Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

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Another of Mantegna's best pictures is in distemper--in which, and on
fresco, Mantegna chiefly painted,--and is in the Louvre, Paris. It is
the Madonna of Victory, so called from its being painted to commemorate
the deliverance of Italy from the French army under Charles VIII., a
name which has acquired a sardonic meaning from the ultimate destination
of the picture. This picture--which represents the Virgin and Child on a
throne, in an arbour of fruit and flowers, between the archangels,
Michael and St Maurice, in complete armour, with the patron saints of
Mantua and the infant St John in the front, and the Marquis Ludovico of
Mantua and his wife, Isabella D'Este, kneeling to return thanks--was
painted by Mantegna at the age of seventy years; and, as if the art of
the man had mellowed with time, it is the softest and tenderest of his
pictures in execution. A beautiful Madonna of Mantegna's, still later in
time, is in the National Gallery.

When Mantegna was sixty years old he took up the art of engraving, and
prosecuted it with zeal and success, being one of the earliest painters
who engraved his own pictures, and this accomplishment spread them
abroad a hundredfold.

Domenico Ghirlandajo was properly Domenico Bicordi, but inherited from
his father, a goldsmith in Florence,[3] the by-name of Ghirlandajo or
Garland-maker--a distinctive appellation said to have been acquired by
the elder man from his skill in making silver garlands for the heads of
Florentine women and children. Domenico Ghirlandajo worked at his
father's craft till he was twenty-four years of age, when, having in the
mean time evinced great cleverness in taking the likenesses of the
frequenters of Ghirlandajo the elder's shop, the future painter
abandoned the goldsmith's trade for art pure and simple. He soon
vindicated the wisdom of the step which he had taken by giving proofs of
something of the strength of Masaccio, united with a reflection of the
feeling of Fra Angelico.

Ghirlandajo was summoned soon to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel,
afterwards to be so glorious; but his greatest works were done in the
prime of his manhood, in his native city, Florence, where he was chosen
as the teacher of Michael Angelo, who was apprenticed to Ghirlandajo for
three years.

While still in the flower of his age and crowned with golden opinions,
being, it is said with effusion, 'the delight of his city,' Ghirlandajo
died after a short illness, in Ghirlandajo's time Florence had reached
her meridian, and her citizens outvied each other in the magnificence of
their gifts to their fair mother city. Ghirlandajo was fitted to be
their painter; himself a generous-spirited artist, in the exuberance of
life and power, he wished that his fellow-citizens would give him all
the walls of the city to cover with frescoes. He was content with the
specified sum for his painting, desiring more the approbation of his
employers than additional crowns. His genius lying largely in the
direction of portrait painting, he introduced frequently the portraits
of contemporaries, causing them to figure as spectators of his sacred
scenes. One of these contemporaries thus presented, was Amerigo
Vespucci, who was to give his name to a continent. Another was a
Florentine beauty, a woman of rank, Ginevra de Benci.

Ghirlandajo was lavish in his employment of rich Florentine costumes and
architecture. He even made the legends of the saints and the histories
of the Bible appear as if they had happened under the shadow of
Brunelleschi's duomo and Giotto's campanile, and within sound of the
flow of the Arno. In the peculiar colouring used in fresco painting
Ghirlandajo excelled.

He painted a chapel for a Florentine citizen, Francesco Sasetti, in the
church of the Trinita, Florence, with scenes from the life of St
Francis. Of these, the death of St Francis, surrounded by the sorrowing
monks of his order, with the figures of Francesco Sasetti and his wife,
Madonna Nera, on one side of the picture, is considered the best. As a
curious illustration of the modernizing practice of Ghirlandajo, he has
painted an old priest at the foot of the bier, chanting the litanies for
the dying, with spectacles on his nose, the earliest known
representation of these useful instruments.

Ghirlandajo painted during four years the choir of the church of Santa
Maria Novella, Florence, for one of the great Florentine benefactors,
Giovanni Tornabuone, and there are to be seen some of Ghirlandajo's
finest frescoes from the history of John the Baptist and the Virgin.

A Madonna and Child with angels in the National Gallery is attributed to
Ghirlandajo.

Francesco Francia, or Il Francia, was born at Bologna, and was the son
of a carpenter, whose surname was Raibaloni, but Francesco assumed the
name of his master, a goldsmith, and worked himself at a goldsmith's
trade till he was forty years of age. Indeed he may be said never to
have relinquished his connection with the trade, and certainly he was no
more ashamed of it than of his calling as a painter, for he signed
himself indiscriminately 'goldsmith' and 'painter,' and sometimes
whimsically put 'goldsmith' to his paintings and 'painter' to his
jewellery. He was a famous designer of dies for coins and medals, and it
is quite probable, as a countryman of his own has sought to prove, that
he was the celebrated type-cutter, known as 'Francesco da Bologna.' But
it is with Francesco '_pictor_' that we have to do.

