Essays and Studies (Swinburne)/Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence
NOTES ON DESIGNS OF THE OLD MASTERS
AT FLORENCE.
In the spring of 1864 I had the chance of spending many days in the Uffizj on the study of its several collections. Statues and pictures I found ranged and classed, as all the world knows they are, with full care and excellent sense; but one precious division of the treasury was then, and I believe is still, unregistered in catalogue or manual. The huge mass of original designs, in pencil or ink or chalk, swept together by Vasari and others, had then been but recently unearthed and partially assorted. Under former Tuscan governments this sacred deposit had Jain unseen and unclassed in the lower chambers of the palace, heaped and huddled in portfolios by the loose stackful. A change of rule had put the matter at length into the hands of official men gifted with something more of human reason and eyesight. Three rooms were filled with the select flower of the collection acquired and neglected by past Florentine governors. Each design is framed, glazed, labelled legibly outside with the designer's name: the arrangement is not too far from perfect for convenience of study. As there can be no collection of the kind more rich, more various, more singular in interest, I supplied for myself the want of a register by taking hasty memorial notes of all the important designs as they fell in my way. They are not ranged in any order of time, nor are all a painter's drawings kept together; some have samples scattered about various corners of different rooms, but all accessible and available. Space even there is bounded, and valued accordingly. In the under chambers there still remain piles of precious things but partially set in order. To these the public visitor has not access; but through the courtesy of their guardian I was offered admission and shown by him through the better part. There are many studies of the figure by Andrea del Sarto which deserve and demand a public place; others also of interest which belong to the earlier Florentine school; many nameless but some recognisable by a student of that time of art. In such studies as these the collection is naturally richest; though, as will at once be seen, not poor in samples of Milanese or Venetian work. The fruitful vigour, the joyous and copious effusion of spirit and labour, which makes all early times of awakening art dear to all students and profitable to all, has left noble fragments and relics behind, the golden gleanings of a full harvest. In these desultory notes I desire only to guide the attention to what seems worthiest of notice, without more form of order than has been given by the framers and hangers; taking men and schools as they come to hand, giving precedence and prominence only to the more precious and significant, For guide I have but my own sense of interest and admiration; so that, while making the list of things remarkable as complete and careful as I can, I have aimed at nothing further than to cast into some legible form my impression of the designs registered in so rough and rapid a fashion; and shall begin my transcript with notices of such as first caught and longest fixed my attention.
Of Leonardo the samples are choice and few; full of that indefinable grace and grave mystery which belong to his slightest and wildest work. Fair strange faces of women full of dim doubt and faint scorn; touched by the shadow of an obscure fate; eager and weary as it seems at once, pale and fervent with patience or passion; allure and perplex the eyes and thoughts of men. There is a study here of Youth and Age meeting; it may be, of a young man coming suddenly upon the ghostly figure of himself as he will one day be; the brilliant life in his face is struck into sudden pallor and silence, the clear eyes startled, the happy lips confused. A fair straight-featured face, with full curls fallen or blown against the eyelids; and confronting it, a keen, wan, mournful mask of flesh: the wise ironical face of one made subtle and feeble by great age. The vivid and various imagination of Leonardo never fell into a form more poetical than in this design. Grotesques of course are not wanting; and there is a noble sketch of a griffin and lion locked or dashed together in the hardest throes of a final fight, which is full of violent beauty; and again, a study of the painter's chosen type of woman: thin-lipped, with a forehead too high and weighty for perfection or sweetness of form; cheeks exquisitely carved, clear pure chin and neck, and grave eyes full of a cold charm; folded hands, and massive hair gathered into a net; shapely and splendid, as a study for Pallas or Artemis.
Here, as in his own palace and wherever in Florence the shadow of his supreme presence has fallen and the mark of his divine hand been set, the work of Michel Angelo for a time effaces all thought of other men or gods. Before the majesty of his imperious advent the lesser kings of time seem as it were men bidden to rise up from their thrones, to cover their faces and come down. Not gratitude, not delight, not sympathy, is the first sense excited in one suddenly confronted with his designs; fear rather, oppressive reverence, and well-nigh intolerable adoration. Their tragic beauty, their inexplicable strength and wealth of thought, their terrible and exquisite significance, all the powers they unveil and all the mysteries they reserve, all their suggestions and all their suppressions, are at first adorable merely. Delightful beyond words they become in time, as the subtler and weightier work of Æschylus or Shakespeare; but like these they first fill and exalt the mind with a strange and violent pleasure which is the highest mood of worship; reverence intensified to the last endurable degree. The mind, if then it enjoys at all or wonders at all, knows little of its own wonder or its own enjoyment; the air and light about it is too fine and pure to breathe or bear. The least thought of these men has in it something intricate and enormous, faultless as the formal work of their triumphant art must be. All mysteries of good and evil, all wonders of life and death, lie in their hands or at their feet. They have known the causes of things, and are not too happy. The fatal labour of the world, the clamour and hunger of the open-mouthed all-summoning grave, all fears and hopes of ephemeral men, are indeed made subject to them, and trodden by them underfoot; but the sorrow and strangeness of things are not lessened because to one or two their secret springs have been laid bare and the courses of their tides made known; refluent evil and good, alternate grief and joy, life inextricable from death, change inevitable and insuperable fate. Of the three, Michel Angelo is saddest; on his, the most various genius of the three, the weight of things lies heaviest. Glad or sad as the days of his actual life may have been, his work in the fullness of its might and beauty has most often a mournful meaning, some grave and subtle sorrow latent under all its life. Here in one design is the likeness of perishable pleasure; Vain Delight with all her children; one taller boy has drawn off a reverted and bearded mask, on which another lays hold with one hand, fingering it as with lust or curiosity; his other hand holds to the mother's knee; behind her a third child lurks and cowers; she, with a hard broad smile of dull pleasure, feeds her eyes on the sight of her own face in a hand-mirror. Fear and levity, cruelty and mystery, make up their mirth; evil seems to impend over all these joyous heads, to hide behind all these laughing features: they are things too light for hell, too low for heaven; bubbles of the earth, brilliant and transient and poisonous, blown out of unclean foam by the breath of meaner spirits, to glitter and quiver for a little under the beams of a mortal sun. Cruel and curious and ignorant, all their faces are full of mean beauty and shallow delight. Hard by, a troop of Loves haul after them, with mocking mouths and straining arms, a live human mask, a hollow face shorn off from the head, old and grim and sad, worn through and through with pain and time, from the vexed forehead to the sharp chin which grates against the ground; the eyes and lips full of suffering, sardonic and helpless; the face of one knowing his own fate, who has resigned himself sadly and scornfully to the violence of base and light desires; the grave and great features all hardened into suffering and self-contempt.
