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

rich men honored by popes and princes as inspired spirits beyond price

and- like Cellini- above the law. More than any other city except

Athens, Florence attached importance to art and artists, talked and

fought about them, and told anecdotes about them, `050428 as we do now

of actors and actresses. It was Renaissance Florence that formed the

romantic concept of the genius- the man inspired by a divine spirit

(the Latin genius ) dwelling within him.

It is worthy of note that Verrocchio's studio left no great sculptor

(except one side of Leonardo) to carry on the master's excellence, but

taught two painters of high degree- Leonardo and Perugino- and one

of lesser but notable talent, Lorenzo di Credi. Painting was gradually

ousting sculpture as the favorite art. Probably it was an advantage

that the painters were uninstructed and uninhibited by the lost murals

of antiquity. They knew that there had been such men as Apelles and

Protogenes, but few of them saw even the Alexandrian or Pompeian

remnants of ancient painting. In this art there was no revival of

antiquity, and the continuity of the Middle Ages with the

Renaissance was most visible: the line was devious but clear from

the Byzantines to Duccio to Giotto to Fra Angelico to Leonardo to

Raphael to Titian. So the painters, unlike the sculptors, had to forge

through trial and error their own technology and style; originality

and experiment were forced upon them. They labored over the details of

human, animal, and plant anatomy; they tried circular, triangular,

or other schemes of composition; they explored the tricks of

perspective and the illusions of chiaroscuro to give depth to

their backgrounds and body to their figures; they scoured the

streets for Apostles and Virgins, and drew from models clothed or

nude; they passed from fresco to tempera and back again, and

appropriated the new techniques of oil painting introduced into

northern Italy by Rogier van der Weyden and Antonio da Messina. As

their skill and courage grew, and their lay patrons multiplied, they

added to the old religious subjects the stories of classic mythology

and the pagan glories of the flesh. They took Nature into the

studio, or betook themselves to Nature; nothing human or natural

seemed in their view alien to art, no face so ugly but art could

reveal its illuminating significance. They recorded the world; and

when war and politics had made Italy a prison and a ruin, the painters

left behind them the line and color, the life and passion, of the

Renaissance.

Formed by such studies, inheriting an ever richer tradition of

methods, materials, and ideas, men of talent painted better now than

men of genius had painted a century before. Benozzo Gozzoli, says

Vasari in an ungracious moment, "was not of great excellence... yet he

distanced all the others of his age in his perseverance; for among the

multitude of his works some could hardly help but be good." `050429 He

began as a pupil of Fra Angelico, and followed him to Rome and Orvieto

as assistant. Piero the Gouty recalled him to Florence and invited him

to portray, on the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace, the

journey of the Magi from the East to Bethlehem. These frescoes are

Benozzo's chef-d'oeuvre: a stately and yet lively procession of

kings and knights in gorgeous robes, of squires, pages, angels,

hunters, scholars, slaves, horses, leopards, dogs, and half a dozen

Medici- and Benozzo himself slyly introduced into the parade- and

all against backgrounds and landscapes marvelous and picturesque.

Flushed with triumph, Benozzo went to San Gimignano, and decorated the

choir of Sant' Agostino with seventeen scenes from the life of its

patron saint. In the Campo Santo at Pisa he labored for sixteen years,

covering vast walls with twenty-one Old Testament scenes from Adam

to the Queen of Sheba; some, like The Tower of Babel, were among the

major frescoes of the Renaissance. Benozzo diluted his excellence

through eager haste; he drew carelessly, made many of his figures

depressingly uniform, and crowded his pictures with a confusing

multitude of persons and details; but he had in him the blood and

joy of life, he loved its lusty panorama and the glory of the great;

and the imperfections of his line are half forgotten in the splendor

of his color and the enthusiasm of his fertility.

