Printers' Certificate ‘ Two Hundred and Fifty-six Copies only of this Edition have been printed , of which this is S\j. £#/ sdH /V Christ & His Mother In Italian Art EDITED BY JULIA CARTWRIGHT (MRS. ADY) WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT EYTON CANON OF WESTMINSTER LONDON BLISS, SANDS ftf CO. MDCCCXCVII * 131 . Contents Introduction PAGE Biographical Notices GIOTTO ..... FRA ANGELICO FRA FILIPPO LIPPI SANDRO BOTTICELLI DOMENICO GHIRLANDAJO . LEONARDO DA VINCI LORENZO DI CREDI . FRA BARTOLOMMEO MARIOTTO ALBERT I NELLI . ANDREA DEL SARTO MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI GENTILE DA FABRIANO PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA . LUCA SIGNORELLI PIETRO PERUGINO FRANCESCO FRANCIA RAPHAEL .... ANTONIO ALLEGRI DA CORREGGIO . 3 8 13 18 23 27 32 35 40 42 47 52 55 58 62 66 70 ... . . -76 81 vii b BERNARDINO LUINI ANDREA MANTEGNA GIOVANNI BELLINI CARLO CRIVELLI . ALVISE VIVARINI VITTORE CARPACCIO GIORGIONE PALMA VECCHIO . LORENZO LOTTO TITIAN JACOPO TINTORETTO PAOLO VERONESE List of Plates {AN HISTORICAL NOTE FACES EACH PLATE) The Madonna del Gran Duca, by Raphael {For note on frontispiece see page 130) The Madonna and Child with Angels , by Fra Filippo Lippi The Madonna writing the Magnificat, with the Child and Angels, by £ Botticelli ........ The Madonna with the Child, S. Anne and S. ‘John the Baptist [The Academy Cartoon], by Leonardo da Vinci ..... The Holy Family, by Fra Bartolommeo .... The Madonna delle Arpie, by Andrea del Sarto .... The Holy Family, by Michelangelo ..... The Madonna and Child, with Saints, by Pietro Perugino Madonna adoring the Child, by Francesco Francia The Cowper Madonna, by Raphael ...... The Madonna di Foligno, by Raphael .... The Madonna di San Sisto, by Raphael ..... The Madonna and Child in Glory, by Antonio Allegri da Correggio Madonna and Child, by Bernardino Luini The Holy Family, by Andrea Mantegna .... The Madonna della Vittoria, by Andrea Mantegna The Madonna and Child, by Giovanni Bellini The Madonna and Sleeping Child, with Two Boy-Angels, by Alvise Vivarini The Madonna and Saints, by Giorgione The Madonna and Child , with Saints, by Palma Vecchio The Holy Family and Saints, by Lorenzo Lotto The Holy Family with Four Saints , by Titian The Annunciation, by Fra Angelico .... Frontispiece . facing 132 facing *34 ' . f.c. c ! 3 6 facing 138 facing 140 facing 142 . facing 144 facing 146 ■ Jacing 148 facing 150 . facing 152 facing *54 . facing 156 facing IJ8 facing l60 facing l62 facing 164 facing 166 facing l68 facing 170 facing 172 facing 174 ix LIST OF PLATES The Annunciation, by Carlo Crivelli ..... facing 176 The Annunciation , a Drawing by Raphael . ... facing 178 The Visitation , by Mariotto Albertinelli ..... facing 180 The Nativity, by Piero della Francesca facing 182 The Nativity, by Francesco Francia ..... ■ f"i»g 184 The Nativity, by Lorenzo di Credi ..... facing 186 The Adoration of the Magi, by Gentile da Fabriano • facing 188 The Adoration of the Magi, by Domenico Ghirlandajo facing 190 The Adoration of the Magi, by Bernardino Luini .... • facing 192 The Circumcision, by Luca Signorelli ..... facing 194 The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, by Vittore Carpaccio . facing T96 The Flight into Egypt, by Fra Angelico .... facing 198 Christ among the Doctors, by Bernardino Luini .... facing 200 The Marriage at Cana, by Paolo Veronese facing 202 The Transfguration, by Fra Angelico ..... . facing 204 Christ taking leave of His Mother, by Antonio Allegri da Correggio facing 206 The Last Supper, by Fra Angelico ..... facing 208 Madonna Addolorata and Ecce Homo , by Bernardino Luini facing 210 The Crucifixion, by Pietro Perugino ..... facing 212 The Crucifixion , by Tintoretto . ..... facjng 2I 4 The Descent from the Cross, by Fra Angelico . facing 2l6 Pieta, by Giovanni Bellini ...... . facing 218 Pieta, by Francesco Francia ..... facing 220 The Entombment, by Titian . facing 222 The Resurrection, by Fra Angelico ...... facing 224 The Ascension , by Giotto ..... facing 226 The Ascension, by Pietro Perugino ...... facing 228 X Introduction WORK like this is founded on the assumption that art has something to teach us about the life of Christ and His Mother — some aspects of the Incarnation to reveal — which cannot be conveyed by means of words or symbols. This assumption at once gives the artist his true place : through him, if he is true to his inspirations, a distinct revelation is made to the human soul — a revelation of certain sides of the Divine Mysteries which can be made in no other fashion. So that a work of this kind is a real con- tribution to the religious forces that are influencing us. I am quite aware that from this view there would be much dissent, chiefly proceeding from those whose view of the function of art is limited to the fact that it ministers to the gratification of the senses or, at most, that it assists the imagination by representing to dull minds that which words cannot convey. But there are considerations founded on our own self-consciousness which, I venture to think, prove that this view of the question is altogether false and unsatisfying. On these I would dwell first : i. The sense of beauty, the admiration and desire for what is beautiful in the largest sense, is implanted in man. No doubt the quantity and quality of this sense vary indefinitely. But, somehow or other, in some shape or other, every one has a sense that certain things are beautiful, and a corresponding desire for them or a longing for their presence. Just as the other perceptions — the sense of truth, or the sense of utility, or the sense of order — vary in strength and scope in individuals, so does the sense of beauty. It ranges from the rough and coarse ideals of the savage to the highest and most refined appreciations of artistic genius ; but all through there is the longing for beauty and the delight in its realisation. It varies, too, not only in different men and in men of different times, but in the same men at different times of their lives ; but while its charm lasts, it is imperious in its demands ; it stills and satisfies the soul as nothing else does. Whether it be awakened by music, art, or nature, it is equally impressive for the time ; it swallows up everything else ; it lifts man into another world. This sense of beauty is implanted, within us, in the germ, by God — it is part of our human outfit ; it is His messenger, whether it wakes up within us at the sight ot sea and mountain, dawn and stars, at the bidding of the succession and harmony of sounds, at the recounting of noble deeds or the survey of great characters, or even. XI INTRODUCTION strange to say, at the portraiture of deep suffering nobly borne, of wasting disease, of pain and tears — for sorrow has a beauty of its own as well as brightness and strength, and completeness of form. There is, then, this mysterious and primary quality of beauty in things which at first sight seem so different, and we can detect it with an inward eye, with a sense that is not bodily but completely spiritual. God has given us this sense and the desire which it awakens ; and He has provided for its satisfaction beauty as an inward element in the things that He has made ; in the lilies of the field ; in the glories of sunrise and sunset ; in the rippling waves and the clear blue lake ; in the stars ; in the sparkling gem ; in the roar of the diapason ; in the clang of the trumpet ; in the sweet, soft voices of harp, flute, and strings. And He has also given to the painter the power to create beauty— to create what He Himself has made— beauty of another kind to that which has been seen before ; beauty of form and beauty of colour ; beauty over which time has no power which remains in our great galleries, and exercises its spell from generation to generation. The great painters have left these creations in the world, which endure, not as mere spectacles, but as lifting and moulding forces. As we look on the work of their hands we feel that there can be no question raised either about the satisfaction which God has provided for the implanted sense of beauty within man, or about their lasting influence. “ They are in truth the substance, we the shadows.” And those who meet and satisfy in any degree the longing for the beautiful in man, above all those who raise his ideals and elevate his conceptions have a right, an undoubted right, to be accounted along with great poets and musicians as “ fellow-workers with God,” — trusted with a ministry — endowed with a special a g^ °f grace. 2. This is our contention then in the face of those who would limit the function of art to merely sensuous gratification. But I go further than this and contend that art has had a great mission in reference to the Incarnation. It has helped men to realise what is in itself so unthink- able, that God Who made heaven and earth entered into these familiar conditions of time and space and came into the world the Child of a human mother. Those are amazing words : “ When Thou tookest upon Thee to deliver man. Thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.” But the painter has filled them with an interpretation which is always appealing to us in some Madonna and Child, and has made their meaning live and thrill, even for us now, who are so familiar with them. At certain epochs this kind of influence spread far more widely. It would not be too much to say that the realisation of Christ’s real Manhood for the masses of men in the middle ages was effected by art. The early theological controversies about the Incarnation had left Him but a dim shadowy figure, a Being non-natural, out of touch with man’s ordinary life. Scholastic subtleties would have completed the dimming process if it had not been for the inspiration of art. Of course art too had its limitations ; it was often used then for purely doctrinal and emotional purposes. It was used to produce what was exquisitely simple and natural, like the frescoes in the Arena Chapel, which brought Christ and His life home to the hearts of homely men ; but it was used also to enforce doctrine, to expand in an unhealthy and coarse detail the idea xii INTRODUCTION of judgment, the terrors of Divinity, as in the Campo Santo at Pisa ; it was used, too, to portray the Passion of Christ in an exclusive fashion, to heighten the idea of His physical sufferings, to represent them in a realistic fashion which robbed them of all awe and sublimity and caused them to appeal to man’s pity and compassion, not to his reverence and deepened feelings. The effect of this limited point of view would have been to extinguish the idea of a pure and natural Manhood, to make Him only a subject for exciting one set of feelings, and to obscure all the rest. The corrective of all this limitation in idea was found in the fascination which the painting of the Madonna and Child exercised on the greatest masters. The humanisation of Christ has always seemed to have been effected for the masses by the portrayal of that which is the most moving of all spectacles, wherever seen on this earth — the child in its mother’s arms. It would not be too much to say that these pictures have acted as a corrective of those theological disputations about Christ, which have made men think of Him as though He were an idea or a doctrine, and not a living, loving Man. The thing that draws Him closest to us, and our- selves to Him, at all times, is that He had a mother, and that His mother was to Him what only a mother can be ; and this idea the “endless” Madonnas have put into a shape and have given to it a concreteness which makes forgetfulness or obscuration of His real Manhood impossible. They have taught the deepest truth about Christ in a wordless language that comes home to every one ; and that by portraying the deepest and truest relation that is connected with our common life. Our theological disputes have often caused earnest and devout souls to cry out for the living Christ, to lament with Mary, “ They have taken away our Lord, and we know not where they have laid Him.” The Christ who blessed the little children and claimed them for His own and for His kingdom seems to have disappeared from among us in a cloud of disputes and dogmatisms ; we feel that we want less controversy and a more quiet realisation of the real sublimity that surrounds all that is meant by “ the Mother and the Son.” Of course there are many other points of view in reference to the life of Our Lord, besides this one, as to which art has given us new conceptions. But its special function seems to have been to teach us most completely the deepest lessons. And it has done this when it has represented the common human life filled with the Divine — has taken every-day life and represented it ideally and with sub- limity — has lifted the prosaic into the poetic and made us feel a sense of the greatness of the smallest things. The painters who have done this — who have been able to combine a sense of Divine Majesty and human friendliness, of Power from on high and every-day working life — remain the great teachers of those who have eyes to see. They have left, in their pictures of Christ, the sense of suggestiveness, the feeling that there was more to know. While they have seemed to separate Him from the race as a King, they have bound Him to the race as a Brother, they have made us feel at once His nearness and His exceeding far-offness. While modern realism has put its withering hand on His Person and Life and tried to strip it of mystery — to treat it with unhappy