Part 10 (1/2)
He began life, as most architects did, as a member of the guild of goldsmiths, and learned to model, but he had a bent towards physics and mechanics, and developed naturally into an architect. A great event in his life was a trip to Rome with Donatello; there the two examined all the cla.s.sical remains in the city and in the country round about, taking measurements and learning all they could.
In Florence besides the abbey of Fiesole, built for Cosimo, Brunelleschi built the church of San Lorenzo for Cosimo's father, and he designed and began the lordly Pitti palace across the Arno, but his great achievement was the dome of the cathedral. The cathedral, first begun by Arnolfo di Cambio, had been in charge of a succession of famous architects, and was nearing completion; but the gap at the intersection of the nave and transepts presented a most difficult architectural problem. The diameter of this gap was about one hundred and thirty-five feet, and the height above the ground was about one hundred and forty-five feet. No such span had been vaulted since the building of the Pantheon. A public compet.i.tion for a dome was held in which Brunelleschi took part. After long discussion, for Florence was ”a city where every one speaks his mind,” and after much consideration, Brunelleschi was chosen architect. His great dome, though no copy of Roman forms, was thoroughly cla.s.sic in its simplicity and its spirit, and is the great achievement of the Early Renaissance in architecture.
Brunelleschi and his fellow architects, no doubt, wished to revive the old Roman art, and did so as far as they could, but their problems were new and their models few, so they were forced, in the main, to follow their own principles of construction and limit their use of Roman forms to ornament and detail. Other famous men seconded Brunelleschi; and Florentine, or at least Tuscan, architects spread the ideas of the new art. To them is really due the foundation of the various schools of Renaissance architecture which sprang up in Milan, Venice, Pavia, Bologna, Rimini, Brescia, Siena, Lucca, Perugia, and in almost every city of Northern Italy.
In sculpture, the puissant Donatello (1386-1466) is the greatest figure. It has been said, that Michelangelo's soul first worked in Donatello's body or that Donatello's soul lived again in Michelangelo.
Donatello was a realist; he shows cla.s.sic influence at times, in technique and in sundry bits of detail, but his instinct was to imitate what he could see and touch. His vigour, his energy and variety produced a profound effect on sculpture and also on painting. His earlier works were statues for the outside of the Campanile and of the church of Orsanmichele, of which the most famous are that known as _Zuccone_, Baldhead, and the splendid St. George. Afterwards he modelled a young David, the first nude bronze since the Romans, and the statue of Gattamelata at Padua, the first equestrian statue since that of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The spectator who examines the collection of Donatello's works in the Bargello is chiefly struck by his intellectual power, and by the immense variety of his style, from the simple outline of the lovely St. Cecilia in low relief, to the pa.s.sionate dramas carved in altars and pulpits.
Donatello was a great friend of Brunelleschi, and Vasari tells this anecdote about them. Donatello modelled a Crucifix for Santa Croce, and thinking he had done something unusually good, asked Brunelleschi what he thought of it. Brunelleschi, with his unswerving artistic rect.i.tude, answered that Donatello had put a peasant on the cross, and not Jesus Christ. Donatello, piqued more than he had antic.i.p.ated, said: ”If it were as easy to model as it is to criticise, my Christ would seem to you a Christ and not a peasant; but let's see you take a piece of wood and go and make one.” Brunelleschi did so secretly, and when he had at last finished his Crucifix, asked Donatello to come home and dine with him.
They walked to Brunelleschi's house together, stopping at the market to buy eggs, cheese, and other things for the dinner. Then Brunelleschi said, ”Donatello, you take these things and go to my house, and I will come after in a minute or two.” So Donatello caught them up in his ap.r.o.n, went to Brunelleschi's, opened the door, and saw the Crucifix. He was so dumbfounded that he dropped the dinner on the floor, and when Brunelleschi, coming in, said, ”Why, Donatello, what shall we have for dinner?” Donatello answered, ”For my part I have had my share to-day. If you want yours, pick it up. No more of that. It is my lot to model peasants, and yours to model Christs.”
Donatello was also a great friend of Cosimo's, modelled many things for him, and inspired Cosimo with a taste for collecting antiques. He loved Cosimo so much that he did whatever he wanted, except when it interfered with his personal idiosyncrasies. One day Cosimo gave Donatello, who used to go about in his workman's blouse, a cloak and a fine suit of clothes, the costume of a gentleman. Donatello wore them for a day or two, and then said he could not wear them, they were too fas.h.i.+onable. He was buried, at his own request, near Cosimo, in the church of San Lorenzo, which Brunelleschi had designed, and he had adorned with his sculpture.