The benign influence of Fra Angelico passed down to Alesso

Baldovinetti and Cosimo Roselli, and through Alesso to one of the

major painters of the Renaissance- Domenico Ghirlandaio. Domenico's

father was a goldsmith who had received the nickname of Ghirlandaio

from the gold and silver garlands that he had fashioned for the pretty

heads of Florence. Under this father and Baldovinetti Domenico studied

with zest and zeal; spent many hours before the frescoes of Masaccio

in the Carmine; learned by indefatigable practice the arts of

perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and composition; "he would draw

everyone who passed the shop," says Vasari, "making extraordinary

likenesses" after a fleeting view. He was barely twenty-one when he

was charged to paint the story of Santa Fina in her chapel in the

cathedral at San Gimignano. At thirty-one (1480) he earned the title

of master by four frescoes in the church and refectory of the

Ognissanti in Florence- a St. Jerome, a Descent From the Cross,

a Madonna della Misericordia (which included a portrait of the

donor, Amerigo Vespucci), and a Last Supper that gave some hints

to Leonardo.

Summoned to Rome by Sixtus IV, he painted in the Sistine Chapel

Christ Calling Peter and Andrew from Their Nets - especially

beautiful in its background of mountains, sea, and sky. During this

stay in Rome he studied and drew the arches, baths, columns,

aqueducts, and amphitheaters of the ancient city, and with so

practiced an eye that he was able to seize at once, without rule or

compass, the just proportions of each part. A Florentine merchant in

Rome, Francesco Tornabuoni, mourning his dead wife, employed

Ghirlandaio to paint frescoes for her memorial in Santa Maria sopra

Minerva, and Domenico succeeded so well that Tornabuoni sent him

back to Florence armed with florins and a letter attesting his

excellence. The Signory soon entrusted to him the decoration of the

Sala del Orologio in their palace. In the next four years (1481-5)

he painted scenes from the life of St. Francis in the Sassetti

Chapel of Santa Trinita. All the progress of the painter's art, except

the use of oil, was embodied in these frescoes: harmonious

composition, accurate line, gradations of light, perspective fidelity,

realistic portraiture (of Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, Palla Strozzi,

Francesco Sassetti), and at the same time the Angelesque tradition

of ideality and piety. From the near-perfection of the altarpiece- the

Adoration of the Shepherds - there would be but a step of deeper

imagination and subtler grace to Leonardo and Raphael.

In 1485 Giovanni Tornabuoni, chief of the Medici bank in Rome,

offered Ghirlandaio twelve hundred ducats ($30,000) to paint a

chapel in Santa Maria Novella, and promised him two hundred more if

the work should prove fully satisfactory. Aided by several pupils,

including Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio gave most of the following five

years to this high moment of his career. On the ceiling he painted the

four Evangelists; on the walls St. Francis, Peter Martyr, John the

Baptist, and scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ, from an

Annunciation to a magnificent Coronation of the Virgin. Here again

he delighted in contemporary portraits: the stately Lodovica

Tornabuoni, fit to be a queen, the saucy beauty of Ginevra de'

Benci, the scholars Ficino, Politian, and Landino, the painters

Baldovinetti, Mainardi, and Ghirlandaio himself. When, in 1490, the

chapel was opened to the public, all the dignitaries and literati of

Florence flocked to examine the paintings; the realistic portraits

were the talk of the town; and Tornabuoni expressed himself as

completely satisfied. Financially pressed at the time, he begged

Domenico to forgive him the extra two hundred ducats; the artist

replied that the satisfaction of his patron was more precious to him

than any gold.

He was a lovable character, so adored by his brothers that one of

them, David, almost slew an abbot with an aged loaf of bread for

bringing to Domenico and his aides food that David held unworthy of

his brother's genius. Ghirlandaio opened his studio to all who cared

to work or study there, making it a veritable school of art. He

accepted all commissions, great or small, saying that none should be

denied; he left the care of his household and finances to David,

saying that he would not be content till he had painted the whole

circuit of Florence's wall. He produced many mediocre paintings, and

yet some incidental pieces of great charm, like the Louvre's

delightful Grandfather with the bulbous nose, and the lovely

Portrait of a Woman in the Morgan Collection in New York- pictures

full of the character that year by year records itself upon the

human face. Great critics of unquestionable learning and repute

yield him only a minor rank; `050430 and it is true that he excelled

rather in line than in color, that he painted too rapidly, and crowded

his pictures with irrelevant detail, and took a step backward,

perhaps, in preferring tempera after Baldovinetti's experiments with

oil. Even so, he brought the accumulated technology of his art to

the highest point that it would reach in his country and his

century; and he bequeathed to Florence and the world such treasures

that criticism hangs its head in gratitude.

