence to a special
pictorial conception, or to a legend, like that of Tristram or
Tannhaeuser, or even to the very thoughts and substance of a book, like
the Imitation, so that no single workman could claim it as his own, and
the book, the image, the legend, had itself a legend, and its fortunes,
and a personal history; and it is a sign of the medievalism of
Michelangelo, that he thus receives from tradition his central
conception, and does but add the last touches, in transferring it to the
frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

But there was another tradition of those earlier more serious
Florentines, of which Michelangelo is the inheritor, to which he gives
the final expression, and which centres in the sacristy of San Lorenzo,
as the tradition of the Creation centres in the Sistine Chapel. It has
been said that all the great Florentines were preoccupied with death.
Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe!--is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante
to Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge
to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who
had taken refuge from the danger of death by plague, in a country-house.
It was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be
pre-occupied with the thought of death was in itself dignifying, and a
note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines of
the fifteenth century was partly due; and it was reinforced in them by
the actual sorrows of their times. How often, and in what various ways,
had they seen life stricken down, in their streets and houses! La bella
Simonetta dies in early youth, and is borne to the grave with uncovered
face. The young Cardinal Jacopo di Portogallo dies on a visit to
Florence--insignis forma fui et mirabili modestia--his epitaph dares to
say. Antonio Rossellino carves his tomb in the church of San Miniato,
with care for the shapely hands and feet, and sacred attire; Luca della
Robbia puts his skyeyest works there; and the tomb of the youthful and
princely prelate became the strangest and most beautiful thing in that
strange and beautiful place. After the execution of the Pazzi
conspirators, Botticelli is employed to paint their portraits. This
preoccupation with serious thoughts and sad images might easily have
resulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of the Rhine,
or in the overcrowded parts of medieval Paris, as it still does in many
a village of the Alps, in something merely morbid or grotesque, in the
Danse Macabre of many French and German painters, or the grim inventions
of Duerer. From such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenth
century were saved by their high Italian dignity and culture, and still
more by their tender pity for the thing itself. They must often have
leaned over the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothed
out. After death, it is said, the traces of slighter and more
superficial dispositions disappear; the lines become more simple and
dignified; only the abstract lines remain, in a great indifference.
They came thus to see death in its distinction; and following it perhaps
one stage further, dwelling for a moment on the point where all that
transitory dignity must break up, and discerning with no clearness a new
body, they paused just in time, and abstained, with a sentiment of
profound pity.

Of all this sentiment Michelangelo is the achievement; and first of all,
of pity. Pieta--pity--the pity of the Virgin Mother over the dead body
of Christ, expanded into the pity of all mothers over all dead sons, the
entombment, with its cruel "hard stones"--that is the subject of his
predilection. He has left it in many forms, sketches, half-finished
designs, finished and unfinished groups of sculpture; but always as a
hopeless, rayless, almost heathen sorrow--no divine sorrow, but mere
pity and awe at the stiff limbs and colourless lips. There is a drawing
of his at Oxford, in which the dead body has sunk to the earth between
the mother's feet, with the arms extended over her knees. The tombs in
the sacristy of San Lorenzo are memorials, not of any of the nobler and
greater Medici, but of Giuliano, and Lorenzo the younger, noticeable
chiefly for their somewhat early death. It is mere human nature
therefore which has prompted the sentiment here. The titles assigned
traditionally to the four symbolical figures, Night and Day, The
Twilight and The Dawn, are far too definite for them; for these figures
come much nearer to the mind and spirit of their author, and are a more
direct expression of his thoughts, than any merely symbolical
conceptions could possibly have been. They concentrate and express, less
by way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a
piece of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments,
which shift and mix and define themselves and fade again, whenever the
thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on the conditions and
surroundings of the disembodied spirit. I suppose no one would come to
the sacristy of San Lorenzo for consolation; for seriousness, for
solemnity, for dignity of impression, perhaps, but not for consolation.
It is a place neither of terrible nor consoling thoughts, but of vague
and wistful speculation. Here, again, Michelangelo is the disciple not
so much of Dante as of the Platonists. Dante's belief in immortality is
formal, precise, and firm, as much so almost as that of a child, who
thinks the dead will hear if you cry loud enough. But in Michelangelo
you have maturity, the mind of the grown man, dealing cautiously and
dispassionately with serious things; and what hope he has is based on
the consciousness of ignorance--ignorance of man, ignorance of the
nature of the mind, its origin and capacities. Michelangelo is so
ignorant of the spiritual world, of the new body and its laws, that he
does not surely know whether the consecrated Host may not be the body of
Christ. And of all that range of sentiment he is the poet, a poet still
alive, and in possession of our inmost thoughts--dumb inquiry over the
relapse after death into the formlessness which preceded life, the
change, the revolt from that change, then the correcting, hallowing,
consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not more
vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three
centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the new
body--a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those
too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment,
retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with
faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in
the doorway, a feather in the wind.