Though he only began to prosecute the painter's art in middle age, he
rose with remarkable rapidity to eminence, was the great painter of
Lombardy in his day, rivalling Squarcione, Mantegna's teacher in his
school, which numbered two hundred scholars, and becoming the founder of
the early Bolognese school of painters.

Francia is said to have been very handsome in person, with a kindly
disposition and an agreeable manner. He was on terms of cordial
friendship with Raphael, then in his youth, and thirty years Il
Francia's junior. Il Francia addressed an enthusiastic sonnet to
Raphael, and there is extant a letter of Raphael's to Il Francia,
excusing himself for not sending his friend Raphael's portrait, and
making an exchange of sketches, that of his 'Nativity' for the drawing
of Il Francia's 'Judith;' while it was to Il Francia's care that Raphael
committed his picture of St Cecilia, when it was first sent to Bologna.
These relations between the men and their characters throw discredit on
the tradition that Il Francia died from jealous grief caused by the
sight of Raphael's 'St Cecilia.' As Il Francia was seventy years of age
at the time of his death, one may well attribute it to physical causes.
Il Francia had at least one son, and another kinsman, painters, whose
paintings were so good as to be occasionally confounded with those of Il
Francia.

Il Francia is thought to have united, in his works, a certain calm
sedateness and frank sincerity to the dreamy imaginativeness of some of
his contemporaries. His finest works are considered to be the frescoes
from the life of St Cecilia in the church of St Cecilia at Bologna.

Of a Madonna and Child, by Francia, at Bologna, I shall write down
another of Dean Alford's descriptions,--many of which I have given for
this, among other reasons, that these descriptions are not technical or
professional, but the expression of the ardent admiration and grateful
comprehension of a sympathetic spectator. 'He,' speaking of the Divine
Child, 'is lying in simple nakedness on a rich red carpet, and is
supported by a white pillar, over which the carpet passes. Of these
accessories every thread is most delicately and carefully painted; no
slovenly washes of meretricious colour where He is to be served, before
whom all things are open; no perfunctory sparing of toil in serving Him
who has given us all that is best. On his right hand kneels the Virgin
Mother in adoration, her very face a magnificat--praise, lowliness,
confidence; next to her, Joseph, telling by his looks the wonderful
story, deeply but simply. Two beautiful angels kneel, one on either
side--hereafter, perhaps, to kneel in like manner in the tomb. Their
faces seemed to me notable for that which I have no doubt the painter
intended to express,--the pure abstraction of reverent adoration,
unmingled with human sympathies. The face and figure of the Divine
Infant are full of majesty, as he holds his hands in blessing towards
the spectator, who symbolizes the world which He has come to save. Close
to him on the ground, on his right branch in trustful repose; on his
left springs a plant of the meadow-trefoil. Thus lightly and reverently
has the master touched the mystery of the Blessed Trinity: the goldfinch
symbolizing by its colours, the trefoil by the form of its leaf.'

In our own National Gallery is a picture by Il Francia of the enthroned
Virgin and Child and her mother, St Anne, who is presenting a peach to
the infant Christ; at the foot of the throne is the little St John; to
the right and left are St Paul with the sword, St Sebastian bound to a
pillar and pierced with arrows, and St Lawrence with the emblematical
grid-iron, etc. etc. Opposite this picture hangs, what once formed part
of it, a solemn, sorrowful Pieta, as the Italians call a picture
representing the dead Redeemer mourned over by the Virgin and by the
other holy women. These pictures were bought by our Government from the
Duke of Lucca for three thousand five hundred pounds.

Fra Bartolommeo. We come to a second gentle monk, not unlike Fra
Angelico in his nature, but far less happy than Fra Angelico, in having
been born in stormy times. Fra Bartolommeo, called also Baccio della
Porta, or Bartholomew of the gate, from the situation of his lodgings
when a young man, but scarcely known in Italy by any other name than
that of Il Frate, or the Friar, was born near Florence, and trained from
his boyhood to be a painter. In his youth, however, a terrible public
event convulsed Florence, and revolutionized Baccio della Porta's life.
He had been employed to paint in that notable Dominican convent of St
Mark, where Savonarola, its devoted friar, was denouncing the sins of
the times, including the profligate luxury of the nobles and the
degradation of the representatives of the Church. Carried away by the
fervour and sincerity of the speaker, Baccio joined the enthusiasts who
cast into a burning pile the instruments of pride, vanity, and godless
intellect denounced by the preacher. Baccio's sacrifice to the flaming
heap of splendid furniture and dress, and worldly books, was all his
designs from profane subjects and studies of the undraped figure. A
little later Savonarola was excommunicated by the Pope and perished as
a martyr; and Baccio, timid from his natural temper, distracted by
doubt, and altogether horror-stricken, took a monk's vows, and entered
the same convent of St Mark, where for four years he never touched a
pencil.