But in one separate head there is more tragic attraction than in these: a woman's, three times studied, with divine and subtle care; sketched and re-sketched in youth and age, beautiful always beyond desire and cruel beyond words; fairer than heaven and more terrible than hell; pale with pride and weary with wrong-doing; a silent anger against God and man, burns, white and repressed, through her clear features. In one drawing she wears a head-dress of eastern fashion rather than western, but in effect made out of the artist's mind only; plaited in the likeness of closely-welded scales as of a chrysalid serpent, raised and waved and rounded in the likeness of a sea-shell. In some inexplicable way all her ornaments seem to partake of her fatal nature, to bear upon them her brand of beauty fresh from hell; and this through no vulgar machinery of symbolism, no serpentine or otherwise bestial emblem; the bracelets and rings are innocent enough in shape and workmanship; but in touching her flesh they have become infected with deadly and: malignant meaning. Broad bracelets divide the shapely splendour of her arms; over the nakedness of her firm and luminous breasts, just below the neck, there is passed a band as of metal. Her eyes are full of proud and passionless lust after gold and blood; her hair, close and curled, seems ready to shudder in sunder and divide into snakes. Her throat, full and fresh, round and hard to the eye as her bosom and arms, is erect and stately, the head set firm on it without any droop or lift of the chin; her mouth crueller than a tiger's, colder than a snake's, and beautiful beyond a woman's. She is the deadlier Venus incarnate;
θeά.
for upon earth also many names might be found for her: Lamia re-transformed, invested now with a fuller beauty, but divested of all feminine attributes not native to the snake–a Lamia loveless and unassailable by the sophist, readier to drain life out of her lover than to fade for his sake at his side; or the Persian Amestris, watching the only breasts on earth more beautiful than her own cut off from her rival's living bosom; or Cleopatra, not dying but turning serpent under the serpent's bite; or that queen of the extreme East who with her husband marked every day as it went by some device of a new and wonderful cruelty. In one design, where the cruel and timid face of a king rises behind her, this crowned and cowering head might stand for Ahab's, and hers for that of Jezebel. Another study is in red chalk; in this the only ornaments are ear-rings. In a third, the serpentine hair is drawn up into a tuft at the crown with two ringlets hanging, heavy and deadly as small tired snakes. There is a drawing in the furthest room at the Buonarroti Palace which recalls and almost reproduces the design of these three. Here also the electric hair, which looks as though it would hiss and glitter with sparks if once touched, is wound up to a tuft with serpentine plaits and involutions; all that remains of it unbound falls in one curl, shaping itself into a snake's likeness as it unwinds, right against a living snake held to the breast and throat. This is rightly registered as a study for Cleopatra; but notice has not yet been accorded to the subtle and sublime idea which transforms her death by the aspic's bite into a meeting of serpents which recognise and embrace, an encounter between the woman and the worm of Nile, almost as though this match for death were a monstrous love-match, or such a mystic marriage as that painted in the loveliest passage of "Salammbô," between the maiden body and the scaly coils of the serpent and the priestess alike made sacred to the moon; so closely do the snake and the queen of snakes caress and cling. Of this idea Shakespeare also had a vague and great glimpse when he made Antony "murmur, Where's my serpent of old Nile?" mixing a foretaste of her death with the full sweet savour of her supple and amorous "pride of life." For what indeed is lovelier or more luxuriously loving than a strong and graceful snake of the nobler kind?
After this the merely terrible designs of Michel Angelo are shorn of half their horror; even the single face as of one suddenly caught and suddenly released from hell, with wild drapery blown behind it by a wind not of this world, strikes upon the sight and memory of a student less deeply and sharply. Certain of his slight and swift studies for damned souls and devils—designs probably for the final work in which he has embodied and made immortal the dream of a great and righteous judgment between soul and soul—resemble much at first sight, and more on longer inspection, the similar studies and designs of Blake. One devil indeed recalls at once the famous "ghost of a flea," having much of the same dull and liquorish violence of expression. Other sketches in the small chamber of his palace bring also to mind his great English disciple: the angry angel poised as in fierce descent; the falling figure with drawn-up legs, splendidly and violently designed; the reverted head showing teeth and nostrils: the group of two old men in hell; one looks up howling, with level face; one looks down with lips drawn back. Nothing can surpass the fixed and savage agony of his face, immutable and imperishable. In this same room are other studies worth record: a Virgin and Child, unfinished, but of supreme strength and beauty; the child fully drawn, with small strong limbs outlined in faint red, rounded and magnificent; soft vigorous arms, and hands that press and cling. There is a design of a covered head, looking down; mournful, with nervous mouth, with clear and deep-set eyes; the nostril strong and curved. Another head, older, with thicker lips, is drawn by it in the same attitude.
Beside the Jezebel or Amestris of the Uffizj there is a figure of Fortune, with a face of cold exaltation and high clear beauty; strong wings expand behind her, or shadows rather of vast and veiled plumes; below her the wheel seems to pause, as in a lull of the perpetual race. This design was evidently the sketch out of which the picture of Fortune in the Corsini Palace was elaborated by some pupil of the master's. In that picture, as in the Venus and Cupid with mystic furniture of melancholy masks and emblems in the background, lodged now in the last Tuscan chamber but one of the Uffizj, the meaner hand of the executive workman has failed to erase or overlay the great and fruitful thought of that divine mind in which their first conceptions lay and gathered form. The strong and laughing God treading with a vigorous wantonness the fair flesh of his mother; the goddess languid and effused like a broad-blown flower, her soft bright side pressed hard under his foot and nestling heel, her large arm lifted to wrest the arrow from his hand, with a lazy and angry mirth; and at her feet the shelves full of masks, sad inverted faces, heads of men overset, blind strings of broken puppets forgotten where they fell; all these are as clearly the device of Michel Angelo's great sad mind as the handiwork is clearly none of his. Near the sketch of Fortune is a strange figure, probably worked up into some later design. A youth with reverted head, wearing furry drapery with plumy fringes, has one leg drawn up and resting on a step; the face, as it looks back, is laughing with fear; the hysterical horror of some unseen thing is branded into the very life of its fair features. This violent laugh as of a child scared into madness subjects the whole figure, brilliant and supple in youth as it seems, to the transformation of terror. Upon this design also much tragic conjecture of allegory or story might be spent, and wasted.
There are here no other sketches so terrible, except one of hell by Luca Signorelli, rough and slight in comparison: a fierce chaos of figures fighting, falling, crushing and crushed together, their faces hissed at and their limbs locked round by lithe snakes, their eyes blasted and lidless from the hot wind and heaving flame; one lost face of a woman looks out between two curving bat's wings, deadlier than the devils about her who plunge and struggle and sink.
The sketches of Filippo Lippi are exquisite and few. One above all, of Lucrezia Buti in her girlhood as the painter found her at Prato in the convent, is of a beauty so intolerable that the eyes can neither endure nor abstain from it without a pleasure acute even to pain which compels them to cease looking, or a desire which, as it compels them to return, relapses into delight. Her face is very young, more faultless and fresher than the first forms and colours of morning; her pure mouth small and curved, cold and tender; her eyes, set with an exquisite mastery of drawing in the clear and gracious face, seem to show actual colour of brilliant brown in their shapely and lucid pupils, under their chaste and perfect eyelids; her hair is deeply drawn backwards from the sweet low brows and small rounded cheeks, heaped and hidden away under a knotted veil whose flaps fall on either side of her bright round throat. The world has changed for painters and their Virgins since the lean school of Angelico had its day and its way in art; this study assuredly was not made by a kneeling painter in the intervals of prayer. More vivid, more fertile, and more dramatic than Lippo, the great invention and various power of Benozzo never produced a face like this. For pure and simple beauty it is absolutely unsurpassable; innocent enough also for a Madonna, but pure by nature, not chaste through religion. No creeds have helped to compose the holiness of her beauty. The meagre and arid sanctities of women ascetic by accident or abstemious by force have nothing in common with her chastity. She might be as well a virgin chosen of Artemis as consecrated to Christ. Mystic passions and fleshless visions have never taken hold upon her sense or faith. No flower and no animal is more innocent; none more capable of giving and of yielding to the pleasure that they give. Before the date of her immortal lover there was probably no artist capable of painting such a thing at all: and in none of his many paintings does the stolen nun look and smile with a more triumphant and serene supremacy of beauty.