and unblessed familiarity, to vulgarise the scenes of the Gospel by introducing the tawdriness and the vulgarity of modern fashions, or has sacrificed moral sublimity to a hateful sentimentalism — their creations remain as a perpetual protest. The purpose and effort of this work is to follow humbly in the same direction. It is meant xiii INTRODUCTION to bring before us some of the greatest and most elevating conceptions of Christ, and in particular to emphasise that which brings Him so near to us, His acceptance of the relationship of the Son of Marv, and all the tender home feeling which it at once involves and sanctifies. We follow the gradual development of this idea, from the first beginnings of Italian painting, in the early years of the fourteenth century, to the days of the full Renaissance, when Christian art reached its highest beauty and perfection in the works of Giovanni Bellini and Titian, of Raphael and Leonardo. We see the Virgin and Child in a thousand different forms ; sometimes alone, sometimes attended by S. Joseph and the infant Baptist, sometimes by S. Anne and S. Elizabeth or other saints. We see the Mother nursing her Babe or kneeling in devout adoration at His cradle, we see her resting in fair meadows or enthroned under marble porticoes, we see her again appearing in glorified visions surrounded by angel hosts and seated on the clouds of heaven. And we see her, too, taking part in the different scenes of her Son’s life on earth, sharing in His joys and in His sorrows, at the marriage-feast of Cana, and by the Cross of Calvary. As a rule, the Madonna is always present in the successive scenes from the Passion and Death of Christ, and in His Ascension into Heaven, while she is occasionally introduced by Fra Angelico and a few other painters in the Transfiguration and Resurrection. The fifty examples here selected are, as far as possible, representative of the chief schools of Italian art, from the days of Giotto to those of Michelangelo. Both Raphael s small Madonna at Panshanger, and the cartoon of the “ Virgin and S. Anne,” by Leonardo, at Burlington House, have been especially reproduced for this work, by the kind permission of Lord Cowper and of the President and Council of the Royal Academy. ROBERT EYTON. xiv GIOTTO 1276-1337 N a village of Etruria,” writes Lorenzo Ghiberti, the earliest historian of the Florentine Renaissance, “ Painting took her rise.” In other words Giotto di Bondone was born in the year 1276, at the little village of Colle, in the Val Mugello, and commune of Vespignano, fourteen miles from Florence. There the great master, named after his grandfather, Angiolo, and known by the diminutive, Angiolotto-Giotto, kept his father’s flocks on the Apennine slopes, until Cimabue, riding one day over the hills, found him drawing his sheep with a coal on a slab of stone. This illustrious personage, struck by the boy’s talent, obtained his peasant-father, Bondone’s leave to take his son back to Florence, and thus at ten years of age, Giotto was taken straight from the sheep-folds to study painting in the shop of the first master of the day. Such is the tale, told alike by Ghiberti and Vasari, and confirmed by Leonardo da Vinci, who remarks that “ Giotto, being born in the mountains, and having no guide but Nature in his art, began by drawing on the rocks the movements of the goats which he kept.” The stories which ran through Florence of the young painter’s marvellous skill, of the O which he drew with a single sweep of his pen, of the fly which Cimabue tried to brush off his picture, or of the thirsty look on the face of the man stooping to drink at the well, are proofs of the wonder and admiration excited among his contemporaries by his first attempts to imitate Nature more closely. The boldness and originality of his genius soon led him to discard the purely conventional art then in practice, and to adopt new types and colouring, as well as to introduce natural incidents and expression into his compositions. At the same time there can be no doubt that the young artist’s style was partly formed by the study of antique models, and that his conceptions were largely influenced by the example of Giovanni Pisano, the great sculptor of the facade of Orvieto, and of the pulpits of Pisa and Pistoja. Giotto’s first important frescoes were painted in the ancient Badia of Florence, and the fame which he thus acquired brought him an invitation to Assisi from Fra Muro, Vicar-General of the Franciscan Order, between the years 1296 and 1302. Here, in the famous sanctuary which had 3 GIOTTO arisen over the tomb of the great Saint, whose memory was still fresh in the hearts of the people, Giotto painted his four allegories of the monastic Virtues on the vaulted roof of the Lower Church. OBEDIENCE, POVERTY, and CHASTITY, were the three fair maidens whom, according to the legend, S. Francis met on the road to Siena, and who represented the graces which he held up to his followers as the sum of evangelical perfection. Nowhere is Giotto’s life-giving power more finely displayed than in these works, where he has managed to animate the frigid conceits of mediaeval allegory with human warmth and reality. And especially interesting for the sake of its connection with Dante is the scene in which S. Francis, the “ glorioso poverell’ di Dio,” is represented as wedding his holy bride, Poverty. The nuptials take place as described in the “ Divina Commedia,” before the whole court of Heaven. Love and Hope are the bridesmaids, Christ himself the priest, who blesses the wedded pair. The bride’s robe is torn and ragged, the children throw stones, and the dogs bark at her, but the thorns blossom into roses about her brow, and the face of Francis glows with love and rapture. A practical illustration of the story is seen on the left of the picture, where a young man led by an angel gives his cloak to a beggar, while on the other side, a richly clad youth with a falcon on his wrist, turns scornfully away, and a miser clutches his bags of gold more tightly in his grasp. All these frescoes are painted in the clear pale colour which Giotto used from the first, and which enabled him to attain striking effects, in spite of his ignorance of light and shade. At the same time he substituted an oval type of countenance with almond-shaped eyes, for the round faces and staring eyes until then in general use. His drapery hangs in simple and natural folds, the action is real and life-like, and there is some attempt at foreshortening, while the grouping of the figures and individual expression of the heads reveal a marked advance upon all that had gone before. According to Ghiberti, Giotto adorned nearly the whole of the Lower Church with paintings, and traces of his hand may be found in several of the scenes from the life of Christ which are still to be seen in the right-hand transept, but all these have been much damaged by damp and restoration, and it is difficult to determine his exact share in the work. The series was probably finished by some of his followers, who worked in the great church which, long after Giotto’s death, remained the home and centre of Tuscan art. Before Giotto’s labours at Assisi were ended, he was summoned to Rome by Pope Boniface VIII., and here, in 1298, he designed the mosaic of the Navicella, which is still to be seen in the portico of S. Peter’s. The tempera altar-piece which he painted according to Ghiberti in the old basilica has long perished, and the only remaining traces of his presence in the Eternal City are to be seen in three interesting panels, representing the martyrdom of S. Peter and S. Paul, and the Pope’s nephew, Cardinal Stefaneschi, kneeling before Christ, which are still preserved in the Canons’ Sacristy at S. Peter’s, and a damaged fresco of Pope Boniface proclaiming the Jubilee, on a pillar in S. John Lateran. This last work proves that Giotto was still in Rome in 1300, when Dante came there among the vast concourse of pilgrims. The poet of the Vita Nuova, who places his great vision of heaven and earth in that memorable year, was an intimate friend of Giotto, and on his return to Florence, the painter introduced Dante’s portrait in an altar-piece which he executed for the chapel of the Podesta palace. This portrait was probably copied in the frescoes 4 GIOTTO that were discovered upon the chapel walls fifty years ago, and were at one time ascribed to Giotto, although they must have been painted by one of his followers, after the fire which destroyed the building in 1332. In 1303, Enrico Scrovegno, a citizen of Padua, built a chapel dedicated to the Virgin on the site of an old Roman amphitheatre, and invited Giotto to adorn its walls. Three years later Dante visited Padua during his exile, and spent some time in the house of Giotto, who was living there with his wife, Madonna Ciuta of the parish of S. Reparata of Florence, and their young children. The painter was then exactly thirty, and is described by Benvenuto da Imola, an early commentator of Dante, as adhuc satis juvenis. “The whole of the Arena Chapel,” writes Ghiberti, “was painted by Giotto,” and, if we except the frescoes in the choir that were added later, his statement is correct. A fresco of Christ in glory occupies the space above the arch leading into the sanctuary. On the entrance wall is the Last Judgment, and along the side walls are three rows of subjects, divided by ornamental borders in imitation of mosaic-work, representing thirty-eight scenes from the life of the Virgin and her Son. Below are allegorical figures of the Virtues and Vices, in chiaroscuro, illustrating the progress of man from earth to heaven. Each virtue is contrasted with the opposite vice, and the series ends with Hope, who, standing on the threshold of Paradise, springs forward to reach a crown held out by angel hands, while Despair, the blackest of all crimes, is dragged down by devils to her place among the lost. Here, in a series of undoubted genuineness and comparatively good preservation, we are able to form some idea of Giotto’s marvellous powers. We see how completely he realises the signi- ficance of the tale he has to tell, and how wonderfully he succeeds in communicating its meaning to the spectator, in spite of the evident limitations of his art. Each line is charged with purpose ; the types which he selects, the grouping and gestures of his figures, all help to set forth his intention. His splendid dramatic powers are fully revealed in the historic subjects leading up, as they do, from the legends of the Virgin’s birth to the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. There are scenes which in point of composition have never been surpassed, such, for instance, as the Resurrection of Lazarus or the “ Entombment, ’ while few later painters have equalled the beautiful expression of sympathy in the face of S. Elizabeth as she hails the Mother of the Lord, or the passion of adoring love, in the outstretched arms and yearning eyes of the Magdalen, kneeling at the feet of the risen Christ. Again, slight and elementary as was his knowledge of anatomy, he contrives to give a wonderful sense of life and movement to the elect, whom he shows us rising from the last sleep or to the form of the ascending Christ, as he returns to his Father’s throne. Here and there we find some of the homely incidents which Giotto did not shrink from introducing in the most solemn scenes — the maid-servant spinning in the room where S. Anne kneels at her prayers, the fat man tossing off his cup of wine at the marriage feast, or the dog that barks at Joachim as he returns, plunged in thought, to his hut in the wilderness. And although the type of countenance which he adopts is of a decidedly massive and heavy cast, some of the women in the marriage procession of the Virgin and many of the single figures of the Virtues are full of grace and charm. We feel that beauty has returned to earth, and lives once more in these youthful forms. The other frescoes which Giotto painted at Verona and Ferrara, at Lucca, Ravenna, and 5 GIOTTO Naples, have all perished, and the only other series now in existence is to be found in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce in Florence, where no less than five chapels were decorated by his hand. Three of these have been covered with modern paintings, but the coat of whitewash which concealed Giotto’s frescoes in the other two, has been of late years removed, and a noble series of frescoes, painted in all probability in the last decade of his life, has been once more brought to light. The Peruzzi chapel contains scenes from the life of S. John the Baptist and S. John the Evangelist which, for grandeur of composition, energy of movement, and beauty and variety of expression, surpass all Giotto’s earlier works. The figures are larger and better drawn, the draperies are treated with greater breadth and freedom, and in the few portions of the surface which have not been utterly destroyed, we trace a marked advance in gradation of colour. The movement of the angel who appears to Zacharias, and the action of the musician playing the viol as he watches Salome dancing before Herod, are both admirably given, while the expression of curiosity and surprise on the faces of the disciples assembled round S. John’s empty grave, is rendered with dramatic vividness. The series of the life of S. Francis in the Bardi chapel has been still more grievously injured, but enough remains to show us the widespread influence which Giotto’s conceptions exerted on future generations of artists, and