Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

face and feeling; it had to be sensitive to, take the impress of,

all the range and moods of piety, affection, passion, suffering,

skepticism, sensualism, pride, and power. Only laborious genius

could accomplish this with marble, bronze, or clay; when Ghiberti

and Donatello attempted it they had to carry into sculpture the

methods, perspectives, and nuances of painting, and sacrificed to

vivid expression the ideal form and placid repose required of Greek

statuary in the Golden Age. Finally, the painter spoke a language more

easily understood by the people, in colors that seized the eye, in

scenes or narratives that told beloved tales; the Church found that

painting moved the people more quickly, touched their hearts more

intimately, than any carving of cold marble or casting of somber

bronze. As the Renaissance progressed, and art broadened its scope and

aim, sculpture receded into the background, painting advanced; and

as sculpture had been the highest art expression of the Greeks, so now

painting, widening its field, varying its forms, improving its skills,

became the supreme and characteristic art, the very face and soul,

of the Renaissance.

In this period it was still groping and immature. Paolo Uccello

studied perspective until nothing else interested him. Fra Angelico

was the perfection, in life and art, of the medieval ideal. Only

Masaccio felt the new spirit that would soon triumph in Botticelli,

Leonardo, and Raphael.

Certain minor talents had transmitted the techniques and

traditions of the art. Giotto taught Gaddo Gaddi, who taught Taddeo

Gaddi, who taught Agnolo Gaddi, who, as late as 1380, adorned Santa

Croce with frescoes still in Giottesque style. Agnolo's pupil, Cennino

Cennini, gathered into a Libro dell' arte (1437) the accumulated

knowledge of his time in drawing, composition, mosaic, pigments, oils,

varnishes, and other phases of the painter's work. "Here," says page

one, "begins the Book of the Art, made and composed in the reverence

of God and the Virgin Mary... and all the saints... and in the

reverence of Giotto, of Taddeo, and of Agnolo"; `050345 art was

becoming a religion. Agnolo's greatest pupil was a Camaldulese monk,

Lorenzo Monaco. In the magnificent altarpiece- The Coronation of

the Virgin - that Lawrence the Monk painted (1413) for his monastery

"of the Angels," a fresh vigor of conception and execution appeared;

the faces were individualized, the colors were brilliant and strong.

But in that triptych there was no perspective; the figures in the rear

rose taller than those in the foreground, like heads in an audience

seen from the stage. Who would teach Italian painters the science of

perspective?

Brunellesco, Ghiberti, Donatello had made approaches to it. Paolo

Uccello almost gave his life to the problem; night after night he

pored over it, to the fury of his wife. "How charming a thing is

this perspective!" he told her; "ah, if I could only get you to

understand its delights!" `050346 Nothing seemed to Paolo more

beautiful than the steady approximation and distant merging of

parallel lines in the furrows of a pictured field. Aided by a

Florentine mathematician, Antonio Manetti, he set himself to formulate

the laws of perspective; he studied how to represent accurately the

receding arches of a vault, the ungainly enlargement of objects as

they advanced into the foreground, the peculiar distortion of

columns arranged in a curve. At last he felt that he had reduced these

mysteries to rules; through these rules one dimension could convey the

illusion of three; painting could represent space and depth; this,

to Paolo, seemed a revolution as great as any in the history of art.

He illustrated his principles in his painting, and colored the

cloisters of Santa Maria Novella with frescoes that startled his

contemporaries but have yielded to the erosion of time. Still

surviving is his vivid portrait of Sir John Hawkwood on a wall of

the cathedral (1436); the proud condottiere, having turned his

arms from attacking to defending Florence, now joined, in the duomo,

the company of scholars and saints.

Meanwhile another line of development had reached from the same

origin to the same end. Antonio Veneziano was a follower of Giotto;

Gherardo Starnina was a pupil of Veneziano; from Starnina stemmed

Masolino da Panicale, who taught Masaccio. Masolino and Masaccio

made their own studies of perspective; Masolino was one of the first

Italians to paint nudes; Masaccio was the first to apply the new

principles of perspective with a success that opened the eyes of his

generation, and began a new era in pictorial art.

