The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 3 (of 3)

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 Sta. 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 Sta. 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 Sta. Maria Novella, in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and alone and better in Sta. 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 - "Oh che dolce cosa è questa prospettiva!" Oh what a dulcet thing is this perspective! This exclamation, usual with Paolo nodding over his compasses when his wife called him to bed, though too late to furnish the hint of a Novel to Boccaccio, has been fondly repeated by some grave writers from Vasari to the author of Lorenzo de' Medici, and has contributed to place Paolo, with the mystic help of his surname, in rather a ludicrous light.] 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 Sta. 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 - Maffei's Verona Illustrata, t. iii. p. 277.] 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 - He was the precursor of Michael Agnolo, and deserved the motto by which Borghini marked some of their designs in the portfolio of Vasari, (Vita di Donato.) viz.Ἠ Δωνατος Βοναρρωτιζει,Ἠ Βοναρρωτος Δωνατιζει.] 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 - "Vi è un monacho vecchio con due grucce sotto le braccia, nel qual si vide un affetto mirabile, e forse speranza di riaver la sanità." – Vasari, Vita di P. Uccello, t. ii. p. 56.]

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 - Born in 1401.] 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 - "Opera Terribilissima – impresa chi arebbe giustamente fatto paura a una legione di pittori." On the whole, Vasari seems to lay more stress on the quantity than the quality of Benozzo's works.] 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 - 1478.]

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 - 1478, when by the conspiracy of the Pazzi and their adherents, Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated in S. Maria del Fiore, and his brother Lorenzo wounded, it was resolved by the Signoria that paintings of the conspirators, hung by their feet, should be exposed in front of the Governor's palace; and the commission being given to Andrea, he executed it with such felicity of resemblance, such variety of hanging attitudes, and so much to the contentment of connoisseurs, that from that instant he lost the name of Andrea dal Castagno in that of "Andrea degli Impiccati," or of the hanged. —Vasari. Of this exhibition the loss may be regretted, as it would have showed us Andrea in his element.]

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 - 1439-40 – 1521.] 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 - There is to the old edition in folio, of Dante, by Niccolo della Magna, a print of the Inferno annexed, which bears the name of Sandro Botticelli; Vasari in his Life says, that he commented a part of Dante and figured his Inferno and published it.]

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 - He was the nephew of Lazzaro Vasari, a helper of Pietro della Francesca, and great uncle of Giorgio the biographer; who in the Life of Luca, with not less fondness than vanity, relates the admonition and encouragement he gave to his father and himself, in a visit which he paid in his old age to their family at Arezzo. – Vita di L. Signorelli, t. iii. p. 9.]

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 - His father, who was a goldsmith, invented and first manufactured the garlands which were at that time the fashionable head-dress of the Florentine girls. – Vasari, Vita di D. Ghirlandajo, vol. ii. p. 410.] 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 Sta. 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 - Among the uncertainties of dates, those relative to the birth of illegitimate children, for obvious reasons the most frequent, are the most perplexing. The birth of Lionardo has been fixed at various dates, viz. 1443; Lett. Pittor. t. ii. p. 192; 1445, according to the computation of Vasari; 1455, by Dargenville; 1467, by Padre Resta; with more probability 1444, by D.V. Pagave of Milano, followed by Fiorillo; but with most at 1452, by Durazzini, adopted by Lanzi. It seems improbable that Verocchio, the friend of Ser Piero, should have been only twelve years older than his pupil. Lionardo died in 1519.] 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 - In the figure of the Angel, conceived and executed by him, in the Baptism of the Saviour, at St. Salvi, which excelled the work of Verocchio so much, that indignant to be outdone by a boy, he dropped the pencil, and for ever abandoned painting. The statues of St. Thomas, in Orsanmichele at Florence, and of the Horse of Collevere at Venice, prove that Verocchio's real talent was sculpture: but the models of the three statues cast in bronze, by Rustici, for S. Giov. at Florence, and that of the great horse at Milano, place the pupil at least upon a level with the master in that branch of art.] 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 - "E non avendo egli, si può dir nulla, e poco lavorando, del continuo tenne servitori, e cavalli, &c." For all this it is the more difficult to account, as an attempt to possess himself of the philosopher's stone has never been mentioned among Lionardo's eccentricities, though he was familiar with alchymists.] 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 - Lorenzo de' Medici occurs not in the Life of Lionardo, and his acquaintance with Leo X. and Giuliano de' Medici relates to the latter periods of it.] 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.

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 - 1433 – 1527. They underwent three banishments in less than a century.] 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 - 1472 – 1492. Most splendid period of Florence this.] 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 - Nardi Storia, lib. 1. Bernardo Rucellai de Bello Italico, Lond. 1733, 4to. p. 52. Pauli Jovii Histor. sui temporis, lib. 1. Memoires de Philippe de Comines, l. vii. c. 9.] at once. The numerous partisans of the family, however, contrived to save much.[65 - Vasari, Vita di B. Bandinelli, Ed. del Bottari, t. ii. p. 576; e Vita del Torrigiano, t. ii. p. 75.]