the “ Death of the Saint ” is a singularly noble and impressive picture. We have only to compare this pathetic scene with Ghirlandajo’s fresco of the same subject in the Trinita to realise the immense superiority of Giotto’s genius. Unfortunately, nearly all the panel pictures which excited the admiration of his contem- poraries — the “ Madonna,” which Petrarch left as his most precious possession to his friend, Francesco di Carrara, the portraits of Dante’s host, “ Can Grande,” and that “ Death of the Virgin ” upon which Michelangelo loved to gaze — have vanished. Of the few that remain, the most important are the large “ Madonna,” formerly in the church of Ognissanti, which now hangs side by side with that of “ Cimabue ” in the Academy, a living proof, as it were, of the truth of Dante’s famous lines, “ Credette Cimabue nella pittura tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido,” and the picture of S. Francis receiving the Stigmata, in the Louvre. This precious work, with its charming predella of S. Francis preaching to the birds, and supporting the falling pillars of the Lateran, was originally painted for the convent church of S. Francesco of Pisa, and is signed Opus Jocti Florentini. This inscription proves the truth of Boccaccio’s statement that Giotto always refused to assume the name of Magister, and it is worthy of notice that the master invariably used the signature Gioctus Pictor in legal documents that are still in existence. The deep impression which Giotto’s powerful personality left upon his contemporaries is recorded not only by Vasari, but by Petrarch, Sacchetti, and other writers, who with one voice bear witness to the great master’s genial temper and ready wit. Boccaccio has left us an amusing picture of the famous painter, trotting along the road to Mugello one rainy day on a tired nag, accompanied by the learned advocate, Messer Forese, both of them wrapt up in old cloaks and hats borrowed from the peasants, and bespattered with mud from head to foot. “Well, Giotto,” said the lawyer, “ could a stranger who met you to-day ever suppose that you were the first painter in Florence ? ” “ Certainly,” was Giotto’s prompt reply, “ if beholding your worship, he could for a moment imagine that you had learned your A B C.” We have a more serious 6 GIOTTO instance of Giotto’s powers of satire in his canzone on the subject, Voluntary Poverty, a virtue which had no merit in his eyes, and his denunciation of the hypocrisy that often lurked under the cloak of monastic perfection, is curious as coming from the man who was the favourite painter of the whole Franciscan Order. In 1329, Giotto went to Naples, on the invitation of King Robert, and painted two series of frescoes, the one which is mentioned by Petrarch in the royal chapel of the Castello Nuovo, the other, in the Franciscan Convent of Santa Chiara, on subjects from the Apocalypse, conceived, we are told, in the spirit of the divine Poet, “ col pensiero di Dante.” Soon after his return to Florence, in 1334, he was appointed Capo-maestro of the Duomo works, and prepared designs for the beautiful Campanile that was completed after his death. In 1334, he was sent to Milan by the Signoria, to work for their ally, Azzo Visconti, and painted another series of frescoes in the ducal palace, which have also perished, but which Vasari describes as being of “ admirable beauty.” Late in 1336, he returned to Florence, to watch over the building of his bell-tower and carve the reliefs which adorn the base, “ being highly skilled,” Ghiberti tells us, “ in both arts.” In the midst of these labours, his glorious life was brought to a premature close by a sudden death, on the 8th of January, 1337. He was buried with great honour in the Cathedral, and more than a hundred years later, Lorenzo de’ Medici placed a bust, carved by Benedetto da Maiano, upon his tomb, while a Latin epitaph composed by Poliziano, gave proud utterance to the popular veneration that was felt for the great master whose genius had brought dead Painting once more to life. 7 FRA ANGELICO 1 3 8 7-145 5 E place that Fra Angelico holds in art-history is altogether unique. In him we see the perfect type of the Christian painter, the saint whose holy life was reflected in his work and whose simple child-like faith supplied the inspiration of his art. All that was purest and best in the mediteval world found expression in his paintings — the passionate love of God and man that beat in the heart of Francis, the yearnings of Dante’s soul after a higher and more perfect order, the dreams of the monks who in those troubled days sang of the celestial country. And Vasari’s glowing language shows how profound was the impression which the angelic painter’s life and art had made upon the age, and how fondly his memory still lingered in the heart of Florence. “This truly Angelic Father,” he writes, “spent his whole life in the service of God and of his tellow creatures. He was a man of simple habits, and saintly in all his ways. He kept his heart pure from all worldliness, and was so good a friend to the poor, that I think his soul must be already in heaven. He worked continually at his art, but never painted any excepting sacred pictures. He might have become rich, but he never cared for money, and used to say that true wealth consists in being content with little. He might have enjoyed high dignities, both in his convent and in the world, but he did not value these things, and he had no wish but to escape hell and gain paradise. He might have ruled over many, but would not, saying that it was easier and safer to obey than to command. He was very gentle and chaste, and kept himself free from earthly ties, saying that he who would practise painting has need of quiet and should be without worldly cares and anxieties, and that he who would do the work of Christ must live continually with Him. He was never known to be impatient with the brothers a thing to me almost incredible ! — and when people asked him for a picture, replied, that if the Prior approved, he would not fail to satisfy their wishes. And the saints which he painted are more like saints in face and expression, than those of any other master. He never corrected or retouched his works, but left them as he had first painted them, saying that such was the will •of God. He never took pencil in hand without prayer, and could not paint a Crucifixion without FRA ANGELICO the tears running down his cheeks. . . . And since it seemed that saints and angels of so divine a beauty could only be painted by the hand of an angel, he was always called Fra Angelico.” His real name was Guido, and he was born in 1387, near Vicchio in Val Mugello, not far from Giotto’s home ; but when he entered the Dominican convent of Fiesole, in 1408, he became known as Fra Giovanni. The first ten years of his monastic life were spent at Cortona, where the Dominicans of Fiesole took refuge, while the Florentine Republic maintained the claim of the schismatic Pope, Alexander, and where Fra Angelico painted his first works. Most ol these perished during the French occupation, but two good altar-pieces — a Madonna and Saints in S. Domenico, and an Annunciation in the Gesu, with a view of Lake Thrasymene as seen from Cortona — are still in existence. In 1418, the community returned to their old home at the foot of the steep hill of Fiesole, and during the next eighteen years, Fra Angelico painted most of the panels for the churches and convents of Florence, which have made his name illustrious. He probably began by painting miniatures in the choir books of the monastery, and afterwards learnt something from his friend the Camaldoli master, Lorenzo Monaco, and more from Masaccio’s frescoes in the Carmine, but his art remained eminently subjective and owed little to other influences. In knowledge of light and shade and of the structure of the human frame he remained behind many of his contemporaries, and the representation of rapid movement or violent action was quite beyond his powers. The soul in his pictures is quite alive, the body hardly so. Even here his inborn grace and delicacy saved him from the worst defects, while the refined beauty of his faces and the pure bright colour of his draperies give a rare charm to his creations. But it is, above all, as the first great master of human expression that Angelico claims to be remembered. And it is this truly modern quality which appeals in so peculiar a manner to us all, and which, in spite of defective drawing and ignorance of anatomy, make the Dominican master’s works so profoundly interesting and attractive. The depth and sincerity of his own religious emotions, the might of his own hope and love, lent wings to his imagination. It is the intensity of his own love and grief that weeps with Dominic at the foot of the Cross, or gazes with Francis, in unspeakable yearning, on the face of his dying Lord, and his own pure dreams that live again in these enchanted visions of Paradise. Little of Angelico’s work remains at S. Domenico of Fiesole to-day, but the predella of Christ in Glory, now in the National Gallery, and the Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre, both formerly adorned the convent-church. Another Coronation, perhaps even more beautiful, was painted for S. Maria Nuova of Florence, and is now in the Uffizi. The artist has lavished all his richest ornament and most radiant colour on the bright beings who crowd the court of heaven and stand before the throne, as Mr. Ruskin has said so well, “ with the flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move, and the sparkles streaming from their purple wings, like the glitter of many suns upon a sounding sea, listening in the pauses of alternate song for the prolonging of the trumpet blast and the answering of psaltery and cymbal throughout the endless deep, and from all the star-shores of heaven.” But perhaps the most widely known of all Fra Angelico’s angels are the twelve seraphs blowing trumpets and playing viols and cymbals on the wings of the Tabernacle which he finished in 1433, for the Guild of Flax-Merchants. 9 FRA ANGELICO About the same time he may have painted the thirty- two panels of the life of Christ, which formerly adorned the presses that held the church plate of the Servite monks, and are now in the Academy of Florence. Here the traditional type adopted by Giottesque artists is followed with little variation, but the sweetness of the Virgin’s face and the simple directness and tender feeling with which each incident is told, are very fascinating. Another subject which Fra Angelico frequently repeated was the Last Judgment. The example that excited Vasari’s admiration was painted for the Camaldoli church of Sta. Maria degli Angeli, and is now in the Academy. Another, still finer in the execution of the details, passed from Cardinal Fesch’s gallery into that of Lord Dudley, and is now at Berlin. The horrors of the final scene and torments of the lost were little suited to Fra Angelico’s art, but Dante’s vision of the happy regions where the blessed dance hand in hand in the flowery meadows of Paradise, has never been more perfectly realised. This is the JJrbs beata , the heavenly Jerusalem of the medieval poet’s dream, where the leaf never withers and the flowers never fade, where the lost and loved are found again and pure hearts gaze on the unveiled face of God. In 1436, the convent of S. Marco in Florence was granted to the Dominicans of Fiesole, through the good offices of their powerful friend, Cosimo de’ Medici. Both church and monastery were rebuilt by the architect Michelozzo, and decorated by Fra Angelico with frescoes and altar-pieces. In 1869, this convent, hallowed by so many memories, was converted into a national museum, and the pictures which he painted as subjects for the devout contemplation of the brothers are now public property. The chapter-house contains his great “ Crucifixion,” which, in spite of the injuries which it has suffered and the dull red colour that hides its ultramarine background, remains one of the most solemn and impressive of pictures. Besides the traditional group of the fainting Virgin supported by the Maries and S. John, the patron saints of the city of Florence and of the Medici family and the founders of the chief monastic orders are all introduced. Every phase of grief and devotion is represented here, from the silent passion of love and sorrow in the eyes of Francis, to the wild burst of anguish with which S. Damiano turns away. The cloisters are adorned with smaller frescoes of Dominican saints, and over the door of the Forestiera is a beautiful lunette of Christ, the yellow-haired Stranger, with staff and scrip in his hand, on the way to Emmaus, in converse with the disciples, who, in the garb of Dominican friars, pray him to tarry with them. “ Abide with us, for it is toward evening and the day is far spent.” The corridors and cells once inhabited by the friars, on the upper floor, are decorated with scenes from the life of Christ, sadly damaged in places, but still of rare beauty and interest. All the well-known subjects are given in due course. Here the Angel of the Annunciation bends before the lowly Maid of Nazareth, and the white-robed seraph, pointing heavenwards in the dim light of the Easter morning, tells the Maries that their Lord is risen. Here Magdalen weeps in her despair at the foot of the Cross ; here, again, walking among the pines and cypresses of the convent garden, she turns in sudden rapture at the sound of the familiar voice calling