HENRY FUSELI, Esq. M.A. R.A. (continued 2)

The Ascension is the last of many similar scenes: no longer with the rapidity of a conqueror, but with the calm serenity of triumphant power, the hero is borne up in splendour, and gradually vanishes from those who, by repeated visions, had been taught to expect whatever was amazing. Silent and composed, with eyes more absorbed in adoration than wonder, they followed the glorious emanation, till addressed by the white-robed messengers of their departed King.

105. We are more impressed by Gothic than by Greek mythology, because the bands are not yet rent which tie us to its magic: he has a powerful hold of us, who holds us by our superstition or by a theory of honour.

106. The east expands, the north concentrates images.

107. Disproportion of parts is the element of hugeness,—proportion, of grandeur; all Oriental, all Gothic styles of Architecture, are huge; the Grecian alone, is grand.

108. The female, able to invigorate her taste without degenerating into a pedant, sloven or virago, may give her hand to the man of elegance, who scorns to sacrifice his sense to the presiding phantoms of an effeminate age.

109. The collector who arrogates not to himself the praise bestowed on his collections, and the reader who fancies himself not the author of the beauties he recites to an admiring circle—are not the last of men.

110. The epoch of rules, of theories, poetics, criticisms in a nation, will add to their stock of authors in the same proportion as it diminishes their stock of genius: their productions will bear the stamp of study, not of nature; they will adopt, not generate; sentiment will supplant images, and narrative invention; words will be no longer the dress but the limbs of composition, and feeble elegance will supply the want of nerves.

111. He "lisped not in numbers, no numbers came to him," though he count his verses by thousands, who has not learnt to distinguish the harmony of two lines from that of a period—whom dull monotony of ear condemns to the drowsy psalmody of one returning couplet.

112. Some seek renown as the Parthians sought victory—by seeming to fly from it.

113. He has more than genius—he is a hero—who can check his powers in their full career to glory, merely not to crush the feeble on his road.

114. He who could have the choice, and should prefer to be the first painter of insects, of flowers, or of drapery, to being the second in the ranks of history, though degraded to the last class of art, would undoubtedly be in the first of men by the decision of Cæsar.

115. Such is the aspiring nature of man, that nothing wounds the copyist more sorely than the suspicion of being thought what he is.

116. He who depends for all upon his model, should treat no other subject but his model.

117. The praises lavished on the sketches of vigorous conception, only sharpen the throes of labour in finishing.

118. As far as the medium of an art can be taught, so far is the artist confined to the class of mere mechanics; he only then elevates himself to talent, when he imparts to his method, or his tool, some unattainable or exclusive excellence of his own.

119. None but the first can represent the first. Genius, absorbed by the subject, hastens to the centre; and from that point disseminates, to that leads back the rays: talent, full of its own dexterities, begins to point the rays before they have a centre, and aggregates a mass of secondary beauties.

120. The ear absorbed in harmonies of its own creation, is deaf to all external ones.

121. Harmony disposes, melody determines.

122. There is not a bauble thrown by the sportive hand of fashion, which may not be caught with advantage by the hand of art.

Coroll.—Shakspeare has been excused for seeking in the Roman senate what he knew all senates could furnish—a buffoon. Paulo of Verona, with equal strength of argument, may be excused for cramming on the foreground of an assembly or a feast, what he knew a feast or assembly could furnish—a dog, an ape, a scullion, a parrot, or a dwarf.

123. He has done much in art who raises your curiosity—he has done all who has raised it and keeps it up restless and uniform; prostrate yourself before the genius of Homer.

124. Difficulties surmounted to obtain what in itself is of no real value, deserve pity or contempt: the painted catalogue of wrinkles by Denner are not offsprings of art, but fac-similes of natural history.

125. Love for what is called deception in painting, marks either the infancy or decrepitude of a nation's taste.

126. Indiscriminate execution, like the monkey's rasor, cuts shear asunder the parts it meant to polish.

Coroll.—Francesco Barbieri broke like a torrent over the academic rules of his masters. As the desire of disseminating character over every part of his composition made Raphael less attentive to its general effect, so an ungovernable itch of copying all that lay in his way made this man sacrifice order, costume, mind, to mere effects of colour: a map of flesh, a pile of wood, a sleeve, a hilt, a feathered hat, a table-cloth, or a gold-tissued robe, were for Guercino what a quibble was for Shakspeare. The countenance of his Dido has that sublimity of woe which affects us in the Æneis, but she is pierced with a toledo and wrapped in brocade; Anna is an Italian Duenna; the scene, the Mole of Ancona or of Naples, the spectators a brace of whiskered Spaniards, and a deserting Amorino winds up the farce. In his St. Petronilla the rags and brawny limbs of two gigantic porters crush the effect which the saint ought to have, and all the rest is frittered into spots. Yet is that picture a tremendous instance of mechanic powers and intrepidity of hand. As a firm base supports, pervades, unites the tones of harmony, so a certain stern virility inspires, invigorates and gives a zest to all Guercino's colour. The gayer tints of Guido vanish before his as insipid,[26] Domenichino appears laboured, and the Carracci dim. Nor was Guercino a stranger to the genuine expressions of untaught nature, and there is more of pathos in the dog which he introduced caressing the returned prodigal, than in all the Farnese gallery; as the Argus of Ulysses, looking up at his old master, then dropping his head and dying, moves more than all the metamorphoses of Ovid. If his male figures be brought to the test of style, it may be said, that he never made a man; their virility is tumour or knotty labour; to youth he gave emaciated lankness, and to old age little besides decrepitude and beards—meanness to all: and though he was more cautious in female forms, they owe the best part of their charms to chiaroscuro.

127. Execution has its classes.

Coroll.—Satan summoning the Princes of Hell stretched over the fiery flood; or the giant snake of the Norway seas hovering over a storm-vexed vessel, by Gerard Douw, or Vanderverf—are incongruous ideas; would be incongruous though Michael Angelo had planned their design and Rembrandt massed their light and shade.

128. It has been said, but let us repeat it: the proportion of will and power is not always reciprocal. A copious measure of will is sometimes assigned to ordinary and contracted minds; whilst the greatest faculties as frequently evaporate in indolence and languor.

129. Mighty execution of impotent conception, and vigour of conception with trembling execution, are coalitions equally deplorable.

130. He is a prince of artists and of men who knows the moment when his work is done. On this Apelles founded his superiority over his contemporaries; the knowledge when to stop, left Sylla nothing to fear, though disarmed; the want of knowing this, exposed Cæsar to the dagger of Brutus.

131. Next to him who can finish, is he who has hid from you that he cannot.

132. If finishing be to terminate all the parts of a performance in an equal degree, no artist ever finished his work. A great part of conception or execution is always sacrificed to some individual excellence which either he possesses or thinks he possesses. The colourist makes lines only the vehicle of colour; the designer subordinates hue to his line; the man of breadth or chiaroscuro overwhelms sometimes both, and the subject itself to produce effect.

133. The fewer the traces that appear of the means by which any work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of Nature, and the nearer it is to sublimity.

134. Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

Coroll.—Take the design of Rome, Venetian motion and shade, Lombardy's tone of colour, add the terrible manner of Angelo, Titian's truth of nature, and the supreme purity of Corregio's style; mix them up with the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, with the learned invention of Primaticcio, and a few grains of Parmegiano's grace: and what do you think will be the result of this chaotic prescription, such elemental strife? Excellence, perhaps, equal to one or all of the names that compose these ingredients? You are deceived, if you fancy that a multitude of dissimilar threads can compose a uniform texture—that dissemination of spots will make masses, or a little of many things produce a whole. If Nature stamped you with a character, you will either annihilate it by indiscriminate imitation of heterogeneous excellence, or debase it to mediocrity and add one to the ciphers of art. Yet such is the prescription of Agostino Carracci,[27] and such in general must be the dictates of academics.

135. If you mean to reign dictator over the arts of your own times, assail not your rivals with the blustering tone of condemnation and rigid censure;—sap with conditional or lamenting praise—confine them to unfashionable excellence—exclude them from the avenues of fame.

136. If you wish to give consequence to your inferiors, answer their attacks.

Coroll.—Michael Angelo, advised to resent the insolence of some obscure upstart who was pushing forward to notice by declaring himself his rival, answered: "Chi combatte con dappochi, non vince a nulla:" who contests with the base, loses with all!

137. Genius knows no partner. All partnership is deleterious to poetry and art: one must rule.[28]

138. The wish of perpetuating a name by enlisting under the banners of another, is the ambition of inferior minds: biography, with all its branches of "Ana," translation and engraving, however useful to man or dear to art, is the unequivocal homage of inferiority offered by taste and talent to the majesty of genius.

139. Dive in the crowd, meet beauty: follow vigour, compare character, snatch the feature that moves unobserved and the sudden burst of passion—and you are at the school of nature with Lysippus.[29]

140. The lessons of disappointment, humiliation and blunder, impress more than those of a thousand masters.

141. There are artists, who have wasted much of life in abstruse theories on proportion, who have measured the Antique in all its forms and characters, compared it with Nature, and mixed up amalgamas of both, yet never made a figure stand or move.

Coroll.—"The Apollo is altogether composed of lines sweetly convex, of very small obtuse angles, and of flats, but the soft convexities predominate the character of the figure, being a compound of strength, dignity and delicacy. The artist has expressed the first by convex outlines, the second by their uniformity, and the third by undulation of forms. The convex line predominates in the Laocoon, and the forms of the muscles are angular at their insertions and ends to express agitation; for by these means the nerves and tendons become more visible, straight lines meeting with concave and convex ones, form those angles which produce violence of action. The sculptor of the Farnesian Hercules invented a style totally different; to obtain fleshiness, he composed the figure of round and convex muscles, but made their insertions flat to signify that they are nervous and unincumbered with fat, the characteristic of strength."