The qualities of the great masters in art or literature, the combination
of those qualities, the laws by which they moderate, support, relieve
each other, are not peculiar to them; but most often typical standards,
or revealing instances, of the laws by which certain aesthetic effects
are produced. The old masters indeed are simpler; their characteristics
are written larger, and are easier to read, than their analogues in all
the mixed, confused productions of the modern mind. But when once we
have succeeded in defining for ourselves those characteristics, and the
law of their combination, we have acquired a standard or measure which
helps us to put in its right place many a vagrant genius, many an
unclassified talent, many precious though imperfect products of art. It
is so with the components of the true character of Michelangelo. That
strange interfusion of sweetness and strength is not to be found in
those who claimed to be his followers; but it is found in many of those
who worked before him, and in many others down to our own time, in
William Blake, for instance, and Victor Hugo, who, though not of his
school, and unaware, are his true sons, and help us to understand him,
as he in turn interprets and justifies them. Perhaps this is the chief
use in studying old masters.

1871.



LEONARDO DA VINCI

HOMO MINISTER ET INTERPRES NATURAE


In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some
variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the
outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator,
holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above
Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression,
are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of
which one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and
graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the time-honoured mode in which
the world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself
alone, his high indifference, his intolerance of the common forms of
things; and in the second edition the image was changed into something
fainter and more conventional. But it is still by a certain mystery in
his work, and something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great
men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His life is one of
sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apart
from the main scope of his work. By a strange fortune the works on which
his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, as the
Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the work of meaner
hands, as the Last Supper. His type of beauty is so exotic that it
fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than that of
any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the world
within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the possessor of
some unsanctified and sacred wisdom; as to Michelet and others to have
anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and crowds all his
chief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet he is so
possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic
events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across
them by chance on some secret errand.

His legend, as the French say, with the anecdotes which every one knows,
is one of the most brilliant in Vasari. Later writers merely copied it,
until, in 1804, Carlo Amoretti applied to it a criticism which left
hardly a date fixed, and not one of those anecdotes untouched. The
various questions thus raised have since that time become, one after
another, subjects of special study, and mere antiquarianism has in this
direction little more to do. For others remain the editing of the
thirteen books of his manuscripts, and the separation by technical
criticism of what in his reputed works is really his, from what is only
half his, or the work of his pupils. But a lover of strange souls may
still analyse for himself the impression made on him by those works, and
try to reach through it a definition of the chief elements of Leonardo's
genius. The legend, corrected and enlarged by its critics, may now and
then intervene to support the results of this analysis.

His life has three divisions--thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty
years at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to rest
under the protection of Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The
dishonour of illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, his
father, was of a noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the Val d'Arno, and
Leonardo, brought up delicately among the true children of that house,
was the love-child of his youth, with the keen, puissant nature such
children often have. We see him in his youth fascinating all men by his
beauty, improvising music and songs, buying the caged birds and setting
them free, as he walked the streets of Florence, fond of odd bright
dresses and spirited horses.

From his earliest years he designed many objects, and constructed models
in relief, of which Vasari mentions some of women smiling. His father,
pondering over this promise in the child, took him to the workshop of
Andrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist in Florence.
Beautiful objects lay about there--reliquaries, pyxes, silver images for
the pope's chapel at Rome, strange fancy-work of the middle age, keeping
odd company with fragments of antiquity, then but lately discovered.
Another student Leonardo may have seen there--a boy into whose soul the
level light and aerial illusions of Italian sunsets had passed, in after
days famous as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of the earlier
Florentine type, carver, painter, and worker in metals, in one;
designer, not of pictures only, but of all things for sacred or
household use, drinking-vessels, ambries, instruments of music, making
them all fair to look upon, filling the common ways of life with the
reflexion of some far-off brightness; and years of patience had refined
his hand till his work was now sought after from distant places.

It happened that Verrocchio was employed by the brethren of Vallombrosa
to paint the Baptism of Christ, and Leonardo was allowed to finish an
angel in the left hand corner. It was one of those moments in which the
progress of a great thing--here, that of the art of Italy--presses hard
and sharp on the happiness of an individual, through whose
discouragement and decrease, humanity, in more fortunate persons, comes
a step nearer to its final success.

For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere well-paid craftsman,
chasing brooches for the copes of Santa Maria Novella, or twisting metal
screens for the tombs of the Medici, lay the ambitious desire of
expanding the destiny of Italian art by a larger knowledge and insight
into things, a purpose in art not unlike Leonardo's still unconscious
purpose; and often, in the modelling of drapery, or of a lifted arm, or
of hair cast back from the face, there came to him something of the
freer manner and richer humanity of a later age. But in this Baptism the
pupil had surpassed the master; and Verrocchio turned away as one
stunned, and as if his sweet earlier work must thereafter be distasteful
to him, from the bright animated angel of Leonardo's hand.