There are two studies of the Holy Family by Lippo in these rooms; the one nearest this separate head of Lucrezia is a sketch for the picture above the doorway in the far small room filled with works of the more ancient masters only. The St. John in this sketch is admirable for fat strength and childish character; and the entire group, in outline as in colour, full of that tender beauty combined with vigorous grace of which this great painter never fails. The second study is more curious; the child lies between the mother's and a nurse's hands; a large book lies open on a broad straw chair, and a tall boy leans upon the chair and watches. The attempted realism here is as visible as in the other is a voluntary subjection to conventional habit and the beauty of prescription. Near the first group are some small studies of separate figures; two of boys, very beautiful. One, a schoolboy or chorister seemingly, is seated on a form and clothed in a long close gown; his face, grave and of exquisite male beauty, looking down as if in pain or thought; from some vessel at his feet rises a thick column of lighted smoke. Another boy with full curled hair is drawn as walking close behind.
Of Sandro Botticelli the samples are more frequent; and in these simple designs the painter is seen at no disadvantage. The dull and dry quality of this thin pallid colouring can here no longer impair the charm of his natural grace, the merit of his strenuous labour. Many of his single figures are worthy of praise and study: the head of a girl with gathered hair; the figure of a youth raised from the dead; that of an old man with a head like a satyr's. Two groups not far apart may be used as studies of his various power and fancy. The first, of two witches loosely draped, not of the great age common to their kind; one stirs and feeds the fire under a caldron of antique fashion and pagan device; one turns away with a hard dull smile showing all her wolfish teeth. The second, of a tuft of marsh-lilies midway on a steep and bare hill-side; under them, where the leaves and moistened earth are cool from the hidden well-head, a nymph lies deeply asleep; Cupid, leaning and laughing over her with a clear and crafty face, presses one hand upon her bosom while the other draws out an arrow. The design is full of fresh beauty, a sense of light and wind and fragrant high-lying land. A Virgin with veil bound up is among the gracefullest and purest of his many studies in that kind. Here also is a sketch for the single figure of Venus, seemingly the one sold in England in 1863, with no girdle of roses round the flanks; not the lovelier or likelier Venus of the two. Another careful satyr-like head suggests the suppressed leaning to grotesque invention and hunger after heathen liberty which break out whenever this artist is released from the mill-horse round of mythologic virginity and sacred childhood; in which at all times he worked with such singular grace and such ingenuity of pathetic device. A sample of his religious manner is the kneeling angel with parted lips and soft fair face; another, the figure of St. John wrapped in skins. Among the unregistered designs here is one, evidently a study for the male figure in Botticelli's beautiful and battered picture of Spring; beautiful for all its quaintness, pallor, and deformities. The sketched figure is slightly made, with curling hair, and one hand resting by the hip; the tree to which in the picture he turns and reaches after fruit is not here given. Among others which may belong to this painter is the sketch of a heavy beardless mask, with fat regular features, round chin, and open lips; an older face, three-quarters seen, with a sick and weary look in the lips, with eyes and cheeks depressed; a child's head, large, sharp though round, studied evidently and carefully from the life; the mouth curved, with long lips; an old profile, aquiline and small; and a head somewhat resembling that of Blake, bald, but with curling hair on the temples; with protuberant brow and protrusive underlip, the chin also prominent. In all these is the same constant and noble effort to draw vigorously and perfectly, in many the same faint and almost painful grace, which give a distinct value and a curious charm to all the works of Botticelli.
The splendid and strong fertility of Filippino Lippi, unequalled save by that of Benozzo, has here borne much noble fruit. His numerous sketches are ranged in different rooms, far apart from each other, among various samples of his own school and time; and may be noted at random, single figures and larger groups alike. The artist had less gift of reproducing physical beauty, less lyric loveliness of work, less fullness of visible and contagious pleasure in his execution, than his father; but far more of variety, of flexible emotion, of inventive enjoyment and indefatigable fancy. From the varied and vagrant life of the elder these qualities might rather have been expected to develope in him than in his son; but if Lippo is more of a painter, Lippino is more of a dramatist. To him apparently the sudden varieties and resources of secular art becoming visible and possible conveyed and infused into his work a boundless energy of delight. Much may be traced to his master Botticelli; more to the force of a truly noble blood inherited from the monk and nun his parents, glorious above all their kind for beauty, for courage and genius; most of all to the native impulse and pliancy of his talent. From his teacher we may derive the ambition after new things, the desire of various and liberal invention, the love of soft hints and veiled meanings, with something now and then of the hard types of face and form, the satisfaction apparently found in dry conventional faults, which disfigure the beauty of Botticelli's own pictures. With these types however he was not long content; no faces can be fuller of a lovely life and brilliant energy than many of Lippino's; and his father's incomparable sense of beauty could not but have preserved from grave or continual error even a son who had not inherited and acquired so many and such noble powers. It is singular that some of the faultiest and most favourite types of his master reappear in the late frescoes of Lippino which add even to the church of Santa Maria Novella new glory and beauty. In those two great pictures of martyrdom and miracle there are faces suggestive of overmuch leather and bony outline, such as Botticelli, in the violent pursuit of realism, too often allowed himself to design for the sake of genuine expression and physical fidelity. Whereas in Lippino's earlier and greater frescoes at the Carmine there is no shortcoming of the kind. A fair sample of the somewhat lean and fleshless beauty, worn down it seems by some sickness or natural trouble rather than by any ascetic or artificial sorrow, in which Botticelli must have taught his pupil to take pleasure, is here in the veiled head of Simonetta, thin-faced, with small sharp features, bright intent eyes, and rippling hair; a model, it will be remembered, dear to the teacher of Lippino. Scarcely less in the manner of his master is the figure of an angel waiting by a door, or the group of witches and beggars, full of a fierce tumultuous grace. Near these is the strange typical figure of a woman holding what seems some armorial blazon on a scroll in her hand; her face is also thin, fierce, and hesitating; some doubtful evil, some mystery of a witch's irresolute anger, is half expressed and half suppressed by her features and action. If indeed she was meant simply for the presiding genius of a family or some allegoric spirit about to proclaim their titles, the artist has contrived to give her rather the aspect of a sorceress who holds their house in her hand, a Sidonia ready to destroy their hope of generation by a single spell. Especially will she recall the heroine of Meinhold to those who have seen Mr. E. Burne Jones's nobler drawing of the young Sidonia wearing a gown whose pattern is of branching and knotted snakes, black upon the golden stuff; for the garment of this witch also is looped up and brooched with serpents. Not far off is the figure of a youth, turbaned, with both hands clasping a staff; his face that of one suddenly startled; noticeable, as are all these smaller studies, for graceful and individual character. Two larger sketches in the same room seem to be either parts of a single story or dubious and tentative studies taken while the artist had not made up his mind how to work and what to work upon. In the one, Cupids discover a knight sleeping in some dim spell-bound place; with soft laughter, with silent feet and swift fingers, they draw off his armour and steal away the sword and helmet, leaving his head bare to the dew and wind of that strange twilight. In the other division, parted off by a mere rough line drawn across the paper, a knight armed, and newly-landed from a ship just inshore, finds a maiden asleep under the sea-rocks; in the low sky behind the ship a faint fire of dawn has risen, and touches the shadowed shore and the dissolving clouds with growing and hesitating light. The design was not improbably made for a picture of Bacchus and Ariadne; it has the cold and lucid beauty of an older legend translated and transformed into mediæval shape. More than any others, these painters of the early Florentine school reproduce in their own art the style of thought and work familiar to a student of Chaucer and his fellows: or pupils, Nymphs have faded into fairies, and gods subsided into