T

to stagnate into blundering repetition of the Church, but no honor; they are sloth,
the same thing), wherever there is prog- stupidity, sensualism, and cunning not yet
ress, there is, in the details of that gran- risen to the dignity of a vice. They look
diose idealistic decoration, realism of the upon the dying and dead saint with indif-
crudest kind. Those Giottesque workers, ference, want of understanding, at most a
who were not content with a kind of Gothic gape or a bright look of stupid miscom-
Byzantinism, those who really handed prehension at the stigmata: they do not
over something vital to their successors even perceive that a saint is a different
of the fifteenth century, while repeating being from themselves. With these fres-
the old idealistical decorations, were study-coes of Giotto I should wish to compare
ing with extraordinary crudeness of real-
ism. Everything that was not conven-
tional ornament or type was portrait; and
portrait in which the scanty technical
means of the artist, every meagre line
and thin dab of color, every timid stroke
of brush or pencil, went towards the mer-
ciless delineation not merely of a body,
but of a soul. And the greater the artist,
the more cruel the portrait: cruelest in
representation of utter spiritual baseness
in the two greatest of these idealistic dec-
orators: Giotto, and his latest disciple,
Fra Angelico. Of this I should like to
give a couple of examples.

In Giotto's frescoes at Santa Croce one of the most lovely pieces of mere architectural decoration conceivable — there are around the dying and the dead St. Francis two groups of monks, which are astoundingly realistic. The solemn ending of the ideally beautiful life of sanctity which was so fresh in the memory of Giotto's contemporaries, is nothing beyond a set of portraits of the most ab solutely mediocre creatures, moral and intellectual, of creatures the most utterly incapable of religious enthusiasm that ever made religion a livelihood. They gather round the dead St. Francis, a noble figure, not at all ecstatic or seraphic, but pure, strong, worn out with wise and righteous labor, a man of thought and action, upon whose hands and feet the stigmata of supernatural rapture are a mere absurdity; monks who are presumably his immediate disciples, those fervent and delicate poetic natures of whom we read in the "Fioretti di San Francesco." To represent them Giotto has painted the likeness of the first half-dozen friars he may have met in the streets near Santa Croce: not caricatures, nor ideals, but portraits. Giotto has attempted neither to exalt nor to degrade them into any sort of bodily or spiritual interestingness. They are not low nor bestial nor extremely stupid. They are in various degrees dull, sly, routinist, prosaic, pedantic; their most noteworthy characteristic is that they are certainly the men who are not called by God. They are no scandal to

Fra Angelico's great ceremonial crucifixion in the cloister chapel of San Marco of Florence; for it displays to an extraordinary degree that juxtaposition of the most conventionally idealistic, pious decorativeness with realism straightforward, unreflecting, and heartless to the point of becoming perfectly grotesque. The fresco is divided into two scenes: on the one side the crucifixion, the mystic actors of the drama; on the other the holy men admitted to its contemplation. A sense that holy things ought to be old-fashioned, a respect for Byzantine inanity which invariably haunted the Giottesques in their capacity of idealistic decorators, of men who replaced with frescoes the solemn, lifeless splendors of mosaic, this kind of artistico-religious prudery has made Angelico, who was able to foreshorten powerfully the brawny crucified thieves, represent the Saviour dangling from the cross, boneless, sinewless, and shapeless. The holy persons around stand rigid, vacant, against their blue nowhere of background, with vague expanses of pink face looking neither one way nor the other; mere modernized copies of the strange, goggle-eyed, vapid beings on the old Italian mosaics. This is not a representation of the actual reality of the crucifixion, like Tintoret's superb picture at S. Rocco, or Dürer's print, or so many others, which show the hill, the people, the hangman, the ladders and ropes and hammers and tweezers: it is a sort of mystic repetition of it, subjective if I may say so, existing only in the contemplation of the saints on the opposite side, who are spectators only in the sense that a contemplative Christian may be said to be the mystic spectator of the Passion. The thing for the painter to represent is fervent contemplation, ectastic realization of the past by the force of ardent love and belief; the condition of mind of St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, Madame Guyon: it is the revelation of the great tragedy of heaven to the soul of the mystic. Now, how does Fra Angelico represent this? A row of saints, founders of orders, kneel one behind the other, and by their side