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 - Nardi, Storia di Firenze, lib. ii. Vasari, Vita di Frà Bartolomeo; but chiefly the Life of Savonarola, by Burlamachi, inserted in Balusii Miscell. ed. Mansi, t. i. p. 558, &c.] 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 - Giovanni dalle Carniole, a celebrated engraver on stone, was an adherent of Savonarola; there is a portrait of that reformer by him, on a cornelian of uncommon size, in the Museo Flor. with this inscription,Hieronymus Ferrariensis Ord. Præd.Propheta Vir et MartyrIt is known from impressions in paste and bronze. In politics, at least, Michael Angelo was a votary of Frà Girolamo, although the nursling of the Medici.]

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 - Vasari, Vita di B.B. t. ii. p. 557.] During the havoc, Michael Angelo's statue of David lost an arm,[69 - Varchi, Storia Fiorent. p. 36.] 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 - "The two masters of Michael Angelo," says Fiorillo, "descend in equidistant degrees from the School of Cimabue and Giotto: the following scale shows the technic pedigree of M. Angelo at one glance:Cimabue.Giotto.Taddeo Gaddi.M.A. Buonarroti."What pity that this laboured scale, which has all the air of an astrologic conceit of Vasari, and gives to chance the sanction of predestination, could not be extended to Architecture! As the notion of a writer who dates the subversion of Art from the epoch and style of M. Angelo, it must appear ludicrous even to the most declared votary of that great name on this side of idolatry.] 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 - The mask of an antique Satyr, and the basso-relievo of the Centaurs, undertaken at the suggestion of Poliziano.] 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.

Soon after his election to the Pontificate, Giulio II. smitten with the wish of a sepulchral monument, called M. Angelo to Rome for that purpose. His first plan was to make it colossal, and on all sides detached, but the obstacles which were thrown in its way for a number of years, reduced it at length to the form in which it now appears at S. Pietro in Vincoli, with probably one figure only by M. Angelo's own hand, the celebrated statue of Moses in front. The attachment of Giulio to M. Angelo was great, but the independent spirit of the artist greater. Indignant at being refused access once to the Pontiff, whose mind was worried by the disturbances at Bologna, he fled, and though pursued by five messengers with letters pressing him to come back, obstinately went on to Florence; nor could his three breves[72 - One has been preserved, and as a document of the relation in which power at that time stood with art, may interest the reader."Julius P.P. II. Dilectis Filiis Prioribus Libertatis, et Vexillifero Justitiae Populi Florentini."Dilecti filii, salutem et apostolicam benedictionem. Michael Angelus sculptor, qui a nobis leviter et inconsulte discessit, redire, ut accepimus, ad nos timet, cui nos non succensemus: Novimus hujusmodi hominum ingenia. Ut tamen omnem suspicionem deponat, devotionem vestram hortamur, velit ei nomine nostro promittere, quod si ad nos redierit, illæsus inviolatusque erit, et in ea gratia apostolica nos habiturus, quâ habebatur ante discessum. Datum Romæ, 8 Julii, 1506, Pontificatûs nostri Anno iii."] addressed to the Signoria, draw him from his asylum; till Pier Soderini guaranteed his safety by investing him with the title of envoy from the Republic. Thus equipped, and accompanied by Cardinal Soderini, brother to the Gonfaloniere, he set out for Bologna, was reconciled to the Pope, and made his statue in bronze. It was placed over the gate of S. Petronio, but was thrown down in 1511 by the party of the Bentivogli, and, with the exception of the head, said to have been preserved by Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, converted into a piece of heavy artillery.

Scarcely returned to Rome, M. Angelo, by command of Giulio, instigated as it is supposed by Bramante and Giuliano da Sangallo, found himself forced to try his powers on a novel theatre of art, the decoration of the ceiling and lunette of the Capella Sistina. Whatever were the motives of the two architects, whether private pique, or envy of M. Angelo's influence over the Pontiff, or friendship for Raffaello, and the desire of showing his superiority over one whom they deemed a novice in fresco, they deserved the thanks of their own and every succeeding epoch, for the most eminent service ever rendered to art. Vasari owns that M. Angelo, conscious of his want of practice, endeavoured to escape from the commission, and even proposed Raffaello as fitter for the task; but his powers soon supplied what circumstances had refused, and single conquered with every obstacle Time itself; for, nearly fabulous to relate, the whole, though interrupted more than once by the Pontiff's impatience, was sufficiently finished to be exhibited to the public in one year and ten months.

This task finished, M. Angelo, eager to resume his labours on the monument, was disappointed by the sudden death of Giulio, (1513,) and the election of Leo X. produced a total change in his situation; he was ordered to Florence to construct the front of the Laurentian Library.

Though the death of Leo, or rather the accession of Adrian VI. had paralysed art, Michael Angelo employed the dull interim by adding some statues to the monument of Giulio; till, in 1523, Clemente VII. reappointed him to the superintendence of the new sacristy and library of S. Lorenzo. It was about this time that he finished and sent to Rome the statue of Christ, still placed in the Minerva.