"In the Gladiator there is a mixture of the Herculean and the Laocoontic forms, the muscles in action are angulated, whilst those at rest are short and round, a variety conformable to nature," &c. Opere di A.R. Mengs, t. i. p. 203.

142. Neither he who forms lines without the power of embodying them, nor he who floats on masses, can be said to draw: the one is the slave of a brush, the other of a point.

143. Pulp without solidity absorbs, and relentless tension tears character.

144. In following too closely a model, there is danger in mistaking the individual for Nature herself; in relying only on the schools, the deviation into manner seems inevitable: what then remains, but to transpose yourself into your subject?

145. Style is the selection of forms and groups and tones to suit a subject.

Coroll.—The Italian Style Grandioso, the French Il y a du style, the English great style and breadth, when applied to a performance, only mean, that the artist followed those who have enlarged the principles of imitation and execution.

146. Style pervades the object; manner floats on the surface.

147. Antient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece, and the servant of Rome.

148. The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means. If they had schools, the Ionian, that of Athens and of Sicyon appear to have directed their instruction to one grand principle, proportion: this was the stamen which they drew out into one immense connected web; whilst modern art, with its schools of designers, colourists, machinists, eclectics, is but a tissue of adventitious threads. Apollonius and the sculptor of the small Hesperian Hercules in bronze are distinguished only by the degree of execution; whilst M. Angelo and Bernini had no one principle in common but that of making groups and figures.

149. Art among a religious race produces reliques; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.

150. Modern art, reared by superstition in Italy, taught to dance in France, plumped up to unwieldiness in Flanders, reduced to "chronicle small beer" in Holland, became a rich old woman by "suckling fools" in England.

151. The rules of art are either immediately supplied by Nature herself, or selected from the compendiums of her students who are called masters and founders of schools. The imitation of Nature herself leads to style, that of the schools to manner.

Coroll.—The line of Michael Angelo is uniformly grand; character and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to grandeur:—the child, the female, meanness, deformity were indiscriminately stamped with grandeur; a beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man, his men are a race of giants.

The design of Raphael is either historic or poetic. The forms of his historic style are characteristic, those of his poetic style he himself calls ideal:[30] the former are regulated by nature, but these are only exaggerations of another style.

The forms of Julio Pipi are poised between character and caricature, but verge to this; even his dresses and ornaments are caricatures; but no poet or painter ever rocked the cradle of infant mythology with simpler or more primitive grace; none ever imparted to allegory a more insinuating power, or swayed the strife of elemental war with a bolder hand. What ever equalled the exuberance of invention scattered over the T of Mantoua?

The line of Polydoro, is that of the antique basso-relievo, seen from beneath (da sotto in su).

The forms of Titian are those of sanguine health; robust, not grand; soft without delicacy.

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michael Angelo with colour, without tracing its principle.

As Michael Angelo was impressed with an idea of grandeur, so Correggio was charmed with a notion of harmony: his line was correct when harmony permitted; it strayed as harmony commanded.

Elegance (sueltezza) was the principle of Parmegiano's line, but he forgot proportion.

Annibale Carracci, one of the founders of the Eclectic school, attempted to combine in his line the appearance of Nature with style, and became the standard of academic drawing.

The medium, not the thing, was the object of the Tuscan and Venetian schools; the school of Urbino[31] aimed at subjecting the medium to the character of things; the Lombards strove to unite the separate attainments of the three with the unattainable spell of Correggio; the Germans, with their Flemish and Dutch branches, now humbly followed, now boldly attempted to improve their Italian masters; the French passed the Alps to study at Rome and Venice what they were to forget at Paris.

Domenichino aimed at the characteristic line of Raffaelle, the compactness of Annibale, and the beauty of the antique; and mixing something of each fell short of all.

Rosso carried anatomy, and the Bolognese Abbate the poetry of their art to the court of Francis. To the haggard melancholy of the Tuscan and the laboured richness of the Lombard, the French added their own cold gaiety, and the French school arose.

The forms of Guido's female heads are abstracts of the antique. The forms of his male bodies are transcripts of models, such as are found in a genial climate, though sometimes distorted by fatigue or emaciated by want.

Pietro Testa copied the Torsos of antiquity, and supplied them with extremities drawn from the dregs of Nature.

The forms[32] of Caravaggio are either substantial flesh or the starveling produce of beggary rendered important by ideal light and shade.

The limbs of Joseph Ribera are excrescences of disease on hectic bodies.

Andrea Mantegna was in Italy what Albert Durer was at Nuremberg; Nature seems not to have existed in any shape of health in his time: though a servile copyist of the antique, he never once adverted from the monuments he copied to the originals that inspired them.

The forms of Albert Durer are blasphemies on Nature, the thwarted growth of starveling labour and dry sterility—formed to inherit his hell of paradise. To extend the asperity of this verdict beyond the forms of Albert Durer, would be equally unjust and ungrateful to the father of German art, on whom invention often flashed, whom melancholy marked for her own, whose influence even on Italian art was such that he produced a temporary revolution in the style of the Tuscan school. Andrea del Sarto and Giacopo da Puntormo became his imitators and his copyists; nor was his influence unfelt by Raffaelle himself, but his Christ led to the Cross (engraved by E. Sadler),[33] compared with that of the Madonna del Spasimo, leaves the claim of superiority doubtful for sublimity and pathos. It is a likewise probable that we owe the horrors of the St. Felicitas to the abominations of his Martyr scenes. The felicity of his organs, the delicacy of his finger, the freedom and sweep of his touch, have found an encomiast in the author of the life prefixed to the Latin edition of his works. What would have been the result of his intended interview, when in Italy, with Andrea Mantegna, had the death of the latter (1505) not prevented it, is difficult to guess: if some amelioration, certainly not the entire change of style, which the uninterrupted study of the antique, during a long life, had failed to produce in Andrea himself.

The forms of Luke of Leyden are the vegetation of a swamp.

The forms of Martin Hemskerck are dislocated lankness.[34]

The forms of Spranger and Goltzius are blasphemies on art; the monstrous incubations of dropsied fancy on phlegm run mad. This verdict, though uniformly true of every male figure of Goltzius that demanded energy of exertion, cannot be equally applied to his females, the features of the face excepted. On limbs and bodies resembling the antique in elegance if not correctness, he placed heads with Dutch features, ideally, often voluptuously dressed: such are his Venus between Ceres and Bacchus; and still more his Diana and Calisto, a composition which in elegance and dignity excels that of Tiziano. In the dreadful familiarity with which the guardian snake of the Beotian well approaches the companions of Cadmus, he has touched the true vein of terror and its limits, and atoned in some degree for the loathsome horror that had polluted his graver, when he condescended to copy the abominable process of that scene from the design of Pistor.

The male forms of Rubens are the brawny pulp of slaughtermen, his females are hillocks of roses: overwhelmed muscles, dislocated bones, and distorted joints are swept along in a gulph of colours, as herbage, trees and shrubs are whirled, tossed, or absorbed by vernal inundation.

The female forms of Rembrandt are prodigies of deformity; his males are the crippled produce of shuffling industry and sedentary toil.

The line of Vandycke is balanced between Flemish corpulence and English slenderness.

Sebastian Bourdon, sublime in his conceptions, filled classic ground and eastern vests with local limbs and Gallic actors.

Poussin renounced his national character to follow the antique; but could not separate the spirit from the stone.

152. The imitator seldom mounts to the investigation of the principles that formed his model; the copier probably never.

153. Many beauties in art come by accident, that are preserved by choice.

Coroll.—Neither the froth formed on the mouth of Jalysus' hound by a lucky dash from the sponge of Protogenes, nor the modern experiments of extracting composition from an ink-splashed wall, are relatives of the beauties alluded to in this aphorism.

154. The praise due to a work, reflects not always on its master; and superiority may beam athwart the blemishes that we despise or pity; some, says Milton, praised the work and some the master: would you prefer him who is able to finish the image which he was unable to conceive, to its inventor?

155. It is the privilege of Nature alone to be equal. Man is the slave of a part; the most equal artist is only the first in the list of mediocrity.

156. He who seeks the grand, will find it in a trifle: but some seem made to find it only there. Rösel saw man like an insect, and insects as Michael Angelo men.

157. Physiognomy teaches what is homogeneous and what is heterogeneous in forms.

158. The solid parts of the body are the base of physiognomy, the muscular that of pathognomy; the former contemplates the animal at rest, this its action.

159. Pathognomy allots expression to character.

160. Those who allow physiognomy to regulate the great outlines of character, and reject its minute discriminations, admit a language and reject its elements.

161. The difficulty of physiognomy is to separate the essence from accident, growth from excrescence.

162. He who aims at the sublime, consults the classes assigned to character by physiognomy, not its anatomy of individuals; the oak in its full majesty, and not the thwarted pollard.

163. None ever escaped from himself by crossing seas; none ever peopled a barren fancy and a heart of ice with images or sympathies by excursions into the deserts of mythology or allegory.

164. The principles of allegory and votive composition are the same; they unite with equal right the most distant periods of time and the most opposite modes of society: both surround a real being, or allude to a real act, with symbols by long general consent adopted, as expressive of the qualities, motives, and circumstances that distinguished or gave evidence to the person or the transaction. Such is the gallery of the Luxembourg, such the Attila of the Vatican.

165. Pure history rejects allegory.

Coroll.—The armed figure of Rome, with Fortune behind her frowning at Coriolanus, surrounded by the Roman matrons in the Volscian camp (by Poussin), is a vision seen by that warrior, and not an allegory; it is a sublime image, which, without diminishing the credibility of the fact, adds to its importance, and raises the hero, by making him submit, not to the impulse of private ties, but to the destiny of his country.

166. All ornament ought to be allegoric.

167. Dignity is the salt of art.

Coroll.—In the Salutation of Michael Angelo,[35] the angelic messenger emerges from solitary twilight, his countenance seems to labour with the awful message, and his knees to bend as he approaches the mysterious personage: with virgin majesty and humble grace Mary bows to the extended arm of the lucid herald, as if waked from sacred meditation, and appears entranced by celestial sounds.