men. A curious realism has grown up out of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could not but falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino's has all the singular charm of the romantic school which remains alike remote from pure tradition and allegoric invention. The clear form has gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight; no freshness and fervour of new significance has come to supplant it; no memory and no desire has begun to reach back with studious eyes and reverted hands towards it, as towards some purer and fuller example of art than any elsewhere attainable; but the mediæval or romantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. False and monstrous as are the conditions and the local colouring with which it works, the forms and voices of women and men which it endeavours to make us see and hear are actually audible voices and visible forms. Before Chancer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory of the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, the whole poem collapsed into romance; but far as these may be removed from the true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not phantoms; they tread real earth, and breathe real air, though it be not in Greece or Troas. Discrowned of epic tradition, dispossessed of divine descent, they are not yet wholly modern, not yet degraded and deformed into base and brutish likeness by the realism and the irony of Shakespeare. Divine they are no longer, but not as yet merely porcine and vulpine. So it is with such designs as this Ariadne, if Ariadne it be; they belong to the same age, almost to the same instant, of transition. Two great samples exist of this school among painters: the Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, the Death of Procris by Piero di Cosimo. Of Filippino's sketch the chief charm lies in a dim light of magic morning mixed with twilight and shed over strange seas and a charmed shore. No careful and grateful student of this painter can overlook his special fondness for sea-sides; the tenderness and pleasure with which he touches upon the green opening of their chines or coombs, the clear low ranges of their rocks. Two admirable pictures in Florence bear witness to this; in the Uffizj his great Adoration of the Magi, where beyond the furthest meadows and behind the tallest trees far-off downs and cliffs open seaward, and further yet pure narrow spaces intervene of gracious and silent sea; and in the Pitti his small similar landscape of the Nativity, where adoring angels rain roses after roses over mother and child; and outside a close fence of interwoven rose-bushes, the sweet and various land breaks down to a green clear shore after miles of rocky and watery field. But that something of the same fondness is perceptible in Botticelli (especially in the background of his Venus, and in a very small picture at the Academia of St. Augustine and the child-angel, where infinite quiet capes and headlands divide bay from receding bay), it might be imagined that with the blood of a father who had roved and laboured perforce by sea Filippino had inherited some salt relish of the pure wide water and various shore unknown to the placid inland painters of his age, content as cattle or sheep with the valley and the field. To him therefore, rather than to Filippo, in whom this note of preference is not so perceptible, must on all accounts be assigned the honour—for to either it must be an additional honour—of having painted the Holy Family in the Corsini Palace, where children make music on strange instruments, and in the background low broken rocks enclose and reveal cold inlets and quiet reaches of the sea. The colour and manner too seem altogether those of Lippino.
His finest study here of a single figure is in another part of the room; a beautiful head of a youth bent sideways, with curls blown back and eager joyful eyes under lifted brows and eyelids; the lips parted with eloquent and vehement expression of pleasure; his cloak is loose, but the collar close about the round and splendid column of his throat; the mouth seems indeed to talk, the hair to vibrate, the eyes to glitter. Near it is a group also noticeable, a boy seated and reaching out both arms towards a girl hard by; full of vivid grace and action, Here too is a long narrow drawing for an architectural facade; in a niche St. Martin and the beggar, who holds the cloak for the saint to cut; the design is active and careful, capable of being put to noble use in fresco or sculpture. Another slight sketch suffices to show the power and enjoyment of a great artist; the bull which has borne Europa far out into mid-sea, looking back with reverted horn and earnest eye, plunges on ahead through a dim swell of obscure and heaving water. No land is in sight, and no sky given; the faint full wave of outer sea, beyond roller or breaker, is dimly seen to sweep and heave in continuous moving outline. A design apparently for the story of Phaethon (or more probably, as I now think, of Hippolytus) has the same kind of mediæval realism as that of Ariadne; four horses plunge violently forward, whirling after them charioteer and chariot; one alone turns backwards his reinless neck in angry liberty; a man hard by, staff in hand, warns eagerly and vainly with hopeless hand and voice. Near this is a noble figure of Fear; the spirit or god of this passion attired in red, with hair loose under a cap lightly set on; in his hand a bow without a bow-string; the whole form and face violently afraid, terrified even to passion. In the second room are two other remarkable studies assigned to Filippino; one of a woman with low fat eyelids, round bare forehead, and cheeks with the hair drawn well off, and a short strained throat. The other, a composition of three figures; one, with a cap half covering his curls, seems to remonstrate; one, turning away, rests his foot sideways on a stool, showing the sole; a third, with face and left arm raised together, grasps a stool in his right hand. The story or the sense of this design may be conjectured by those who have time or taste for such guesswork.
The studies by Paolo Uccello give proof in the main rather of his laborious care and devout desire to work well than of his rare and vigorous fancy. Separate heads and figures of his drawing recur in more than one division; one at least is worth a second look; an ancient close-capped head, with the ear bent up as by continuous pressure upon it of knight's helmet or citizen's bonnet; the eye bright, and the neck thick; the mouth, with under-lip thrust out, expressive of a sick and scornful fatigue; a portrait seemingly of some one overworked by thoughtful or active life; an old man of great strength now wearing weak. Other figures, less suggestive, are not less vigorous in design: studies of men wrestling and sleeping, and two or three of a boy wrought evidently after the same model, various in grace of attitude; now sitting and now kneeling, and again seen from behind leaning on a spear, holding one foot with his hand, the full drapery drawn with skill and labour. Among other such academic studies we may notice that of a naked man, bony and sinewy in build of figure, seated on a narrow chair and holding out at arm's length a spear or staff. The woman resting against another chair is singularly beautiful for an artist who seems oftener to have painted men and animals in scenes of war or labour. Two other women are sitting near; another drawing of the same man shows him sitting on the ground and clasping his knees. There is yet another study of wrestlers, one lifting the other back to back with a violent grace of action. In small drawing of a boy watching some beast feed, which may be a rabbit or not, the boy's head recalls a noticeable head by Benozzo in the group of singing angels near the altar of the Riccardi chapel; a head full-curled, open-mouthed, showing the teeth bare; suddenly recalling the more grotesque manner of Blake in the midst of those fair smooth faces of serene and joyous angels, Two more of these sketches may here be set down; one of a child, swift and slight; one of the Moorish king Balthazar bearing his gifts for Christ. All these, however graceful and good, are simply sketched for the sake of such draperies and postures; elsewhere the man's strong fancy and freshness of invention stand more visibly forward. His finest sketch here given is a design which recalls Chaucer's tale of three robbers, who seeking for Death to slay him are directed by an old man to a field where lies a great heap of treasure; the two elder send the youngest for wine that they may drink together to their good luck, and when left alone devise to slay him on his return and share the spoil; meantime he buys them poison for wine, being mindful of past violences, and covetous as they of the treasure; he returning is stabbed, and his murderers drink and die; and thus all three overtake the Death they sought. In this drawing of Paolo's three men lie dead in a wide woody field; the youngest in front, turned half over on his face as one who has died hard; the two others rigid and supine, with faces upturned to the bleak heaven, as men slain by sudden judgment. The rare trees growing in this fatal field of blood, a barren and storm-swept Aceldama, are bare of limb and worried with wind, blown out of shape and vexed with violent air; not a bird or beast has here place to feed or sing, but a grey and drifted roof of cloud leaves dark the shaken grass and haggard trees.
