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

action. What transfigures them is the harmonious flow of the design,

and, above all, the uncompromising faithfulness with which Piero's

hand, disdaining idealization and sentimentality, has represented what

his eye has seen and his mind has conceived.

He lived too far from the intense centers of the Renaissance to

attain the potential perfection, or to exert the full influence, of

his art. Nevertheless he numbered Signorelli among his pupils, and

shared in forming Luca's style. It was Raphael's father who invited

Piero to Urbino; and though this was fourteen years before Raphael's

birth, that blessed youth must have seen and studied the paintings

left by Piero there and in Perugia. Melozzo da Forli learned from

Piero something of strength and grace in design; and Melozzo's angel

musicians in the Vatican recall those which Piero painted in one of

his final works- the Nativity of the London National Gallery- even

as Piero's angel choristers recall Luca della Robbia's Cantoria.

So men hand down to their successors their heritage- their lore and

codes and skills; and transmission becomes half the technique of

civilization.

II. SIGNORELLI

-

When Piero della Francesca was painting his masterpieces at

Arezzo, Lazzaro Vasari, great-grandfather of the historian, invited

a young art student, Luca Signorelli, to come and live in the Vasari

home and study with Piero. Luca had first seen the light at Cortona,

some fourteen miles southeast of Arezzo (1441). He was only eleven

when Piero came, but he was twenty-four when Piero finished. In the

interval the youth, taking with passion to the painter's art,

learned from Piero to draw the nude body with merciless veracity- with

a stern rigor that went back to his teacher, and a masculine force

that pointed forward to Michelangelo. In the studio and the hospitals,

under the gibbet and in the cemeteries, he sought the human body, as

naked as he could find it; and he asked of it not beauty but strength.

He seems to have cared for nothing else; if he painted anything else

it was by impatient concession; and then, as often as not, he would

use nude figures for incidental ornament. Like Michelangelo he was not

at home (if we may speak so carelessly) with female nudes; he drew

them with scant success; and among males he preferred not the young

and fair, as Leonardo did and Sodoma, but the middle-aged man in the

full development of musculature and virility.

Carrying this passion with him, Signorelli moved about among the

cities of central Italy depositing nudes. After some early works in

Arezzo and San Sepolcro he moved on to Florence (c. 1475), and there

painted, and presented to Lorenzo, The School of Pan, a canvas

crowded with naked pagan gods. Probably for Lorenzo he painted the

Virgin and Child now in the Uffizi: the Virgin ample but

beautiful, the background largely composed of naked men; here

Michelangelo would find a hint for his Doni Holy Family.

And yet this carnal pagan could paint piously. The Virgin in his

Uffizi Holy Family is one of the fairest figures in Renaissance art.

At the behest of Pope Sixtus IV he went to Loreto (c. 1479), and

adorned the sanctuary of Santa Maria with excellent frescoes of the

evangelists and other saints. Three years later we find him in Rome

contributing to the Sistine Chapel a scene from the life of Moses-

admirable in its male figures, ungainly in its women. Called to

Perugia (1484), he painted some minor frescoes in the cathedral.

Thenceforth he seems to have made Cortona his home, producing pictures

there for delivery elsewhere, and leaving it chiefly for major

assignments in Siena, Orvieto, and Rome. In the cloister of the

monastery of Monte Oliveto at Chiusuri, near Siena, he depicted scenes

from the life of St. Benedict. For the church of Sant' Agostino in

Siena he completed an altarpiece which was ranked among his best

works; only the wings remain. For the palace of the Sienese

dictator, Pandolfo Petrucci, he painted episodes from classic

history or legend. Then he passed on to Orvieto for his culminating

achievement.

The cathedral council there had waited in vain for Perugino to

come and decorate the chapel of San Brizio. It had considered and

rejected Pinturicchio. Now (1499) it summoned Signorelli, and bade him

complete the work that Fra Angelico had begun in that chapel half a

century before. It was the favorite altar in the great cathedral,

for over it hung an old picture of the Madonna di San Brizio, who (the

people liked to believe) could ease the pains of childbirth, keep

lovers and husbands faithful, ward off the ague, and quiet a storm.