stand apostles and doctors of the Church, | goldsmiths and sculptors, who taught admitting them to the sight of the super them modelling and anatomy, that realhuman, with the gesture, the bland, indif- istic element of Giottesque painting. Its ferent vacuity of the Cameriere Segreto ideal decorative part had become imposor Monsignore who introduces a troop of sible. Painting could no longer be a decpilgrims to the pope; they are privileged oration of architecture, and it had not yet persons, they respect, they keep up de- the means of being ornamental in itself; corum, they raise their eyes and compress it was an art which did not achieve, but their lips with ceremonious reverence; merely studied. Among its exercises in but they have gone through it all so often, anatomy, modelling, perspective, and so they are so familiar with it, they don't forth, always laborious and frequently look at it any longer; they gaze about abortive, its only spontaneous, satisfaclistlessly, they would yawn if they were tory, mature production was its portrait not too well bred for that. The others, work. Portraits of burghers in black meanwhile, the sainted pilgrims, the men robes and hoods, of square-jawed youths whose journey over the sharp stones and with red caps stuck on to their fuzzy among the pricking brambles of life's heads, of bald and wrinkled scholars and wilderness finds its final reward in this magnificoes, of thinly bearded artisans, admission into the presence of the Holi- people who stand round the preaching est, kneel one by one, with various ex- Baptist or crucified Saviour, look on at pressions; one with the stupid delight of miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complaa religious sightseer; his vanity is satis- cent, heedless, against their background fied, he will next draw a rosary from his of towered, walled, and cypressed city, of pocket and get it blessed by Christ him- buttressed square and street; ugly, but self; he will recount it all to his friends at real, interesting, powerful among the grohome. Another is dull and gaping, a tesque agglomerations of bag-of-bones clown who has walked barefoot from Va- nudities, bunched and taped-up draperies lencia to Rome, and got imbecile by the and out-of-joint architecture of the early way; yet another, prim and dapper; the Renaissance frescoes; at best among its rest indifferent, looking restlessly about picture-book and Noah's ark prettinesses them, at each other, at their feet and of toy-box cypresses, vine trellises, inlaid hands, perhaps exchanging mute remarks house fronts, rabbits in the grass, and about the length of time they are kept peacocks on the roofs; for the early Rewaiting; those at the end of the kneel- naissance, with the one exception of Maing procession, St. Peter Martyr and S. saccio, is in reality a childish time of art, Giovanni Gualberto especially, have the giving us the horrors of school-hour blunbored, listless, devout look of the priest- ders and abortions varied with the delights lets in the train of a bishop. All these of nursery wonderland: maturity, the figures, the standing ones who introduce power of achieving, the perception of and the kneeling ones who are being something worthy of perception, comes introduced, are the most perfect types only with the later generation, the one of various states of dull, commonplace, immediately preceding the age of Raphael mediocre routinist superstition; so many and Michelangelo, with Ghirlandaio, SigCamerlenghi on the one hand, so many norelli, Filippino, Botticelli, Perugino, Passionists or Propagandists on the other: and their contemporaries. the first aristocratic, bland, and bored; the second dull, listless, mumbling, chewing Latin prayers which never meant much to their minds, and now mean nothing; both perfectly reverential and proper in behavior, with no more possibility of individual fervor of belief than of individual levity of disbelief: the Church, as it exists in well-regulated decrepitude. And thus does the last of the Giottesques, the painter of glorified Madonnas and dancing angels, the saint, represent the saints admitted to behold the supreme tragedy of the Redemption.