The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of sunlight in the
cold, laboured old picture; but the legend is true only in sentiment,
for painting had always been the art by which Verrocchio set least
store. And as in a sense he anticipates Leonardo, so to the last
Leonardo recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful
toys, such as the vessel of water for a mirror, and lovely needle-work
about the implicated hands in the Modesty and Vanity, and of reliefs
like those cameos which in the Virgin of the Balances hang all round the
girdle of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as the
agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic preciseness and grace, as of
a sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the cunning and intricacy of
his Lombard manner this never left him. Much of it there must have been
in that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared as a cartoon for
tapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the perfection of
the older Florentine style of miniature-painting, with patient putting
of each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass, where the
first man and woman were standing.

And because it was the perfection of that style, it awoke in Leonardo
some seed of discontent which lay in the secret places of his nature.
For the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts; and this
picture--all that he had done so far in his life at Florence--was after
all in the old slight manner.  His art, if it was to be something in the
world, must be weighted with more of the meaning of nature and purpose
of humanity. Nature was "the true mistress of higher intelligences." So
he plunged into the study of nature. And in doing this he followed the
manner of the older students; he brooded over the hidden virtues of
plants and crystals, the lines traced by the stars as they moved in the
sky, over the correspondences which exist between the different orders
of living things, through which, to eyes opened, they interpret each
other; and for years he seemed to those about him as one listening to a
voice, silent for other men.

He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of
expression to their subtlest retreats, the power of an intimate presence
in the things he handled. He did not at once or entirely desert his art;
only he was no longer the cheerful, objective painter, through whose
soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life,
only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on
to the white wall. He wasted many days in curious tricks of design,
seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of lines
and colours. He was smitten with a love of the impossible--the
perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great
buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those
feats for the performance of which natural magic professed to have the
key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of
modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the
overwrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in him,
as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood beyond the
measure of other impressions--the smiling of women and the motion of
great waters.

And in such studies some interfusion of the extremes of beauty and
terror shaped itself, as an image that might be seen and touched, in the
mind of this gracious youth, so fixed that for the rest of his life it
never left him; and as catching glimpses of it in the strange eyes or
hair of chance people, he would follow such about the streets of
Florence till the sun went down, of whom many sketches of his remain.
Some of these are full of a curious beauty, that remote beauty
apprehended only by those who have sought it carefully; who, starting
with acknowledged types of beauty, have refined as far upon these, as
these refine upon the world of common forms. But mingled inextricably
with this there is an element of mockery also; so that, whether in
sorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante even. Legions of grotesques sweep
under his hand; for has not nature too her grotesques--the rent rock,
the distorting light of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled structure
of man in the embryo, or the skeleton?

All these swarming fancies unite in the Medusa of the Uffizii. Vasari's
story of an earlier Medusa, painted on a wooden shield, is perhaps an
invention; and yet, properly told, has more of the air of truth about it
than any-thing else in the whole legend. For its real subject is not the
serious work of a man, but the experiment of a child. The lizards and
glow-worms and other strange small creatures which haunt an Italian
vineyard bring before one the whole picture of a child's life in a
Tuscan dwelling--half castle, half farm--and are as true to nature as
the pretended astonishment of the father for whom the boy has prepared a
surprise. It was not in play that he painted that other Medusa, the one
great picture which he left behind him in Florence. The subject has been
treated in various ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alone
realises it as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all
the circumstances of death. What may be called the fascination of
corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty.
About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat flits unheeded. The delicate
snakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle to
escape from the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always brings
with it is in the features: features singularly massive and grand, as we
catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, sloping upwards,
almost sliding down upon us, crown foremost, like a great calm stone
against which the wave of serpents breaks. But it is a subject that may
well be left to the beautiful verses of Shelley.

The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to
our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to
concentrate a thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of the
well-ordered treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du
Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from Leonardo's bewildered
manuscripts, written strangely, as his manner was, from right to left,
have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was
little in accordance with the restlessness of his character; and if we
think of him as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and
composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that
impression which those about him received from him. Poring over his
crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying, by a strange
variation of the alchemist's dream, to discover the secret, not of an
elixir to make man's natural life immortal, but rather of giving
immortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, he
seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious
secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone
possessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like is
that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older
alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd
byways to knowledge. To him philosophy was to be something giving
strange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springs
beneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance,
clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things, in the reed at
the brook-side, or the star which draws near to us but once in a
century. How, in this way, the clear purpose was overclouded, the fine
chaser's hand perplexed, we but dimly see; the mystery which at no point
quite lifts from Leonardo's life is deepest here. But it is certain that
at one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist.