Piero di Cosimo has not here more than three or four drawings; not however mere studies after models, but compositions marked with the strong romantic invention, the subtle questionable grace, which more or less distinguish at all times from his fellows the painter of Procris and Andromeda. Here the sacred dove is seen poising over the heads of children at prayer, two holding an open book, others bearing lilies; a design full of the pure blind pleasure of worship. There a saint enters the desolate Thebaid with almost smiling face, the smile controlled by sadness and the sadness lighted by a smile; he is high up already in the waste land, full of storms and streams; the pine and the poplar are wasted with wind, the ground covered as with stones of stumbling and rocks of offence; only higher yet on a ledge of the hill-side under lee of the pine-wood a hermit's cottage hangs over the one barren path that winds among bleak spaces and windy solitudes. No modern realist has excelled in quaint homeliness of device Piero's study of a Nativity. The sacred group of mother, child, and angel is gathered together in a farm-house room; of this group the angel supporting the new-born child in his arms is the most graceful figure: the ox looking on has an air of amusement, not of the reverence improper to brute nature; amused possibly at the lodging chosen for it by an artist whose neglect of the traditional manger is a sample of his eccentric scorn of traditions. The window of this room looks out on a low land at sunrise, coldly lighted by the clear level morning new-born with the birth of Christ. The subject of another study I have not guessed at. Before a judge in round cap and eastern robe stands a girl averting her eyes from a Jew-faced man with silk sash and high hat, who is in act (it seems) to draw a dagger from his sleeve; her expression that of a disdainful desire for death rather than shame; to her on the other hand a plumed knight seems eagerly to appeal; his face is distinct in character, with small sharp upper lip and large chin. The girl may be a martyr standing before her judge for her faith's sake, between the lover she renounces and the traitor she abhors; or the subject may be simply taken in full from some mediæval legend of adventurous constancy: it is assuredly graceful and vital as a piece of work.
There are a few designs of either Pollajuolo; by Piero, a fine head, wrinkled and sullen; a youth with clasped hands in grinning agony of fear, the lips convulsed and sharpened by the rapid spasm; by Antonio, an angel's or virgin's head, over-sweetened into a look of dulcet devotion, but graceful in its fashion; a lady lightly veiled and sharply smiling, with ringlets on the neck and the main mass of hair plaited up behind; groups of saints and virtues, chief among them Justice and Prudence with serpents emblematic of wisdom; a fight of Centaurs and Lapithz; male studies, possibly for his picture of St. Sebastian in the National Gallery; one in half-length stripped naked and seeming to appeal, and one of ruffianly feature looking upwards as though after the flight of his arrow; and a singular allegoric design, in which Fortune from a platform shakes gold into the hands of an infant, borne in the arms of a man weeping aloud and violently, while another child clings to his leg; a winged boy leaning on a bar looks up to the group and laughs; his light glad spiritual scorn, the blind bright indifference of the goddess who gives and the infant who receives gold, the loud agony of the grown man on whom, though bearing in his very hands the chosen of fortune, no flake of the golden rain has fallen; the helpless adherence of the slighted older child; all these are touched with rough suggestive rapidity, and share with many others the chief charm of these studies; that gift, namely, which they give us, of ability to see for a little the passage of swift thoughts and flying fancies across fruitful minds of masters whose daily work was cut out something too much on one pattern, exclusive therefore of new device and mobile invention. Near this is what seems a portrait-drawing of a boy seated, thinking hard, unhandsome, with long mouth, powerful and grave.
Like others of the minor masters, Alessio Baldovinetti shows here more capacity of thought and work in slight studies than in large pictures, where his touch is thin and his work sterile. His Deposition from the Cross is fine enough to surprise at first sight, fresh and not feeble, inventive even, as in the action of the boy assisting. Another group by the same hand is forcible and expressive: two men, with faces full of busy passion, meet and exchange rapid looks; the one with hands clasped, the other about to mount a step on which his foot already rests, with elbow on knee and cheek on hand; hard by waits an attendant with a short pike, and near him a torturer or hangman, with the tools of his trade. This design is probably a sketch to be worked up in some picture of martyrdom; its dramatic and distinct intention strikes and attracts at once. By Taddeo Gaddi is a noticeable drawing of the meeting of Elizabeth and Mary; noticeable mainly for its background of rocky barren highland, with lean trees rising behind the low quaint house whence the elder woman has come forth in glad reverence and eager welcome. Of Mantegna there are but few samples, grouped mainly with those of Botticelli near the entrance of the first room; a design of the final death-grapple of Anteus with Hercules; one of Judith attended by two maids; a mask as of one just awakened after death in hell, fierce with perpetual fear and violent with immortal despair; a young girl gathering up her dress and looking back, her old nurse near at hand—a Juliet as it were before the advent of passion; a youth raised from the dead, in whom miraculous life leaps back into a face full of dawning wonder and departing heaviness; an old man satyr-headed; a kneeling Virgin, recalling to modern eyes the earliest pictures of Mr. Rossetti—a type of clear holiness and grave beauty. Of Francia there is one example, pretty enough if also petty; a Virgin and Child among flowering rose-beds. Of Benozzo Gozzoli there is merely a double group of angels and pilgrims, not of course without interest for those who would follow in any way of work the trace of this Chaucer of painting; but not so full of labour and of life as they might hope, who had seen the cartoon at Pisa for his lost fresco of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and felt there as always the fruitful variety and vigour of his sleepless and joyous genius. By Ghirlandajo there is a veiled Virgin of straight and sad profile; by Masolino, a sketch of boys disputing, and a woman with chaplet in hand; by some pseudo-Giotto or Giottino, a Saint Cecilia at a piano-like organ, with a dog roughly sketched—curious and worth a look; by Pesello, a Virgin seated between Christ and St. John, an arm passed round either child; their heads are merely sketched; her face, under a light veil of loose hair, has a look at once pained and smiling. By Pesellino there are some fine studies of single figures, worth notice rather than comment. Of Masaccio there is here less than might be hoped; a few single figures, and one sketch of a crowd, strong but slight, and to which only the name appended draws immediate attention. By Lorenzo di Credi there is an elaborate study of a kneeling saint with huge fan-shaped beard.
In the same room, as elsewhere, are many sketches by hands unknown. Among these are several full of various power and fine invention. A few only can here be noticed at random; as these: a man's head, three-quarters seen, with strong brows well apart, lips open and somewhat narrow, firm flattish nose and short neck; a girl seen from behind, with huddled clothes and arms violently lifted; studies of boys by the same hand, some sitting, one kneeling on a stool, one holding his foot; and again, different from this, a naked boy with foot wounded by a thorn; exquisite, and not copied from the statue; but full of grace and fair life. Elsewhere, also unassigned, is a vigorous drawing of a monk's head with cowl flung back: a larger design of the Virgin and certain saints adoring the corpse of Christ in a wilderness where grow the palms of martyrdom; far off by the ready grave an angel watches in wait; on a remote hill three dim crosses rise scarcely into light; and in another line of distance a city is seen, and bays of sea on a varying shore. To this is appended a note stating that the owner in 1458,[1] "had it from a painter in the Borgo San Sepolcro, named Pietro."