Under the ceiling frescoes where Fra Angelico had pictured the Last

Judgment in the full spirit of medieval hopes and fears,

Signorelli

painted similar themes- Antichrist, The End of the World, The

Resurrection of the Dead, Paradise, and The Descent of the Damned

Into Hell. But these old themes were for him merely a frame wherein

to show the naked bodies of men and women in a hundred different

attitudes, and in a hundred varieties of joy and pain. Not until

Michelangelo's Last Judgment would the Renaissance see again such an

orgy of human flesh. Bodies handsome or deformed, faces bestial or

celestial, the grimaces of devils, the agony of the condemned

sprayed by jets of fire, the torturing of one sinner by breaking his

teeth and his thighbone with a club- did Signorelli delight in these

scenes, or was he instructed to paint them as encouragement to

piety? In any case he pictured himself (in a corner of the

Antichrist ) looking upon the melee with the equanimity of the saved.

After spending three years on these frescoes, Signorelli returned to

Cortona, and painted a Dead Christ for the church of Santa

Margherita. It was about this time that tragedy overtook him in the

violent death of his favorite son. When the corpse was brought to him,

says Vasari, "he caused it to be stripped, and with extraordinary

fortitude, without shedding a tear, he made a drawing of the body,

so that he might always behold in this work of his hands what Nature

had given him and cruel Fortune had taken away." `05083

In 1508 a different misfortune came. With Perugino, Pinturicchio,

and Sodoma he was commissioned by Julius II to decorate the papal

chambers in the Vatican. While their labors were progressing Raphael

arrived, and so pleased the Pope with his initial frescoes that Julius

turned over all the rooms to him, and dismissed the other artists.

Signorelli was then sixty-seven, and perhaps his hand had lost its

skill or steadiness. Nevertheless, eleven years later, he painted with

success and acclaim an altarpiece commissioned by the Company of San

Girolamo at Arezzo; when it was finished the brothers of the Company

came to Cortona and carried this Madonna and Saints on their

shoulders all the way to Arezzo. Signorelli accompanied them, and

again lodged in the house of the Vasari. There Giorgio Vasari, a lad

of eight, saw him, and received from him long-remembered words of

encouragement in the study of art. Once a youth of impetuous

passion, Signorelli was now a kindly old gentleman, nearing eighty,

living in moderate prosperity in his native town, and honored by

all. At the age of eighty-three he was elected for the last time to

the governing council of Cortona. In that year, 1524, he died.

Excellent scholars `05084 have thought that Signorelli's fame is

inadequate to his deserts; but perhaps it exceeds them. He was a

facile draftsman, who amazes us with his studies of anatomy,

posture, perspective, and foreshortening, and amuses us with his use

of human figures in composition and ornament. Sometimes in his

Madonnas he reaches a note of tenderness, and the musician angels at

Loreto have charmed discriminating minds. But for the rest he was

the apostle of the body as anatomy; he gave it no sensual softness, no

voluptuous grace, no glory of color, no magic of light and shade; he

seldom realized that the function of the body is to be the outward

expression and instrument of a subtle and intangible spirit or

character, and that the sovereign task of art is to find and reveal

that soul through its veil of flesh. Michelangelo took from Signorelli

this idolatry of anatomy, this loss of the end in the means, and in

the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel he repeated on a larger

scale the physiological frenzy of the Orvieto frescoes; but on the

ceiling of that same chapel, and in his sculpture, he used the body as

the voice of the soul. In Signorelli painting passed at one step

from the terrors and tenderness of medieval art to the strained and

soulless exaggerations of baroque.

III. SIENA AND SODOMA

-

In the fourteenth century Siena had almost kept pace with Florence

in commerce, government, and art. In the fifteenth she exhausted

herself with such fanatical factional violence as no other city in

Europe could match. Five parties- monti, hills, the Sienese called

them- ruled the city in turn; each in turn was overthrown by

revolution, and its more influential members, sometimes numbering

thousands, were exiled. We may judge the bitterness of this strife

from the oath that two of the factions swore to end it (1494). An awed

eyewitness describes them as gathering solemnly at dead of night, in

separate aisles, in their vast and dimly lit cathedral.