The year 1483--the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirty-first
of Leonardo's life--is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by the
letter in which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to
tell him, for a price, strange secrets in the art of war. It was that
Sforza who murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was so
susceptible of religious impressions that he blended mere earthly
passions with a sort of religious sentimentalism, and who took for his
device the mulberry-tree--symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding
of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economises all forces
for an opportunity of sudden and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had
gone before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the
first Duke of Milan. As for Leonardo himself, he came not as an artist
at all, or careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a
strange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious
likeness to a horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico was
susceptible also of the charm of music, and Leonardo's nature had a kind
of spell in it. Fascination is always the word descriptive of him. No
portrait of his youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that up
to this time some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough to balance
the disadvantage of his birth, had played about him. His physical
strength was great; it was said that he could bend a horse-shoe like a
coil of lead.

The Duomo, the work of artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to the
eye of a Florentine used to the mellow, unbroken surfaces of Giotto and
Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of
Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful and dreamlike. To Leonardo
least of all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers
of sentiment which grew there. It was a life of brilliant sins and
exquisite amusements: Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants:
and it suited the quality of his genius, composed in almost equal parts
of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.

Curiosity and the desire of beauty--these are the two elementary forces
in Leonardo's genius; curiosity often in conflict with the desire of
beauty, but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curious
grace.

The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold; partly the
Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the "modern
spirit," with its realism, its appeal to experience: it comprehended a
return to antiquity, and a return to nature. Raffaelle represents the
return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In this return
to nature, he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by her
perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of finish by her finesse, or
delicacy of operation, that subtilitas naturae which Bacon notices. So
we find him often in intimate relations with men of science,--with Fra
Luca Poccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist Marc Antonio della
Torre. His observations and experiments fill thirteen volumes of
manuscript; and those who can judge describe him as anticipating long
before, by rapid intuition, the later ideas of science. He explained the
obscure light of the unilluminated part of the moon, knew that the sea
had once covered the mountains which contain shells, and the gathering
of the equatorial waters above the polar.

He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferred
always the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an
instance of law more refined, the construction about things of a
peculiar atmosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with such
curious felicity that different writers have attributed to him a
fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the
jasmin; while, at Venice, there is a stray leaf from his portfolio
dotted all over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In him first
appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape; hollow
places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of
trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light--their exact
antitype is in our own western seas; all the solemn effects of moving
water; you may follow it springing from its distant source among the
rocks on the heath of the Madonna of the Balances, passing, as a little
fall, into the treacherous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, next, as a
goodly river, below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks, washing the
white walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a network of
divided streams in La Gioconda to the seashore of the Saint Anne--that
delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher
over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand,
and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with
grass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of
fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand
with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight
things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light
of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or
through deep water.

And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality,
and became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modelling more
skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality
which almost amounts to illusion, on dark air. To take a character as it
was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in
observation, curious in invention. So he painted the portraits of
Ludovico's mistresses, Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the
poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The portrait of
Cecilia Galerani is lost; but that of Lucretia Crivelli has been
identified with La Belle Feroniere of the Louvre, and Ludovico's pale,
anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian library. Opposite is the
portrait of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught some
presentiment of early death, painting her precise and grave, full of the
refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with pale
stones.

Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the desire of beauty; it
tended to make him go too far below that outside of things in which art
begins and ends. This struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the
senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life at
Milan--his restlessness, his endless re-touchings, his odd experiments
with colour. How much must he leave unfinished, how much recommence!
His problem was the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had
attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier Florentine style,
with its naive and limited sensuousness. Now he was to entertain in this
narrow medium those divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that
larger vision of the opening world, which is only not too much for the
great, irregular art of Shakspere; and everywhere the effort is visible
in the work of his hands. This agitation, this perpetual delay, give him
an air of weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming at an
impossible effect, to do something that art, that painting, can never
do. Often the expression of physical beauty at this or that point seems
strained and marred in the effort, as in those heavy German
foreheads--too German and heavy for perfect beauty.

For there was a touch of Germany in that genius which, as Goethe said,
had "thought itself weary"--muede sich gedacht. What an anticipation of
modern Germany, for instance, in that debate on the question whether
sculpture or painting is the nobler art.* But there is this difference
between him and the German, that, with all that curious science, the
German would have thought nothing more was needed; and the name of
Goethe himself reminds one how great for the artist may be the danger of
overmuch science; how Goethe, who, in the Elective Affinities and the
first part of Faust, does transmute ideas into images, who wrought many
such transmutations, did not invariably find the spell-word, and in the
second part of Faust presents us with a mass of science which has almost
no artistic character at all. But Leonardo will never work till the
happy moment comes--that moment of bien-etre, which to imaginative men
is a moment of invention. On this moment he waits; other moments are but
a preparation, or after-taste of it. Few men distinguish between them as
jealously as he did. Hence so many flaws even in the choicest work. But
for Leonardo the distinction is absolute, and, in the moment of
bien-etre, the alchemy complete: the idea is stricken into colour and
imagery: a cloudy mysticism is refined to a subdued and graceful
mystery, and painting pleases the eye while it satisfies the soul.

*How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer, Quanto piu,
un'arte porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto piu e vile!