By the sculptor Ghiberti there is a study for a statue in the shrine of a virgin saint; she stands glorified in the grace and state of delicate work, with hair drawn upwards round the head.
By Simone Memmi there is a finished drawing in three divisions, as though for a triptych; first the shepherds awakened by a sudden sound of descending angels; then the Nativity, then the Crucifixion, with a guard of armed knights about the cross. There is no other sample of early Sienese work, and but one later drawing of a Sienese artist.
Of the Venetians, early or late, there is ample and splendid witness even in these slighter things how supreme was their power upon all forms of beauty. The drawings of Titian and Giorgione are indeed the chief decorations of the place. Among the earlier of their famous men there is a sketch by Gentile Bellini, of a procession with lighted candles through a square with a central well. The great painter of sacred feasts and triumphal crowds has left one minor and separate study: a youth reclining, who leans against a tree, his head crowned with rich and rippling hair. Of such studies there are many by his greater brother; one in red chalk, a lank-haired aquiline head; a group of monks, one kneeling as reproved, with a face of stupid shame; the reprover, an erect ascetic figure, stands over him with features sharpened for rebuke; two others look on, sly and frightened. By Giovanni too there is a procession; the crowd swarms deep in street and loggia, under roof and abroad. Near this is a sketch of a poet crowned with broad leaves of laurel, his back turned. In Bellini's chiaroscuro drawing of the "Burial of Christ" (No. 581 in the Uffizj Catalogue) there reappears as Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea a head here separately sketched; a head rather aging than aged, turbaned, with double tuft of moustache, and whiskers meeting under the chin; with strong mouth and glancing eyes. There is also a drawing by the master of himself, done in red chalk: the beautiful grave face, sweet and strong, full of grace and thought, is hard to mistake or to forget.
The designs of Carpaccio recall not less than these the painter's habit of mind and work. By him there is a drawing of two brothers, one with sword by side and wearing deep boots, one clothed in a full civic gown with round balls hanging down it by way of fringe, both with spurs on their heels. One design may be a sketch for his Presentation of the Virgin: here in the Piazzetta of Venice a priest receives a kneeling girl. There are sketches besides of hags, of priests and nuns; a dog-headed chimæra with a fragment of sword stuck in its neck, the knight about to despatch it with the haft; a crowd with horses and trumpets filling the Piazza of St. Mark, here altered in proportions, but not the less recognisable; studies of full-sleeved arms and hands—one bearing keys, one a book, one an apple, and so forth—studiously wrought and varied; a head that might well serve for Shylock's, the typical Jew of Venice, with a face of keen and vigorous cruelty; a reading priest, with broad beard shaped like an open fan.
But the designs of Titian and Giorgione are more precious and wonderful than these. From his sketches alone it might be evident that Titian was the chief of all landscape painters. The priceless samples of his work here exhibited demand long and loving study from those who desire to estimate them aright. They are fresher than the merest suggestions, more perfect than the most finished elaborations of other men. It is not by intellectual weight or imaginative significance that these Venetians are so great. That praise is the proper apanage of the Milanese and the Roman schools—of Michel Angelo and Leonardo. Those had more of thought and fancy, of meaning and motive. But since the Greek sculptors there was never a race of artists so humbly and so wholly devoted to the worship of beauty. This was enough for them; and for no other workmen. First among these pen-and-ink landscapes of Titian is one which gives us in full outline the likeness of a high hill, rising over a fort; before and beyond it a wild length of broken land expands and undulates, clothed with all manner of trees in full beauty of blossom and leaf, haunted by flying and settling birds. Next to this we find a sudden sunny bank in the dim depth of a wood, with a wolf at watch and a rabbit at wait. Next, a bay deeply wooded to the verge of the soft sea, with low rocks far off under the wash of the tender water. The fourth design is traversed by a river, which curves rapidly and roughly round the sudden steep of a broken bank, fringed with wild herbage and foliage of untrimmed and windy growth; in front, where the wide water elbows its way round a corner of grassy land, a little child is embracing a lamb, with fat strenuous arms and intent face; hard by is the stump of a felled tree, well-nigh buried in rank overgrowth of deep wild grass; beyond this the rising towers of a city watered by the further stream, and a remote church seen among tall slim stems of trees. Next to this we find a city set among the sloping folds of a hill-country; full in front of the design are two firs, rigidly clipped and pared up to the topmost tuft; on a rise of ground beyond these a small close wood, crowning as with native plumes the head of the slanting land; in the middle valley are sheep at pasture; and the wooded slopes, warm with summer and sweet at once with life and sleep, bend and flow either way in fruitful repose, shaped like waves of the sea after a wind, that seem at once to move and to rest, to change and to remain.
Next, a sudden nook or corner of high-lying land in some wild wood, opening at the skirt upon a fresh waste ground, a place of broken banks fringed and feathered with thick grasses full of the wind and the sun; to the right, a land of higher hills, with a city framed and radiant among them. Then comes another such corner of woodland, rocky, strewn with stones curiously notched and veined; and here too infinite summer hills open and recede and melt into further and nearer forms in solid undulation without change, billows of the inland crowned not with foam but with grass, and clothed with trees, not moulded out of mutable water.
Other work of Titian is here besides these seven finished sketches; slighter work, and not in the line of landscape. There is a vision of Virgin and Child appearing in a Thebaid desert to some saint—Anthony apparently, as the typical swine's snout obtrudes itself with a quaint innocent bestial expression. Note also a lovely and vigorous group of Cupids grappling in play with a great hound, which all they can hardly overset; the eager laughing labour of the bare-limbed boys and the gravely gamesome resistance of the beast are things to see and remember, as given by the great master. There are studies too for the famous picture of St. Peter Martyr; there is a head like Michel Angelo's Brutus, with large bread nose.
