Part 11 (2/2)
For the lowest region is that of natural life, of plant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man. It is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built and work is done. Thence we climb to purified humanity, the mountains of purgation, the solitude and simplicity of contemplative life not yet made perfect by freedom from the flesh. Higher comes that thin white belt, where are the resting-places of angelic feet, the points whence purged souls take their flight towards infinity. Above all is heaven, the hierarchies ascending row on row to reach the light of G.o.d.
This fancy occurred to me as I climbed the slope of the Superga, gazing over acacia hedges and poplars to the mountains bare in morning light.
The occasional occurrence of bars across this chord--poplars s.h.i.+vering in sun and breeze, stationary cypresses as black as night, and tall campanili with the hot red shafts of glowing brick--adds just enough of composition to the landscape. Without too much straining of the allegory, the mystic might have recognised in these aspiring bars the upward effort of souls rooted in the common life of earth.
The panorama, unrolling as we ascend, is enough to overpower a lover of beauty. There is nothing equal to it for s.p.a.ce and breadth and majesty.
Monte Rosa, the ma.s.ses of Mont Blanc blended with the Grand Paradis, the airy pyramid of Monte Viso, these are the battlements of that vast Alpine rampart in which the vale of Susa opens like a gate. To west and south sweep the Maritime Alps and the Apennines. Beneath glides the infant Po; and where he leads our eyes the plain is only limited by pearly mist.
A BRONZE BUST OF CALIGULA AT TURIN.
The Albertina bronze is one of the most precious portraits of antiquity, not merely because it confirms the testimony of the green basalt bust in the Capitol, but also because it supplies an even more emphatic and impressive ill.u.s.tration to the narrative of Suetonius.
Caligula is here represented as young and singularly beautiful. It is indeed an ideal Roman head, with the powerful square modelling, the crisp short hair, low forehead, and regular firm features proper to the n.o.blest Roman type. The head is thrown backward from the throat; and there is a something of menace or defiance or suffering in the suggestion of brusque movement given to the sinews of the neck. This att.i.tude, together with the tension of the forehead and the fixed expression of pain and strain communicated by the lines of the mouth--strong muscles of the upper lip and abruptly chiselled under lip--in relation to the small eyes, deep set beneath their cavernous and level brows, renders the whole face a monument of spiritual anguish. I remember that the green basalt bust of the Capitol has the same anxious forehead, the same troubled and overburdened eyes; but the agony of this fretful mouth, comparable to nothing but the mouth of Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta, and, like that, on the verge of breaking into the spasms of delirium, is quite peculiar to the Albertina bronze. It is just this which the portrait of the Capitol lacks for the completion of Caligula. The man who could be so represented in art had nothing wholly vulgar in him. The brutality of Caracalla, the overblown sensuality of Nero, the effeminacy of Commodus or Heliogabalus are all absent here.
This face idealizes the torture of a morbid soul. It is withal so truly beautiful that it might easily be made the poem of high suffering or n.o.ble pa.s.sion. If the bronze were plastic I see how a great sculptor by but few strokes could convert it into an agonizing Stephen or Sebastian.
As it is, the unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of madness, made Caligula the genius of insatiable appet.i.te; and his martyrdom was the torment of l.u.s.t and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident of empire tantalized him with vain hopes of satisfying the Charybdis of his soul's sick cravings. From point to point he pa.s.sed of empty pleasure and unsatisfying cruelty, forever hungry; until the malady of his spirit, unrestrained by any limitations, and with the right medium for its development, became unique--the tragic type of pathological desire.
What more than all things must have plagued a man with that face was probably the unavoidable meanness of his career. When we study the chapters of Suetonius we are forced to feel that, though the situation and the madness of Caligula were dramatically impressive, his crimes were trivial and small. In spite of the vast scale on which he worked his devilish will, his life presents a total picture of sordid vice, differing only from pothouse dissipation and school-boy cruelty in point of size. And this of a truth is the Nemesis of evil. After a time, mere tyrannous caprice must become commonplace and cloying, tedious to the tyrant and uninteresting to the student of humanity; nor can I believe that Caligula failed to perceive this to his own infinite disgust.