This curious beauty is seen above all in his drawings, and in these
chiefly in the abstract grace of the bounding lines. Let us take some of
these drawings, and pause over them awhile; and, first, one of those at
Florence--the heads of a woman and a little child, set side by side, but
each in its own separate frame. First of all, there is much pathos in
the reappearance in the fuller curves of the face of the child, of the
sharper, more chastened lines of the worn and older face, which leaves
no doubt that the heads are those of a little child and its mother. A
feeling for maternity is indeed always characteristic of Leonardo; and
this feeling is further indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of
the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You may note a like
pathetic power in drawings of a young man seated in a stooping posture,
his face in his hands, as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an uneasy
inclined posture, in some brief interval of rest; of a small Madonna and
Child, peeping sideways in half-reassured terror, as a mighty griffin
with batlike wings, one of Leonardo's finest inventions, descends
suddenly from the air to snatch up a lion wandering near them. But note
in these, as that which especially belongs to art, the contour of the
young man's hair, the poise of the slave's arm above his head, and the
curves of the head of the child, following the little skull within, thin
and fine as some seashell worn by the wind.

Take again another head, still more full of sentiment, but of a
different kind, a little drawing in red chalk which every one remembers
who has examined at all carefully the drawings by old masters at the
Louvre. It is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair,
the cheek-line in high light against it, with something voluptuous and
full in the eyelids and the lips. Another drawing might pass for the
same face in childhood, with parched and feverish lips, but with much
sweetness in the loose, short-waisted childish dress, with necklace and
bulla, and in the daintily bound hair. We might take the thread of
suggestion which these two drawings offer, when thus set side by side,
and, following it through the drawings at Florence, Venice, and Milan,
construct a sort of series, illustrating better than anything else
Leonardo's type of womanly beauty. Daughters of Herodias, with their
fantastic head-dresses knotted and folded so strangely to leave the
dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not of the Christian
family, or of Raffaelle's. They are the clairvoyants, through whom, as
through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of
nature, and the modes of their action, all that is magnetic in it, all
those finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of
operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve
and the keener touch can follow: it is as if in certain revealing
instances we actually saw them at their work on human flesh. Nervous,
electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness, they seem to be
subject to exceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in the common
air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, receptacles of them, and
pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences.

But among the more youthful heads there is one at Florence which Love
chooses for its own--the head of a young man, which may well be the
likeness of Andrea Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled and
waving hair--belli capelli ricci e inanellati--and afterwards his
favourite pupil and servant. Of all the interests in living men and
women which may have filled his life at Milan, this attachment alone is
recorded; and in return Salaino identified himself so entirely with
Leonardo, that the picture of Saint Anne, in the Louvre, has been
attributed to him. It illustrates Leonardo's usual choice of pupils, men
of some natural charm of person or intercourse like Salaino, or men of
birth and princely habits of life like Francesco Melzi--men with just
enough genius to be capable of initiation into his secret, for the sake
of which they were ready to efface their own individuality. Among them,
retiring often to the Villa of the Melzi at Canonica al Vaprio, he
worked at his fugitive manuscripts and sketches, working for the present
hour, and for a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself. Other artists
have been as careless of present or future applause, in
self-forgetfulness, or because they set moral or political ends above
the ends of art; but in him this solitary culture of beauty seems to
have hung upon a kind of self-love, and a carelessness in the work of
art of all but art itself. Out of the secret places of a unique
temperament he brought strange blossoms and fruits hitherto unknown; and
for him, the novel impression conveyed, the exquisite effect woven,
counted as an end in itself--a perfect end.

And these pupils of his acquired his manner so thoroughly, that though
the number of Leonardo's authentic works is very small indeed, there is
a multitude of other men's pictures through which we undoubtedly see
him, and come very near to his genius. Sometimes, as in the little
picture of the Madonna of the Balances, in which, from the bosom of His
mother, Christ weighs the pebbles of the brooks against the sins of men,
we have a hand, rough enough by contrast, working upon some fine hint or
sketch of his. Sometimes, as in the subjects of the Daughter of Herodias
and the Head of John the Baptist, the lost originals have been re-echoed
and varied upon again and again by Luini and others. At other times the
original remains, but has been a mere theme or motive, a type of which
the accessories might be modified or changed; and these variations have
but brought out the more the purpose, or expression of the original. It
is so with the so-called Saint John the Baptist of the Louvre--one of
the few naked figures Leonardo painted--whose delicate brown flesh and
woman's hair no one would go out into the wilderness to seek, and whose
treacherous smile would have us understand something far beyond the
outward gesture or circumstance. But the long, reedlike cross in the
hand, which suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in a copy at
the Ambrosian Library, and disappears altogether in another, in the
Palazzo Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the last to the original, we are
no longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the Bacchus
which hangs near it, which set Theophile Gautier thinking of Heine's
notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves, after the fall of
paganism, took employment in the new religion. We recognise one of those
symbolical inventions in which the ostensible subject is used, not as
matter for definite pictorial realisation, but as the starting-point of
a train of sentiment as subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one
ever ruled over his subject more entirely than Leonardo, or bent it more
dexterously to purely artistic ends. And so it comes to pass that though
he handles sacred subjects continually, he is the most profane of
painters; the given person or subject, Saint John in the Desert, or the
Virgin on the knees of Saint Anne, is often merely the pretext for a
kind of work which carries one quite out of the range of its
conventional associations.