In samples of Giorgione's work the collection is not less rich. Sixteen sketches and studies, variously finished, bear witness for him. First, a most noble male profile, with blunt nose, mouth fretted, and hard cheek; a strong man weary, with tough spirit growing tired too. Unlike this, a large priestly head, loose about the jaw, firm in the upper part; with a long mouth like a slit; by no means unlike the recognisable head of Alexander VI.; on the medals of the great Borgia you see just such a strong brow of statecraft, such a resolute eye, such a heavy lax lustful under-face. Next, three heads together; the first may be boy's or girl's, having in it the delicious doubt of ungrown beauty, pausing at the point where the ways of loveliness divide; we may give it the typical strawberry flower (Fragoletta) and leave it to the Loves; the second is a priest's, wearing a skull-cap, and very like the middle musician of the three in Giorgione's divine picture in the Pitti; the third an old man's head, cowled and bearded. Next a girl with a book of music; many bend over her; two faces to the right are specially worth notice; a youth of that exquisite Venetian beauty which in all these painters lifts male and female together on an equal level of loveliness; and an older head near him, stamped with scorn as with a brand. Next, and slightly wrought, on a raised couch or step of a palace, a group of revellers embracing and gazing outward; one leans round a girl to read with her from some joyous book. Next, a full face, wasted by time or thought or pleasure, with a clear sardonic look left in it; next, a close-curled imperial head; next, a gathering of counsellors, a smile on their chief man's face. Then a very noble naked study from behind; a figure planted with knees apart as if bestriding, with strained back and muscles leaping, with curly Herculean hair; naked down to the thighs, then draped, but finished only to one knee. Next, one of the most perfect of these studies, a superb head of one in pain, the face drawn and not disfigured by suffering. Next, an infant covering its mouth with its hand in a lifelike and gracious gesture. Next, in a Thebaid, a skin-clad saint sinking as in swoon, all but sunken already through fasting or trance; on the same paper are studies of hands and feet. Then a Virgin and Child, with an old man kneeling; then the figure of a youth seemingly made ready for torture, a fair and brave martyr's face; this and the next are figures about two-thirds or three-fourths of the length of the whole. The next I take to be a design for Lucretia; a naked woman, loose-haired, with the left arm raised, and with the right hand setting as it seems a dagger under the right breast; on the wall by her is an escutcheon, which may indicate, if it be a serious part of the design, some later suicide than the Roman matron's; it matters little to the interest of the study. Apart from these is a sketch of some pagan feast, with torchlight and blast of trumpets; several figures and faces are noticeable here: a youth fallen on his knees; a boyish torch-bearer, with blown cheeks and subtle sharp-edged eyes; the head of a boy who rests his hand on the shoulder of another; a face seen behind, with rounded mouth and blowing hair: the whole design profuse of interest and invention. In these light sketches, or even in these rough notes, the vivacity and warm strength as of sunlight which distinguish the painter's imagination are traceable. With all the deep sweet tragic colour, the divine oppression of a delight whose eyes grow sorrowful with past thought and future dream—"large discourse, looking before and after;" with all the pathos of pleasure never translated as in his pictures but once, in Keats's Ode to Melancholy; the adorable genius of Giorgione, like the beautiful mouth of Chaucer's mistress, is always "most glad and sad."
By Paolo Veronese there is one design of a feast disturbed and breaking up; in one corner the figure of an old man; a girl sinking at his feet clasps him by the ancle. In front of course is a dog, and sidelong from under the table-cloth a dog's head peers with the bright-eyed caution of its kind; the whole design has interest and character. Unluckily for the affectionate students of Bonifazio, there is but one slight sketch by that master of all gracious and pleasant beauty; as the subject is music-making, it might have been finished into a nobly delightful piece of work, and significant of his love of sweet sound and fair form met together and made one in the sight of art. Of Tintoretto there is not much arranged and framed above-stairs: a Doge in his quaint buttoned robe; a study of a knight's lance and helmet held by his page—Gattamelata's, as I thought at first, a design for the great portrait, but it seems doubtful. A more important design is one, very noble and impressive in sentiment, of the Deposition of Christ; the body is carried off through a steep and strait gorge between rocky hills below Calvary; the Virgin has fallen in utter swoon. There is also a small oval-faced figure of a girl at prayer; and a noble design of four angels rushing down to judgment, with violent wings and blowing trumpets that betray the artist; their fierce flight and thunder of summoning sound have roused the dead already; some are precipitated hellward, some aspire as on sudden wings; three newly roused sit still and gaze upward. Again, a naked woman startled in bed by the advent of a witch with cap and broom . In the lower rooms, among the unregistered masses of designs, I saw a huge port folio crammed with rough figure-sketches by Tintoretto, in his broad gigantic manner, but too slight to be of any descriptive interest, though to him they doubtless had their use and might have the like to an artist who should now care to study them.
Assigned to Raffaelle is a sketch in pen-and-ink of a cavalcade passing a seaport town, recognisable as the first design for one of the great series at Siena representing the life of Æneas Sylvius, in which Raffaelle is supposed to have assisted Pinturicchio. The name of "Messer Domenicho da Capranicha" (the Cardinal) is scribbled on the drawing itself; and the composition is pretty much that of the fresco; the horses turn at the same point, the groups are massed and the line of harbour shown in the same manner. By Giulio Romano there are two designs for Circe; in one the sorceress lets down an urn among her transformed beasts, holding it may be some strange food or fume of magic drugs; among them are two griffins and an eagle. In the other design she is in the act of transformation, an incarnate sorcery; two men yet undegraded are already confounded and lost with their fallen fellows. Another careful sketch is that of Dædalus building up the hollow wooden cow for Pasiphae; the strange machine is well-nigh perfect; a whole troop of Loves lend helping hands to the work, sawing wood, whetting steel, doing all manner of carpentry, with light feet and laughing faces full of their mother's mirth.
Of Sodoma, again, there is but one example; it may be that Vasari's well-known and memorable ill-will towards the great Sienese excluded others from his collection, if indeed this one came from thence, It is a beautiful and elaborate drawing, partly coloured; a boy with full wavy curls, crowned with leaves, wearing a red dress banded with gold and black and fringed with speckled fur; the large bright eyes and glad fresh lips animate the beauty of the face; Razzi[2] never painted a fairer, full as his works are of fair forms and faces.
I may here, as well as anywhere else among these disconnected notes, turn to the samples of German work in this collection; to the sketches of Durer, Holbein, and Mabuse, which have found favour in Italian eyes. Two studies of the Passion by Durer are noticeable; in this Christ is bearing the cross, in that sinking under it; the press of the crowd, the fashion of the portcullis, recall the birthplace and the habit of the master. From his hand we have also secular and allegoric sketches; one a design for the famous figure of Fortune; an old man's head with heavy lips and nose, a collar tied loose round the large throat; another head, bearded and supine; slight studies of man and horse and child; a Deposition of Christ, and a Burial, with fine realistic landscape hard by the city walls; a man beheading a woman, who in the act grasps hard the doomed head with his unarmed left hand. By Mabuse there is a quaint horror in the way of martyrology; the boiling of some saint in a vessel like a kitchen-pot, while one tormentor scalds his head with water or oil or molten metal out of a little bucket at the end of a pole. Mabuse in his sketches has revelled in the ways and works of hangmen, seen in a grim broad light of German laughter; their quaint gestures and quaint implements have a ludicrous and bloody look; observe another pot with rings round it, ominous and simple in make, and the boy staring with strained eyes. These fine sharp caricatures of torturers might serve a modern eye as studies for Henriet Cousin of "Notre-Damede Paris" or Master Hansen of "Sidonia;" there is a stupid funereal fun in the brute mechanism of their aspect. He has also a really fine drawing of a saint stepping into his own grave, made ready in a chapel before the altar. Martin Schöngauer too has left a good female head with ample hair, and a strong hard design of a knight and devil in deadly grapple. A head after Holbein is unmistakeable; the hair is thick, the chin long, the fine lips fretted and keen. Not far off is the only waif of Spanish art I find here; a head sketched in chalk by Velasquez, with large eyes and red lips, the upper lip thin.