At the request of his superior Fra Bartolommeo painted again, and when
Raphael visited Florence, and came with all his conquering sweetness and
graciousness to greet the monk in his cell, something of Il Frate's old
love for his art, and delight in its exercise, returned. He even visited
Rome, but there his health failed him, and the great works of Lionardo,
Michael Angelo, and Raphael, when he compared his own with theirs,
seemed to crush and overwhelm him. But he painted better for his visit
to Rome, even as he had painted better for his intimacy with Raphael.
Nay, it is said Raphael himself painted better on account of his
brotherly regard for, and confidence in, Fra Bartolommeo.

Fra Bartolommeo died aged forty-eight years. Among his best pupils was a
nun of St Catherine's, known as Suor Plautilla.

To Il Frate, as a painter, is attributed great softness and harmony, and
even majesty, though, like Fra Angelico, he was often deficient in
strength. He was great in the management of draperies, for the better
study of which he is said to have invented the lay figure. He indulged
in the introduction into his pictures of rich architecture. He was fond
of painting boy-angels--in which he excelled--playing frequently on
musical instruments, or holding a canopy over the Virgin. Very few of
his works are out of Italy; the most are in Florence, especially in the
Pitti Palace. His two greatest works are the Madonna della Misericordia,
or the Madonna of Mercy, at Lucca, where the Virgin stands with
outstretched arms pleading for the suppliants, whom she shelters under
the canopy, and who look to her as she looks to her Son,--and the grand
single figure of St Mark, with his Gospel in his hand, in the Pitti
Palace, Florence. Sir David Wilkie said of the Madonna of Mercy, 'that
it contained the merits of Raphael, of Titian, of Rembrandt, and of
Rubens.'

Andrea Vanucchi, commonly called Andrea del Sarto, from the occupation
of his father, who was a tailor (in Italian, _sarto_), was born at
Florence in 1488. He was first a goldsmith, but soon turned painter,
winning early the commendatory title of 'Andrea senza errori,' or
'Andrea the Faultless.' His life is a miserable and tragic history. In
the early flush of his genius and industry, with its just crown of fame
and success, he conceived a passion for a beautiful but worthless woman,
whom, in spite of the opposition of his friends, he married. She
rendered his home degraded and wretched, and his friends and scholars
fell off from him. In disgust he quitted Florence, and entered the
service of Francis I, of France; but his wife, for whom his regard was a
desperate infatuation, imperiously summoned him back to Florence, to
which he returned, bringing with him a large sum of money, entrusted to
him by the king for the purchase of works of art. Instigated by his
wife, Andrea del Sarto used this money for his, or rather her, purposes,
and dared not return to France. Even in his native Florence he was
loaded with reproach and shame. He died of the plague at the age of
fifty-five years, according to tradition, plundered and abandoned in his
extremity by the base woman for whom he had sacrificed principle and
honour. We may read the grievous story of Andrea del Sarto, written by
one of the greatest of England's modern poets.

As may be imagined, Andrea del Sarto's excellence lay in the charm of
his execution. His works were deficient in earnestness and high feeling,
and some will have it, that, evilly haunted as he was, he perpetually
painted in his Madonnas the beautiful but base-souled face of the woman
who ruined him. Andrea del Sarto's best works are in Florence,
particularly in the cloisters of the convent of the Annunziata. In the
court of the same convent is his famous Riposo (or rest of the Holy
Family on their way to Egypt), which is known as the 'Madonna of the
Sack,' from the circumstance of Joseph in the picture leaning against a
sack. This picture has held a high place in art for hundreds of years.




CHAPTER IV.

LIONARDO DA VINCI, 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL,
1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566.


