Part 4 (1/2)
The lunette opposite this is one of the happiest of the series--”The Visit of St. Anthony to Paul the Hermit.” Beneath a rough natural stone archway in which the hermitage is concealed, its presence indicated by the bell which the hermit uses to call himself to prayers, the two saints sit, sharing the loaf of bread which has been brought by the faithful raven, which flies away on the left. Close to St. Paul two disciples in white robes contemplate the edifying conversation, behind St. Anthony are grouped three women, richly dressed. They advance with half-closed, wanton eyes, and by the little horns on their fas.h.i.+onably dressed hair, their bats' wings, and the claws peeping out from under their flowing skirts, their demoniacal character is betrayed. The last of the group, with head thrown back and hands resting on either side of her waist, is a very original and beautiful figure. The face and hands of St. Anthony are strongly drawn and the robes finely draped. In the hermit, dressed in the legendary garment of palm leaves, and in the very inferior figures of disciples, the hand of an a.s.sistant may be seen. The latter recall Signorelli, without his force and freshness.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Anderson photo_] [_Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome_
ST. ANTHONY AND ST. PAUL--HERMITS]
In ”The Visitation,” which fills the remaining s.p.a.ce on this side, we have one of those sweet, home-like narrative paintings so dear to Umbrian art. The Virgin and St. Elizabeth, dressed in the long conventional blue and green draperies, clasp hands in the foreground, the Virgin with downcast eyes, the saint with the searching gaze prescribed by tradition. Behind them, St. Joseph leans on a staff, and a procession of children and pages follows: a girl with graceful swathings of scarf and sleeve carries a basket of fruit upon her head, and with a child at her feet, is distantly reminiscent of certain figures by Botticelli in the Sixtine Chapel. The smiling landscape, across which the visitors have journeyed, is seen through a perspective of elaborately drawn and decorated arches, on which some of those drawings of grotesque ornamentation can be discerned. On the right, in the shadows of the arcades, is a delightful group, one of those bits with which Pintoricchio gives interest and charm to his compositions.
Zacharias, who is as yet unaware of the arrival, leans in an angle, absorbed in a book. On the ground a group of women, young and old, are occupied in spinning and embroidery; at the back another graceful figure twirls a distaff, and a child plays with a dog on the ground in front.
In some of the secondary parts of the execution of this, Schmarsow sees the hand of Pintoricchio's best scholar. The architecture has nothing of the Umbrian style, but shows the hand of one to whom the Lombard decoration, with its terra-cotta work, is familiar. The whole of the fresco is more broadly painted, the draperies in large, broad folds, the value of the landscape better kept, more softly modulated than in any we have yet noticed.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Anderson photo_] [_Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome_
THE DEMON WOMEN (Detail from the fresco of ”St. Anthony and St. Paul”)]
The light over the windows is so bad that it is almost impossible to get an adequate view of the frescoes placed there. This is particularly unfortunate in the Hall of Saints, for no one of the scenes is more beautiful, more happily grouped or more full of interest than the one of St. Sebastian's martyrdom. The young Saint who, transfixed with arrows and bound with cords, stands at the base of a column placed against a ma.s.s of ruined brickwork on Mount Palatine, is a pathetic figure, full of calm dignity and resignation. It is drawn and modelled with care and freedom, and has a force and solidity which make us regret that Pintoricchio did not give himself more chance by oftener painting studies from the nude. The figure and drapery with some modifications seem to have been adapted from his fresco of the ”Baptism of Christ,”
but he has learnt more since then, and it stands firmer and gives a greater sense of elasticity and poise. The groups of archers on either hand, shooting at their human mark, under the superintendence of a Janissary in Eastern dress,[25] are full of movement and variety. One draws his bow, another is putting the arrow in the string, another has just let fly, while behind him a fourth in half armour shades his eyes with his hand and watches the weapon speed to the mark--a quaint, matter-of-fact rendering of a scene of tragedy, which deprives it of its serious character and gives it, as Steinmann remarks, a social air, as of a friendly shooting match.
[25] In the British Museum is a drawing for this figure, attributed to Gentile Bellini, about which I shall have more to say.