The Madonnas of Raffaelle, whether hailed parents of a God, or pressing the divine offspring to their breast, whether receiving him from his slumbers, or contemplating his infant motions, are uniformly transcripts from the daily domestic images of common life and of some favourite face matronized: the eyes of his Fornarina beamed with other fires than those of sanctity; the sense and native dignity of her lover could veil their fierceness, but not change their language.

The Madonna of Titiano receives her celestial visitant under an open portico of Palladian structure, and skirted by gay gardens; the usual ray precedes the floating angel; gold-ringleted and in festive attire, he waves a lily wand: in sable weeds the Virgin receives the gorgeous homage, proudly devout, like a young abbess amidst her cloistered lambs.

Tintoretto has turned salutation into irruption. The angel bursts through the shattered casement and terrifies a vulgar female; but his wings are tipped in heaven.[36]

168. Dignity gives probability to the impossible: we listen to the monstrous tale of Ulysses with all the devotion due to a creed. By dignity, even deformity becomes an instrument of art: Vulcan limps like a god at the hand of Homer: the hump and withered arm of Richard are engines of terror or persuasion in Shakspeare; the crook-back of Michael Angelo strikes with awe.

169. Luxuriance of ornament destroys simplicity and repose, the attendants of dignity.

Coroll.—"Simon Mosca, one of the most distinguished sculptors of ornament and foliage in the sixteenth century, when proposed by Vasari to embellish by his designs the monument of the Cardinal di Monte, was discountenanced by Michael Angelo on this principle." Vasari, vita de Simone Mosca.

170. Judge not an artist from the exertions of accidental vigour or some unpremeditated flights of fancy, but from the uniform tenor, the never-varying principle of his works: the line and style of Titian sometimes expand themselves like those of Michael Angelo; the heads and groups of Raphael sometimes glow and palpitate with Titiano's tints; and there are masses of both united in Correggio: but if you aim at character, let Raphael be your guide; if at colour, Tiziano; if harmony allure, Correggio: they indulged in alternate excursions, but never lost sight of their own domain.

Coroll.—No one, of whatever period of art, of whatever eminence or school, out-told Rembrandt in telling the story of a subject, in the choice of its real crisis, in simplicity, in perspicuity: still, as the vile crust that involves his ore, his local vulgarity of style, the ludicrous barbarity of his costume, prepossess eyes less penetrating than squeamish against him, it requires some confidence to place him with the classics of invention. Yet with all these defects, with every prejudice or superiority of taste and style against him, what school has produced a work (M. Angelo's Creation of Adam, and the Death of Ananias by Raffaelle excepted,) which looks not pale in the superhuman splendour that irradiates his conception of Christ before Pilate, unless it be the raising of Lazarus by Lievens, a name comparatively obscure, whose awful sublimity reduces the same subject as treated by Rembrandt and Sebastian of Venice, to artificial parade or common-place?

171. Tone is the moral part of colour.

172. If tone be the legitimate principle of colour, he who has not tone, though he should excel in individual imitation, colours in fragments and produces discord.

173. Harmony of colour consists in the due balance of all, equally remote from monotony and spots.

174. The eye tinges all nature with its own hue. The eye of the Dutch and Flemish schools, though shut to forms, tipped the cottage, the boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and even the haze of winter, with orient hues and the glow of setting suns.

175. Clearness, freshness, force of colour, are produced by simplicity; one pure, is more than a mixture of many.

176. Colour affects or delights like sound. Scarlet or deep crimson rouses, determines, invigorates the eye, as the war-horn or the trumpet the ear; the flute soothes the ear, as pale celestial blue or rosy red the eye.

177. The colours of sublimity are negative or generic—such is the colouring of Michael Angelo.

178. The passions that sway features and limbs equally reside, fluctuate, flash and lower in colour.

179. The colours of pleasure and love are hues.

180. The colour of gravity, reverie, solemnity, approaches to twilight.

181. Colour in Raffaelle was the assistant of expression; to Titian it was the vehicle of truth; Correggio made it the minister of harmony. It was sometimes seized, and though reluctant held, but oftener neglected by the first; it was embraced, it domineered over, it coalesced with the second; it attended the third like an enchanted spirit.

182. Lodovico Carracci was the first who gave in oil the colours of gravity, the dignified twilight of cloistered meditation.

183. Annibale Carracci, from want of feelings, though impressed by a grave principle, changed the mild evening-ray of his master to the bleak light of a sullen day.

184. Colour owes its effect sometimes more to position and gradation than to its intrinsic value.[37]

185. The colour of Titian is the most independent of surrounding objects; their union may assist, but their discrepance cannot destroy it.

186. The harmony of Correggio is independent of colour.

187. Historic colour imitates, but copies not.

188. The portrait-painter copies the colour of his object, but chooses the medium through which that object is seen.

189. The mixtures that anticipate the beauties of time are big with the seeds of premature decay.

190. The colours of health are neither cadaverous nor flushed like meteors.

191. There are works whose effect is entirely founded on the contrast of tints, of what is termed warm and cold colour, and on reflected hues: strip them of this charm, reduce them to the principles of light and shade and masses, and as far as the want of those can degrade a picture, they will be fit to take their places on sign-posts.

192. Him who has freshness without frigidity, who glows without being adust, whose tints luxuriate though not fermented by putrefaction; who is juicy yet not clammy, though broad not empty, sharp without dryness, clear not pellucid, airy not volatile, without being clumsy plump—him you may venture to call a colourist.

193. Breadth is not vacuity—Breadth might easily be obtained if emptiness could give it.

194. The forms of virtue are erect, the forms of pleasure undulate: Minerva's drapery descends in long uninterrupted lines; a thousand amorous curves embrace the limbs of Flora.

195. Subordination is the character of drapery. The heraldry of dress, the rows of aggregated mitres and pontifical trappings, are noticed only for the sake of their wearers in the compositions of the Vatican.

Coroll.—The superiority of style in drapery over that of the limbs which it covers in the earliest essays of art after its restoration, is not accounted for by the assertion that it is transcribed from the antique: if it is, by what unaccountable perverseness did the forms of the nudities uniformly escape observation? In painting, this dissonance continues more or less offensively from the epoch of Cimabue to that of Masaccio, and, him excepted, down to Pinturicchio; and ceases not to shock us in sculpture from the Pisani, to the appearance of Lorenzo Ghiberti. Nor did that style of drapery mark only the productions of Italian art; on this side of the Alps it invested that of Germany, from the Angels and Madonnas of Martin Schongaver and Albert Durer, to those of Aldegraver and Sebald Behm: in nearly all their performances, Trans and Cisalpine, the wearer is the appendix of his garment, chucked into vestments not his own, a dwarfish thief hid in a giant's robe.

196. Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character; in Michael Angelo it envelopes grandeur; it is in Rubens the ponderous robe of pomp.

197. If Nature has not taught you to sketch, you apply in vain to art to finish your work.[38]

198. Some must be idle lest others should want work.[39]

199. He who submits to follow, is not made to precede.[40]

200. Consider it as the unalterable law of Nature that all your power upon others depends on your own emotions. Shakspeare wept, trembled, laughed first at what now sways the public feature; and where he did not, he is stale, outrageous or disgusting.

201. None but indelible materials can support the epic. Whatever is local, or the volatile creature of the time, beauties of fashion and sentiments of sects, tears shed over roses, epigrammatic sparkling, passions taught to rave, and graces trained to move, the antiquary's mouldering stores, the bubbles of allegorists—are all with equal contempt passed over or crushed by him who claims the lasting empire of the human heart.

202. The invention of machines to supersede manual labour will at length destroy population and commerce;[41] and the methods contrived to shorten the apprenticeship of artists annihilate art.

203. Expect no religion in times when it is easier to meet with a saint than a man; and no art in those that multiply their artists beyond their labourers.

204. Expect nothing but trifles in times when those who ought to encourage the arts are content to debase them by their own performances.

205. Mediocrity despatches and exults; the man of talent congratulates himself on the success of his exertions—Genius alone mourns over defeated expectation.

206. Pride.—Call not him proud who is influenced by the tide and ebb of opinion.

207. Modesty.—The touchstone of genuine modesty is the attention paid to criticism, and the temper with which it is received, or its advice adopted; the most arrogant pretence, the most fiery ambition, the most towering conceit, may fence themselves with smoothness, silence and submissive looks—Oil, the smoothest of substances, swims on all.

208. Praise.—Despise all praise but what he gives who has been praised for similar efforts; or his whose interest it is to blame.

209. Emulation.—The vindication of the innate powers, of the individual dignity of man, careless of appendages and accidental advantage, grasps the substance of its object.

210. Envy, the bantling of desperate self-love, grasps the appendages, heedless of things. Emulation embalms the dead; Envy the vampire, blasts the living.

211. Flattery, the midwife of half-born conceits and struggling wishes, sometimes persuades, a boy that he is a man, a dwarf that he is a giant, but too often enervates the limbs of energy.

212. Vanity.—The vain is the most humble of mortals: the victim of a pimple.

213. Those reduced to live on the alms of genius, are the first to deny its existence.

214. Shakspeare is to Sophocles what the incessant flashes of a tempestuous night are to daylight.

215. Things came to Raffaelle and Shakspeare; Michael Angelo and Milton came to things.

216. The women of Michael Angelo are the sex.

Coroll.—Eve emerging from the side of Adam; Eve reclining under the tree of knowledge, in the Capella Sistina; the figures of Night and Dawn on the tombs of the Medici, are pure generic forms, little discriminated by character, and more expressive by action than emotion of features; solidity without heaviness separates them from the females in the Last Judgment, which, with the exception of the Madonna and St. Catharine, are less beholden to grace than anatomy. The Cartoon of the Leda proves that he was not inattentive to the detail of female charms, but beauty did not often visit his slumbers, guide his hand, or interrupt the gravity of his meditation.