-

The conditions of the peace were read, which took up eight pages,

together with an oath of the most horrible sort, full of maledictions,

imprecations, excommunications, invocations of evil, confiscations

of goods, and so many other woes that to hear it was a terror; even in

the hour of death no sacrament should save, but should rather add to

the damnation of, those who should break the conditions; so that

I... believe that never was made or heard a more awful or horrible

oath. Then the notaries, on either side of the altar, wrote down the

names of all the citizens, who swore upon the crucifix, of which there

was one on each side; and every couple of the one or other faction

kissed, and the church bells rang, and Te Deum laudamus was sung

with the organs and the choir while the oath was being sworn. `05085

-

From this turmoil a dominant family emerged, the Petrucci. In 1497

Pandolfo Petrucci made himself dictator, took the title il

Magnifico, and proposed to give Siena the order, peace, and

gentlemanly autocracy that had been the fortune of Florence under

the Medici. Pandolfo was clever, and always landed on his feet after

any crisis, even eluding the vengeance of Caesar Borgia; he patronized

art with some discrimination; but he so often resorted to secret

assassination that his death (1512) was celebrated with universal

acclaim. In 1525 the desperate city paid the Emperor Charles V

15,000 ducats to take it under his protection.

In the lucid intervals of peace Sienese art had its final fling.

Antonio Barile continued the medieval tradition of the wondrous

carving of wood. Lorenzo di Mariano built in the church of Fontegiusta

a high altar of classic beauty. Iacopo della Quercia took his cognomen

from a village in Siena's hinterland. His early sculptures were

financed by Orlando Malevolti, who thus belied his name of Evil Faces.

When Orlando was banished for taking the losing side in politics,

Iacopo left Siena for Lucca (1390), where he designed a stately tomb

for Ilaria del Carretto. After competing unsuccessfully against

Donatello and Brunellesco in Florence, he went on to Bologna, and

carved over and alongside the portal of San Petronio marble

statues

and reliefs which are among the finest sculptures of the Renaissance

(1425-8). Michelangelo saw them there seventy years later, admired the

vigor of the nude and virile figures, and found in them for a time

inspiration and stimulus. Returning to Siena, Iacopo spent much of the

next ten years on his masterpiece, the Fonte Gaia. On the base of this

Gay Fountain he cut in marble a relief of the Virgin as the official

sovereign of the city; around her he represented the Seven Cardinal

Virtues; for good measure he added scenes from the Old Testament,

and filled the surviving spaces with children and animals- all with

a power of conception and execution that presaged Michelangelo. For

this work Siena renamed him Iacopo della Fonte, and paid him 2200

crowns ($55,000?). He died at sixty-four, exhausted by his art and

mourned by the citizens.

Through most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the proud

city engaged a hundred artists, of any provenance, to make its

cathedral the architectural jewel of Italy. From 1413 to 1423 Domenico

del Coro, a master of intarsia, was superintendent of the cathedral

work; he and Matteo di Giovanni and Domenico Beccafumi and

Pinturicchio and many others inlaid the floor of the great shrine with

marble marquetry picturing episodes from Scripture, and making this

the most remarkable church pavement in the world. Antonio Federighi

carved for the cathedral two handsome baptismal fonts, and Lorenzo

Vecchietta cast for it a dazzling tabernacle in bronze. Sano di Matteo

raised the Loggia della Mercanzia in the Campo (1417-38), and

Vecchietta and Federighi faced its pillars with harmonious statuary.

The fourteenth century saw a dozen famous palaces take form- the

Salimbeni, the Buonsignori, the Saracini, the Grottanelli... and about

1470 Bernardo Rossellino supplied plans for the Florentine-style

palace of the Piccolomini family. Andrea Bregno designed for the

Piccolomini an altar in the cathedral (1481); and Cardinal Francesco

Piccolomini built, as an adjunct to the duomo, a library (1495) to

house the books and manuscripts bequeathed to him by his uncle Pius

II. Lorenzo di Mariano gave the library one of the handsomest

portals in Italy; and Pinturicchio and his aides (1503-8) painted on

the walls, within superb architectural frames, delightful frescoes

picturing scenes in the life of the scholar Pope.