The scene in which the event takes place is more interestingly painted in some ways than any of the other landscapes. It is easy to see that studies for it have been made upon the Palatine itself, where tradition has always held that Sebastian, who was a captain of the Roman Guard, met his martyrdom. The small old Roman brickwork, overgrown with exquisitely drawn acanthus and ivy, is rendered with detailed care, and broken columns stand or lie around. In the background we see the half-ruined Colosseum, as Sixtus IV. left it when he built the Sixtine Bridge from its blocks. On the right is a church--it may be San Giovanni e Paolo, or the one raised in honour of the saint himself. Nowhere up to this time has the beauty and the melancholy of the Roman landscape been rendered by any artist, and once more we feel how deeply beauty in all its forms appealed to the Umbrian painter.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Anderson photo_] [_Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome_
THE MARTYRDOM OF ST. SEBASTIAN]
We now turn to the princ.i.p.al wall, facing the window, the most splendid of all the frescoes which Pintoricchio has left. At the foot of the great arch of Constantine, which is crowned with a golden bull, St.
Catherine of Alexandria holds a theological dispute with fifty philosophers at a council convoked by the Emperor Maximian. The only woman in the great a.s.semblage, the fair little figure stands before the throne of the Emperor and ill.u.s.trates the points of her arguments upon her fingers. The same model has served here as for Santa Barbara--tradition says it was Lucrezia herself, the dearly-loved daughter of the Pope--with the small delicate features and long fair hair, which she is described by Burckhardt as possessing. The scene is laid in the usual sunny landscape. Old men with high caps and turbans dispute together, potentates ride upon the scene, pages attend their masters, bearing their volumes for reference, a greyhound steals forward at the feet of a squire who bears a halberd on his shoulder. Some are hastily searching their books as if short of arguments, but the king's daughter is speaking on without hesitation, as if inspired by an unerring director. Lucrezia was fifteen the year this was painted, and was given in marriage to Giovanni Sforza. Full of wit and charm as she was, the painter may have caught the idea of his composition from seeing her foremost in lively discussion among the n.o.bles of her father's court, but the figure and gesture is practically copied from Masolino's of the same subject in San Clemente. All the evil Lucrezia witnessed, all the black deeds she took part in, if history says truly, seem to have swept over that fair head, and when she settled down at Pesaro with her third husband, we gather that she was glad to leave intrigue and crime behind and to lead a comparatively peaceable, respectable existence for the rest of her life.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Anderson photo_] [_Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome_
THE DISPUTE OF ST. CATHERINE]
The idea of the splendour of the Pope's court has fascinated the painter, and round the beautiful girl, who was its centre, he has grouped other remarkable personages who must have struck him there. The sad-eyed, bitter-looking man in Greek dress, who stands on the left in the foreground, is said to be Andrea Paleologos, commonly called the Despot of Morea, nephew and heir of the unfortunate Emperor Constantine, under whose rule Constantinople fell into the hands of the Turks. Andrea had with his father, taken refuge at the Papal court some twenty years earlier; they had brought with them a precious gift--the bones of St.
Andrew--and the hospitality of successive Popes had been extended to them. Andrea could never forget his former grandeur or reconcile himself to his position, though, as he made profit out of his hereditary rights in many petty ways, he was held in little repute. Certainly the resentful, brooding expression, the isolated air, accords well with the descriptions of the disappointed, disinherited man, standing silent and moody while the gay court of the Renaissance is unheeding of him. This interesting attribution is now questioned by some authorities.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Anderson photo_] [_Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome_
ST. CATHERINE (A detail from the ”Dispute of St. Catherine”)]
In the British Museum are drawings of a Turk and a Turkish woman, both seated cross-legged. The drawing of the man serves for the Janissary in the ”Martyrdom of St. Sebastian,” reversed, and the arm slightly altered.
At Frankfort is a drawing of an Albanian, and also the one from which the alleged portrait of the Despot of Morea is taken.
In the Louvre are two drawings of Turks and one of a Turkish woman. Here we find the Turk standing on the Emperor's left hand, and supposed to be the Sultan Djem.
All these drawings appear to be by the same hand and done at the same time--alike in size and style. The two in the British Museum have been ascribed to Gentile Bellini, and are believed to have been sketches made by him in Constantinople. They have all the appearance of being from life. There are touches of reality in the under-robe of the Turk, the wrinkles in his face and the muscles of the neck, which entirely disappear when the sketch is transferred to the plaster wall. The question then arises, Did Pintoricchio transfer drawings by Bellini straight into his fresco, or can we entertain the opinion advanced by Signor A. Venturi, that the drawings are not by Bellini at all, but by Pintoricchio himself?[26]
[26] _L'Arte_, vol. i. p. 32.