His real name was Tommaso Guidi di San Giovanni; Masaccio was a

nickname meaning Big Thomas, as Masolino meant Little Thomas; Italy

was fond of giving such identifying marks to her children. Taking to

the brush at an early age, he so lost himself in devotion to

painting that he neglected everything else- his clothes, his person,

his income, his debts. He worked a while with Ghiberti, and may have

learned in that bottega-academy the anatomical precision that was to

be one mark of his drawing. He studied the frescoes that Masolino

was painting in the Brancacci Chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine, and

noted with special delight their experiments in perspective and

foreshortening. On a pillar in the abbey church known as the Badia

he represented St. Ivo of Brittany with feet foreshortened as seen

from below; the spectators refused to believe that a saint could

have such mighty feet. In Santa Maria Novella, as part of a fresco

of the Trinity, he pictured a barrel vault in such perfect diminishing

perspective that the eye seemed to see the painted ceiling as sunk

into the church wall.

The epochal masterpiece that made him the teacher of three

generations was his continuation of Masolino's Brancacci Chapel

frescoes on the life of St. Peter (1423). The incident of the

tribute money was represented by the young artist with a new power

of conception and veracity of line: Christ with stern nobility,

Peter in angry majesty, the tax collector with the lithe frame of a

Roman athlete, every Apostle individualized in feature, raiment, and

pose. Buildings and background hills illustrated the young science

of perspective; and Tommaso himself, self-portrayed by posing to a

mirror, became a bearded apostle in the crowd. While he was working on

this series the chapel was consecrated with processional ceremony;

Masaccio watched the ritual with sharp retentive eye, then

reproduced it in a fresco in the cloister; Brunellesco, Donatello,

Masolino, Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, and Antonio Brancacci, sponsor

of the chapel, had taken part, and now found themselves in the

picture.

In 1425, for reasons now unknown, Masaccio left his work unfinished,

and went to Rome. We do not hear of him again, and we can only surmise

that some accident or disease prematurely ended his life. But even

though incomplete those Brancacci frescoes were recognized at once

as an immense step forward in painting. In those bold nudes,

graceful draperies, startling perspectives, realistic foreshortenings,

and precise anatomical details, in this modeling in depth through

subtle gradations of light and shade, all sensed a new departure,

which Vasari called the "modern" style. Every ambitious painter within

reach of Florence came to study the series: Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo

Lippi, Andrea del Castagno, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli,