We have arrived at the triumph of art, not, indeed, in unconsciousness
and devotion, but in fulness and completeness, as shown in the works of
four of the greatest painters and men whom the world ever saw. Of the
first, Lionardo da Vinci, born at Vinci in the neighbourhood of
Florence, 1452, it may be said that the many-sidedness which
characterized Italians--above all Italians of his day--reached its
height in him. Not only was he a painter, a sculptor, an architect, and
engineer, but also one of the boldest speculators of the generation
which gave birth to Columbus, and was not less original and ingenious
than he was universally accomplished--an Admirable Crichton among
painters. There is a theory that this many-sidedness is a proof of the
greatest men, indicating a man who might have been great in any way,
who, had his destiny not found and left him a painter, would have been
equally great as a philosopher, a man of science, a poet, or a
statesman. It may be so; but the life of Lionardo tends also to
illustrate the disadvantage of too wide a grasp and diffusion of genius.
Beginning much and finishing little, not because he was idle or fickle,
but because his schemes were so colossal and his aims so high, he spent
his time in preparation for the attainment of perfect excellence, which
eluded him. Lionardo was the pioneer, the teacher of others, rather than
the complete fulfiller of his own dreams; and the life of the proud,
passionate man was, to him self mortification. This result might, in a
sense, have been avoided; but Lionardo, great as he was, proved also one
of those unfortunate men whose noblest efforts are met and marred by
calamities which could have hardly been foreseen or prevented.

Lionardo da Vinci was the son of a notary, and early showed a taste for
painting as well as for arithmetic and mathematics. He was apprenticed
to a painter, but he also sedulously studied physics. He is said,
indeed, to have made marvellous guesses at truth, in chemistry, botany,
astronomy, and particularly, as helping him in his art, anatomy. He was,
according to other accounts, a man of noble person, like Ghirlandajo.
And one can scarcely doubt this who looks at Lionardo's portrait painted
by himself, or at any engraving from it, and remarks the grand presence
of the man in his cap and furred cloak; his piercing wistful eyes;
stately outline of nose; and sensitive mouth, unshaded by his
magnificent flowing beard.

He was endowed with surprising bodily strength, and was skilled in the
knightly exercises of riding, fencing, and dancing. He was a lover of
social pleasure, and inclined to indulge in expensive habits. While a
lad he amused himself by inventing machines for swimming, diving, and
flying, as well as a compass, a hygrometer, etc. etc. In a combination
from the attributes of the toads, lizards, bats, etc. etc., with which
his studies in natural history had made him familiar, he painted a
nondescript monster, which he showed suddenly to his father, whom it
filled with horror. But the horror did not prevent the old lawyer
selling the wild phantasmagoria for a large sum of money. As something
beyond amusement, Lionardo planned a canal to unite Florence with Pisa
(while he executed other canals in the course of his life), and
suggested the daring but not impossible idea of raising _en masse_, by
means of levers, the old church of San Giovanni, Florence, till it
should stand several feet above its original level, and so get rid of
the half-sunken appearance which destroyed the effect of the fine old
building. He visited the most frequented places, carrying always with
him his sketch-book, in which to note down his observations; he followed
criminals to execution in order to witness the pangs of despair; he
invited peasants to his house and told them laughable stories, that he
might pick up from their faces the essence of comic expression.[4] A
mania for truth--alike in great and little things--possessed him.

Lionardo entered young into the service of the Gonzaga family of Milan,
being, according to one statement, chosen for the office which he was to
fill, as the first singer in _improvisatore_ of his time (among his
other inventions he devised a peculiar kind of lyre). He showed no want
of confidence in asserting his claims to be elected, for after declaring
the various works he would undertake, he added with regard to
painting--'I can do what can be done, as well as any man, be he who he
may.' He received from the Duke a salary of five hundred crowns a year.
He was fourteen years at the court of Milan, where, among other works,
he painted his 'Cenacolo,' or 'Last Supper,' one of the grandest
pictures ever produced. He painted it, contrary to the usual practice,
in oils upon the plastered walls of the refectory of the Dominican
convent, Milan. The situation was damp, and the material used proved so
unsuitable for work on plaster, that, even before it was exposed to the
reverses which in the course of a French occupation of Milan converted
the refectory into a stable, the colours had altogether faded, and the
very substance of the picture was crumbling into ruin.

The equestrian statue of the old Duke of Milan by Lionardo excited so
much delight in its first freshness, that it was carried in triumph
through the city, and during the progress it was accidentally broken.
Lionardo began another, but funds failed for its completion, and
afterwards the French used the original clay model as a target for their
bowmen.

Lionardo returned to Florence, and found his great rival, Michael
Angelo, already in the field. Both of the men, conscious of mighty
gifts, were intolerant of rivalry. To Lionardo especially, as being much
the elder man, the originator and promoter of many of the new views in
art which his opponent had adopted, the competition was very
distasteful, and to Michael Angelo he used the bitter sarcasm which has
been handed down to us, 'I was famous before you were born.'