217. The women of Raffaelle are either his own mistress, or mothers.

Coroll.—This relates chiefly to his Madonnas—Of his saints the St. Cecilia at Bologna has most of antique beauty, and, whether imitated or conceived, resembles the Niobe; but pride is absorbed in devotion, she is the enraptured victim of divine love, and glows with celestial fire: the goddesses of the Farnesina, however gracefully imagined, are too ponderous for aërial forms and amorous conceits.

218. The women of Correggio are seraglio beauties.

Coroll.—The enchantment of the Magdalen, in the picture of the St. Jerome in the Pilotta at Parma, is produced by chiaroscuro and attitude. Sensuality personified is the general character of his females, and the grace of his children, less naiveté than grimace, the caricature of jollity.

219. The women of Titiano are the plump, fair, marrowy Venetian race.

Coroll.—Venus taking a reluctant farewell of Adonis; Diana starting at the intrusion of Acteon, with every allure of attitude, with heads dressed by the Graces, are local beauties, sink under the weight of Venetian limbs, and are only distinguished by contrast from the model that plumped herself down for his Danae. The reposing figure commonly called the Venus of the Tribuna, is an exquisite portrait of some favourite female, but not a Venus.

220. The women of Parmegiano are coquettes.

221. The women of Annibale Carracci are made up by imitation and vulgarity.

Coroll.—Venus with Anchises, Juno with Jupiter, Omphale with Hercules, Diana and Calisto in the Farnese gallery, owe their charms and dignity of action to imitation; the celebrated three Maries, Magdalen penitent in her hempen shroud, are the conceptions of his own mind.

222. The women of Guido are actresses.

223. The forms of Domenichino's female faces are ideal; their expression is poised between pure helpless virginity and sainted ecstasy.

224. The veiled eyes of Guercino's females dart insidious fire.

225. Such is the fugitive essence, such the intangible texture of female genius, that few combinations of circumstances ever seemed to favour its transmission to posterity.

226. In an age of luxury women have taste, decide and dictate; for in an age of luxury woman aspires to the functions of man, and man slides into the offices of woman. The epoch of eunuchs was ever the epoch of viragoes.

227. Female affection is ever in proportion to the impression of superiority in the object. Woman fondles, pities, despises and forgets what is below her; she values, bears and wrangles with her equal; she adores what is above her.

228. Be not too squeamish in the choice of your materials; you will disgrace the best, if you cannot give value to the worst: the gold and azure wasted on Rosselli's[42] draperies cannot give value to their folds or hide the wants beneath.

229. There are moments when all are men, and only men, and ought to be no more; but the artist, who when his daily task is over can lock his meditation up with his tools—ranks with mechanics.

230. Date the death of emulation and of excellence from the moment of your employer's indifference; and mediocrity of success from the moment of his meddling with the process of your work.

231. One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams, and what may be called the personification of sentiment: the Prophets, Sibyls and Patriarchs of Michael Angelo are so many branches of one great sentiment. The dream of Raffaello is a characteristic representation of a dream; the dream of Michael Angelo is moral inspiration, a sublime sentiment.

Coroll.—Of three visionary subjects ascribed to Raffaello and known from the prints of Marc Antonio, Georgio Mantuano, and Agostino Veneziano, this alludes to the last, called by the Italians Stregozzo, by the French "La Carcasse:" an association of ideas big with the very elements of dreams, and almost a definition. That it be a conception of Raffaello rests on no other proof than the tablet of Marc Antonio and its own internal merit; which is so uniform that although one principal figure is undoubtedly transcribed from another in the cartoon of Pisa, the whole can never be considered as a pasticcio.

232. A trite subject becomes interesting by the introduction of appropriate ornaments; a small statue of Moses breaking the tables in the back-ground of a Salutation; and a number of Baptists in that of a Madonna with her son and Joseph, expressing the dissolution of the old and the institution of the new doctrine, both by Michael Angelo,[43] give unexpected sublimity to subjects for which Raffaelle and Titiano had ransacked in vain the nursery and heaven.

233. Compilation is the lowest degree in art, but let him who means to borrow with impunity, follow the statesman's maxim: "strip the mean and spare the great."

Coroll.—A composition of which every thing was borrowed from himself, being shown to Michael Angelo, and his opinion asked, "I commend it," said he, "but when on the day of judgement each body shall claim its original limbs, what will remain in this picture?"

234. He ought to possess some himself, who attempts to make use of borrowed excellence: a golden goblet on a beggar's table, serves only to expose its companions of lead.

235. Resemblance, character, costume, are the three requisites of portrait: the first distinguishes, the second classifies, the third assigns place and time to an individual.

236. Landscape is either the transcript of a spot, or a picturesque combination of homogeneous objects, or the scene of a phenomenon. The first pleases by precision and taste; the second adds variety and grandeur; the third may be an instrument of sublimity, affect our passions, or wake a sentiment.

237. Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

238. He never can be great who honours what is little.

Coroll.—Grandeur of style and execution do not exclusively depend upon dimensions: but in an age and amidst a race who have erected littleness or rather diminutiveness of size to the only credentials of admissibility into collections, to the passports without which Raffaelle himself finds it difficult to penetrate the sanctuaries of pigmy art, that which ennobled the age of Pericles, of Julio, and Leone, must be content to look to posterity for its reward. If it were physiognomically true, that the structure of every human face bears some analogy to that of some brute, it might reasonably surprise, that an individual marked by nature with no very remote resemblance to a Hippopotamus, should be considered as the legislator of a taste equally noted for tameness of conception and effeminate finish; but as it is improbable that one individual, however favoured by circumstances or endowed with all-persevering activity, or arrogance, could stamp the taste of a nation exclusively with his own, it may be fairly surmised that he did no more than find and rear the seeds of that Micromania which infects the public taste.

239. The medium of poetry is time and action; that of the plastic arts, space and figure. Poetry then is at its summit, when its hand arrests time and embodies action: and these, when they wing the marble or the canvass, and from the present moment dart rays back to the past and forward to the future.

Coroll.—Subjects are positive, negative, repulsive. The first are the proper materials, the voluntary servants of invention; to the second she gives interest and value; from the last she can escape only by the help of execution, for execution alone can palliate her defeat by the last. The Laocoon, the Hæmon and Antigone, the Niobe and her daughters, the death of Ananias, the Sacrifice at Lystra, Elymas struck blind, are positive subjects, speak their meaning with equal evidences to the scholar and the unlettered man, and excite the sympathy due to the calls of terror and pity with equal energy in every breast. St. Jerome presenting the translation of his Bible to the Infant Jesus, St. Peter at the feet of the Madonna receiving the thanksgivings of victorious Venice, with every other votive altar-piece, little interesting to humanity in general, owe the impression they make on us to the dexterous arrangement, the amorous or sublime enthusiasm of the artist;—but we lament to see invention waste its powers, and execution its skill, to excite our feelings for an action or event that receives its real interest from a motive which cannot be rendered intuitive; such as Alceste expiring, the legacy of Eudamidas, the cause of Demetrius's disorder.

FOOTNOTES

A HISTORY OF ART IN THE SCHOOLS OF ITALY.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

The analogy of style observable in the figures impressed on Tuscan coins of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth century, and those found in the miniatures that decorate the manuscripts of the contemporary periods, proves that Tuscany had its artists long before the epoch which Vasari and his copyists fix for the importation of Greek art with Greek artists: whether those paintings be all pure Tuscan, or here and there interspersed with Greek ones, none will venture to decide, who knows the impossibility of drawing a limitary line sufficiently severe to distinguish the last spasms of an expiring art from the first stammerings of an infant one. Of the still surviving monuments of painting during those epochs, it may be sufficient to mention the famed Christ, painted on canvass and glued to a wooden cross, of a date anterior to 1003.

In subsequent times, the earliest and least unsuccessful essays in art, were made by the Pisano. Whilst a Greek sarcophagus at Pisa, storied with the incidents of Hippolytus and Phædra, furnished some elements of form to the sculptors Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, painting made some progress with Giunta Pisano: his composition of Christ on the Cross at the Angeli of Assisi, though defective in design, possesses life and expression.[44]

A similar progress was made by his contemporary Guido or Guidone of Sienna; a name not mentioned by Vasari, though in his frequent excursions to Sienna, he could not remain unacquainted with the works of Guido, at least one which still exists in the chapel of the Malevolti in S. Dominico, with the following often repeated inscription and date:—

This Madonna, twenty years anterior to the birth of Cimabue, is superior to his Madonna in expression, and nearly equal in taste and colour, though inferior in style.

Duccio di Boninsegna, probably of his school, was celebrated as the restorer of that inlaid kind of Mosaic, called "Lavoro di Commesso." His works are from 1275, the year in which he received a commission for S^ta. Maria Novella at Florence, to 1311, the period at which he was employed in the Domo of Sienna. If these dates be genuine, he can scarcely have lived till 1357, the year at which Fiorillo fixes his death. It is not probable that he should have stretched his span beyond a century, which must have been the case, if we suppose that he was twenty at the time he painted in S. Maria Novella; it is not probable that he should have chosen, or been suffered, to remain idle with the celebrity he had acquired in the labours of the Domo; and it is still less probable, that, if he was employed, what he produced in the interval, between that period and his death, should have perished or been destroyed, whilst we are still in possession of the paintings in the Domo, which made nearly an epoch in art, at which he laboured three years, for which he was paid upwards of 3000 scudi d'oro, the expense of gilding and ultramarine included. That part of it which faced the audience, represented in large figures the Madonna and various saints; that which fronted the choir, divided into many compartments, exhibited numerous compositions of Gospel subjects in figures of small proportion; it cannot be denied, that with all its copiousness, the whole savours strongly of the Greek manner.