About the Last Supper, its decay and restorations, a whole literature
has risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch of its sad fortunes being far the
best. The death in childbirth of the Duchess Beatrice was followed in
Ludovico by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling which in him
were constitutional. The low, gloomy Dominican church of Saint Mary of
the Graces had been the favourite shrine of Beatrice. She had spent her
last days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had been
almost necessary to remove her from it by force; and now it was here
that mass was said a hundred times a day for her repose. On the damp
wall of the refectory, oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted the
Last Supper. A hundred anecdotes were told about it, his retouchings and
delays. They show him refusing to work except at the moment of
invention, scornful of whoever thought that art was a work of mere
industry and rule, often coming the whole length of Milan to give a
single touch. He painted it, not in fresco, where all must be impromptu,
but in oils, the new method which he had been one of the first to
welcome, because it allowed of so many afterthoughts, so refined a
working out of perfection. It turned out that on a plastered wall no
process could have been less durable. Within fifty years it had fallen
into decay. And now we have to turn back to Leonardo's own studies,
above all to one drawing of the central head at the Brera, which, in a
union of tenderness and severity in the face-lines, reminds one of the
monumental work of Mino da Fiesole, to trace it as it was.

It was another effort to lift a given subject out of the range of its
conventional associations. Strange, after all the misrepresentations of
the middle age, was the effort to see it, not as the pale Host of the
altar, but as one taking leave of his friends. Five years afterwards the
young Raffaelle, at Florence, painted it with sweet and solemn effect in
the refectory of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the mystical
unreality of the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the central
head was never finished; but finished or unfinished, or owing part of
its effect to a mellowing decay, this central head does but consummate
the sentiment of the whole company--ghosts through which you see the
wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall, on autumn
afternoons; this figure is but the faintest, most spectral of them all.
It is the image of what the history it symbolises has more and more
become for the world, paler and paler as it recedes into the distance.
Criticism came with its appeal from mystical unrealities to originals,
and restored no lifelike reality but these transparent shadows, spirits
which have not flesh and bones.

The Last Supper was finished in 1497; in 1498 the French entered Milan,
and whether or not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows,
the model of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive. What, in that
age, such work was capable of being--of what nobility, amid what racy
truthfulness to fact--we may judge from the bronze statue of Bartolomeo
Colleoni on horseback, modelled by Leonardo's master, Verrocchio (he
died of grief, it was said, because, the mould accidentally failing, he
was unable himself to complete it), still standing in the piazza of
Saint John and Saint Paul at Venice. Some traces of the thing may remain
in certain of Leonardo's drawings, and also, perhaps, by a singular
circumstance, in a far-off town of France. For Ludovico became a
prisoner, and ended his days at Loches in Touraine;--allowed at last, it
is said, to breathe fresher air for awhile in one of the rooms of a high
tower there, after many years of captivity in the dungeons below, where
all seems sick with barbarous feudal memories, and where his prison is
still shown, its walls covered with strange painted arabesques, ascribed
by tradition to his hand, amused a little, in this way, through the
tedious years:--vast helmets and faces and pieces of armour, among
which, in great letters, the motto Infelix Sum is woven in and out, and
in which, perhaps, it is not too fanciful to see the fruit of a wistful
after-dreaming over all those experiments with Leonardo on the armed
figure of the great duke, that had occupied the two so often during the
days of his good fortune at Milan.

The remaining years of Leonardo's life are more or less years of
wandering. From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and he
returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit
excited: the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of
invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authentic
works, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First,
at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the Saint Anne--not the Saint Anne
of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon, now in London--revived for a moment a
sort of appreciation more common in an earlier time, when good pictures
had still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all
qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung,
and gave Leonardo a taste of Cimabue's triumph. But his work was less
with the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he lived
still in the polished society that he loved, and in the houses of
Florence, left perhaps a little subject to light thoughts by the death
of Savonarola--the latest gossip (1869) is of an undraped Monna Lisa,
found in some out-of-the-way corner of the late Orleans collection--he
saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third wife of Francesco del
Giocondo. As we have seen him using incidents of sacred story, not for
their own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as a
symbolical language for fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for
his thoughts in taking one of these languid women, and raising her, as
Leda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical
expression.