Nevertheless Lionardo consented to compete with Michael Angelo for the
painting in fresco of one side of the council-hall, by the order of the
gonfaloniere for the year. Lionardo chose for his subject a victory of
the Florentines over the Milanese, while Michael Angelo took a scene
from the Pisan campaigns. Not only was the work never done (some say
partly because Lionardo _would_ delay in order to make experiments in
oils) on account of political troubles, but the very cartoons of the two
masters, which all the artists of the day flocked to see, have been
broken up, dispersed, and lost; and of one only, that of Michael Angelo,
a small copy remains, while but a fragment from Lionardo's was preserved
in a copy made by Rubens.

Lionardo went to Rome in the pontificate of Leo X., but there his
quarrel with Michael Angelo broke out more violently than ever. The Pope
too, who loved better a gentler, more accommodating spirit, seemed to
slight Lionardo, and the great painter not only quitted Rome in disgust,
but withdrew his services altogether from ungrateful Italy.

At Pavia Lionardo was presented to Francis I, of France, who, zealous
in patronizing art, engaged the painter to follow Francis's fortunes at
a salary of seven hundred crowns a year. Lionardo spent the remainder of
his life in France. His health had long been declining before he died,
aged sixty-seven years, at Cloux, near Amboise. He had risen high in the
favour of Francis. From this circumstance, and the generous, chivalrous
nature of the king, there doubtless arose the tradition that Francis
visited Lionardo on his death-bed; and that, while in the act of gently
assisting him to raise himself, the painter died in the king's arms.
Court chronicles do their best to demolish this story, by proving
Francis to have been at St Germain on the day when Lionardo died at
Cloux.

Lionardo was never married, and he left what worldly goods he possessed
to a favourite scholar. Besides his greater works, he filled many MS.
volumes, some with singularly accurate studies and sketches, maps, plans
for machines, scores for music (three volumes of these are in the Royal
Library at Windsor), and some with writing, which is written--probably
to serve as a sort of cipher--from right to left, instead of from left
to right. One of his writings is a valuable 'Treatise' on painting;
other writings are on scientific and philosophic subjects, and in these
Lionardo is believed to have anticipated some of the discoveries which
were reached by lines of close reasoning centuries later.

Lionardo's genius as a painter was expressed by his uniting, in the very
highest degree, truth and imagination. He was the shrewdest observer of
ordinary life, and he could also realize the higher mysteries and
profounder feelings of human nature. He drew exceedingly well. Of
transparent lights and shadows, or chiaroscuro, he was the greatest
master; but he was not a good colourist. His works are very rare, and
many which are attributed to him are the pictures of his scholars, for
he founded one of the great schools of Milan or Lombardy. There is a
tradition that he was, as Holbein was once believed to be, ambidextrous,
or capable of using his left hand as well as his right, and that he
painted with two brushes--one in each hand. Thus more than fully armed,
Lionardo da Vinci looms out on us like a Titan through the mists of
centuries, and he preaches to us the simple homily, that not even a
Titan can command worldly success; that such men must look to ends as
the reward of their travail, and before undertaking it they must count
the cost, and be prepared to renounce the luxurious tastes which clung
to Lionardo, and which were not for him or for such men as he was.

Lionardo's great painting was his 'Last Supper,' of which, happily, good
copies exist, as well as the wreck of the picture itself. The original
is now, after it is too late, carefully guarded and protected in its old
place in the Dominican convent of the Madonna della Grazia, Milan. The
assembled company sit at a long table, Christ being seated in the
middle, the disciples forming two separate groups on each side of the
Saviour. The gradations of age are preserved, from the tender youth of
John to the grey hairs of Simon; and all the varied emotions of mind,
from the deepest sorrow and anxiety to the eager desire of revenge, are
here portrayed. The well-known words of Christ, 'One of you shall betray
me,' have caused the liveliest emotion. The two groups to the left of
Christ are full of impassioned excitement, the figures in the first
turning to the Saviour, those in the second speaking to each
other,--horror, astonishment, suspicion, doubt, alternating in the
various expressions. On the other hand, stillness, low whispers,
indirect observations, are the prevailing expressions in the groups on
the right. In the middle of the first group sits the betrayer; a
cunning, sharp profile, he looks up hastily to Christ, as if speaking
the words, 'Master, is it I?' while, true to the Scriptural account, his
left hand and Christ's right hand approach, as if unconsciously, the
dish that stands before them.[5]

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