Andrea Taffi, born 1213, the scholar of Apollonius, a Greek painter, and his assistant in some mosaics at S. Giovanni of Florence, is not mentioned out of that line by Vasari and Baldinucci: but the discovery of a picture with his name by Ignazio Stugford adds another legitimate name to the predecessors of Cimabue.

Buonamico di Cristofano, or Buffalmacco, of facetious memory, was the pupil of Taffi. His best works are lost, but from the remains it may be suspected that he owes at least as much to the tales of Boccaccio and Sacchetti, for the preservation of his name, as to his own powers. There still exists in Campo Santo at Pisa, a fresco of the Creation with a God Father five ells high, supporting Heaven and the elements; and three other stories of Adam, Noah and his Sons; a Crucifix, a Resurrection, and an Ascension. We must not look here for much symmetry of design or Giottesque elegance; his heads have little variety, and less beauty; sameness of features, a vulgar cast, and a gaping deformity of mouth, characterize his women; but now and then attention rests on the vivacity or physiognomy of some male countenance, especially that of Cain. Sometimes he snatches some movement from nature, such as that of the terrified man who flies from Calvary: he overflows in particoloured drapery, and delights in laboured ornaments of flowers and lace. A St. John the Baptist of his, yet existing, deserves to be mentioned as an instance of the utility of comparing works in painting and sculpture with contemporary coins, in order to ascertain their dates; for the same figure is exactly repeated on the Florentine scudo d'oro of that age. A jocular host of artists, scholars of this school, we pass over, as more important to the reader of the Decamerone and the Novelle, than to the student of art.

Lucca, about 1235, possessed Bonaventura Berlingieri, whose St. Francis still exists in the castle of Guiglia, near Modena, and is described as a work of considerable merit for its time: Margaritone of Arezzo, a pupil and follower of the Greeks, appears to have been several years anterior to Cimabue. He painted on canvass, and was the first, according to Vasari, who found the method of giving a more solid texture to pictures. Some crucifix of his is still seen at Arezzo, and another at Santa Croce in Florence, facing one of Cimabue. The style of both is antiquated, but not so different in merit to make us refuse a painter's name to Margaritone if we grant it to Cimabue.

Giovanni Cimabue,[45] of noble lineage, was an architect and painter. He is considered as the father of Italian art, because with him legitimate history and a less interrupted series of dates, begin; because he succeeded better than his predecessors in disentangling himself from the shackles of Greek barbarity, and chiefly because he discovered and called forth the genius of Giotto. Vasari may be right in making him the scholar of those Greeks whom the Florentine Government had employed to paint the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but he errs in placing them in the Chapel Gondi, which, with the body of the church, was not erected till the subsequent century; he should have assigned them another chapel under the church, where time has discovered some vestiges of ancient painting. It seems, however, more probable, that Giunta Pisano gave Cimabue instruction, if it be ascertained, as Fiorillo asserts, that he worked in the great church of Assisi, 1253, when he was in his thirteenth year, and Giunta superintended the decorations of that fabric.

The pompous visit which Charles of Anjou paid to Cimabue in passing through Florence, sufficiently proves the celebrity he enjoyed, if it has not been sanctioned by the authority of Dante, who calls him the unrivalled champion of his day. Cimabue was then painting the Madonna with the Infant adored by six angels; the picture when finished was carried in procession from Borgo Allegro to Santa Maria Novella, and placed in the Chapel Rucellai, where it still exists. The heraldic arrangement of the figures, their physiognomic monotony, the exility of the detail and barbarous execution, contrast strangely with the elevation and novelty of the artist's conception. Cimabue lost the female and the mother in the Queen of Heaven. Insensible to the blandishments of beauty, fierce like the age in which he lived, he excelled in male, especially aged characters; these he impressed with something of a stern grandeur, not often surpassed since. Vast and comprehensive in his ideas, he seized on subjects of numerous composition, and expressed them in large proportions; those features of prophetic grandeur which surprise in his frescoes at the Dominicans and Santa Trinità of Florence, are still excelled by the features which he displayed in the upper church of Assisi—meteors of the age in which he lived. They still exist, nor is it easily conceived how works of so different style, against the testimony of Vasari, and the uniform tradition of five centuries, could, as they were of late, be ascribed to the more regulated hand and gentler spirit of Giotto.

Giotto's year of birth has been disputed; Vasari fixes it to 1276, Baldinucci to 1265. He was the son of a cottager at Vespignano, and bred to be a shepherd; but, a painter born, he amused himself from infancy with attempts to draw whatever object struck his fancy. A sheep which he had copied on a flat stone caught the eye of Cimabue, who was in the neighbourhood, happened to pass by, demanded him of his father, and carried him to Florence to instruct him; but he soon rivalled, and in a short time eclipsed his master by a grace and an amenity of execution which remained unequalled to the time of Masaccio.

For the rapidity of this progress, unless we were to ascribe it to inspiration, we must account from the happy coincidence of external advantages with the genius of the man. A period so obscure, admits of little more than conjecture, but there is no improbability in supposing that Giotto outstripped his master and the times by the same means which rendered Michael Agnolo so soon superior to Ghirlandaio, —modelling and the study of the antique. We know that he was a sculptor, and that his models still existed in the time of Lorenzo Ghiberti. Good originals he could find among the fragments of antiquity discovered before his time, and scattered over Florence and Rome: from what other source could he derive the character of his male heads, and that squareness of form so different from the exility and indecision of all contemporary styles? The few majestic natural folds of his draperies, and the composure and unaffected air of his figures, breathe the spirit of the antique. His very defects are the consequences of such a study. His manner has been charged with a kind of statuine precision (del statuino), unknown to other schools, and unknown to artists who do not form themselves on the antique.

If to these conjectures it be objected, that the want of uniformity, dryness of design, extremities either faulty or hid under a preposterous length of drapery, rather betray a nurseling of Pisa than a pupil of the ancients; it ought to be considered that uniformity is the result of settled principles; that he who had to remove the rubbish could not be expected to give the polish; that he who had to teach eyes to look, hands to move, and feet to stand, could not be supposed to make them do it with all the correctness, propriety or elegance, they were capable of; that a certain gymnophobia equally attends the infancy and the decrepitude of taste, and that the approbation of a public and an artist's flattery are always reciprocal.

And no artist commanded more of public favour than Giotto. Legislator of taste, not in Tuscany alone, but at Rome, Naples, Bologna, and the Venetian State, he excelled his master as much in celebrity as he had excelled him in grace and method. How soon he did this may be seen on comparing his earliest works at Assisi with those of his master in the same place. Genuine elements of composition, expressions inspired by Nature, accuracy of design, progressively appear. It is no hyperbole to affirm, that in certain characters no artist ever went nearer the source of expression than Giotto, and that in the maiden airs of untainted virginity none ever excelled, and perhaps, Raphael and Domenichino excepted, few ever approached him.

Though not the inventor, Giotto was the restorer of portrait-painting; resemblance, with character of face and attitude, date from him. He gave us Dante, Brunetto Latini, Corso Donato, &c. Mosaic was improved by him, and his powers in it shown by the celebrated Navicella, or boat of Saint Peter, in the portico of the Basilica at Rome; though restoration has transformed it to a work of shreds and patches, and reduced his claim on it to the mere name. Missal painting likewise owes him some gratitude; and in architecture the grand steeple of the Domo at Florence is the work of Giotto.

Implicit imitation checks progress; the numerous school of Giotto were for the greater part content to walk behind their master. Taddeo Gaddi, the most familiar and most favoured of his pupils, is said by Vasari, whom time still suffered to judge with some competence, to have excelled him in colouring and mellowness. The works of Taddeo in S^ta. Croce are inferior in originality and execution to his compositions in the Capitolo degli Spagnuoli, where, in the ceiling, he represented some Gospel subjects, and in the Cenacolo the Descent of the Holy Spirit, one of the beautiful relics of the fourteenth century. On the sides he painted the Sciences, with their most eminent professors under each, no unfair specimen of poetic conception; here is what remains of vivacity and brightness in his tints. Taddeo outlived the period assigned him by Vasari; we find him mentioned as late as 1352, which still might not be the ultimate date of his life.

Another conspicuous name among his pupils is Stefano of Florence, (Fiorentino,) whom Vasari, without hesitation, in every part of the art prefers to his master. He was the son of one Catharina, a daughter of Giotto; an ardent and inquisitive spirit, quick to discover and eager to overcome difficulties; the first who ventured on foreshortening, and if success did not fully second his efforts in that, it favoured him in perspective, which he much improved, and in the attitudes, variety and vivacity of heads. Landino fancied to compliment his memory by repeating the silly epithet of "Scimia della Natura," "Ape of Nature," which, from the resemblance of his portraits, was given him by the vulgar and the dilettanti of his day. His works in Ara Cœli at Rome, at S. Spirito of Florence, and elsewhere, perished, and nothing can safely be stamped with his name, if it be not a Madonna in Campo Santo at Pisa, grander in style than those of his master, but retouched.

Of Tommaso, his son and reputed scholar, a Pietà, which might be taken for a work of Giotto, exists at S. Remigi of Florence; and still some frescoes at Assisi. They entitle him to the surname of "Giottino," given him by his fellow-citizens, who used to say that the spirit of Giotto had passed into him and animated his hand.

Without embarrassing ourselves with conjectures on Ugolino da Sienna, we pass to the more celebrated name of Simone Memmi, or Simon di Martino, a native of the same place, the painter of Laura, and the friend of Petrarca, who in two affected sonnets has transmitted him to posterity. Whether Simone were the pupil of Maestro Mino as the Siennese, or of Giotto as the Florentine writers pretend, is a point beyond decision: he restored a picture of the first, and his style has some analogy to that of the second, though with more suavity of colour, and more poetry of conception. He was the first who dared to fill a spacious façade with one composition without dividing it into compartments. Such is that in the Capitolo degli Spagnuoli of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, where Vasari discovered every beauty of his own time, and where, in the crowd of introduced portraits, many have fancied, in spite of chronology, to discover the portraits of Laura and her friend; whom probably he did not become personally acquainted with till four years after the completion of that work, 1336, when he was sent to the Pope at Avignon, became familiar with Petrarca, painted Laura, and, strange to tell, reached the expectation of the lover, who saw

"Il lampegiar dell' angelico riso."