2. Botticelli

-

Only one Florentine surpassed him in his generation. Sandro

Botticelli was as different from Ghirlandaio as ethereal fancy from

physical fact. Alessandro's father, Mariano Filipepi, unable to

persuade the boy that life would be impossible without reading,

writing, and arithmetic, apprenticed him to the goldsmith

Botticelli, whose name, through the affection of the pupil or the whim

of history, became permanently attached to Sandro's own. From this

bottega the lad passed at sixteen to that of Fra Filippo Lippi,

who came to love the restless and impetuous youth. Filippo's Filippino

later painted Sandro as a sullen fellow with deep-set eyes, salient

nose, sensual fleshy mouth, flowing locks, purple cap, red mantle, and

green hose; `050431 who would have guessed such a man from the

delicate fantasies that Botticelli has left to the museums? Perhaps

every artist must be a sensualist before he can paint ideally; he must

know and love the body as the ultimate source and standard of the

esthetic sense. Vasari describes Sandro as "a merry fellow," who

played pranks upon fellow artists and obtuse citizens. Doubtless, like

all of us, he was many men, turned on one or another of his selves

as occasion required, and kept his real self a frightened secret

from the world.

About 1465 Botticelli set up his own studio, and soon received

commissions from the Medici. It was apparently for Lorenzo's mother,

Lucrezia Tornabuoni, that he painted Judith; and for Piero

Gottoso, her husband, he made his Madonna of the Magnificat and

his Adoration of the Magi - hymns in color to three Medici

generations. In the Madonna Botticelli pictured Lorenzo and Giuliano

as boys of sixteen and twelve, holding a book upon which the Virgin-

borrowed from Fra Lippo- writes her noble song of praise; in the

Adoration Cosimo kneels at Mary's feet, Piero kneels at a lower

level before them, and Lorenzo, now seventeen, holds a sword in his

hand as a sign that he has reached the age of legitimate killing.

Lorenzo and Giuliano carried on Piero's patronage of Botticelli. His

finest portraits are of Giuliano and Giuliano's beloved Simonetta

Vespucci. He still painted religious pictures, like the powerful

St. Augustine in the church of the Ognissanti; but in this period,

perhaps under the influence of Lorenzo's circle, he turned more and

more to pagan subjects, usually from classical mythology, and favoring

the nude. Vasari reports that "in many houses Botticelli painted...

plenty of naked women," and accuses him of "serious disorders in his

living"; `050432 the humanists, and animal spirits, had won Sandro for

a time to an epicurean philosophy. It was apparently for Lorenzo and

Giuliano that he painted (1480) The Birth of Venus. A demure nude

rises from a golden shell in the sea, using her long blonde tresses as

the only fig leaf at hand; on her right winged zephyrs blow her to the

shore; on her left a pretty maid (Simonetta?), clad in a gown of

flowered white, offers the goddess a mantle to enhance her loveliness.

The painting is a masterpiece of grace, in which design and

composition are everything, color is subordinate, realism is

ignored, and everything is directed to evoking an ethereal fancy

through the flowing rhythm of the line. Botticelli had taken the theme

from a passage in Politian's La giostra. From a description, in

the same poem, of Giuliano's victories in jousts and love the artist

took his second pagan picture, Mars and Venus; here Venus is

clothed, and may again be Simonetta; Mars lies exhausted and asleep,

no rude warrior but a youth of unblemished flesh, who might almost

be mistaken for another Aphrodite. Finally, in his Spring

( Primavera ) Botticelli expressed the mood of Lorenzo's hymn to

Bacchus ("Who would be happy, let him be!"): the auxiliary lady of the

Birth reappears with her flowing robe and pretty feet; at the left

Giuliano (?) plucks an apple from a tree to give to one of the three

graces standing half nude beside him; on the right a lusty male seizes

a maiden dressed in a little mist; Simonetta presides modestly over

the scene; and in the air above her Cupid shoots his quite superfluous

darts. These three pictures symbolized many things, for Botticelli

loved to allegorize; but perhaps without his realizing it they

represented also the victory of the humanists in art. The Church would

now for half a century (1480-1534) struggle to regain her dominance

over pictorial themes.