her by name. As a rule, the traditional composition is preserved, but with certain variations, prompted by the painter’s tender devotion. For instance, in the Scourging and Crowning with thorns, only 10 FRA ANGELICO the form of Christ and the hands of the soldiers are seen, as if he could not bear to represent the whole of the painful scene. In the “ Agony of Gethsemane,” Martha and Mary are seen watching and praying, while the disciples slumber. The Virgin, who was the object of S. Dominic’s special devotion, figures in almost every subject, and S. Dominic, and occasionally S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Peter Martyr, are introduced in the Passion scenes, devoutly meditating on their Lord’s sufferings. The “ Sermon on the Mount ” and the “ Descent into Hades ” are of especial interest, and the rush of the spirits in prison to meet their victorious Deliverer is rendered with a power to which Fra Angelico seldom attains. But the whole series is marked by greater freedom and originality than any of his earlier works, and inspired with a fervent devotion such as no painter before or since has ever equalled. These frescoes in S. Marco must have been completed by 1445, when Pope Eugenius IV. summoned Fra Angelico to Rome, to paint the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the old Vatican Palace. Unfortunately, this Chapel was pulled down by Pope Paul III., to make room for a new staircase and both these frescoes, and another series which Angelico painted in the Dominican Church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, have perished. According to Vasari, the Pope was anxious to elevate Fra Angelico to the dignity of Archbishop of Florence, but consented at his request to appoint another friar of S. Marco, S. Antonio, to the vacant office. After the death of this pontiff, Angelico accepted a pressing invitation from the Board of the Cathedral Works, to visit Orvieto, and signed a contract by which he agreed to devote the summer months of each succeeding year, to the decoration of the newly erected Chapel of S. Brizio. On the 14th of June, 1447, he arrived at Orvieto, bringing Benozzo Gozzoli to help him in the work, and remained there until the 28th of September, by which time he had finished two of the triangular compartments on the ceiling of the Chapel immediately above the altar. The central form of Christ as the Judge of all, surrounded by angel choirs, is one of his most impressive figures, and the sixteen prophets in the pyramidal group on the left, are full of fire and inspiration. But the painter went back to Rome and the work which he had begun was left unfinished, until Luca Signorelli came to Orvieto fifty years afterwards. In January, 1450, we find Fra Angelico once more in Florence, acting in the capacity of Prior of S. Marco. In the following year, he went to Prato at the request of the commune of that little town, who had begged him to decorate their church, but was recalled to Rome by Pope Nicholas V. before he had time to begin the work. His last years were spent in Rome, where he painted a series of subjects from the lives of the early martyrs, S. Laurence and S. Stephen, in the chapel that still bears the name of its founder, Pope Nicholas V. These frescoes, which had been covered with whitewash and were only discovered a hundred years ago, are finer in point of composition and modelling than any of Angelico’s earlier works, and show that the Dominican master had not failed to profit by the great advance in technical knowledge that had been made during his lifetime. The women and children sitting at the feet of Stephen, the sick and lame receiving alms from Laurence, have all his old grace of line and charm of expression, with a far greater degree of dramatic power. And to-day, as we turn from the Stanze where the Angelic Painter figures among the saints of the Disputa, to visit the modest Chapel of Pope Nicholas, we feel that these FRA ANGELICO frescoes are not unworthy of a place by the side of Raphael’s immortal creations. They were Fra Angelico’s last works. He died in 1455, and was buried in the Dominican Church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, where his tomb may still be seen, and a Latin inscription in his honour, which is said to have been composed by Pope Nicholas himself. Hie jacet ven : Pictor Fr : Jo : de Flor : Ord : Pred : M.CCCC.LV. Non mihi sit laudi, quod eram velut alter Apelles Sed quod lucra tuis omnia, Christe, dabam. Altera nam terris opera extant, altera cslo ; Urbs me Joannem flos tulit Etruria:. 12 FRA FILIPPO LIPPI I 406—1469 HE history of Fra Filippo Lippi was at one time the subject of much controversy. On the one hand, there was Vasari’s romantic account of the Carmelite friar’s adventures, upon which Browning founded his well-known poem. On the other, we had an indignant protest from his modern biographers, who rejected Vasari’s scandalous tales as calumnies. But of late years new documents have come to light which go far to justify the Aretine writer, and to prove that his picture of the turbulent friar is in the main correct. The true version of Fra Filippo’s life is a curious and instructive page of history, especially as regards the morals of religious communities in these days. He was born in Florence in 1406, but his mother died at his birth, and his father, a butcher who lived in a street behind the Carmine Church, only survived her two years. At eight years old, the boy was taken by his aunt Mona Lapaccia, who declared herself unable to support him, to the neighbouring convent, where the Carmelites taught him to read and kept him in their service until, at the age of fifteen, he was admitted into the order. But the young novice had already shown signs of his talent for drawing. Instead of learning grammar, he scrawled faces over his copy-books and turned musical notes into arms and legs. The Prior, to do him justice, encouraged these artistic tastes, and Fra Filippo, after learning the elements of his art from some Giottesque master, spent his days in the church, watching Masaccio at work upon the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel. The vivid realism of the new art, the sense of the value and meaning of human life that was slowly dawning upon the age, appealed forcibly to the young Carmelite who had so little vocation for the cloister and so keen a taste for mundane pleasures. Soon he outstripped all his fellow-students, and when, in 1428, Masaccio died at the early age of twenty-six, he was employed to continue the frescoes in the church and cloister. “ The soul of Masaccio,” it was said, “had entered into the body of Fra Lippi.” These early works perished in the fire of 1771, but the word painter is affixed to his name in the convent records of 1430 and 1431. At the end of this year he left the convent to devote himself entirely to painting, but remained on ! 3 FRA FILIPPO LIPPI friendly terms with the friars, and continued to sign his pictures with his conventual name, Frater Philippus. About this time, Vasari tells us, he fell into the hands of Moorish pirates, as he was sailing in a pleasure boat off the coast of Ancona, and was taken captive to Barbary and there sold as a slave. Here the skill with which he drew his master’s portrait in charcoal, upon his prison- wall, produced so great an impression upon the Moors, that he was released and allowed to return to Italy. Whether this strange tale be true or not, it is certain we have no record of Fra Filippo’s movements between 1431 and 1434, when we find him at Padua engaged in painting a tabernacle for the Church of Sant Antonio. In the same year, he received a commission from the nuns of S. Ambrogio of Florence, for an altar-piece which was not completed till 1441, and for which he received 1200 lire. This was the famous Coronation of the Virgin, which now hangs in the Academy of Florence. The treatment of the subject is distinctly original. Three rows of angels wearing garlands of roses and holding tall lilies in their hands, are seen standing before the throne of the Eternal ; saints and bishops mingle with nuns and little children in the crowd of wor- shippers below. “ God in the midst, Madonna and her babe, Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood, Lilies and vestments and white faces sweet . . . And there, in the front, of course, a saint or two.” In the right hand, conspicuous by his brown Carmelite habit and shaven head among all these rich costumes and ornamental details, is Fra Lippi himself, raising his clasped hands devoutly, while a smiling angel, standing opposite, holds a scroll bearing the words, Iste perfecit opus. This altar-piece, Vasari informs us, first won for the painter the friendship and patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, “ the great man at the corner-house,” who was then all-powerful in Florence. But some years before the S. Ambrogio picture was finished, Fra Filippo was already working for the Medici, and among the panels which he executed for the chapel of their palazzo in the Via Larga, was the Madonna here reproduced, and the charming lunettes of the Annunciation and the Seven Saints in the National Gallery. The patron-saints of the Medici house, Cosimo and Damiano, are prominent figures in the last-named group and the pedestal of the vase which holds the lily of the Annunciation, bears their family badge of three feathers fastened together by a ring. Commissions now reached the Carmelite painter from all sides. In 1438, he was engaged by the Captain of the Guild of Or San Michele, to paint the altar-piece of the Madonna and Saints, now in the Louvre, for a chapel in S. Spirito, a work which he declared cost him five years of continual toil by day and night, and in 1447 completed two panels for the Palazzo Pubblico, one of which, the Vision of S. Bernard, is also in the National Gallery. At the same time his growing fame brought him orders from Perugia and Arezzo, and the Medici not only employed him to decorate their own chapels, but sent his works as gifts to the King of Naples and the Pope. And through Cosimo’s influence he was, in 1642, appointed rector of S. Quirico, a parish near Florence, and chaplain to a nunnery in the neighbourhood. 14 FRA FILIPPO LIPPI But in spite of these emoluments and of the liberal payment which he received for his pictures, Fra Filippo was always poor and needy, always breaking his contracts and wrangling with his employers, always beset with angry creditors, and writing begging letters to his patrons. In August 1439, he addressed a piteous entreaty to Cosimo’s son Piero, saying that he was the poorest friar in Florence, with four orphan nieces dependent upon him, and begging him to send supplies of corn and wine to his house for the sake of the poor children. Another time, when he was engaged upon a picture for Giovanni de’ Medici, he sent an urgent request for a supply of gold and silver-leaf, which he was unable to buy, and confessed that he dared not stay in Florence for fear of his creditors. A week later, the agent of the Medici paid a visit to his workshop and found that the friar had absconded in the night and that a forced sale of his goods was in the act of taking place in his atelier. The cause of this penury, according to Vasari, lay in Fra Lippi’s own lazy and dissolute habits, which led him constantly to neglect his work and waste his time and money in riotous living. On one occasion, Cosimo de’ Medici is actually said to have locked the painter up in a room of the palace, in order to make him finish a picture, but even then the friar found means to escape, by knotting his bed-clothes into a rope, and letting himself down through the window. In 1455, -he was brought before the Archbishop’s court by one of his apprentices, to whom he owed forty lire and was forced to confess that he had forged the receipt which he produced. He was, in consequence, deprived of his office as rector of S. Quirico, and the Pope to whom he appealed, not only confirmed the sentence, but declared the said friar to have been guilty of many and great crimes, plurima et nefanda scelera. In 1452, Fra Lippo was engaged to paint the choir of the Pieve or parish church of Prato, which Fra Angelico had been unable to undertake, and, four years later, he settled there and bought a house close to the Convent of Santa Margherita. At the same time he was appointed chaplain to the nuns and requested to paint a Madonna for the convent church. Although by this time past fifty, he fell in love with a beautiful young novice, Lucrezia Buti, who sat to him as model, and on the festival of the Sacra Cintola he carried her off to his house, where she was soon joined by her sister Spinetta, who was also a nun of Sta. Margherita. “ I laughed heartily,” wrote Giovanni de’ Medici, “when I heard of Fra Filippo’s escapade !” In 1457, Lucrezia gave birth to a son, who afterwards became known as the painter Filippino Lippi, but two years afterwards, both she and her sister returned to the convent and renewed their vows solemnly in the presence of the Bishop of Pistoja. Before long, however, the penitent nuns found the observ- ance of the convent rule too irksome for their taste and, in 1461, once more sought refuge in Fra Filippo’s house. This time a serious charge of unlawful abduction was brought against the painter, who sought the help of his Medici patrons, and at Cosimo’s request, Pope Pius II. absolved both the guilty parties from their vows. Lucrezia remained with the painter as his lawful wife and is mentioned