Siena in the fifteenth century was rich in painters of secondary

excellence. Taddeo Bartoli, Domenico di Bartolo, Lorenzo di Pietro

called Vecchietta, Stefano di Giovanni called Sassetta, Sani di

Pietro, Matteo di Giovanni, Francesco di Giorgio- all continued the

strong religious tradition of Sienese art, painting devout themes

and somber saints, often in stiff and cramping polyptychs, as if

resolved to prolong the Middle Ages forever. Sassetta, recently

restored to fame by a passing whim of critical opinion, painted in

simple line and color a charming procession of Magi and attendants

moving sedately through mountain passes to the crib of Christ; he

described in a graceful triptych the birth of the Virgin; celebrated

the wedding of St. Francis to poverty; and died in 1450, "stabbed

through and through by the sharp southwest wind." `05085a

Only toward the end of the century did Siena produce an artist whose

name, for good or evil, rang through Italy. His real name was Giovanni

Antonio Bazzi, but his ribald contemporaries rechristened him Sodoma

because he was so candid a catamite. He accepted the cognomen with

good humor as a title that many deserved but failed to obtain. Born at

Vercelli (1477), he moved to Milan, and may have learned painting

and pederasty from Leonardo. He put a Vincian smile on his Brera

Madonna, and copied Leonardo's Leda so well that for centuries his

imitation was taken for the Master's original. Migrating to Siena

after Lodovico's fall, he developed a style of his own, picturing

Christian subjects with a pagan joy in the human form. Perhaps it

was during this first stay at Siena that Bazzi painted a powerful

Christ at the Column - about to be scourged, yet physically

perfect. For the monks of Monte Oliveto Maggiore he told the story

of St. Benedict in a series of frescoes, some carelessly done, some so

seductively beautiful that the abbot insisted, before paying Sodoma,

that the nude figures should be prefaced with clothing to preserve

peace of mind in the monastery. `05086

When the banker Agostino Chigi visited his native Siena in 1507 he

took a fancy to Sodoma's work, and invited him to Rome. Pope Julius II

set the artist to work painting one of the rooms of Nicholas V in

the Vatican, but Sodoma spent so much time living up to his name

that the old Pope soon turned him out. Raphael replaced him, and

Sodoma, in a modest moment, studied the young master's style, and

absorbed something of his smooth finish and delicate grace. Chigi

rescued Sodoma by engaging him to paint in the Villa Chigi the story

of Alexander and Roxana, and soon Leo X, succeeding Julius, restored

Sodoma to papal favor. Giovanni painted for the jolly Pope a nude

Lucretia stabbing herself to death; Leo rewarded him well, and made

him a Cavalier of the Order of Christ.

Returning to Siena with these laurels, Sodoma received numerous

commissions from clergy and laity. Though apparently a skeptic, he

painted Madonnas almost as lovely as Raphael's. The martyrdom of St.

Sebastian was a subject especially to his taste; and his rendering

of the theme in the Pitti Palace has never been excelled. In the

church of San Domenico at Siena he pictured St. Catherine fainting, so

realistically that Baldassare Peruzzi pronounced the painting

incomparable in its kind. While engaged on these religious subjects,

Sodoma scandalized Siena with what Vasari calls his "bestial

pursuits."

-

His manner of life was licentious and dishonorable; and as he always

had boys and beardless youths about him, of whom he was inordinately

fond, this earned him the name of Sodoma. Instead of feeling shame, he

gloried in it, writing verses about it, and singing them to the

accompaniment of the lute. He loved to fill his house with all kinds

of curious animals: badgers, squirrels, apes, catamounts, dwarf asses,

Barbary race horses, Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, turtle doves, and

similar creatures.... In addition to these he had a raven which he had

taught to speak so well that it imitated his voice, especially in

answering the door, and many mistook it for its master. The other

animals were so tame that they were always about him, with their

strange gambols, so that his house resembled a veritable Noah's

ark. `05087

-

He married a woman of good family; but after giving him one child

she left him. Having worn out his welcome and his income in Siena,

he went to Volterra, Pisa, and Lucca (1541-2), seeking new patrons.

When these too ran out, Sodoma went back to Siena, shared his

poverty for seven years with his animals, and died at seventy-two.

He had accomplished in art all that a skilled hand could do without

a deepened soul to guide it.