As if to meet the issue squarely, Sixtus IV called Botticelli to

Rome (1481), and commissioned him to paint three frescoes in the

Sistine Chapel. They are not among his masterpieces; he was in no mood

for piety. But when he returned to Florence (1485) he found the city

astir with Savonarola's sermons, and went to hear him. He was deeply

moved. He had always harbored a strain of austerity, and whatever

skepticism he might have caught from Lorenzo, Pulci, and Politian

had been lost in the secret well of his youthful faith. Now the

fiery preacher at San Marco's pressed upon him and Florence the

awful implications of that faith: God had allowed Himself to be

insulted, scourged, and crucified to redeem mankind from the guilt

of Adam and Eve's sin; only a life of virtue or sincere repentance

could win some grace from that sacrifice of God to God, and so

escape eternal hell. It was about this time that Botticelli

illustrated Dante's Divine Comedy. He turned his art again to the

service of religion, and told once more the marvelous story of Mary

and Christ. For the church of St. Barnabas he painted a masterly group

of the Virgin enthroned, with divers saints; she was still the

tender and lovely maiden whom he had drawn in Fra Lippo's studio. Soon

afterward he painted the Madonna of the Pomegranate - the Virgin

surrounded by singing cherubim, the Child holding in His hand the

fruit whose innumerable seeds symbolized the dissemination of the

Christian faith. In 1490 he recapitulated the epic of the Divine

Mother in two pictures: the Annunciation and the Coronation. But

he was aging now, and had lost the fresh clarity and grace of his art.

In 1498 Savonarola was hanged and burned. Botticelli was horrified

at this most distinguished murder of the Renaissance. Perhaps it was

shortly after that tragedy that he painted his complex symbolism,

Calumny. Against a background of classic archways and distant sea

three women- Fraud, Deception, Calumny- led by a ragged male (Envy),

drag a nude victim by the hair to a tribunal where a judge with the

long ears of an ass, advised by females personifying Suspicion and

Ignorance, prepares to yield to the fury and bloodthirst of the

crowd and condemn the fallen man; while at the left Remorse, garbed in

black, looks in sorrow upon naked Truth- Botticelli's Venus once more,

clad in the same reptilian hair. Was the victim intended to

represent Savonarola? Perhaps, though the nudes might have startled

the monk.

The Nativity in the National Gallery at London is Botticelli's

final masterpiece, confused but colorful, and capturing for the last

time his rhythmic grace. Here all seems to breathe a heavenly

happiness; the ladies of the Spring return as winged angels, hailing

the miraculous and saving birth, and dancing precariously on a bough

suspended in space. But on the picture Botticelli wrote in Greek these

words, savoring of Savonarola, and recalling the Middle Ages in the

height of the Renaissance:

-

This picture I, Alessandro, painted at the end of the year 1500,

in the troubles of Italy... during the fulfillment of the Eleventh

[Chapter] of St. John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, in the

loosing of the Devil for three years and a half. Later he shall be

chained, according to the Twelfth of St. John, and we shall see him

trodden down as in this picture.

-

After 1500 we have no paintings from his hand. He was only

fifty-six, and might have had some art left in him; but he yielded

place to Leonardo and Michelangelo, and lapsed into a morose

poverty. The Medici who had been his mainstay gave him charity, but

they themselves were in a fallen state. He died alone and infirm, aged

sixty-six, while the forgetful world hurried on.

Among his pupils was his teacher's son, Filippino Lippi. This

"love child" *05016 was loved by all who knew him: a man gentle,

affable, modest, courteous, whose "excellence was such," says

Vasari, "that he obliterated the stain of his birth, if any there be."

Under his father's tutelage and Sandro's he learned the painter's

art so rapidly that already at twenty-three he produced in The Vision

of St. Bernard a portrait that in Vasari's judgment "lacked only

speech." When the Carmelite monks decided to complete the frescoes

begun in their Brancacci Chapel sixty years before, they awarded the

commission to Filippino, still but twenty-seven. The result did not

equal Masaccio, but in St. Paul Addressing St. Peter in Prison

Filippino achieved a memorable figure of simple dignity and quiet

power.