La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the
revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness,
only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude
symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We
all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in
that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea.
Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.* As often
happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limits, there
is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that
inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were
certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that
Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to
connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its
germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of
something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work.
Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image
defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express
historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady,
embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living
Florentine to this creature of his thought? By means of what strange
affinities had the person and the dream grown up thus apart, and yet so
closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's
thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present
at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture
in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the
presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was
protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed
labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of
magic, that the image was projected?

*Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips and
cheeks, lost for us.

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to
desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are
come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange
thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of
antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the
soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience
of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of
power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of
Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its
spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world,
the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she
sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the
secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their
fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern
merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint
Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound
of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has
moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.
The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand
experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of
humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of
thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of
the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is the history of his
art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward history
begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which
he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting
together the stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through
every day of it, up the strange tower of Siena, which looks towards
Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the seashore at Piombino, each
place appearing as fitfully as in a fever dream.

One other great work was left for him to do, a work all trace of which
soon vanished, The Battle of the Standard, in which he had Michelangelo
for his rival. The citizens of Florence, desiring to decorate the walls
of the great council-chamber, had offered the work for competition, and
any subject might be chosen from the Florentine wars of the fifteenth
century. Michelangelo chose for his cartoon an incident of the war with
Pisa, in which the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the Arno, are
surprised by the sound of trumpets, and run to arms. His design has
reached us only in an old engraving, which perhaps helps us less than
what we remember of the background of his Holy Family in the Uffizii to
imagine in what superhuman form, such as might have beguiled the heart
of an earlier world, those figures may have risen from the water.
Leonardo chose an incident from the battle of Anghiari, in which two
parties of soldiers fight for a standard. Like Michelangelo's, his
cartoon is lost, and has come to us only in sketches, and in a fragment
of Rubens. Through the accounts given we may discern some lust of
terrible things in it, so that even the horses tore each other with
their teeth; and yet one fragment of it, in a drawing of his at
Florence, is far different--a waving field of lovely armour, the chased
edgings running like lines of sunlight from side to side. Michelangelo
was twenty-seven years old; Leonardo more than fifty; and Raffaelle,
then nineteen years old, visiting Florence for the first time, came and
watched them as they worked.

We catch a glimpse of him again, at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his
mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of
wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through
life, and made him like one under a spell, was upon him now with double
force. No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had
always been his philosophy to "fly before the storm"; he is for the
Sforzas, or against them, as the tide of their fortune turns. Yet now in
the political society of Rome, he came to be suspected of concealed
French sympathies. It paralysed him to find himself among enemies; and
he turned wholly to France, which had long courted him.

France was about to become an Italy more Italian than Italy itself.
Francis the First, like Lewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted by
the finesse of Leonardo's work; La Gioconda was already in his cabinet,
and he offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, with its vineyards
and meadows, in the pleasant valley of the Masse, just outside the walls
of the town of Amboise, where, especially in the hunting season, the
court then frequently resided. A Monsieur Lyonard, peinteur du Roy pour
Amboyse--so the letter of Francis the First is headed. It opens a
prospect, one of the most interesting in the history of art, where,
under a strange mixture of lights, Italian art dies away as a French
exotic.

Two questions remain, after much busy antiquarianism, concerning
Leonardo's death--the question of the precise form of his religion, and
the question whether Francis the First was present at the time. They are
of about equally little importance in the estimate of Leonardo's genius.
The directions in his will about the thirty masses and the great candles
for the church of Saint Florentin are things of course, their real
purpose being immediate and practical; and on no theory of religion
could these hurried offices be of much consequence. We forget them in
speculating how one who had been always so desirous of beauty, but
desired it always in such definite and precise forms, as hands or
flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and experienced
the last curiosity.

1869.



THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE

It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and
Painting--all the various products of art--as but translations into
different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative
thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in
painting--of sound, in music--of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this
way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art
that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a
clear apprehension of the opposite principle--that the sensuous material
of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty,
untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions
distinct in kind--is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For,
as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the
"imaginative reason" through the senses, there are differences of kind
in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the
gifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar
and incommunicable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching
the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One
of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations;
to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils its
responsibilities to its special material; to note in a picture that true
pictorial charm, which is neither a mere poetical thought nor sentiment,
on the one hand, nor a mere result of communicable technical skill in
colour or design, on the other; to define in a poem that true poetical
quality, which is neither descriptive nor meditative merely, but comes
of an inventive handling of rhythmical language--the element of song in
the singing; to note in music the musical charm--that essential music,
which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable
from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.