by name, together with a daughter, to whom she gave birth in 1465, in the will of her son Filippino. Fra Lippi, being thus deprived of all his ecclesiastical offices, was compelled to devote himself more assiduously to painting, and the frescoes of the Pieve, which he had long neglected, *5 FRA FILIPPO LIPPI in spite of the threats and remonstrances of his employers, were at length finished. The history of S. John the Baptist and of S. Stephen, the patron saint of Prato, are the subjects here illustrated. On the right wall of the choir we have the “ Birth of the Baptist, his departure for the desert, his ministry on the banks of Jordan, and finally his execution and the feast of Herodias. On the left we see the birth of Stephen, his ordination, preaching, and stoning. The portrait of Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, at that time vicar of Prato, is introduced in the last scene, among a group of ecclesiastics in full canonicals, standing at the foot of the bier, where the body of the dead martyr is laid, and a black-robed figure behind is said to be the likeness of the painter, whose signature, Frater Filippus, appears on a pediment in the corner. In these frescoes at Prato we see Fra Filippo at his best. The grandeur of the composition, the rich costumes and splendid architecture introduced, above all the striking character of the heads and dramatic vigour of the representation, deserve the high praise bestowed upon them by Morelli, who ranks them with Mantegna’s Eremitani frescoes as the finest works of the Cinque- cento. When these frescoes were at length completed, Fra Filippo left Prato with his wife and children, and in 1467 moved to Spoleto, where he began to paint a new series of frescoes on the life of the Virgin, in the Cathedral choir. These works, upon which he was engaged for the next two years, are full of individual excellences, but have suffered greatly from injudicious restoration, and the latter subjects were completed by inferior hands. For, before the work was finished, Fra Filippo died, on October 4, 1469. His illness was short and sudden, and his death not without suspicion of poison, as Vasari is careful to inform us, “probably administered by his wife’s relations.” His faithful disciple, the Carmelite, Fra Diamante, who had followed him from Prato, buried the great artist — pictor famosissimus , as he is styled in the archives of the Carmine — in the Cathedral of Spoleto, where they had worked together. Eighteen years afterwards, Lorenzo de’ Medici, mindful of the services which Fra Filippo had rendered to his house, himself visited Spoleto and sought permission to remove the painter’s bones to Florence. But his request was declined by the municipality, and II Magnifico had to content himself with raising a tomb of red and white marble, inscribed with an epitaph from Politian’s pen, over the Carmelite friar’s resting-place. The exact place that Fra Filippo holds in the evolution of painting is not easy to define. He had neither Giotto nor Masaccio’s strong sense of material significance, nor yet Fra Angelico’s deep spiritual feeling. But his style has a charm and freshness of its own, and the part that he played in the development of art is more important than might at first sight be supposed. It was his to hand on the lessons that he had learnt from Masaccio in the dim Carmine chapel, and to set forth new ideals in the eyes of the next generation. And for this task he was fitted no less by Nature, than by the strange fate which made him a friar in that same Carmelite house. In his genial delight for all fair and pleasant things, in the rich ornament and glowing colour, the splendid architecture and sunny landscapes of his pictures, in the close attention which he bestows upon the lilies and daisies in the grass, and the garments and head-dresses of his women, above all in his love for merry urchins and round baby-faces, we see how strong 16 FRA FILIPPO LIPPI was the human element of his genius. This it was which fitted him to be in an especial manner the precursor of the Renaissance, and to proclaim to the men of his day that sense of a fuller and larger life that was slowly dawning upon the Italy of the fifteenth century. And to-day, as we look at these Madonnas bending in motherly love over their babies, or stand before the fading frescoes on the walls of the Duomo of Prato, we realise the power of this master, whom Michelangelo not only admired, but strove to imitate, and say with Vasari, “ Fii gran uomo “ After all he was a great man.” 17 SANDRO BOTTICELLI 1446-1510 HEN Fra Filippo died in 1469, his son Filippino was sent to learn painting in the shop of Sandro Botticelli, who was then counted the best master in Florence. During the next thirty years he maintained this position and stood high in the favour of successive generations of Medici. In his treatise on painting, Leonardo da Vinci quotes him as a great authority, and the extra- ordinary demand for his pictures at one time, is shown by the immense quantity of Madonnas, executed indeed by inferior hands, but all bearing the stamp of his invention, that are still to be seen in every gallery of Europe. And now after centuries of neglect, Botticelli is once more high in popular favour. One reason for the interest and admiration which he excites, is that he appeals to us in so many different ways. Some of us are charmed by his wonderful sense of movement or mastery of line and decorative design. Others are thrilled by the poetry of his imagination and his profound spiritual feeling. The range of his art is as wide as the culture of the Renaissance, and his works reflect the aspirations and ideals of his age, the different currents of thought in Florence in the days of the Medici, more completely than those of any other painter. Alessandro Filipepi, the youngest of a family of four brothers, was apprenticed as a boy to a goldsmith, but took his own name of Botticelli, not as Vasari tells us, from his first employer, but from his elder brother Giovanni, who acquired the nickname of Botticelli, from the tub which was the sign of his broker’s shop. Sandro, however, soon left the goldsmith’s bottega to enter Fra Filippo’s atelier , and worked with him until he left Prato for Spoleto, by which time he was already an independent master. Two pictures, one round, the other oblong, representing the Adoration of the Magi, in the National Gallery, and there ascribed to his pupil Filippino Lippi are now recognised by some as of the best critics as early works of Botticelli. Both the Madonna and Child bear a marked resem- blance to the types of his master Fra Filippo, but in the animation of the surrounding groups we already see marks of the scholar s hand. Several of the painter’s early works are also to be seen in the Uffizi, amongst others, the little pictures of S. Augustine in his study, of Judith bearing a sword in one hand and an olive-branch in the other, and a seated figure of Fortitude which was SANDRO BOTTICELLI evidently a companion to the Virtues painted by the Pollainoli for the Mercatanzia, or Tribunal of Commerce. In this Judith who goes quietly home in the strength of her great deed, and this Fortezza who looks at us with her sad patient eyes, the spiritual note already makes itself felt. And in the Judith we already see the long neck, angular features, and dreamy expression of Botticelli’s peculiar type, a type not beautiful, hardly even attractive, which none the less compels our attention and fascinates us with its sense of perpetual yearning. This is the type that we see repeated, with many different variations, in the circular Madonnas surrounded by child-angels, which, originally suggested by the marble or terra-cotta roundels of Mino da Fiesole and Luca della Robbia, soon became the most popular sacred pictures in Florence. One of the earliest of these is the Madonna of the Pomegranate, in the Uffizi, who looks down upon us with great sorrowful eyes, attended by singing boys and angels crowned with roses, a picture painted in all probability about 1470. The finest and most famous, the Virgin writing the Magnificat, is also in the Uffizi, but belongs to a later period. One of the few of Botticelli’s sacred pictures to which a date can with certainty be assigned, is the fine S. Sebastian at Berlin, which was painted in 1473, f° r Church of S. Maria Maggiore and reveals in a remarkable degree the knowledge of the human form and power of expression which the artist had already attained. Sandro’s powerful and interesting personality, no less than his artistic genius, early attracted the attention of Lorenzo de’ Medici. An ardent student and lover of Dante, who is even said to have written a commentary on the Divine Comedy, Botticelli was versed in all the learning of the day, and the pictures which he painted for the Medici villa at Castello show how fully he entered into the spirit of the humanists and poets of the day. The famous “ Birth of Venus” in the Uffizi, the “Primavera” of the Academy, and the “Mars” and “Venus” of the National Gallery, were evidently inspired by passages from the “ Giostra,” that unfinished poem which Poliziano wrote in honour of the tournament held in 1475, on the Piazza di Santa Croce, when Giuliano de’ Medici bore off the prize before the eyes of his adored lady, la bella Simonetta. That wonderful “ Venus,” borne on the waves and blown by sea-breezes to the laurel groves on the flowery shore, had been exactly described in the poet’s verse. Sandro has painted her in the very attitude, laying one hand on her heart, and the other on her long tresses of golden hair, surrounded by the same flying draperies and falling roses. Only, instead of the three nymphs whom Poliziano describes as awaiting her coming, the painter has represented one alone, clad in a white robe, patterned over with blue corn-flowers, and spreading a pink daisy-sown mantle to fold around this sea-born Aphrodite. And in the same way, Sandro’s beautiful vision of Spring agrees exactly with Poliziano’s verses on the “ Garden of Venus.” The joy of the young May-time was a favourite theme with the poets of Lorenzo’s day, and all the bright and pleasant imagery of their songs lives again in this picture of the bower where “Venus ” reigns and Spring enters, garlanded with roses, and radiant with youth and beauty. At her feet the flowers spring up in the grass, and the Graces, draped in gauzy white, dance hand in hand under the myrtle groves. There Zephyr sports with Flora, and Mercury, in the guise of the handsome Giuliano, goes before to scatter the clouds of winter with his wand, while Cupid, hovering in the air, aims a shaft at his heart. But a tragic doom soon overshadowed these dreams of love and youth. Before Poliziano’s poem 19 SANDRO BOTTICELLI was finished, the fair Simonetta died suddenly and was borne, with her face uncovered, through the streets of Florence, to her grave. Two years afterwards, on the 26th of April, 1478, Giuliano himself was murdered by the Pazzi at the most solemn moment of the mass, in Santa Maria del Fiore, and fell pierced with nineteen wounds. Botticelli was employed to paint the effigies of the conspirators on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico, and afterwards commemorated the triumph of the Medici over their foes, in the recently discovered picture of “ Pallas subduing the Centaur.” A striking portrait of Giuliano from his hand is in the Morelli collection, at Bergamo, and three generations of the Medici family figure in the fine “ Adoration of the Magi,” which he painted at Lorenzo’s command for Santa Maria Novella. Cosimo, an aged and grey-headed king, is seen kneeling at the feet of the Virgin and Child, with his two sons Piero and Giovanni at his side, and Giuliano and Lorenzo are among the youths standing by, while in the man wearing a yellow mantle on the right, we recognise the painter’s own strong and thoughtful face. It was for another member of the Medici house, Lorenzo di Pier Francesco, that Botticelli executed the ninety-three precious drawings in illustration of the “ Divina Commedia,” which, after being long in the Ashburnham collection, were bought some years ago for the Berlin Museum. In 1480, Botticelli painted a fresco of S. Augustine at his desk, as a companion to Ghirlandajo’s “ S. Jerome ” in the church of Ognissanti, and two years later, he was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV. to decorate his newly-erected chapel in the Vatican. The three frescoes by his hand in the Sistina, are characteristic examples both of his excellences and defects. In illustrating the story of Moses, instead of concentrating his forces on one grand composition, he breaks up the picture into seven different subjects, which leave the spectator with a sense of confusion. Yet many of the separate groups are full of charm, and he seldom painted a more gracious figure than that of “ Zipporah ” standing under the palm-trees at the well, with a myrtle wreath in her hair and a distaff and apple- bough, the symbols of labour and its reward, in her hand. We are conscious of the same absence of unity in the fresco of the “Temptation,” where a procession of richly-clad worshippers assist at the temple service and the chief actors in the scene, Christ and the tempter, are descried afar, standing on a distant pinnacle of the building. In the history of Korah, the figure of Moses stretching out his rod to destroy the rebellious people, gives a certain unity to the whole, but the general effect is injured by the exaggerated action of Korah’s followers. Force here degenerates into violence, and despair verges upon extravagance. A faithful reproduction of the “ Arch of Constantine,” and several ruined temples in the background, bear witness to the deep impression left upon the painter’s mind by this visit to Rome. In 1484, Botticelli returned to Florence, and in i486 he painted two subjects in tempera on the walls of Villa Lemmi, near Fiesole, to celebrate the marriage of Lorenzo Tornabuoni, a kinsman of the Medici, to Giovanna degli Albizzi. These works were only discovered under a thick coat of whitewash in 1873, and have been removed to the Louvre. In the one, Lorenzo is received by the seven liberal arts and sciences; in the other his bride is welcomed to her new home by Venus and the Graces. Here the delicate touch of his fancy is manifest in the maidens whose airy grace and sprightly motion recall the nymphs of the Primavera. But a new influence now made itself felt in the painter’s life. In 1490, Savonarola began to preach in Florence. His voice 20 SANDRO BOTTICELLI had a strange fascination for the scholars and artists of Lorenzo’s circle. Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, Cronaca and Michelangelo alike paused to listen, and heard his teaching gladly. And Sandro caught, what Vasari in his contemptuous way calls “the new frenzy,” and threw himself into the Piagnone movement with all the energy of his nature. He illustrated Savonarola s sermons, painted processional banners, and designed a large plate of the Triumph of Fra Girolamo. But Vasari’s statement that he gave up painting on this account is plainly untrue. On the contrary, several of his finest pictures belong to this period. The “ Coronation of the Virgin ” in the Academy was painted for Savonarola’s own convent church of S. Marco, by order of the Guild of Silk-Weavers. In the upper part, the Father, wearing the triple tiara, places a crown on the brows of the kneeling Virgin, while a troop of angels dance on the clouds in a tumult of wild rapture, and one winged child, borne upwards as it were by the uncontrollable power of love, darts to the side of Mary to share in her joy and triumph. Even the aged Saints who stand below, look up with eager eyes at the dancing seraphs, and seem to catch something of their ecstasy. Perhaps these boy-angels with their streaming locks and flying draperies were meant to recall the white-robed children who danced round the bonfire of Vanities at the Frate’s bidding. Another picture that bears a marked resemblance to this Coronation, is the fine altar-piece formerly in the Bardi chapel of S. Spirito, and now at Berlin. Here the Madonna is throned in a bower of palm and myrtle, between the white-bearded Evangelist S. John, and the rugged and hairy Baptist of the wilderness. Tall pots of flowering lilies and olive boughs, and copper bowls filled with red and white roses, painted with all Sandro’s loving care, adorn the stone balustrade of the garden, and a small figure of Christ on the Cross, at the base of the picture, reminds us that the painter was a follower of the Frate, and owned Christ as king in Florence. Both the small subjects from the legend of S. Zenobius in the Mond Collection and at Dresden, as well as the story of Virginia at Bergamo and the Death of Lucretia exhibited at the New Gallery in 1894, and now in America, belong to this period. So too does the splendid “Allegory of Calumny ” that Botticelli painted for his intimate friend Antonio Segni, and which is now in the Uffizi. The subject is taken from Lucian’s description of a picture by Apelles, which had been rendered familiar to Italian humanists by a quotation in Leon Battista Alberti’s “ Treatise on Painting,” but the fierce strife of factions in Florence and the tragedy of Savonarola’s end, may well have stirred the master’s heart when he painted this allegory of the violence and injustice of man. The scene is laid in a stately portico adorned with statuary, where Midas, weary of the impor- tunities of Ignorance and Suspicion, holds out his hand to Calumny, a richly clad woman bearing the torch of discord in one hand, and dragging the prostrate youth Innocence by the other. Envy, Intrigue, and Treachery attend her steps, and Remorse, in the shape of a ragged old hag with tottering limbs, looks back at Truth, a nude figure pointing up to heaven, in the calm certainty that there her mute appeal will be heard. The pillars of the loggia at the back, open out on a wide expanse of yellow-green sea, bounded by no further shore, and giving that indefinable sense of dreariness — the expression of the conviction fast growing on the painter’s soul, that nowhere on earth were truth and justice to be found. 21 SANDRO BOTTICELLI But the best proof we have of the passionate belief with which Sandro clung to the faith of the Frate, is the Nativity which he painted two years and a half after Savonarola’s death. The mystical intention of the picture is explained by the Greek inscription on the panel, which has been thus interpreted by Mr. Sidney Colvin : “This picture I, Alessandro, painted at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, in the half-time after the time, during the fulfilment of the Eleventh of S. John in the Second Woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosing of the devil for three years and a half. Afterwards he shall be chained, according to the Twelfth of John, and we shall see him trodden down as in this picture/’ The Holy Family as usual occupies the centre of the picture, the shepherds and Magi kneel on either side, and a troop of angels clad in symbolic hues of red, white and green, sing the Gloria in Excelsis on the pent-house roof, while in the opened heavens above, twelve more seraphs dance hand in hand, swinging olive-branches and dangling their golden crowns in an ecstasy of joy. In the foreground, devils are seen crawling away to hide themselves in the rocks, and rejoicing angels fall upon the necks of Savonarola and his martyred companions, the witnesses slain for the word of their testimony, as described in the Eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation. So the painter would have us know that, in these dark times of trial and persecution, his faith in the Friar had never faltered, and that he still looked forward to a day when the prophet’s word should be accomplished, and good triumph over evil. In 1503, Botticelli was summoned, among the chief artists in Florence, to choose a site for his friend Michelangelo’s colossal statue of David. After that we hear no more of him, and all we know is that he died on the 17th of May, 1510, and was buried by the side of his old father, in the parish church of Ognissanti. 22 DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO 1 44 9“ 1 49 4 OMENICO GHIRLANDAJO was the son of a silk merchant, named Tommaso Bigordi, and began life in the shop of a goldsmith who was noted as a maker of the gold and silver garlands worn by the Florentine women of the day. To this circumstance he owed his nickname del Ghirlandajo , in the Tuscan dialect Grillandajo , by which both he and his younger brother David became known. Domenico early showed his skill for portraiture by taking drawings of the men and women whom he saw walking in the streets, and before long he left the goldsmith’s shop to study painting under Alessio Baldovinetti. Both his natural gifts and early training fitted him for the position that he occupies as the central figure of the Florentine realists. Essentially prosaic by nature, and lacking the higher artistic gifts, Ghirlandajo was an able and accomplished master, gifted with rare facility of hand, and with a keen eye for all the small details of domestic life and their accompanying surroundings. His natural taste for architecture was developed by a visit to Rome, where he and his brother were employed in the Vatican library, during the winter of 1475, and where he painted •a fresco over the tomb of Francesco Tornabuoni’s wife, in S. Maria sopra Minerva. He made good use of his spare time on this occasion, and took several careful drawings of the temples, baths, and other classical remains, which in after years he often introduced in the background of his works. In 1480, he is described in a Florentine income-tax return as a painter by trade, living with his father, and having a wife of nineteen, Costanza by name. In the same year he executed the fresco of S. Jerome in the church of Ognissanti, a vigorous piece of work, in which the variegated pattern of the tablecloth, the flask and cardinal’s hat on the shelf, are all painted with Dutch-like precision. A Cenacolo in the refectory of the neighbouring convent, also bears the date of 1480, and was afterwards repeated, with some variations, in the smaller refectory of S. Marco. The traditional form of composition is retained in both, and there is the same lack of dramatic intention, together with the same accurate rendering of the dishes and water-bottles, the cherries on the table and the fruit and foliage of the trees in the background. The next ten years (1480-1490) were marked by many important works, executed with 2 3 DOMENICO GHIRLANDAJO amazing rapidity by this industrious artist, who often said that he longed to decorate the entire circle of the walls of Florence with frescoes. Between 1481 and 1485, he painted a grand fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, representing the “ Apotheosis of S. Zenobius, the patron saint of Florence, with figures of Roman warriors above, and a view of the Duomo and Baptistery in the background. In 1482, he executed several frescoes at S. Gimignano, and went to Rome at the invitation of Pope Sixtus IV., to work in the Vatican Chapel with Botticelli and other well-known artists. There he painted a “ Resurrection,” which has been destroyed, and a fresco of the “ Calling of S. Peter and S. Andrew.” In this fine composition he follows Masaccio closely, and at the same time gratifies his own inclination by introducing a number of contemporary personages. After his return to Florence three years were devoted to the frescoes on the “ Life of S. Francis,” in the Sassetti Chapel of the Trinita Church. Here, again, we have a number of portraits, including those of “ Lorenzo de' Medici ” and the painter himself. Both in execution and design these works show a marked improvement; the arrangement is simple and dignified, the colour refined and harmonious, while there is an evident attempt at expression in the last fresco of the series. The death of the saint, and the careless indifference of the choristers and of the mitred bishop, who chants the service with his spectacles on his nose, forms a striking contrast to the grief of the sorrowing friars. It is curious to see how closely Ghirlandajo has followed Giotto’s rendering of the same subject without being able to improve upon his composition. But, in spite of the great advance in anatomy and technique which had been made during the last century, in spite of the rich costumes and splendid architecture with which Ghirlandajo adorns the subject, his work lacks the supreme qualities that move us so deeply in Giotto’s work, and we feel how far short he falls of his great forerunner. Yet, for vigorous life-like rendering, nothing can surpass the admirable portraits of “ Francesco Sassetti” and “Madonna Nera,” his wife, whom Ghirlandajo has represented on either side of the high altar in this same chapel. No sooner had the master completed the frescoes of the Trinitd, than he set to work on a third great series, “The History of the Baptist and of the Virgin” in Santa Maria Novella. The commission was given him by Giovanni Tornabuoni, who agreed to pay him 1000 gold florins, and to add 200 more, if he were satisfied with the result. When, however, at the end of four years the great series was completed, Giovanni expressed the utmost satisfaction with the painter’s work, but begged him to be content with the sum which had been originally named. Ghirlandajo, who seems to have been comparatively indifferent to gain, agreed without a murmur ; but afterwards his patron’s conscience seems to have been uneasy; and when, in 1492, the painter fell ill at Pisa, he sent him a present of 100 florins. These twenty-one subjects, which Ghirlandajo and his scholars painted in the choir of S. Maria Novella, have been much injured by damp, and the decorative effect of the better preserved scenes is marred by the crowd of figures introduced. They are, we feel all through, the work of a very clever and highly trained artist, who un- fortunately lacked the divine spark of genius. But taken merely as illustrations of contemporary Florentine life, they are of great interest. All the poets and Platonists of Lorenzo’s day are here : Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Gentile de’ Becchi, together with the members of the Tornabuoni family. Here too are Giovanna degli Albizzi, the bride of Villa Lemmi, 24 DOMENICO GHIRLANDAJO and Ginevra de’ Benci, in her yellow gown, and other beauties of the day, in all the finery of their gorgeous robes and rich jewels. On the one hand, in the guests assembled at Herod’s banquet, or meeting in the temple courts, we see the public and official life of Florence, on the other we catch a glimpse of their private and domestic habits. We enter the chamber where the mother has given birth to a child, and see the friends who have come to wish her joy, the peasant-woman carrying a basket of fruit on her head, the nurse dandling the new-born infant, the maids preparing