Suetonius a.s.serts that he was hideously ugly. How are we to square this testimony with the witness of the bronze before us? What changed the face, so beautiful and terrible in youth, to ugliness that shrank from sight in manhood? Did the murderers find it blurred in its fine lineaments, furrowed with lines of care, hollowed with the soul's hunger? Unless a life of vice and madness had succeeded in making Caligula's face what the faces of some maniacs are--the bloated ruin of what was once a living witness to the soul within--I could fancy that death may have sanctified it with even more beauty than this bust of the self-tormented young man shows. Have we not all seen the anguish of thought-fretted faces smoothed out by the hands of the Deliverer?
FERRARI AT VERCELLI.
It is possible that many visitors to the Cathedral of Como have carried away the memory of stately women with abundant yellow hair and draperies of green and crimson in a picture they connect thereafter with Gaudenzio Ferrari. And when they come to Milan they are probably both impressed and disappointed by a Martyrdom of St. Catherine in the Brera, bearing the same artist's name. If they wish to understand this painter they must seek him at Varallo, at Saronno, and at Vercelli. In the Church of S. Christoforo, in Vercelli, Gaudenzio Ferrari, at the full height of his powers, showed what he could do to justify Lomazzi's t.i.tle chosen for him of the eagle. He has indeed the strong wing and the swiftness of the king of birds. And yet the works of few really great painters--and among the really great we place Ferrari--leave upon the mind a more distressing sense of imperfection. Extraordinary fertility of fancy, vehement dramatic pa.s.sion, sincere study of nature, and great command of technical resources are here (as elsewhere in Ferrari's frescos) neutralized by an incurable defect of the combining and harmonizing faculty so essential to a masterpiece. There is stuff enough of thought and vigor and imagination to make a dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded, dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on these mighty walls.
All that Ferrari derived from actual life--the heads of single figures, the powerful movement of men and women in excited action, the monumental pose of two praying nuns--is admirably rendered. His angels, too, in S.
Cristoforo, as elsewhere, are quite original; not only in their type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari, without a touch of Correggio's sensuality; but also in the intensity of their emotion, the realisation of their vitality. Those which hover round the Cross in the fresco of the ”Crucifixion” are as pa.s.sionate as any angels of the Giottesque masters in a.s.sisi. Those, again, which crowd the Stable of Bethlehem in the ”Nativity” yield no point of idyllic charm to Gozzoli's in the Riccardi Chapel.
The ”Crucifixion,” and the ”a.s.sumption of Madonna” are very tall and narrow compositions, audacious in their attempt to fill almost unmanageable s.p.a.ce with a connected action. Of the two frescos, the ”Crucifixion,” which has points of strong similarity to the same subject at Varallo, is by far the best. Ferrari never painted anything at once truer to life and n.o.bler in tragic style than the fainting Virgin. Her face expresses the very acme of martyrdom--not exaggerated nor spasmodic, but real and sublime--in the suffering of a stately matron.
In points like this Ferrari cannot be surpa.s.sed. Raphael could scarcely have done better; besides, there is an air of sincerity, a stamp of popular truth in this episode which lies beyond Raphael's sphere. It reminds us rather of Tintoretto.
After the ”Crucifixion,” I place the ”Adoration of the Magi,” full of fine mundane motives and gorgeous costumes; then the ”Sposalizio” (whose marriage I am not certain), the only grandly composed picture of the series, and marked by n.o.ble heads; then the ”Adoration of the Shepherds,” with two lovely angels holding the bambino. The ”a.s.sumption of the Magdalen”--for which fresco there is a valuable cartoon in the Albertina Collection at Turin--must have been a fine picture; but it is ruined now. An oil altar-piece, in the choir of the same church, struck me less than the frescos. It represents Madonna and a crowd of saints under an orchard of apple-trees, with cherubs curiously flung about almost at random in the air. The motive of the orchard is prettily conceived and carried out with spirit.