I turn back to Florence for my last note; to one of her dearest and noblest names, reserved with love for this last place. With the majestic and the tragic things of art we began, at the landmarks set by Leonardo and Michel Angelo; and are come now, not quite at random, to the lyric and elegiac loveliness of Andrea del Sarto. To praise him would need sweeter and purer speech than this of ours. His art is to me as the Tuscan April in its temperate days, fresh and tender and clear, but lulled and kindled by such air and light as fills the life of the growing year with fire. At Florence only can one trace and tell how great a painter and how various he was. There only but surely there can the influence and pressure of the things of time on his immortal spirit be understood; how much of him was killed or changed, how much of him could not be. There are the first-fruits of his flowering manhood, when the bright and buoyant genius in him had free play and large delight in its handiwork; when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power of motion and variety; before the old strength of sight and of flight had passed from weary wing and clouding eye, the old pride and energy of enjoyment had gone out of hand and heart. How the change fell upon him, and how it wrought, any one may see who compares his later with his earlier work; with the series, for instance, of outlines representing the story of St. John Baptist in the desolate little cloister of Lo Scalzo. In these mural designs there is such exultation and exuberance of young power, of fresh passion and imagination, that only by the innate grace can one recognise the hand of the master whom hitherto we knew by the works of his after life, when the gift of grace had survived the gift of invention. This and all other gifts it did survive; all pleasure of life and power of mind, all the conscience of the man, his will, his character, his troubles, his triumphs, his sin and honour, heart-break and shame. All these his charm of touch, his sweetness of execution, his "Elysian beauty, melancholy grace," outlived, and biossomed in their dust. Turn from that cloistral series to those later pictures painted when he was "faultless" and nothing more; and seeing all the growth and all the gain, all the change and all the loss, one to whom the record was unknown would feel and foreknow his story and his sorrow. In the cloister, what life and fullness of growing and strengthening genius, what joyous sense of its growth and the fair field before it, what dramatic delight in character and action! where St. John preaches in the wilderness and the few first listeners are gathered together at his feet, old people and poor, soul-stricken, silent—women with worn still faces, and a spirit in their tired aged eyes that feeds heartily and hungrily on his words—all the haggard funereal group filled from the fountain of his faith with gradual fire and white-heat of soul; or where Salome dances before Herod, an incarnate figure of music, grave and graceful, light and glad, the song of a bird made flesh, with perfect poise of her sweet slight body from the maiden face to the melodious feet; no tyrannous or treacherous goddess of deadly beauty, but a simple virgin, with the cold charm of girlhood and the mobile charm of childhood; as indifferent and innocent when she stands before Herodias and when she receives the severed head of John with her slender and steady hands; a pure bright animal, knowing nothing of man, and of life nothing but instinct and motion. In her mother's mature and conscious beauty there is visible the voluptuous will of a harlot and a queen; but, for herself, she has neither malice nor pity; her beauty is a maiden force of nature, capable of bloodshed without bloodguiltiness; the king hangs upon the music of her movement, the rhythm of leaping life in her fair fleet limbs, as one who listens to a tune, subdued. by the rapture of sound, absorbed in purity of passion. I know not where the subject has been touched with such fine and keen imagination as here. The time came when another than Salome was to dance before the eyes of the painter; and she required of him the head of no man, but his own soul; and he paid the forfeit into her hands, With the coming of that time upon him came the change upon his heart and hand; "the work of an imperious whorish woman." Those words, set by the prophet as a brand upon the fallen forehead of the chosen bride, come back to mind as one studies in her husband's pictures the full calm lineaments, the large and serene beauty of Lucrezia del Fede; a predominant and placid beauty, placid and implacable, not to be pleaded with or fought against. Voluptuous always and slothful, subtle at times no doubt and sweet beyond measure, full of heavy beauty and warm slow grace, her features bear no sign of possible love or conscience. Seen side by side with his clear sad face, hers tells more of the story than any written record, even though two poets of our age have taken it up. In the feverish and feeble melodrama of Alfred de Musset there is no touch of tragedy, hardly a shadow of passionate and piteous truth; in Mr. Browning's noblest poem—his noblest it seems to me—the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh. One point only is but lightly touched upon—missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skilful—the effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love. How his life was corroded by it and his soul burnt into dead ashes, we are shown in full; but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a painter he might have been without it. This is what I think the works of his youth and age, seen near together as at Florence, make manifest to any loving and studious eye. In those latter works, the inevitable and fatal figure of the woman recurs with little diversity or change. She has grown into his art, and made it even as herself; rich, monotonous in beauty, calm, complete, without heart or spirit. But his has not been always the "low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand" it was then. He had started on his way towards another goal than that. Nothing now is left him to live for but his faultless hand and her faultless face—still and full, suggestive of no change in the steady deep-lidded eyes and heavy lovely lips without love or pudency or pity. Here among his sketches we find it again and ever again the same, crowned and clothed only with the glory and the joy and the majesty of the flesh. When the. luxurious and subtle sense which serves the woman for a soul looks forth and speaks plainest from those eyes and lips, she is sovereign and stately still; there is in her beauty nothing common or unclean. We cannot but see her for what she is; but her majestic face makes no appeal for homage or forgiveness. Above stairs and below I saw many of Andrea's studies of figure; first, a sketch of Lucrezia seated with legs bare, perfect in shapeliness and state; in a larger drawing she is naked, and holds a child; sitting, as I presume, for the appropriate part of the Virgin. There is another and most beautiful drawing on yellow paper, which gives her full face in all its glory of form without a fault—not heavenly, but adorable as heaven. His sketches of landscape and studies of children are lovely and many: round-limbed babies in red-chalk outline, with full-blown laughter in their mouths and eyes; such flowers of flesh and live fruits of man as only a great love and liking for new-born children could have helped him to render. The wonderful and beautiful make of limb and feature, the lovely lines and warm curves of the little form, are so tenderly and fully made the most of and caressed as with mother's hands, that here as in his portrait you can tell at once his fondness for them. His sad and sensitive smiling face has the look of a lover of children; the quiet and queenly beauty of his wife has not. One superb boy-baby {in Sidney's phrase, a "heavenly fool with most kiss-worthy face") attempting to embrace his round fat knees with his fat round arms, and laughing with delight in the difficulty, is a more triumphant child than ever painter drew before or since. A sketch of a castle with outlying lodge is marked as "begun on the twentieth of August, 1527." Among other studies is one of a cavalry skirmish among the rounded and rising downs of a high hill-country, with a church and castle at hand. Among the figure drawings I took note of these: a portrait in profile of a man still young, ill-favoured and sullen, with sinewy neck and cruel eye, with snub nose and thick thrust-out lips—a portrait it clearly is, and whose it would be worth while to know, so careful has the artist been to reproduce the native stamp of aspect; a naked youth, with arms doubled up round the neck, leaning aslant on a staff, with ruffed hair and a set face; a noble head, like Nero's, in red chalk, with hair blown loose and rough by the wind; a boy's figure on a step of some entrance, drawing the curtain of a tent, with loose ribbons at the shoulder, and with a curling plume of hair; a slender figure, thin and graceful, the face smiling, but drawn and fixed; the fierce aquiline head of a prophet or apostle, with upper lip thinner than the under. These complete my roll, and conclude these notes. They might have been fuller and more orderly, but could never have had any value other than that of a clear and genuine impression. Transcribed at stray times from the roughest memorial jottings, they may claim to give this at least. I close as I began them with a hope that they may perhaps, in default of a better handbook, afford some chance help to a casual student of such unclassed relics of the old great schools, and with a glad affectionate memory of these and of all things in Florence.
- ↑ I am not certain whether this be not rather the date of the painter's birth; the day of the month is added, I think the 12th or 13th of March, but cannot be sure that my hasty transcript was accurate or complete. Of the words given in the text there is no doubt.
- ↑ Bazzi, as the last Sienese guide-book will needs have him called; Razzi or Bazzi, Sodoma or Sodona, the name of St. Catherine's great painter seems doomed to remain a riddle. Happily the beauty of his work is no such open question, so that the name matters little enough.