the bath. We note the antique frieze and bas reliefs that adorn the rooms, the splendid porticoes and Renaissance columns, the rich brocades and velvets worn by the wealthy Florentines. Here and there the painter has been a little over-anxious to display his skill. He puts in a distant window to show his understanding of perspective, and introduces a naked beggar as a proof of his knowledge of anatomy, while a perfect gale of wind blows out the skirts of the maid, who is pouring out water for the child’s bath. But, as a whole, these compositions are stately and imposing, and may well have seemed little short of marvellous to Ghirlandajo’s contemporaries. Many of this master’s finest easel-pictures were produced during the four years that he was at work on the frescoes of Sta. Maria Novella. “The Adoration of the Shepherds ” in the Academy, was painted for the high altar of the Sassetti Chapel in 1485, the large “Coronation” in the Town Hall at Narni, was finished in i486, and the round “Adoration ” in the Uffizi, bears the date, 1487. The last-named subject was repeated on a larger scale, with still more elaborate accessories, for the Chapel of the Spedale degli Innocenti, in the following year. The fine “ Madonna ” of the Uffizi, attended by archangels and bishops, was originally painted for the Church of S. Giusto, and another Madonna with a rich oriental carpet in the Academy, belongs to the same period, although bearing no date. In 1491, he painted the “Visitation ” now in the Louvre, for Lorenzo Tornabuoni’s chapel in S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, but this picture was evidently finished by his assistants, probably Bastiano Mainardi, or his own brother David. In the same year, Ghirlandajo was chosen, together with his brother and Botticelli, to execute a mosaic decoration for the Chapel of S. Zanobi, in the Duomo of Florence, but the work was ultimately abandoned, owing to the death of Lorenzo de* Medici. Two years before, Ghirlandajo had executed the mosaic of the “ Annunciation ” over one of the Cathedral doors, and took much pleasure in the work, saying that mosaic was painting for eternity. The same indefatigable zeal prompted him to accept orders of the most varied kind. Even the candelabra of the Duomo were sent to his shop to be re-gilt and decorated, and he told his assistants, jestingly, that they must never decline a commission, were it only an order for the hoops of a peasant-woman’s basket. Vasari tells us that Ghirlandajo decorated a chapel at the Villa Tornabuoni with frescoes, but the building was destroyed by floods in the next century. He also painted altar-frescoes at Lucca and Pisa, and, in 1492, undertook to execute a large picture for a convent at Volterra, which has lately been removed to the Town Hall of that city. This was probably his last work. In the midst of these labours and in the full tide of his renown, this active and prolific master was cut off by a sudden death. The sad event is recorded in the following terms, in the archives of the confraternity of S. Paul, “ Domenico de Churrado Bighordi, painter, called del Grillandaio, died on Saturday 2 5 d DOMENICO GHIRLANDAJO morning, on the nth day of January, 1493 (O.S.), of a pestilential fever, and the overseers desired that no one should see the dead man, and would not allow him to be buried by day. He was buried on Saturday night after sunset, and may God forgive him ! It was a very great loss, for he was a man highly esteemed for many qualities, and universally lamented.” Ghirlandajo was twice married, and left nine children, the eldest of whom Ridolfo, became a painter of repute and the intimate friend of Raphael. His first wife, Costanza, died in 1485, and a year later he married a widow of San Gimignano, Antonia di Ser Paolo. Several of his assistants, such as Mainardi and Granacei, were excellent artists and did good work in their day, but the fame of all alike was eclipsed by one boy, who grew up in this busy workshop and received his earliest lessons on the scaffolding of S. Maria Novella. It is the glory of Ghirlandajo to have been the first to recognise the genius of Michel- angelo. 26 LEONARDO DA 1452-1519 VINCI \HE richest gifts of Heaven are sometimes showered upon the same man, and beauty, grace, and genius are combined in so rare a manner in one person, that to whatsoever he may apply himself, his every action is so divine as to leave all others far behind him.” With these words Vasari begins his biography of that most gifted of mortals, Leonardo da Vinci. The personal beauty and heroic strength by which he was distinguished, the brilliant conversation and fascinating presence that charmed all hearts, were only the outward signs of a marvellously refined and subtle intellect, and of a mental energy that has been rarely equalled. In this wonderful man, the highest scientific and artistic faculties were united, and the passion for practical knowledge went hand in hand with the finest imaginative genius. There was hardly a branch of human learning which Leonardo did not seek to explore. Architecture, sculpture, painting, mathematics, geology, engineering, and anatomy, all in turn absorbed his attention. He wrote an elaborate treatise on painting, and filled volumes with his observations on scientific subjects. He played and sang divinely, painted pictures and modelled statues, planned canals and tunnels, discovered the use of water and steam as a motive force, and in the words of a contemporary French \yriter was “not only an excellent artist and a veritable Archimedes, but a very great philosopher.” So universal a genius naturally had but little time to devote to any one art, and spent the greater part of his days in seeking after a perfection to which he could not attain. In consequence, he left few works of art behind him, and of these few the greater number have perished. But the little that remains is of so fine a quality that his name will never cease to rank among the world's supreme masters. Leonardo was born in 1452 at Vinci, a village in the mountains of Val d’Arno, near Empoli, half-way between Florence and Pisa, and was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary. His mother, Caterina, a country girl of Vinci, married a native of the village soon after the birth of her child, and died many years afterwards in a hospital in Florence, dutifully tended by her illustrious son. His father, Piero da Vinci, was an active and prosperous man, who married four wives in succession and had eleven other children, but Leonardo, who for twenty-four years remained his only 27 LEONARDO DA VINCI child, was brought up in his house and treated in all respects as his legitimate son. The boy early showed extraordinary talent for music and mathematics, as well as for drawing and modelling, and was placed by his father in Andrea Verrocchio’s workshop, where he remained till 1476. Besides the famous angel which young Leonardo is supposed to have painted in the “Baptism” which his master executed for the monks of Vallombrosa, two more of his early works have been recently discovered. One is a little “ Annunciation ” in the Louvre, which had long been ascribed to his fellow-pupil, Lorenzo di Credi ; the other, a lovely profile of a maiden, in the collection of Donna Laura Minghetti, in Rome. Both were evidently painted in Verrocchio’s shop, and bear strong marks of his influence. The type of the face and folds of the drapery in the former picture, the cypresses and stone balustrade of the garden, where the scene is laid, closely resemble the earlier “Annunciation” painted by Verrocchio in the Uffizi, while the clearly-cut features of the portrait recall many similar profiles, which came out of the goldsmith’s shop. But in both we are conscious of that straining after a higher ideal and purer loveliness, which never ceased to haunt the brain of this painter, who, as a boy, modelled terra-cotta heads of smiling women, and followed the beautiful unknown faces which he saw, up and down the streets of Florence. In January 1478, Leonardo received a commission for an altar-piece to be placed in the Chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico, and sketched out the “Adoration of the Kings” in brown monochrome, which now hangs in the Uffizi. The familiar subject is set in a mountainous landscape, with a ruined colonnade and broad flight of steps on one side, and a group of fighting horsemen on the other. In the foreground, the three Kings kneel before the youthful Virgin, and behind a crowd of followers on foot and horseback press forward with eager devotion on their faces. The scene is full of life and animation ; each face and gesture is rendered with striking power. But this noble design was left unfinished, as Vasari remarks, “like so many of the painter’s other works.” So too was another monochrome of this period, the boldly fore-shortened figure of a kneeling S. Jerome, in the Vatican, while an important commission which the painter received in 1481, from the monks of S. Donato, never seems to have been even begun. The anonymous author of the short life of Leonardo in the Magliabecchiana Library, who wrote about 1540, tells us that Lorenzo de’ Medici sent the painter, when he was thirty years old, with the musician Atalanta Migliorotti, to bear a lute to Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Vasari confirms this statement, adding that the instrument was a silver lute of Leonardo’s own invention on which he played with surpassing sweetness. Whether the date is correct or not, he certainly left Florence about the year 1482, and we hear no more of him until 1487, in which year he was living at Milan and designed a model for the cupola of the Duomo. But some rough drafts of letters addressed to the Governor of Syria, which Dr. Richter discovered among Leonardo’s MSS., seem to prove that at one time during these five years he was employed by the Sultan of Egypt on engineering works in Armenia. From 1487 to 1499, he lived at Milan in the service of Lodovico Sforza, who found his versatile talents of the greatest use and employed him in turn to arrange court pageants, construct canals, and paint pictures. During this active and brilliant period of his life, in the midst of all his other occupations, Leonardo wrote his “Treatise on Painting” for the instruction of the Academy founded by the Duke, and modelled the colossal statue of Franceso Sforza which met with so 28 LEONARDO DA VINCI untimely a fate. And there, in the last years of the century, he painted that great masterpiece of his life, the ruined “ Last Supper,” in the Dominican refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Instead of working in fresco, a process that did not admit of the endless alterations and improvements prompted by his fastidious taste, Leonardo painted in oils on a dry stucco ground which soon crumbled away, and when Vasari wrote, the great picture was already a wreck. After the fall of Lodovico Sforza in 1500, Leonardo left Milan and spent the next sixteen years in perpetual journeyings up and down Italy. In 1500, he was at Mantua and Venice, the next year he spent some time in Florence and designed the famous cartoon of the Virgin, S. Anne and the Child playing with a lamb, which excited so much enthusiasm among the crowds who thronged to see it, in the hall of the Servite Convent. But after all, the altar-piece was never painted, for in 1 502, Leonardo entered the service of Caesar Borgia as military engineer, and in this capacity visited Urbino, Romini, Perugia, Orvieto, Volterra, and other cities of Central Italy. After the fall of Borgia, he returned to Florence, early in 1504, and was engaged with Michelangelo, to adorn the Council Hall of the Palazzo Pubblico with great historical com- positions. The battle of Anghiari was the subject chosen by Leonardo, who worked for two years assiduously at the cartoon, and then began to paint in oils on the plaster of the walls. The design, we are told, was magnificent, but the method again proved disastrous, and in disgust at his failure, Leonardo abandoned the work to the great annoyance of the Signoria. “ Leonardo,” wrote the Gonfaloniere, Piero Soderini, in October 1506, to the French Governor of Milan, “has not treated the Republic well. He received a large sum of money, but has only made a small beginning of his work. He has, in fact, acted like a traitor.” The painter, to do him justice, offered to return the money, but the magistrates declined to take it back, and allowed him to accept the invitation of Louis XII. of France, who had longed wished to retain his services. In 1507, he went to Milan, where he assisted the French king in celebrating his triumphal entry, and planned various hydraulic works for his newly acquired province. Both in 1 5 1 1 and 1512, he paid visits to Florence, and in 1514, accompanied Giuliano de’ Medici to Rome, on the occasion of Leo the Tenth’s coronation. In 1515, he met the victorious French king, Francis the First, at Pavia, and accompanied him to France early in the following year. This monarch appointed him court painter with a salary of 700 florins, and gave him the small house of Cloux, near the royal ch&teau of Amboise, as his residence. Here Leonardo spent the last three years of his life in this quiet county home, with his faithful scholar Melzi and two Italian servants, Battista and Maturina, as his companions. Soon after his arrival in France, his health began to show signs of weakness, and the Cardinal d’Aragon, who paid him a visit on the 10th of October, 