Miniature, though the last object of this work, was not the least of Memmi's powers. Lanzi has noticed one which fronts a MS. Virgil with the commentary of Servius, now in the Ambrosiana at Milan, but formerly possessed by Petrarca, who probably dictated the subject, and added the following lines:-

Mantua Virgilium qui talia carmina finxit, Sena tulit Simonem digito qui talia pinxit.

The painting represents Virgil in a sitting attitude ready to write, with his face turned upwards as invoking the Muse. Æneas, in martial vest and attitude, stands before him, and pointing to his sword, alludes to the subject of the Æneis, "Arma Virumque." A shepherd and a husbandman, symbols of the Pastorals and Georgics, placed somewhat lower, listen to the theme; whilst Servius draws a transparent curtain, to denote his labours in unveiling the beauties and removing the obscurities of the poet. In this miniature, the originality of conception, the beauty and harmony of colour, the varied and appropriate drapery, are, however, balanced by rudeness of design, vulgarity of character, and deformed extremities.

It was a barbarous singularity of Simone, promiscuously to admit different proportions on the same plane: to flank or cross figures of natural size with figures a third less than nature.

Lippo, or Filippo Memmi, was the relative, scholar, and imitator, of Simone: assisted by his designs, Lippo often executed works, which, had he not marked them with his name, would be ascribed to the master: when left to his own invention, he rose in nothing above mediocrity, but in colour. Sometimes they were partners in the same picture, as in that at S. Ansano di Castel Vecchio, at Sienna; sometimes the second finished what the first began, as in some works at Ancona and Assisi; and at Sienna there remains still something entirely executed by Lippo.

Simone co-operated in the works of S. Maria Novella with Taddeo Gaddi, who, with his son, Angelo Gaddi, left a number of pupils, imitators through him of Giotto, inferior to both, not much distinguished by tradition, and less favoured by time. Of Jacopo di Casentino, the most conspicuous, what vestiges remain in the church of Orsanmichele at Florence, are in conformity with the style of Taddeo; barriers soon overleaped by the vivid fancy of his scholar, Spinello the Aretine, whom his own conception of a demon is said to have terrified into insanity and death. His son, Parri Spinelli, with barbarous incongruities of line, possessed exquisite colour; and his pupil, Lorenzo di Bicci, has been compared to Vasari, for the number, dispatch, and opinion of his works. Antonio, surnamed Veneziano, whether he were a Venetian or a Florentine, is, against evidence of dates and style, supposed to have been a pupil of Angelo Gaddi, and to have educated Paolo Uccello, the first master of perspective, and Gherardo Starnina, an artist of gay style, whose relics live still a chapel of S^ta. Croce. They are numbered among the last productions of Giotto's expiring epoch, and the verge of the fourteenth century, in which we have still to mark, though pupils of some other school, the family of Orcagna; Bernardo, a painter; Jacopo, a sculptor; but chiefly Andrea, conspicuous for writing, painting, sculpture, and architecture, in a degree little inferior to Giotto himself. Architects date from him the abolition of the acute angle and restoration of semicircular arches, as in the Loggia of the Lanzi, which he likewise decorated with sculpture. Some, without attention to time, have supposed him the pupil of Angelo Gaddi, but he was probably trained to the art by his brother Bernardo, jointly with whom he painted in the Capella Strozzi of S^ta. Maria Novella, in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and alone and better in S^ta. Croce, Death, Judgement, Paradise, and Hell, placing with Dantesque licence his friends among the elect, his enemies with the damned.

The downfall of Pisa had raised Florence to the metropolis of Tuscany, and the spirit of its citizens to render its appearance worthy of that pre-eminence. Cosmo, styled the father of his country, who tuned the public affairs, might with better right have been called the father of distinguished talents: never was tyranny meditated on a less suspicious plan, or approached by more popular means. The house of the Medici, in the quaint Italian phrase, became the Lyceum of Philosophers, the Arcadia of Poets, the Academy of Artists. Dello, Paolo, Masaccio, the two Peselli, both the Lippi, Benozzo, Sandro, the Ghirlandai, were the clients of the family, and emulated each other in their homage. Their pictures, according to the usage of the age, full of portraits, perpetually presented to the people likenesses of the Medici, and often in the characters of the Magi royally robed, the sceptre firmly held in the gripe of the Medici, to prepare the public eye gradually for what it was soon to witness, the firm establishment of sovereignty in that House. The competition of rival citizens, and still more the wide-extended influence of religion, diffused Taste and beckoned Talent to Florence as to its centre, from every part of Italy. At her call Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Filarete, the Rossellini, Verrocchio arose, and with their works spread the Elements of Art.

Poetry, that supplies the real features and materials of expression when it inspires the thought, arrives at the full display of its powers long before its sisters have disentangled themselves from the impediments of infancy; and of these, Sculpture, whose aim is infinitely less complex, raises the vigorous fabric of forms, whilst Painting is still impotently struggling with the rudiments of line, perspective, keeping, chiaroscuro, colour; which to unite in an equal degree has hitherto been found above the lot of humanity. The imitators of Giotto were in this state of struggle; they saw little in chiaroscuro, and less in perspective and line; their figures still slip from their planes, their fabrics have no true point of sight, their fore-shortenings depended solely on the eye: Stefano dal Ponte rather saw than overcame; the rest either avoided or palliated these difficulties. The Umbrian Pietro della Francesca seems to have been the first who called geometry to the assistance of painting, and taught by his works at Arezzo the principles of perspective; Brunelleschi formed it into system for architecture, and the mathematician Manetti roused the attention of Paolo Uccello, who owes the perpetuity of his name nearly exclusively to the study of that science. His immoderate attachment to perspective is become proverbial;[46] and almost equalled his fondness for birds, from which he got his surname. He applied it, from grounds and buildings, to the human body, which he foreshortened with a skill unknown to his predecessors: and some proofs of it still exist in the figures of God and Noè among the chiaroscuroes in the chiostro of S^ta. Maria Novella, and in the equestrian colossus of Gio. Aguto (John Montacute), which he painted in chiaroscuro of terra verde, and which is still in the duomo. The art, since its revival, perhaps for the first time showed that, if it had dared much, it had dared well: nor did he fall short of it in the gigantic imagery of the House Vitali at Bologna; he was, however, more employed in painting private furniture: the triumphs of Petrarch on some small presses in the gallery of Florence are supposed to come from his hand. That he was a master of expression, the instances adduced by Vasari leave no doubt; and in describing the flying drapery of some friar in the series of pictures relative to S. Benedetto, the same writer tells us, that it served as a model to all succeeding artists: to such powers, praise of variety is added by the truth and diligence with which he copied trees, plants, birds and animals, and for which some critic styles him the Bassano of the first epoch. In the nearly general wreck of Paolo's works, it is difficult to form a judgment of his technic character independent of tradition: but, comparing what remains with what we are told, it is evident that he reached from one extreme of the Art to the other; and that, if he was blameable for frequently playing with a tool instead of using it, mistaking an instrument of the Art for Art itself, and means for the end of execution, he has been deprived by partiality of the praise due to powers which he appears to have possessed in a degree unknown to the times that preceded Masaccio.

Masolino da Panicale cultivated chiaroscuro: he was enabled to treat it with more truth than his predecessors, by a long practice of modelling under the tuition of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the master of design and grouping in those days, but whose animation he did not attain. Starnina instructed him in colour; and thus by uniting the characteristics of two schools, he produced that new style, which, though still infected by dryness and clogged by inelegance, possesses grandeur, union and breadth: the proofs still remain in the chapel of S. Pietro al Carmine, where, besides the Evangelists, he painted several subjects from the story of that Apostle. The remaining ones, which he did not live to finish, were some years afterward added by his scholar Tomaso Gisioli, celebrated by the name of Masaccio from his careless way of living.

Historians, biographers, and poets, unite in dating a new period from Masaccio. The compass of his mind led him to uniformity of pursuit, and the introduction of style; he had formed his principles on the works of Ghiberti and Donatello; perspective he had learnt of Brunelleschi, and in an excursion to Rome, it is unreasonable to suppose that he did not improve himself on the antique. Gentile da Fabriano and Vittore Pisanello were then at Rome, and the high opinion which they are said to have expressed of him[47] as the first painter of the age has been recorded: it is, however, difficult to say on what that opinion could be founded: they were too far advanced in life to see more of Masaccio than his juvenile essays, perhaps such as the S. Anna in S. Ambrogio at Florence, or what he painted in the chapel of St. Catherine, in the church of St. Clemens of Rome, the figures of the ceiling excepted, all retouched, and though fine works for the time, of doubtful authority, and in no manner to be compared to the pictures del Carmine. Here appear the virility of his powers and the legitimacy of his superior claim: here the figures, however varied by attitude, pose or are foreshortened with that truth and uniformity of success which the less established principles of Paolo Uccello did not always reach. In expression, sublimity distinguishes Donatello; he always aims at, and sometimes succeeds in personifying a sentiment or a passion.[48] Masaccio, more dramatic, poises expression by character and propriety; hence he has been said, and truly said, to resemble Raffaello.