The man who superseded him at Siena was Domenico Beccafumi. When

Perugino came there in 1508 Domenico studied his style. When

Perugino left, Domenico sought further instruction in Rome,

familiarized himself with the remains of classic art, and sought the

secrets of Raphael and Michelangelo. In Siena again, he first imitated

Sodoma, then rivaled him. The Signory asked him to decorate the Sala

del Consistorio; he painted its walls during six laborious years

(1529-35) with scenes from Roman history; the result was technically

excellent, spiritually dead.

When Beccafumi died (1551) the Sienese Renaissance was finished.

Baldassare Peruzzi was of Siena, but left it for Rome. Siena fell back

into the arms of the Virgin, and adjusted itself without discomfort to

the Counter Reformation. To this day it is contentedly orthodox, and

lures tired or curious spirits with its simple piety, its

picturesque annual palio or tournament of races (from 1659), and its

precious immunity to modernity.

IV. UMBRIA AND THE BAGLIONI

-

Hemmed in by Tuscany on the west, Latium on the south, and the

Marches on the north and east, mountainous Umbria lifts up, here and

there, the cities of Terni, Spoleto, Assisi, Foligno, Perugia, Gubbio.

We preface them here with Fabriano- across the border in the

Marches- because Gentile da Fabriano was a prelude to the Umbrian

school.

Gentile is an obscure but dominating figure: painting medieval

pictures in Gubbio and Perugia and the Marches, feeling vaguely the

influence of the early Sienese painters, and slowly maturing to such

prominence that Pandolfo Malatesta, says a quite incredible tradition,

paid him 14,000 ducats to fresco the chapel of the Broletto in Brescia

(c. 1410). `05088 Some ten years later the Venetian Senate

commissioned him to paint a battle scene in the Hall of the Great

Council; Gentile Bellini seems to have been among his pupils at that

time. We find him next in Florence, painting for the church of Santa

Trinita an Adoration of the Magi (1423) which even the proud

Florentines acclaimed as a masterpiece. It is still preserved in the

Uffizi: a bright and picturesque cavalcade of kings and retinues,

stately horses, musing cattle, squatting monkeys, alert dogs, a lovely

Mary, all compellingly focused upon a charming Infant who places an

explorative hand upon the bald head of kneeling royalty; it is a

picture admirable in gay color and flowing line, but almost

primitively innocent of perspective and foreshortening. Pope Martin

V called Gentile to Rome, where the artist deposited some frescoes

in San Giovanni Laterano; they have disappeared, but we may surmise

their quality from the enthusiasm of Rogier van der Weyden, who, on

seeing them, pronounced Gentile the greatest painter in

Italy. `05089 In the church of Santa Maria Nuova Gentile painted other

lost frescoes, one of which led Michelangelo to say to Vasari, "he had

a hand like his name." `050810 Gentile died in Rome in 1427, at the

height of his renown.

His career is evidence that Umbria, to which he culturally belonged,

was generating its own geniuses and style in art. By and large,

however, the Umbrian painters took their lead from Siena, and

continued the religious mood without a break from Duccio to Perugino

and the early Raphael. Assisi was the spiritual source of Umbrian art.

The churches and legends of St. Francis disseminated through the

neighboring provinces a devotion that dominated painting as well as

architecture, and discountenanced the pagan or secular themes that

were elsewhere invading Italian art. Portraits were seldom asked of

Umbrian painters, but private individuals, sometimes using the savings

of a lifetime, commissioned an artist, usually local, to paint a

Madonna or a Holy Family for their favorite chapel; and there was

hardly a church so poor but it could raise funds for such a symbol

of hopeful piety and community pride. So Gubbio had her own painter,

Ottaviano Nelli, and Foligno had Niccolo di Liberatore, and Perugia

boasted Bonfigli, Perugino, and Pinturicchio.

Perugia was the oldest, largest, richest, and most violent of the

Umbrian towns. Placed sixteen hundred feet high on an almost

inaccessible summit, it commanded a spacious view of the surrounding

country; the site was so favorable for defense that the Etruscans

built- or inherited- a city there before the foundation of Rome.

Long claimed by the popes as one of the Papal States, Perugia declared

itself independent in 1375, and enjoyed over a century of passionate

factionalism surpassed only by Siena. Two wealthy families fought

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

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