Perugino, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del

Sarto, Michelangelo, Raphael; no dead man had ever had such

distinguished pupils, no artist since Giotto had wielded, unwittingly,

such influence. "Masaccio," said Leonardo, "showed by perfect works

that those who are led by any guide except Nature, the supreme

mistress, are consumed in sterile toil." `050347

2. Fra Angelico

-

Amid these exciting novelties Fra Angelico went quietly his own

medieval way. Born in a Tuscan village and named Guido di Pietro, he

came to Florence young, and studied painting, probably with Lorenzo

Monaco. His talent ripened quickly, and he had every prospect of

making a comfortable place for himself in the world, but the love of

peace and the hope of salvation led him to enter the Dominican order

(1407). After a long novitiate in various cities, Fra Giovanni, as

he had been renamed, settled down in the convent of San Domenico in

Fiesole (1418). There, in happy obscurity, he illuminated manuscripts,

and painted pictures for churches and religious confraternities. In

1436 the friars of San Domenico were transferred to the new convent of

San Marco, built by Michelozzo at Cosimo's order and expense. During

the next nine years Giovanni painted half a hundred frescoes on the

walls of the monastery church, chapter house, dormitory, refectory,

hospice, cloisters, and cells. Meanwhile he practised religion with

such modest devotion that his fellow friars called him the Angelic

Brother- Fra Angelico. No one ever saw him angry, or succeeded in

offending him. Thomas a Kempis would have found fully realized in

him the Imitation of Christ, except for one smiling lapse: in a

Last Judgment the angelic Dominican could not resist placing a few

Franciscan friars in hell. `050348

Painting, with Fra Giovanni, was a religious exercise as well as

an esthetic release and joy; he painted in much the same mood in which

he prayed, and he never painted without praying first. Protected

from the harsh competitions of life, he saw it all as a hymn of divine

atonement and love. His subjects were invariably religious- the life

of Mary and Christ, the blessed in heaven, the lives of the saints and

the generals of his order. His aim was not so much to create beauty as

to inspire piety. In the chapter house where the friars held their

assemblies he painted the picture that the prior thought should most

frequently be in their minds- the Crucifixion; a powerful

representation, in which Angelico showed his study of the nude, and at

the same time the all-embracing quality of his Christianity; here,

at the foot of the cross, along with St. Dominic, were the founders of

rival orders- Augustine, Benedict, Bernard, Francis, John Gualberto of

the Vallombrosans, Albert of the Carmelites. In a lunette over the

entrance to the hospice, where the friars were required to offer

hospitality to any wayfarer, Angelico told the story of the pilgrim

who proved to be Christ; every pilgrim was to be treated as if he

might be so revealed. Within the hospice are now gathered some of

the subjects painted by Angelico for divers churches and guilds: the

Madonna of the Linaioli (linen workers), where the angel

choristers have the pliant figures of women and the smiling faces of

guileless children; a Descent from the Cross, equal in beauty and

tenderness to any of the thousand representations of that scene in the

art of the Renaissance; and a Last Judgment, a bit too

symmetrical, and crowded with lurid and repellent fantasies, as if

to forgive were human and to hate were divine. At the top of the

staircase leading to the cells stands Angelico's masterpiece, The

Annunciation - an angel of infinite grace already in his obeisance

revering the future Mother of God, and Mary bowing and crossing her

hands in humble incredulity. In each of the half hundred cells the

loving friar, aided by his friar pupils, found time to paint a

fresco recalling some inspiring Gospel scene- the Transfiguration, the

communion of the Apostles, Magdalen anointing the feet of Christ. In

the double cell where Cosimo played monk, Angelico painted a

Crucifixion, and an Adoration of the Kings gorgeous with such

Eastern costumes as perhaps the artist had seen in the Council of

Florence. In his own cell he pictured the Coronation of the Virgin. It

was his favorite subject, which he painted time and again; the

Uffizi Gallery has one form of it, the Academy at Florence another,

the Louvre a third; best of all is that which Angelico painted for the

dormitory of San Marco, wherein the figures of Christ and Mary are

among the most exquisite in the history of art.

The fame of these devout creations brought Giovanni hundreds of

proffered commissions. To all such seekers he replied that they must

first obtain the consent of his prior; that secured, he would not fail

them. When Nicholas V asked him to come to Rome he left his Florentine

cell and went to decorate the chapel of the Pope with scenes from

the lives of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence; they are still among the

most pleasant sights in the Vatican. Nicholas so admired the painter

that he offered to make him archbishop of Florence; Angelico excused

himself, and recommended his beloved prior; Nicholas accepted the

suggestion, and Fra Antonino remained a saint even under the pallium.

No painter except El Greco ever made a style so uniquely his own

as Fra Angelico; even a novice can identify his hand. A simplicity

of line and form going back to Giotto; a narrow but ethereal

assemblage of colors- gold, vermilion, scarlet, blue, and green-

reflecting a bright spirit and happy faith; figures perhaps too simply

imaged, and almost without anatomy; faces beautiful and gentle, but

too pale to be alive, too monotonously alike in monks, angels, and

saints, conceived rather as flowers in paradise; and all redeemed by

an ideal spirit of tender devotion, a purity of mood and thought

recalling the finest moments of the Middle Ages, and never to be

captured again by the Renaissance. This was the final cry of the

medieval spirit in art.

Fra Giovanni worked for a year in Rome, for a time in Orvieto;

served for three years as prior of the Dominican convent in Fiesole;

was called back to Rome, and died there at the age of sixty-eight.

Probably it was Lorenzo Valla's classic pen that wrote his epitaph:

-

Non mihi sit laudi quod eram velut alter Apelles,

sed quod lucra tuis omnia, Christe, dabam;

altera nam terris opera extant, altera coelo.

urbs me loannem Flos tulit Etruriae:-

-

"Let it not be to my praise that I was as another Apelles, but

that I gave all my gains, O Christ, to your faithful; for some works

are for the earth, some for heaven. I, Giovanni, was a child of the

Tuscan City of Florence."