To be praised immoderately for what, with regard to judgment, deserved it least, has, as of others, been likewise the lot of Masaccio: the introduction and masterly execution of the man who, in the baptism of St. Peter, appears to shiver with cold, is extolled by Vasari, and makes, by the verdict of Lanzi, an epoch in art. Had the apostle immersed the race of a Northern clime, a man frost-bitten, (assiderando di freddo,) or impatient of cold, might have been admitted without impropriety, but under an Asiatic sun he is worse than superfluous. This either Masaccio did not consider, or if he did, fondly sacrificed propriety to the expression of an incident, which, had it even been admissible, had in itself less dignity, and incomparably less pathos, than that of the sick monk on whose eyes and lips the hope of recovery seemed to tremble, introduced among the series of pictures from the life of St. Benedict, by Paolo Uccello.[49]

A higher and more legitimate praise of Masaccio's expression is, that Raffaello not only imitated its general character, but in the same or similar subjects sometimes individually adopted it, as in the gesture of Paul in the Cartoon of the Areopagus, and that of Adam dismissed from Paradise, in the Loggia; and that, if he improved the taste and added elegance to the Tuscan's drapery, he closely adhered to its principles, simplicity, propriety, and breath.

Of Masaccio's colour, what remains possesses truth, variety, delicacy, union, and great relief. He lived not to finish the whole of the Chapel, some stories still remaining to be added in 1443, the reputed year of his death,[50] which was not without suspicion of having been hastened by poison. His other frescoes at Florence have been destroyed by time, and perhaps no gallery can produce an authentic picture by his hand, if we except the portrait of a youth in the Pitti palace, a work that breathes life.

Ghiberti and Donatello had taught Masaccio to find style by selection from nature; his followers for half a century, content to look at him without adhering to his method, gradually shrunk back to the exility and meagreness of the preceding age: without embarrassing ourselves with the angelic prettinesses of Frà Giovanni da Fiesole, a name dearer to sanctity than to art, and whom both his age and missal-taste prove the nursling of another school, we pass to Benozzo Gozzoli, his pupil, who strove to forget his puny lessons in the bolder dictates of Masaccio.

That he could not soon do it, is evident from the profusion of ornamental glitter and tinsel colouring in the frescoes of the Chapel Riccardi. He succeeded better at Pisa, where his Scripture stories cover an entire wing of Campo Santo. This enormous enterprise, which, in the phrase of Vasari might smite with fear a legion of painters,[51] he is said to have completely achieved in two years. Everywhere inferior to his model in composition, design, and expression, he often goes beyond him in vastness and amenity of scenery, a certain play of ideas and picturesque exuberance. After all, perhaps more than one hand shared in the execution. Benozzo lived long, and lies buried near his work, where public gratitude had placed his sepulchre, and inscribed it with an eulogy.[52]

Filippo Lippi, a Carmelitan friar, studied and imitated the works of Masaccio, especially in compositions of small proportion, with great success. Suavity of conception and colour animates his angels and Madonnas: in the large historic frescoes at Pieve di Prato, he introduced proportions exceeding the natural size, praised as his masterpieces by Vasari, who has related Lippi's escape from the convent; his captivity among the Moors; the pictures which he painted at Naples, Padoua, and elsewhere; his premature death by poison from the relatives of the female by whom he had a natural son, Filippino Lippi. Frà Filippo died at Spoleti, 1469, on the point of finishing his great work in the dome, where Lorenzo de' Medici, who had demanded but not obtained his ashes from the citizens, entombed them under a stately monument inscribed by Angelo Poliziano. His scholars and imitators were F. Diamante of Prato, the partner of his last work; F. Pesello of Florence, and Pesellino his son, whom, if we believe Vasari, shortness of life alone intercepted from superior excellence.

About this period the first attempts of painting in oil were made at Florence, by Andrea dal Castagno, of detested memory, who had improved himself by looking at Masaccio. Domenico, called Veneziano, to whom Antonello of Messina had communicated the novel mystery of Johan Van Eyk, after practising it with success at home, Loretto, and other parts of the Papal State, came to exercise it at Florence: caressed and encouraged, he excited the envy and cupidity of Castagno, who under the mask of submissive attachment, wheedled himself into his confidence, obtained the secret, and then assassinated the hapless donor. The treacherous but complete acquisition added lustre to his practice during life, but time has swept the sacrilegious produce of his hand, and left nothing to the memory of "Andrea degli Impiccati," but the execration of posterity.[53]

The farther we leave Masaccio behind, the nearer we approach the golden epoch, the more lurid becomes the atmosphere of art. Mediocrity, tinsel ostentation, and tasteless diligence mark the greater number of that society of craftsmen whom Sixtus IV. conscribed (1474, Manni,) to decorate or rather to disfigure the panels of the grand Chapel which took its name from him (La Sistina): one of its sides was to be occupied by subjects from the Pentateuch, the other by Gospel stories. Pietro Perugino excepted, the artists convoked were nearly all Florentines or Tuscans; viz. Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Bigordi, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca, Signorelli of Cortona, and Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, with their assistants. The superintendence of the whole the Pope, with the usual vanity and ignorance of princes, gave to Sandro, the least qualified of the group, whose barbarous taste and dry minuteness palsied, or assimilated with his own, the powers of his associates, and rendered the whole a monument of puerile ostentation, and conceits unworthy of its place. Nor is it from what there remains of either, that the names of Luca Signorelli and Domenico Bigordi claim that attention which history owes to the first as the real precursor of Michael Angelo, and to the second as the master of his rudiments.

Luca Egidio Signorelli, of Cortona,[54] less to be considered as the reviver of Masaccio's style than as the founder of that which distinguished the succeeding epoch, might have led its banners, as his life stretched beyond that of Raphael and Lionardo, had his principle been more uniform. The greater part of his works exhibit the evident struggle of his own perceptions with the prescriptive ones of his time, and a kind of coalition between the barbarity of the expiring and the emancipated taste of the rising æra. The best evidence of this is in the Duomo of Orvieto, where in the mixed imagery of final dissolution and infernal punishment, he has scattered ideas of original conception, character and attitude, in copious variety, but not without numerous remnants of Gothic alloy. The angels who announce the impending doom or scatter plagues, exhibit with awful simplicity bold foreshortenings, whilst the St. Michael presents only the tame heraldic figure and attitude of a knight all cased in armour. In the expression of the condemned groups and dæmons, he chiefly dwells on the supposed perpetual renewal of the pangs attending on the last struggles of life with death, contrasted with the inexorable scowl or malignant grin of fiends methodizing torture: a horrid feature reserved by Dante for the last pit of his Inferno, and far beyond the culinary abominations of Sandro Botticelli.[55]

Though Luca's style of design was no more that of Masaccio than Michael Agnolo's that of Raphael, less characteristic than grand, and fit to be the vehicle of those conceptions and attitudes which furnished hints of imitation to the painter of the Last Judgement in the Sistina, yet he was master of a grace in celestial scenery and angelic attitudes unapproached by his contemporaries, seldom equalled and never surpassed by his successors.

Luca Signorelli was a painter of much popularity. Urbino, Volterra, Florence, Rome, his native and many other towns, possess or possessed works of his. He was related to the family of the Vasari of Arezzo, and caressed and encouraged to the art his infant biographer.[56]

Another of the artists employed in the Sistina, inferior to Luca, but of no despicable (though, if we look at Masaccio, too highly rated) powers, was Domenico Bigordi, commonly called Del Ghirlandajo;[57] this is he under whose auspices not only his son Ridolfo, but even Bonaroti and the best artists of the succeeding epoch, began their course. Precision of outline, decorum of countenance, variety of ideas, facility and diligence, distinguish his works. He is the first of Florentines, who gave depth and keeping to composition: if gold and tinsel glitter are not entirely banished from his colours, they appear at least less often. He was fond of introducing portraits among his actors, but with selection and of distinguished characters; though hands and feet had no part in his attention to physiognomy. The churches Degli Innocenti, Santa Trinità, and S^ta. Maria Novella at Florence, possess his most celebrated productions, and many are scattered over Tuscany and the Ecclesiastic State. Of the two which he painted in the Sistina, the Resurrection of Christ perished; the Vocation of Peter and Andrew to the Apostolate Survives.

Cosimo Rosselli and Pier di Cosimo likewise employed at the Sistina, inferior in all essential parts to their competitors, owe the perpetuity of their names less to their parti-coloured glare and immoderate display of gold and azure, which attracted the vulgar eye of their employer the Pope, than to the luck of having been the masters of Bartolomeo della Porta, and Andrea del Sarto.

Piero and Antonio Pollajuoli, though employed only as statuaries in the same Chapel, possessed no inconsiderable powers as painters. Piero's pictures at S. Miniato discover the scholar of Castagno, austere countenances and deep and massy colour; but in novelty of composition and design he yields to his brother and pupil Antonio, whose Martyrdom of St. Sebastian in the Chapel Pucci of that church, though humble in style, crude in colour, and oddly rather than originally conceived, has been numbered with the first productions of the age, because with the earliest traces of legitimate anatomy it exhibits its application, and subordinates enumeration to function. Both the Pollajuoli died at Rome.

Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, having nothing to add of his own to the works of the Sistina, is mentioned here only as the helper of Luca Signorelli and Pietro Perugino; nor is Filippino Lippi, the natural son of Frà Filippo, numbered among the companions of Sandro his master, though the perpetual recurrence of antique customs and dresses in his works makes it probable that he formed his juvenile studies at Rome. Inferior in real capacity to his father, he may be praised rather for the accessory than the substantial parts of his works: he filled with an unequal hand the remaining panels left by Masaccio al Carmine; and in the Minerva at Rome, yields the palm in expression and amenity of ideas to his own scholar Raffaelino del Garbo, whose early works at Monte Oliveto of Florence, and elsewhere, give sufficient evidence that he might have raised himself to the first artists of his day, had not the cravings of a numerous family crushed his powers, and poverty and dejection hastened his death. His contemporary Andrea Verocchio, though a celebrated statuary, and a designer of style, has deserved our notice as a painter, only because he was the master of Lionardo da Vinci, the first name in the annals of Tuscany's golden epoch.