To such a philosophy of the variations of the beautiful, Lessing's
analysis of the spheres of sculpture and poetry, in the Laocoon, was a
very important contribution. But a true appreciation of these things is
possible only in the light of a whole system of such art-casuistries.
And it is in the criticism of painting that this truth most needs
enforcing, for it is in popular judgments on pictures that that false
generalisation of all art into forms of poetry is most prevalent. To
suppose that all is mere technical acquirement in delineation or touch,
working through and addressing itself to the intelligence, on the one
side, or a merely poetical, or what may be called literary interest,
addressed also to the pure intelligence, on the other;--this is the way
of most spectators, and of many critics, who have never caught sight,
all the time, of that true pictorial quality which lies between (unique
pledge of the possession of the pictorial gift) the inventive or
creative handling of pure line and colour, which, as almost always in
Dutch painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veronese, is
quite independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject it
accompanies. It is the drawing--the design projected from that peculiar
pictorial temperament or constitution, in which, while it may possibly
be ignorant of true anatomical proportions, all things whatever, all
poetry, every idea however abstract or obscure, floats up as a visible
scene, or image: it is the colouring--that weaving as of just
perceptible gold threads of light through the dress, the flesh, the
atmosphere, in Titian's Lace-girl--the staining of the whole fabric of
the thing with a new, delightful physical quality. This drawing,
then--the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying figures, by
Titian's forest branches; this colouring--the magic conditions of light
and hue in the atmosphere of Titian's Lace-girl, or Rubens's Descent
from the Cross--these essential pictorial qualities must first of all
delight the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragment
of Venetian glass; and through this delight only be the medium of
whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them, in the intention of the
composer. In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite
message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a
moment, on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such
fallen light, caught as the colours are caught in an Eastern carpet, but
refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by nature
itself. And this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we may trace
the coming of poetry into painting, by fine gradations upwards; from
Japanese fan-painting, for instance, where we get, first, only abstract
colour; then, just a little interfused sense of the poetry of flowers;
then, sometimes, perfect flower-painting; and so, onwards, until in
Titian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne, so actually a touch of
true childlike humour in the diminutive, quaint figure with its silk
gown, which ascends the temple stairs, in his picture of the
Presentation of the Virgin, at Venice.

But although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions,
and an untranslatable charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate
differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it
is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given material,
each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art,
by what German critics term an Anders-streben--a partial alienation from
its own limitations, by which the arts are able, not indeed to supply
the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.

Thus some of the most delightful music seems to be always approaching to
figure, to pictorial definition. Architecture, again, though it has its
own laws--laws esoteric enough, as the true architect knows only too
well--yet sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a picture, as
in the Arena chapel; or of sculpture, as in the flawless unity of
Giotto's tower at Florence; and often finds a true poetry, as in those
strangely twisted staircases of the chateaux of the country of the
Loire, as if it were intended that among their odd turnings the actors
in a wild life might pass each other unseen: there being a poetry also
of memory and of the mere effect of time, by which it often profits
greatly. Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of the hard limitation of
pure form towards colour, or its equivalent; poetry also, in many ways,
finding guidance from the other arts, the analogy between a Greek
tragedy and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a relief, of
French poetry generally with the art of engraving, being more than mere
figures of speech; and all the arts in common aspiring towards the
principle of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art,
the object of the great Anders-streben of all art, of all that is
artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in
all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the
form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is
the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a
poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that
the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the
actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form,
the spirit, of the handling; that this form, this mode of handling,
should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the
matter:--this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in
different degrees.

This abstract language becomes clear enough, if we think of actual
examples. In an actual landscape we see a long white road, lost suddenly
on the hill-verge. That is the matter of one of the etchings of M.
Legros: only, in this etching, it is informed by an indwelling solemnity
of expression, seen upon it or half-seen, within the limits of an
exceptional moment, or caught from his own mood perhaps, but which he
maintains as the very essence of the thing, throughout his work.
Sometimes a momentary tint of stormy light may invest a homely or too
familiar scene with a character which might well have been drawn from
the deep places of the imagination. Then we might say that this
particular effect of light, this sudden inweaving of gold thread through
the texture of the haystack, and the poplars, and the grass, gives the
scene artistic qualities; that it is like a picture. And such tricks of
circumstance are commonest in landscape which has little salient
character of its own; because, in such scenery, all the material details
are so easily absorbed by that informing expression of passing light,
and elevated, throughout their whole extent, to a new and delightful
effect by it. And hence the superiority, for most conditions of the
picturesque, of a river-side in France to a Swiss valley, because, on
the French river-side, mere topography, the simple material, counts for
so little, and, all being so pure, untouched, and tranquil in itself,
mere light and shade have such easy work in modulating it to one
dominant tone. The Venetian landscape, on the other hand, has in its
material conditions much which is hard, or harshly definite; but the
masters of the Venetian school have shown themselves little burdened by
them. Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted elements
only, of cool colour and tranquillising line; and they use its actual
details, the brown windy turrets, the straw-coloured fields, the forest
arabesques, but as the notes of a music which duly accompanies the
presence of their men and women, presenting us with the spirit or
essence only of a certain sort of landscape--a country of the pure
reason or half-imaginative memory.

Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the first instance to the
mere intelligence; and it deals, most often, with a definite subject or
situation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite legitimate function
in the expression of moral or political aspiration, as often in the
poetry of Victor Hug

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