3. Fra Filippo Lippi

-

From the gentle Angelico, crossed with the lusty Masaccio, came

the art of a man who preferred life to eternity. Filippo, son of the

butcher Tommaso Lippi, was born in Florence in a poor street behind

the convent of the Carmelites. Orphaned at two, he was reluctantly

reared by an aunt, who rid herself of him when he was eight by

entering him into the Carmelite order. Instead of studying the books

assigned to him he covered their margins with caricatures. The

prior, noting their excellence, set him to drawing the frescoes that

Masaccio had just painted in the Carmelite church. Soon the lad was

painting frescoes of his own in that same church; they have

disappeared, but Vasari thought them as good as Masaccio's. At the age

of twenty-six (1432) Filippo left the monastery; he continued to

call himself Fra, brother, friar, but he lived in the "world" and

supported himself by his art. Vasari tells a story that tradition

has accepted, though we cannot test its truth.

-

Filippo is said to have been so amorous that when he saw a woman who

pleased him he would have given all his possessions to have her; and

if he could not succeed in this he quieted the flame of his love by

painting her portrait. This appetite so took possession of him that

while the humor lasted he paid little or no attention to his work.

Thus, on one occasion when Cosimo was employing him, he shut him up in

the house so that he might not go out and waste time. Filippo remained

so for two days; but, overcome by his amorous and bestial desires,

he cut up his sheet with a pair of scissors, and letting himself out

of the window, devoted many days to his pleasures. When Cosimo could

not find him he caused a search to be made for him, until at length

Filippo returned to his labors. From that time forward Cosimo gave him

liberty to go and come as he chose, repenting that he had shut him

up... for, he said, geniuses are celestial forms and not pack

asses.... Ever afterward he sought to hold Filippo by the bonds of

affection, and was thus served by him with greater readiness. `050349

-

In 1439 "Fra Lippo" described himself, in a letter to Piero de'

Medici, as the poorest friar in Florence, living with, and

supporting with difficulty, six nieces anxious to be

married. `050350 His work was in demand, but apparently not as well

paid as the nieces wished. His morals could not have been

notoriously bad, for we find him engaged to paint pictures for various

nunneries. At the convent of Santa Margherita in Prato (unless

Vasari and tradition err) he fell in love with Lucrezia Buti, a nun or

a ward of the nuns; he persuaded the prioress to let Lucrezia pose for

him as the Virgin; soon they eloped. Despite her father's reproaches

and appeals she remained with the artist as his mistress and model,

sat for many Virgins, and gave him a son, the Filippino Lippi of later

fame. The wardens of the cathedral at Prato did not hold these

adventures against Filippo; in 1456 they engaged him to paint the

choir with frescoes illustrating the lives of St. John the Baptist and

St. Stephen. These paintings, now much damaged by time, were acclaimed

as masterpieces: perfect in composition, rich in color, alive with

drama- coming to a climax on one side of the choir with the dance of

Salome, on the other with the stoning of Stephen. Filippo found the

task too wearisome for his mobility; twice he ran away from it. In

1461 Cosimo persuaded Pius II to release the artist from his

monastic vows; Filippo seems to have thought himself also freed from

fidelity to Lucrezia, who could no longer pose as a virgin. The

Prato wardens exhausted all schemes for luring him back to his

frescoes; at last, ten years after their inception, he was induced

to finish them by Carlo de' Medici, Cosimo's illegitimate son, now

an apostolic notary. In the scene of Stephen's burial Filippo

exercised all his powers- in the deceptive perspective of the

architectural background, in the sharply individualized figures

surrounding the corpse, and in the stout proportions and calm rotund

face of Cosimo's bastard reading the services for the dead.