Vinci, a burgh of Lower Valdarno, had the honour of giving a surname to Lionardo, the natural son[58] of one Ser Piero, a state notary at Florence. Elevated by nature above the common standard of men, born to discover, he joined to boundless inquiry intrepidity of pursuit, and lofty conception to minute investigation, nor only in the arts connected with his own, music and poesy, but in science, philosophy, mathematics, mechanics, hydrostatics: this wide mental range, supported by equal vigour and gracefulness of body, was commended by every accomplishment of a gentleman. Such was the genius whom Nature had destined to establish art on elements, to open the realms of light and shade, to inspire the subject with its tone, and to poise expression between insipidity and caricature.

Notwithstanding the distractions of so many diverging inclinations, for powers they could not yet be called, an innate attachment to the art appears to have predominated at the earliest period to such a degree that Ser Piero determined to place Lionardo under his friend Verocchio, whom he soon excelled in painting,[59] and in modelling equalled.

The obscurity which involves the life of Lionardo from his boyish years, through the bloom of youth, to the vigour of manhood, can only be accounted for by that independence of mind which made him prefer indulgence of his own various inclinations to a decided, steady, and if more confined, more lucrative pursuit of art. By what means he, whom Vasari describes as possessing "nothing,"[60] was enabled to gratify studies and fancies equally expensive, no where appears; it appears not that he was patronized by the great and rich; he escaped the eye of the Medici;[61] it was reserved for Lodovico Sforza to discover and to conduct the first citizen of Florence to Milano, and for aught we are told, rather from expectation of amusement than motives of homage. Lodovico was a dilettante in music, and wished to increase the harmony of his concerts with the silver tones of the lyre, invented and constructed by Lionardo, who, we are told, soon distanced all rival performers, and by the aid of his powers as an "Improvisatore," became the object of general admiration: it was then, and perhaps not till then, that the Duke cast a steadier eye on his superior accomplishments, and allowed the musician to become a benefactor to the public in adopting his plans for the establishment and direction of an academy; and granting the means for carrying into effect the still more important ones of conducting the Adda to Milano, and a navigable canal from Martisana to Chiavenna, and the Valteline, &c. plans and effects only interrupted by the fall of the Sforzas and the captivity of Lodovico.

FOOTNOTES

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

We are now arrived at the epoch which forms the distinctive character of the Tuscan school, the epoch of Michael Agnolo. In placing him here, chronology has been less attended to than the spirit of works; for Frà Bartolomeo, Andrea del Sarto, and others, his contemporaries or juniors, belong more properly to the period of Lionardo than his; the elements of which he gave in the Cartoon of Pisa, and the consummation in the Capella Sistina, on which his school and the imitation of his style were founded; and to which the politics of his time, the splendid oligarchy of the Medici, and the fierce republican spirit of their opponents, gave an energy and produced efforts, unknown to society in repose.

Notwithstanding the insinuating arts by which the Medici had debauched public affection, and that undermining power which at last changed influence to tyranny, they were in less than a century[62] three times exiled from their country. The first, the banishment of Cosmo, called the Father of his Country, lasted not above one year, and drew no consequences; for the interval between it and the next (1494) was marked with uniform success, and its last twenty years[63] with the splendid administration and the extended patronage of Lorenzo the Magnificent. His Garden near the church of S. Marco, which he opened as a repository and a school of art, has been little less celebrated than the Hesperian ones of old: it contained, if not all that had been discovered, what could be purchased of antique statues, basso-relievoes, and fragments of every kind; and the apartments were hung with pictures, cartoons, and designs of Donatello, Brunellesco, Paolo Uccello. Frà Giovanni da Fiesole, Masaccio, &c.; here the student was not only instructed, but, by the magnificence of the founder, supported; and it may without exaggeration be asserted, that whatever rose to eminence in the art at that period, was the offspring of Lorenzo's garden.

His death was followed by the expulsion of his sons, Pietro, Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., and Julian, in the sequel Duke of Nemours. An immediate anarchy succeeded the expulsion; the populace broke into their houses, destroyed or carried off their furniture, and demolished the residence of Giovanni, the garden of Lorenzo, and the palace on the Via Larga,[64] at once. The numerous partisans of the family, however, contrived to save much.[65]

Other circumstances conspired to render this interval of anarchy pernicious to art, till the return of the Medici in 1512. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, the Dominican Frà Girolamo Savonarola, of enthusiastic memory, by prophecies and sermons, loaded with democratic principles, gained gradually such an ascendancy over the minds of the people, that the Signoria found themselves forced to adopt a senate at large; in other words, to submit to a democracy. But Savonarola, not content with political victory, aimed at a total revolution in morals, and continued to lash the profligacy of public manners, overflowing in voluptuous song and music, or gazing at the lascivious nudities of statues and pictures, as irresistible incentives to vice. It had been customary during carnival, to erect certain cabins in the market-place, to set them on fire on the eve of Ash-Wednesday, and bid them farewell amid the shouts of convivial mirth and the frolic of amorous dalliance. Savonarola instituted in 1497 a public festival of another kind: a large scaffold was erected in the market-place, a vast number of the finest specimens in painting and sculpture, offensive from their nudities, were collected; the pictures placed on the first step; the sculptures, especially when portraits of first-rate Florentine belles, disposed on the second; the whole inclosed by foreign precious tapestry, and that, with great solemnity, set on fire. The scaffolding of the next year excelled the first in magnificence; its gorgeous apparel invested the busts of the most celebrated beauties of former years; those of the Bencina, Lena Morella, Bina and Maria de'Lenzi, works of the most eminent sculptors; on it was placed a copy of Petrarca, decorated with gold, missal-painting, and miniatures, estimated at fifty scudi d'oro; and to prevent theft, the whole was constantly guarded. The procession approached, surrounded the scaffold, and amid a concert of consecrating hymns, bells, trumpets, cymbals, and the acclamations of the Signoria and the people, the victims, sprinkled with holy water, were delivered to flame by the torches of the guards.[66] Such was the epidemic influence of this enthusiasm, that even artists, the gentle Frà Bartolomeo, Lorenzo di Credi, and many more caught the infection, and contributed to the sacrifice, till the death of Savonarola and the return of the Medici extinguished the furor.[67]

The democracy, however, gave origin to two works, which not only atoned for the ravages it had committed, but whose splendour no subsequent æra of art has been able to eclipse, or perhaps to equal: the two Cartoons of Lionardo da Vinci and M. Angelo Buonarroti, destined to decorate the senatorial hall, by order of Pietro Soderini. They produced an immediate revolution in art, but disappeared like meteors in the tumult that attended the reinstatement of the Medici and the fall of the Gonfaloniere, 1512.

The third expulsion of the Medici—Hippolyto and Alessandro, the sons of Giuliano the Magnificent, and all their relatives—was the consequence of the sack of Rome, 1527, and the Pontificate of Clemente VII. The Medici, pressed by the moment, consigned part of their technic treasure, their bronzes, cameos, &c. to the care of their client Baccio Bandinelli.[68] During the havoc, Michael Angelo's statue of David lost an arm,[69] and the waxen figures of Leo X. and Clemente VII. in the church of the "Annunciata," were mutilated and carried off; and perhaps much more was lost in the demolition of the suburbs, which took place to secure the town itself against the siege of 1529. But active resistance and lampoons proved equally ineffectual; the destiny of the Medici prevailed, and Florence paid ducal homage in 1530 to Alessandro; whose assassination, indeed, by Lorenzo his relative, commonly called Lorenzino, produced, six years afterwards, another sedition and farther damage to their stores of art by the soldiers, who, at the instigation of Alessandro Vitelli, broke into and plundered both their houses. Cosmo the First succeeded Alessandro, and left uninterrupted dominion to his heirs: but if the consolidation of monarchy prevented the momentary devastations of insurrection, it failed to re-produce the splendid period that flashed athwart the storms of democracy.

MICHAEL ANGELO BUONARROTI.

1474—1564.

M. Angelo was born at Castel Caprese, and showed such early proofs of a decided attachment to art, that he was put into the school of Domenico del Ghirlandaio. Here he soon advanced beyond the principles of the master, who, jealous of a rival in his pupil, recommended him to Lorenzo de Medici, for admission among the students of sculpture in his garden; where, under the tuition of Bertoldo,[70] an ancient scholar of Donatello, he soon mastered the elements, and, equally conspicuous for his superiority and diligence, attracted the attention and gained the patronage of Lorenzo, but excited the envy of his fellow-students, one of whom, Torrigiano, on some slight provocation, with a blow of the fist shattered his nose, which left him with a mark for life.

That predilection for sculpture imbibed from his earliest days and now invigorated by the incessant study of the antique with practice, the successful specimens mentioned in copies and productions of his own,[71] leave little authority to the tradition that he studied much after Masaccio.

His mind appears to have anticipated the expulsion of the Medici, and he left Florence for Bologna, where he found a protector in Aldrovandi, for whom he executed two small statues, of an Angel and of a St. Petronius on the tomb of S. Dominico. After his return to Florence he continued to work in sculpture, and a legend, less probable than amusing, of an Amor sold for an antique to Cardinal Riario, has been fondly repeated by his biographers. He now went to Rome and produced two of his most surprising works—the Bacchus of the Museo Fiorentino, and the Madonna della Pietà in one of the chapels of the Basilica of S. Pietro. On his return to Florence, Pietro Soderini tried his powers on a huge block of marble, mutilated by the ignorance of one Maestro Simone: he contrived to rear from it the statue of David, which, in 1504, was placed, and still remains in front of the old palace. These works, not less discriminated by peculiarity of character, than connected by propriety of style and energy of finish, were produced within the short period of six years, and equally prove the wide range of his powers, and the perseverance of his application to sculpture.

What he did as painter, during, or soon after this period, is for us reduced to the single specimen which he executed for Angelo Doni; for the far-famed Cartoon of Pisa, of which we soon shall have occasion to speak, begun in contest with Lionardo da Vinci, but not finished till after his second return from Rome, perished, as a whole, long before the middle of the sixteenth century.