Donatello worked in Venice, Mantua, Modena, Ferrara, and Prato, spent several years in Siena, and nine in Padua, and introduced the Renaissance into the sculpture of Northern Italy. He was a man of strong character and poetic spirit, striving in his statues to be true to nature and to the beautiful, to mingle pagan and Christian notions, tradition, and freedom. He and his pupils affected the whole plastic art of Italy.
In painting, Masaccio (1401-28) stands conspicuous, even among many painters of rare gifts. Modern critics call him Giotto reincarnate.
Masaccio is an unflattering nickname for Tommaso, and recalls the only personal trait we know of him. Vasari says: ”He was a most absent-minded person and very casual, like a man who has fixed his will and his whole mind on art only, and cares little about himself and less about others.
He never wanted to think in any way about the things or the cares of this world, even of his own clothes, and he never went to get the money due him from his debtors except when he was in extreme need. Instead of Thomas, everybody called him Masaccio; not because he was bad, being good nature itself, but because of his great absent-mindedness.
Nevertheless, he was as affectionate in doing useful and amiable acts for other people as could possibly be wished.” This ”marvellous boy”
died at the age of twenty-seven, but left an ineffaceable mark on Italian painting. Across the Arno, in the ugly church of Santa Maria del Carmine, is a chapel on the right, in which, mingled with the work of contemporaries and continuers, are Masaccio's frescoes, figures of St.
Peter and St. John, of a s.h.i.+vering boy, and a few others. Leonardo da Vinci said: ”After Giotto, the art of painting declined again, because every one imitated the pictures that were already done; thus it went on till Tommaso of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but Nature--the mistress of all masters--weary themselves in vain.”[16] In that little chapel, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and scores of the greatest painters of Italy have admired, studied, and copied.
Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio are but the greater names in the fine arts. Well might Leon Battista Alberti, himself a great architect and humanist, on return from exile to his native city, say to Brunelleschi: ”I have been accustomed both to wonder and to grieve that so many divine arts and sciences which we see to have abounded in those most highly endowed ancients were now lacking and utterly lost ... but since I have been restored to this our native land that surpa.s.seth all others in her adornment, I have recognized in many but chiefly in thee, Philip [Brunelleschi], and in our near friend Donato [Donatello] the sculptor, and in those others, Nencio [Ghiberti], and Luca [della Robbia], and Masaccio, genius capable for every praiseworthy work, not inferior to that of any ancient and famous master in the arts.”[17]
FOOTNOTES:
[16] _Leonardo da Vinci_, Richter.
[17] _Church Building in the Middle Ages_, C. E. Norton, p. 280.
CHAPTER XXV
THE RENAISSANCE (1450-1492)
The last chapter confined itself to the fine arts and omitted the main element, humanism, which gave volume and impetus to the stream, and, though not memorable for conspicuous achievements as the fine arts were, flowed more directly from the cla.s.sic impulse and produced the greatest immediate effect. The humanists played a part a.n.a.logous to that which men of science play in our own time; they devoted themselves heart and soul to the cla.s.sics, as men of science do to Nature. For some time they had had access to the Latin past through Italy, and now they also found their way to the far greater cla.s.sic world of Greece. The one uninterrupted communication with that world was through Constantinople, which, like a long, ill-lighted and ill-repaired corridor, led back to the great pleasure domes of Plato and Homer, and all the wonderland of Greek literature and thought. Aristotle, indeed, had come by way of the Arabs, and had long been a lay Bible, but for the other Greek cla.s.sics the rising humanism of Italy was indebted to Constantinople. The glowing young city of Florence lit its torch at the expiring embers of the imperial city. A few Italians went to Constantinople and learned Greek, then stray Byzantines came to Italy. The doom which hung over Constantinople frightened scholars and drove them westward, and the fall itself (1453) dispersed the last of them. These Greeks brought invaluable ma.n.u.scripts and firmly established h.e.l.lenic culture in the kindred soil of Tuscany. In the list of books in Cosimo's library, there was no mention of any Greek cla.s.sic except Aristotle; but after the immigration of Greek scholars all intellectual Florence went mad over Plato, and Cosimo founded a Platonic Academy. The study of Greek brought with it examination, comparison, criticism; it brought new knowledge; it gave new ideas to all the arts, new impulses to the creative imagination, and general intellectual freedom. Interest in the humanities became so widespread throughout the peninsula that we get a feeling of Italian unity stronger than any we have experienced since the days of Theodoric.
The importance of the humanists, however, was merely as an intellectual leaven. They need not be spoken of apart from the general intellectual movement which expressed itself so much more fully and freely in art than in any other way. That movement kindled enthusiasm from Lombardy to Calabria; and Florence still maintained her primacy. All the other cities of Italy lagged far behind her. We must therefore keep Florence as our paradigm, only remembering that at her heels a score of cities toil and pant in artistic eagerness to make themselves as beautiful and famous as Florence.