In 1489, at Lorenzo's suggestion, Cardinal Caraffa called him to

Rome to decorate a chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva with scenes

from the life of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the main fresco the artist,

perhaps recalling a similar picture by Andrea da Firenze a century

before, showed the philosopher in triumph, with Arius, Averroes, and

other heretics at his feet; meanwhile, in the universities of

Bologna and Padua, the doctrines of Averroes were gaining ground

over the orthodox faith. Back in Florence, in the chapel of Filippo

Strozzi in Santa Maria Novella, Filippino recorded the careers of

the Apostles Philip and John in frescoes so realistic that legend told

how a boy tried to hide a secret treasure in a hole that Filippino had

represented in a pictured wall. Interrupting this series for a time,

and replacing the dilatory Leonardo, he painted an altarpiece for

the monks of Scopeto; he chose the old subject of the Magi adoring the

Child, but enlivened it with Moors, Indians, and many Medici; one of

these last, serving as an astrologer with a quadrant in his hands,

is among the most human and humorous portraits of the Renaissance.

Finally (1498), as if to say that his father's sins had been forgiven,

Filippino was invited to Prato to paint a Madonna; Vasari praised

it, the Second World War destroyed it. He settled down to marriage

at forty, and knew for a few years the joys and tribulations of

parentage. Suddenly, at forty-seven, he died of so simple an ailment

as quinsy sore throat (1505).

VII. LORENZO PASSES

-

Lorenzo himself was not among the few who in those centuries reached

old age. Like his father he suffered from arthritis and gout, to which

was added a stomach disorder that frequently caused him exhausting

pain. He tried a dozen remedies, and found nothing better than the

passing alleviation given by warm mineral baths. For some time

before his death he perceived that he, who had preached the gospel

of joy, had not much longer to live.

His wife died in 1488; and though he had been unfaithful to her he

sincerely mourned her loss and missed her helping hand. She had

given him a numerous progeny, of whom seven survived. He had

sedulously supervised their education; and in his later years he

labored to guide them into marriages that might redound to the

happiness of Florence as well as their own. The oldest son, Piero, was

affianced to an Orsini to win friends in Rome; the youngest, Giuliano,

married a sister of the duke of Savoy, received from Francis I the

title of duke of Nemours, and so helped to build a bridge between

Florence and France. Giovanni, the second son, was directed into an

ecclesiastical career, and took to it amiably; he pleased everyone

by his good nature, good manners, and good Latin. Lorenzo persuaded

Innocent VIII to violate all precedents by making him a cardinal at

fourteen; the Pope yielded for the same reason that made most

marriages of royalty- to bind one government to another in the amity

of one blood.

Lorenzo retired from active participation in the government of

Florence, delegated more and more of his public and private business

to his son Piero, and sought comfort in the peace of the countryside

and the conversation of his friends. He excused himself in a

characteristic letter.

-

What can be more desirable to a well-regulated mind than the

enjoyment of leisure with dignity? This is what all good men wish to

obtain, but which great men alone accomplish. In the midst of public

affairs we may indeed be allowed to look forward to a day of rest; but

no rest should totally seclude us from an attention to the concerns of

our country. I cannot deny that the path which it has been my lot to

tread has been arduous and rugged, full of dangers, and beset with

treachery; but I console myself in having contributed to the welfare

of my country, the prosperity of which may now rival that of any other

state, however flourishing. Nor have I been inattentive to the

interests and advancement of my own family, having always proposed

to my imitation the example of my grandfather Cosimo, who watched over

his public and private concerns with equal vigilance. Having now

obtained the object of my cares, I trust I may be allowed to enjoy the

sweets of leisure, to share the reputation of my fellow-citizens,

and to exult in the glory of my native place.

-

But little time was left him to enjoy his unaccustomed peace. He had

hardly moved to his villa at Careggi (March 21, 1492) when his stomach

pains became alarmingly intense. Specialist physicians were

summoned, who made him drink a mixture of jewels. He became rapidly

worse, and reconciled himself to death. He expressed to Pico and

Politian his sorrow that he could not live long enough to complete his

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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.