What Ferrari possessed was rapidity of movement, fulness and richness of reality, exuberance of invention, excellent portraiture, dramatic vehemence, and an almost unrivalled sympathy with the swift and pa.s.sionate world of angels. What he lacked was power of composition, simplicity of total effect, harmony in coloring, control over his own luxuriance, the sense of tranquillity. He seems to have sought grandeur in size and mult.i.tude, richness, eclat, contrast. Being the disciple of Leonardo and Raphael, his defects are truly singular. As a composer, the old leaven of Giovenone remained in him; but he felt the dramatic tendencies of a later age, and in occasional episodes he realized them with a force and _furia_ granted to very few of the Italian painters.
LANINI AT VERCELLI.
The Casa Mariano is a palace which belonged to a family of that name.
Like many houses of the sort in Italy, it fell to vile uses, and its hall of audience was turned into a lumber-room. The Operai of Vercelli, I was told, bought the palace a few years ago, restored the n.o.ble hall, and devoted a smaller room to a collection of pictures valuable for students of the early Vercellese style of painting. Of these there is no need to speak. The great hall is the gem of the Casa Mariano. It has a coved roof, with a large, flat, oblong s.p.a.ce in the centre of the ceiling. The whole of this vault and the lunettes beneath were painted by Lanini; so runs the tradition of the fresco-painter's name; and though much injured by centuries of outrage, and somewhat marred by recent restoration, these frescos form a precious monument of Lombard art. The object of the painter's design seems to have been the glorification of Music. In the central compartment of the roof is an a.s.sembly of the G.o.ds, obviously borrowed from Raphael's ”Marriage of Cupid and Psyche” in the Farnesina at Rome. The fusion of Roman composition with Lombard execution const.i.tutes the chief charm of this singular work, and makes it, so far as I am aware, unique. Single figures of the G.o.ddesses, and the whole movement of the scene upon Olympus, are transcribed without attempt at concealment. And yet the fresco is not a bare-faced copy. The manner of feeling and of execution is quite different from that of Raphael's school. The poetry and sentiment are genuinely Lombard. None of Raphael's pupils could have carried out his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill in coloring so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the master have given for such a craftsman? The hardness, coa.r.s.eness, and animal crudity of the Roman school are absent; so also is their vigor.
But where the grace of form and color is so soft and sweet, where the high-bred calm of good company is so sympathetically rendered, where the atmosphere of amorous languor and of melody is so artistically diffused, we cannot miss the powerful modelling and rather vulgar _tours de force_ of Giulio Romano. The scala of tone is silvery golden. There are no hard blues, no coa.r.s.e red flesh-tints, no black shadows. Mellow lights, the morning hues of primrose or of palest amber, pervade the whole society. It is a court of gentle and harmonious souls; and though this style of beauty might cloy, at first sight there is something ravis.h.i.+ng in those yellow-haired, white-limbed, blooming deities. No movement of lascivious grace as in Correggio, no perturbation of the senses, as in some of the Venetians, disturbs the rhythm of their music; nor is the pleasure of the flesh, though felt by the painter and communicated to the spectator, an interruption to their divine calm. The white, saffron-haired G.o.ddesses are grouped together like stars seen in the topaz light of evening, like daffodils half smothered in snow-drops, and among them Diana, with the crescent on her forehead, is the fairest.
Her dream-like beauty need fear no comparison with the Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo. Apollo and Bacchus are scarcely less lovely in their bloom of earliest manhood; honey-pale, as Greeks would say; like statues of living electron; realizing Simaetha's picture of her lover and his friend:
+tois d' en xanthotera men helichrysoio geneias, stethea de stilbonta poly pleon e ty Selana.+
It was thus that the almost childlike spirit of the Milanese painters felt the antique; how differently from their Roman brethren! It was thus that they interpreted the lines of their own poets:
E i tuoi capei piu volte ho somigliati Di Cerere a le paglie secche o bionde Dintorno crespi al tuo capo legati.[F]
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