There Cosimo, _Pater Patri_, had died in fulness of years and was succeeded by his grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, though not immediately, for there was a short-lived Piero in between. Lorenzo took his grandfather's place, became lord of Florence in all but name, and stood the centre of a brilliant group of artists, sculptors, poets, and scholars. His reign, for it must be so called, lasted from 1469 to 1492, a most notable span of time. The mere names of the famous Florentines would fill pages. A few must be mentioned: Benedetto da Maiano, sculptor and architect, who carved the beautiful pulpit in Santa Croce, and drew the designs for the palace-fortress of the Strozzi; Giuliano da San Gallo, sculptor and architect, who made the plans for Lorenzo's villa at Poggio a Caiano; Andrea della Robbia, nephew to Luca, and almost his equal in the tender charm of his blue and white Madonnas; Mino da Fiesole, who made a bust of Lorenzo's father, and carved in marble the sweetness of young mothers; Antonio Rossellino, who wrought the famous tomb for a great Portuguese prelate in the church of San Miniato; Andrea Verrocchio, who painted the Uffizi Annunciation, so beautiful that it was long attributed to Leonardo, modelled the lady _dalle belle mani_ in the Bargello, and the Colleoni at Venice, greatest of equestrian statues; Benozzo Gozzoli, who painted the three generations of Medici in the Riccardi palace, and in the Campo Santo at Pisa the enchanting frescoes which turn the Old Testament into a kind of Arabian Nights; Antonio Pollaiuolo, sculptor and painter, a leader in the new school of realism, and notable for the feeling of movement which he conveys; Filippino Lippi, Lippo Lippi's son, who completed the frescoes in the chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine left unfinished by Masaccio; Botticelli, the greatest of all the Florentine painters, except Leonardo and Michelangelo; Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose frescoes in Santa Maria Novella tell us more about those shrewd, capable, quick-witted Florentines than any historian; Pulci, the poet, who wrote ”Morgante Maggiore,” a gay epic, which Savonarola thought ought to be burned; Poliziano, great embodiment of culture, who wrote the first lyrical tragedy, and led the way towards the opera; Marsilio Ficino, the philosopher who helped Cosimo found the Platonic Academy; Pico della Mirandola, the charming scholar, whom Machiavelli called ”a man almost divine.”
Perhaps none of these men were equal to the leaders in the group which surrounded Cosimo, but they are more interesting to us, and touch our sympathy more readily. They are nearer to us. The earlier problems in architecture, sculpture, and painting were more difficult, but they had been successfully solved; and the fresh problems, which confronted the younger generation, though less adventurous, were more refined. The sons have entered into a hard-earned inheritance, and live more freely. They have more spiritual alertness than their fathers though less vigour, more sensitiveness to pa.s.sing moods though less robustness, greater mastery of technique though less genius for principles. Less great themselves, they have created greater works. Benedetto's Palazzo Strozzi is more majestic and splendid than Michelozzo's Palazzo Riccardi; Verrocchio's statue of Colleoni surpa.s.ses Donatello's Gattamelata; Botticelli's poetry is more interesting, at least to the unlearned, than Masaccio's puissant drawing. Nevertheless, the greater intimacy of sympathy and interest which we feel for the later men is not accounted for by their greater command of their crafts. There is some new element less readily discovered. We perceive a change of att.i.tude toward life, a new conception of human existence. The readiest explanation and perhaps the best, if we do not treat it as completely adequate, lies in the new Greek thought (or rather Greek thought as the Florentines understood it), which the humanists contributed to Italian culture; and indeed not so much in Greek thought itself, as in the impulse it gave to a subtler and more complicated conception of life.
Direct Greek influence is most conspicuous in Botticelli. This rare spirit wandered about half in the world of reality which he ill understood and depicted badly, and half in a world of fantasy which he knew better than any other painter. The secret of this world of fantasy, as he discovered, was motion. If a vision tarries, it becomes touched by the blight of familiarity, soiled by the comrades.h.i.+p of life. The fairy spirit of imagination must be ever on the wing. No artist ever let Sweet Fancy loose as Botticelli did in his two great pictures, The Primavera (Spring) and The Birth of Venus. In them this Greek influence finds its fullest direct expression. The glory of dawn, the first unveiled fresh beauty of the world, which the Greeks saw, Botticelli saw also. But besides the childlike joy in pure beauty is another, more complicated, element. Into the rapturous Greek world, beautiful with sensuous charm, the bewildering idea of a moral order presents itself. On the countenance of Venus and in the figure of Primavera there is a wistfulness, as if they had a presentiment that they must leave the rose-strewn ocean and the magic wood in which they found themselves. The consequence is a sadness as of beholding an antagonism between two beautiful things.