Thus much for the Giottesques. The Tuscans of the early Renaissance developed up to the utmost, assisted by the

But this period is not childish, is not immature in everything. Or, rather, the various arts which exist together at this period are not all in the same stage of development. While painting is in this immature ugliness, and ideal sculpture, in works like Verrochio's and Donatello's David, only a cleverer, more experienced, but less legitimate kind of painting, painting more successful in the present, but with no possible future, the almost separate art of portrait-sculpture_arises again where it was left by Græco-Roman masters, and, developing to yet greater perfection, gives in marble the equivalent of what painting will be able to produce only much later: realistic art which is decora

tive; beautiful works made out of ugly | outlined, cross-legged knight or praying materials.

priest, flattened down on his pillow as if The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculp- ashamed even of that amount of promiture are strange: its life, its power, de- nence, and in a hurry to be trodden down pend upon death; it is an art developed and obliterated into a few ghostly outin the burying vault and cloister cemetery. lines. But to this humiliated prostrate During the Middle Ages sculpture had image, to this flat thing doomed to oblithad its reason, its vital possibility, its eration, came the sculptor of the Renaissomething to influence it, nay, to keep it sance, and bade the wafer-like simulacrum alive, in architecture; but with the disap- fill up, expand, raise itself, lift itself on pearance of Gothic building disappears its elbow, arise and take possession of also the possibility of the sculpture which the bed of state, the catafalque raised covers the portals of Chartres and the high above the crowd, draped with brobelfry of Florence. The pseudo-classic cade, carved with rich devices of leaves colonnades, entablatures, all the thin bas- and beasts and heraldry, roofed over with tard Ionic and Corinthian of Alberti and a daïs, which is almost a triumphal arch, Bramante, did not require sculpture; or garlanded with fruits and flowers, upon had its own little supply of unfleshed ox- which the illustrious dead were shown to skulls, greengrocer's garlands, scallopings the people; but made eternal, and of eterand wave-linings, which, with a stray siren nal magnificence, by the stone-cutter; and one or two bloated emperors' heads, and guarded, not for an hour by the livamply sufficed. On the other hand, me- eried pages or chanting monks, but by diæval civilization and Christian dogma winged genii for all eternity. Some peodid not encourage the production of naked ple, I know, call this a degradation, and or draped ideal statues like those which say that it was the result of corrupt pride, antiquity stuck on countless temple fronts, this refusal to have the dear or illustrious and erected at every corner of square, dead scraped out any longer by the shoestreet, or garden. The people of the nails of every ruffian, rubbed out by the Middle Ages were too grievously ill-grown, knees of every kitchen wench; but to me distorted, hideous, to be otherwise than it seems that it was due merely to the indecent in nudity; they may have had fact that sculpture had lost its former an instinct of the kind, and, ugly as they employment, and that a great art cannot knew themselves to be, they must yet (thank Heaven!) be pietistically self-huhave found in forms like those of Ver-miliating. Be this as it may, the sculpture rocchio's David insufficient beauty to give of the Renaissance had found a new and much pleasure. Besides, if the Middle singularly noble line of work, the one in Ages had left no moral room for ideal which it was great, unique, unsurpassed, sculpture once freed from the service of because untutored. It worked here witharchitecture, they had still less provided out models, to suit modern requirements, it with a physical place. Such things with modern spirit; it was emphatically could not be set up in churches; and only modern sculpture, the only modern sculpa very moderate number of statues could ture which can be talked of as somebe wanted as open-air monuments in the thing original, genuine, valuable, by the narrow space of a still Gothic city; and, side of antique sculpture. Greek antiqin fact, ideal heroic statues of the early uity had evaded death, and neglected the Renaissance are fortunately not only ugly dead; a garland of mænads and fauns but comparatively few in number. There among ivy leaves, a battle of amazons or remained, therefore, for sculpture, unless centaurs; in the late semi-Christian, Placontented to dwindle down into brass and tonic days, some Orphic emblem, or gen. gold miniature work, no regular employ. ius; at most, as in the exquisite tombs of ment save that connected with sepulchral the Keramikos of Athens, a figure, a monuments. During the real Middle youth on a prancing steed, like the Phidian Ages, and in the still Gothic north, the monument of Dexileus; a maiden, draped ornamentation of a tomb belonged to ar- and bearing an urn, but neither the youth chitecture: from the superb miniature nor the maiden is the inmate of the minsters, pillared and pinnacled and tomb: they are types, living types, no sculptured, cathedrals within the cathe-portraits. Nay, even where antiquity dral, to the humbler foliated arched can- shows us Death or Hermes, gently leadopy, protecting a simple sarcophagus at ing away the beloved, the spirit, the the corner of many a Lombard Street, manes, the dead one, is unindividual. the sculptor's work was but the low relief "Sarkophagen u. Urnen bekränzte der on the church flags, the timidly carved, Heide mitt Leben," said Göthe; but it