Despite his sexual irregularities, and perhaps because of his

amiable sensitivity to the loveliness of woman, Filippo's finest

pictures were of the Virgin. *05013 They missed the ethereal

spirituality of Angelico's Madonnas, but they conveyed a deep sense of

soft physical beauty and infinite tenderness. In Fra Lippo the Holy

Family became an Italian family, surrounded with homely incidents, and

the Virgin took on a sensuous loveliness heralding the pagan

Renaissance. To these feminine charms Filippo in his Madonnas added an

airy grace that passed down to his apprentice Botticelli.

In 1466 the city of Spoleto invited him to tell the story of the

Virgin again in the apse of its cathedral. He labored conscientiously,

passion having cooled; but his powers failed with his passion, and

he could not repeat the excellence of his Prato murals. Amid this

effort he died (1469), poisoned, Vasari thought, by the relatives of a

girl whom he had seduced. The story is improbable, for Filippo was

buried in the Spoleto cathedral; and there, a few years later, his

son, on commission from Lorenzo de' Medici, built for his father a

splendid marble tomb.

Everyone who creates beauty deserves remembrance, but we must pass

in shameful haste by Domenico Veneziano and his supposed murderer

Andrea del Castagno. Domenico was called from Perugia (1439) to

Paint murals in Santa Maria Nuova; he had as aide a promising youth

from Borgo San Sepolcro- Piero della Francesca; and in these works-

now lost- he made one of the earliest Florentine experiments with

paints mixed in oil. He has left us one masterpiece- the Portrait

of a Woman (Berlin) with upswept hair, wistful eyes, obtrusive

nose, and bulging bosom. According to Vasari, Domenico taught the

new technique to Andrea del Castagno, who was also painting murals

in Santa Maria Nuova. Rivalry may have marred their friendship, for

Andrea was a dour and passionate man; Vasari tells how he murdered

Domenico; but other records relate that Domenico outlived Andrea by

four years. Andrea reached fame by his picture of the scourging of

Christ, in the cloister of Santa Croce, where his tricks of

perspective astonished even his fellow artists. Hidden away in the old

monastery of Sant' Apollonia in Florence are his imaginary portraits

of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Farinata degli Uberti, a vivid

representation of the swashbuckler Pippo Spana, and a Last Supper

(1450) that seems poorly drawn and lifeless, but may have suggested an

idea or two to Leonardo none the less.

VIII. A MISCELLANY

-

To feel with any vividness the life of art in Cosimo's Florence we

must not only contemplate those major geniuses whom we have here

commemorated so hurriedly. We must enter the side streets and alleys

of art and visit a hundred shops and studios where potters shaped

and painted clay, or glassmakers blew or cut glass into forms of

fragile loveliness, or goldsmiths fashioned precious metals or stone

into gems and medals, seals and coins, and a thousand ornaments of

dress or person, home or church. We must hear noisy intent artisans

beating or chasing iron, copper, or bronze into weapons and armor,

vessels and utensils and tools. We must watch the cabinet makers

designing, carving, inlaying, or surfacing wood; engravers cutting

designs into metal; and other workers chiseling chimney pieces, or

tooling leather, or carving ivory, or producing delicate textiles to

make flesh seductive or adorn a home. We must enter convents and see

patient monks illuminating manuscripts, placid nuns stitching

storied tapestries. Above all we must picture a population developed

enough to understand beauty, and wise enough to give honor,

sustenance, and stimulus to those who consumed themselves in its

making.

Metal engraving was one of the inventions of Florence; and its

Gutenberg died in the same year as Cosimo. Tommaso Finiguerra was a

worker in niello- i.e., he cut designs into metal or wood, and

filled the cavities with a black compound of silver and lead. One day,

says a pretty story, a stray piece of paper or cloth fell upon a metal

surface just inlaid; removed, it was found imprinted with the

design. The tale has the earmarks of an afterthought; in any case

Finiguerra and others deliberately took such impressions on paper in

order to judge of the effect of the engraved patterns. Baccio

Baldini (c. 1450), a Florentine goldsmith, was apparently the first to

take such impressions, from incised metal surfaces, as a means of

preserving and multiplying the drawings of artists. Botticelli,

Mantegna, and others supplied him with designs. A generation later

Marcantonio Raimondi would develop the new technique of engraving into

a means of broadcasting all but the color of Renaissance paintings

to the world.

We have kept for the last a man who defies classification, and can

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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