smooth life-current circulating through their heroes; so did these men of the fifteenth century give the gentle and harmo nious ebbing after-life of death in their sepulchral monuments. Things difficult to describe, and which must be seen and remembered. There is Rossellino's Car

the slight body, draped in episcopal robes, lying with delicate folded hands, in gracious decorum of youthful sanctity; the strong, delicate head, of clear feature and gentle furrow, of suffering and thought, a face of infinite purity of strength, strength still ungnarled by action; a young priest, who in his virginal dignity is almost a noble woman.

was the life which was everlasting be- sance. As the Greeks gave the strong, cause it was typical, the life not which had been relinqished by the one buried there, but the life which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes. The Romans, on the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as more domestic, less coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from the Etrus-dinal of Portugal at St. Miniato a Monte: cans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a desire unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband and wife stare forth togaed and stolaed, half reduced to a conventional crop-headedness, grim and stiff as if sitting unwillingly for their portrait; or reclining on the sarcophagus lid, neither dead, nor asleep, nor yet alive and awake, but with a hieratic mummy stare, have little of æsthetic or sympathetic value. The early Renaissance, then, first bethought it of representing the real individual in the real death slumber. And I question whether anything more fitting could be placed on a tomb than the effigy of the dead as we saw them when the coffin-lid is being closed down, as we would have given our all to see them but one little moment longer, as they continue to exist for our fancy within the grave; for to any but morbid feelings the beloved can never suffer decay. Whereas a portrait of the man in life, as the throning popes in St. Peter's, seems heartless and derisive; such monuments striking us as conceived and ordered by their inmates while alive, like Michelangelo's Pope Julius, and Browning's bishop, who was so preoccupied about his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the late Middle Ages, felt better than this: on the extreme pinnacle, high on the roof, they might indeed place against the russet brick or the blue sky, amid the hum of life and the movement of the air, the living man, like the Scaligers, the mailed knight on his charger, lance in rest; but in the church below, under the funereal pall, they could place only the body such as it may

have lain on the bier.

And that figure on the bier was the great work of Renaissance sculpture. Inanimate and vulgar when in heroic figures they tried to emulate the ancients, the sculptors of the fifteenth century have found their own line. The modesty, the simplicity, the awful and beautiful repose of the dead; the individual character cleared of all its conflicting meannesses by death, simplified, idealized as it is in the memory of the survivors all these are things which belongs to the Renais

And there is the Ilaria Guinigi of Jacopo della Quercia (the man who had most natural affinity with the antique of all these sculptors, as one may see from the shattered remains of the Fonte Gaia of Siena), the lady stretched out on the rose-garlanded bed of state in a corner of Lucca Cathedral, her feet upon her sleeping dog; her sweet, girlish head, with wavy plaits of hair encircled by a rose-wreathed, turban-like diadem, lying low on round cushions; the bed gently giving way beneath the beautiful, amplebosomed body, round which the soft robe is chastely gathered, and across which the long-sleeved arms are demurely folded; the most beautiful lady (whose majestic tread through the palace rooms we can well imagine) that the art of the fifteenth century has recorded. There is, above all, the Carlo Marsuppini of Desiderio da Settignano, the humanist secretary of the commonwealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb with shell fretwork and curling acanthus, in Santa Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty of the Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady Ilaria are commonplace compared with the refinement of this worn old face, with scant, wavy hair and thin, gently furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features. slight figure looks as if in life it must have seemed almost transparent; and the hands are very pathetic; noble, firm hands, subtle of vein and wrist, crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, but in gentle weariness, over the book on his breast. That book is certainly no prayer. book; rather a volume of Plato or Cic ero; in his last moments the noble old man has longed for a glance over the familiar pages; they have placed the book on his breast, but it has been too late ; the drowsiness of death has overtaken him, and with his last sigh he has gently folded

The

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