1516, gives a pathetic account of the great master’s failing powers. After describing the picture of “ The Virgin and Child resting on the lap of S. Anne,” “all most perfectly painted,” he goes on to say, “how, by reason of a certain paralysis that has affected his right hand, the master cannot now paint with his old sweetness, but is still able to make designs and teach others, and has trained a Milanese assistant, who does his work fairly well.” On the 23rd of April, 1519, Leonardo made a will, leaving his papers to Melzi, the vineyard which Lodovico Sforza had given him at Milan, to his servant Battista and his favourite pupil Salai, the handsome youth with the curled and waving hair ; and to his half-brothers the sum of 400 ducats, 2 9 LEONARDO DA VINCI which he had deposited in the bank at Sta. Maria Nuova of Florence. A week or two later, on the 2nd of May, the great man died, and was buried in the cloisters of the royal chapel at Amboise, where, in obedience to his wishes, sixty torch-bearers followed him to the grave, and thirty masses were said for the repose of his soul. All early writers agree in saying that Leonardo completed very few of his paintings. The Anonimo’s statement to this effect is confirmed by Paolo Giovio and Lomazzo. And when Isabella d’Este begged the distinguished Carmelite preacher, Fra Pietro di Nuvolaria, to ask Leonardo for a picture, he replied that the great man was too deeply absorbed in mathematical experiments to take up a brush. As the Servite brothers found to their cost, he kept his employers waiting for months without even making a beginning ; and when he did attempt a drawing, seldom got further than the preliminary sketch. “ When he began to paint, he seemed,” writes Lomazzo, “ as if he were overcome with fear. And he could finish nothing, because his soul was so filled with the greatness of art, that he saw faults in pictures which others hailed as marvellous creations.” When he was painting the “ Last Supper,” he would remain three or four days without touching the picture, and merely stand before it with folded arms, lost in contemplation. At other times, he would leave the citadel, where he was modelling his colossal horse, and hurry through the blazing streets of Milan, in the noonday heat, to add a few touches to the painting, and then return immediately. Two Madonnas and one portrait are the only oil paintings that remain to us of his mature period. The first of these is the “ Vierge aux Rochers ” in the Louvre, which he painted during the brilliant days of his life at Milan. Here he breaks away from the old Florentine traditions, and proclaims himself as a great and original master. The delicate grace of the Virgin and children, and of the lovely angel pointing with his uplifted finger to Christ, the play of light over the rocky hollows of the cavern, reveal the presence of a new power in art. The replica of this picture in the National Gallery was at one time supposed by some critics to be the original work, but it is impossible to deny the superior merits of the “ Vierge aux Rochers,” and recently discovered documents may be considered to have settled the question. About 1490, Leonardo, it appears, painted an altar-piece for the Chapel of the Conception in the Church of S. Francesco, at Milan ; but since the Brothers who gave the order, refused to pay more than 25 ducats for the picture, he sold it to an agent of Louis the Twelfth, for four times this amount. A replica of Leonardo’s composition, with some variations, was painted by his assistants and placed in the Chapel of S. Francesco, where it remained, until Gavin Hamilton bought it in 1777, for the sum of 30 ducats. He brought the picture with him to England, and sold it as a Leonardo to Lord Suffolk, from whom the National Gallery acquired it, in 1880. The other Madonna, known as “La Sainte Anne,” and also in the Louvre, belongs to a later period, and is partly the work of Leonardo’s hand. The composition agrees with that of the cartoon which he designed for the Servi brothers, and which is described in Fra Pietro di Nuvolaria’s letter to Isabella d’Este. The Virgin, clad in a pale blue robe, is resting on her mother’s knee, and bends forward to hold the Child who is at play with a lamb. The group is designed with all Leonardo’s wonted grace, and numerous studies for the figure by his hand are to be seen at Windsor, but the execution is less finished and the colour less transparent 30 LEONARDO DA VINCI than that of the “ Vierge aux Rochers.” The picture is evidently the same which the Cardinal of Aragon saw in the painter’s atelier in Cloux, in 1516, when he had to depend mainly upon assistants for the execution of his designs. After his death, it was brought back to Milan, where it was purchased by Cardinal Richelieu, in the next century. The portrait of Mona Lisa, the beautiful Neapolitan wife of Zanobi del Giocondo, belongs to Leonardo’s Florentine days and is said to have occupied him four years. It was afterwards bought by Francis I. for the large sum of 4000 gold florins, and is now one of the chief ornaments of the Salon Carre. Although the colour has faded and the shadows have lost some of their transparency, this picture is in a better state of preservation and gives us a truer idea of Leonardo’s technique than any other. The exquisite simplicity of the pose, the soft tints of blue and yellow in the dress, the delicately painted rocks and waters, all serve to heighten the indescribable charm of the wonderful face with the brown eyes and haunting smile. In spite of the lapse of years, Vasari’s description still holds good. “ The eyes have all the liquid sparkle of Nature, you see the pulse beating in the dimple of the throat, and the smile is so enchanting, it seems a thing more divine than human life itself.” To these three masterpieces, we may add the cartoon of the Virgin and Child with S. Anne in the Royal Academy, in which we see, not indeed a finished drawing, but that most interesting of all things, the first thought of a great picture. And this brings us to the last and most wonderful phase of Leonardo’s art, the vast quantity of drawings which are still preserved in the galleries of the Uffizi and the Louvre, in the Venetian Academy, the Ambrosian Library, and the royal collection at Windsor. These, as we all know, are of the most varied description, and include angels’ heads, studies of children and horses, flowers and brambles, together with sketches of monuments and hydraulic machines, caricatures and grotesques. Everywhere we see the same passionate desire to penetrate the mysteries and learn the secrets of Nature. All forms of life attracted his eager imagination. Nothing was too minute or insignificant to escape his notice. We find whole sheets covered with studies of bones and muscles, together with minute indications explaining the structure and movement of the human frame. And in the midst of all this varied and amazing display of mental activity, we come across lovely women faces wearing Mona Lisa’s exquisite smile, and heads of fair boys, with the curled and wavy locks he loved so well. As we turn over these wonderful pages, we realise more and more the rare creative faculty of the man, and feel that we are brought face to face with the most brilliant intellect and the most richly gifted nature which the world has ever known. 31 LORENZO DI *45 9~ 1 5 3 7 CREDI ORENZO DI CREDI belonged to the group of Florentine painters' in the last half of the fifteenth century, who were directly influenced by sculptors and metal-workers, and was himself one of a race of goldsmiths. He leafnt the trade first of all in his father Andrea di Credi’s shop, and afterwards worked under Verrocchio, in that famous bottega where so much of the finest art of the Renaissance had its birth. There Lorenzo grew up with Perugino and Leonardo as his comrades and became the favourite scholar of Verrocchio, who, when he died at Venice in 1488, recommended him to the Doge in his will as well qualified to complete his unfinished equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni. This, however, proved a task beyond Lorenzo’s powers, and the bronze statue was ultimately completed by the Venetian Leopardi. Verrocchio further showed his confidence in his beloved scholar, by appointing him executor of his will, and leaving him his stock of metal and stone, as well as his household goods both in Florence and Venice. Lorenzo, who had hastened to Venice on hearing of his master’s death, brought back Verrocchio’s remains to be buried in Sant’ Ambrogio of Florence, and never left his native city again. His gentle and affectionate nature endeared him to all his brother-artists, and the confidence which they placed in his judgment is shown by their frequent appeals to him, to settle disputes or value pictures and statues. His own range of art was almost entirely limited to easel-pictures of sacred subjects, chiefly Madonnas and Nativities, or Annunciations. He began, Vasari tells us, by copying Verrocchio and Leonardo’s Madonnas, which he did to such perfection, that it was almost impossible to distinguish the copy from the original, and his “Virgin of the Borghese ” with the pot of flowers on the parapet, seems to have deceived the historian himself. This little picture was long ascribed to Leonardo and is finished with the miniature-like care that marked all Lorenzo’s work, and made Vasari exclaim, that such excessive labour was as blameworthy as extreme negligence. “ So great was his care to keep his colours clean,” writes the biographer, “ that he often kept as many as thirty separate tints on his palette at once and always used a separate brush for each. And he never would allow any one to move about in his studio, for fear of raising the dust and soiling his colours.” 32 LORENZO D I CRED1 Credi’s style, as might be expected, was closely derived from that of Verrocchio, whom he imitates in his defects as well as in his excellences, preserving his sharply defined outlines and trans- parent colour, and reproducing his fat babies, with their awkward limbs and turned-up toes. Here and there, the grace of his smiling faces and curly-headed cherubs, recalls Leonardo’s types and reminds us of the great fellow-student who was only five years his senior. And although he never attained the exquisite suavity of Leonardo’s smile or the ardent devotion of Perugino’s saints, his works all breathe the same deep feeling and sincerity. One of his early works is the fine picture of an angel bringing the Sacrament to the penitent, “ S. Maria Egyptiaca ” at Berlin, which, like the Borghese Madonna, is painted in tempera. Another is the graceful little “Annunciation ” in the Uffizi. Here both the youthful Virgin, looking round with uplifted hand, and the landscape background, strongly resemble Verrocchio’s works. These park-like scenes, where clear streams wind among green lawns and avenues of trees with spreading branches throw long shadows on the grass, are a peculiar feature of Lorenzo’s pictures, and make charming settings for his grave and gentle Saints. Another of his favourite subjects was the “ Noli me Tangere,” the Risen Christ with a spade in his hand walking in a lovely garden, while Magdalen kneels at his feet in adoration. Good examples of this subject are to be seen both in the Louvre and Uffizi. Of this painter’s larger pictures, the most important are the “ Adoration of the Shepherds,” in the Accademia delle belle Arti of Florence, and the enthroned “ Madonna,” originally painted for S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, but carried off to Paris in 1812, and now in the Louvre. This altar-piece, which is remarkable for its fine colour, and for the Leonardesque air of the youthful S. Giuliano, is described by Vasari as Lorenzo di Credi’s best work. Both of these were painted before 1508, in which year they are mentioned by Albertini. In the latter years of his life, this master contented himself with repeating old subjects, and painting small devotional pictures, that were in great demand for the decoration of private houses and chapels. Lorenzo remained in Florence all through the troubled years of Savonarola’s revival and persecution, and, like most of his brother artists, was deeply moved by the Frate’s sermons. He became a zealous piagnone , and is said to have destroyed all his studies of nude and pagan subjects in the Bonfire of Vanities. Certainly a Venus in the Uffizi, clearly a work of his early days, is the only subject of this kind, from his hand, that has ever come to light. He was closely associated with the Viagnoni, and lived on intimate terms with the artists who had been the most devoted followers of Fra Girolamo. For instance, he painted the portrait of Benivieni, the poet who wrote lauds and canzoni for the children of S. Marco, and together with Corniole, the engraver of the famous gem bearing Savonarola’s head, witnessed the will of the architect Cronaca, on the 16th of September, 1508. In 1501, he restored an altarpiece by Fra Angelico in the Dominican convent at Fiesole; and in 1 506, he was called in to settle a dispute between the Prior of S. Marco and a patron who had commanded Fra Bartolommeo to paint the “Vision of St. Bernard” for the Badia. In 1505, both he and Perugino were chosen to value the mosaics executed in the Duomo by David Ghirlandajo, and the piagnone miniature painter, Monte di Giovanni, who frequently introduces Savonarola’s portrait in the illuminations with which he enriched the choir books of S. Marco or S. Maria Nuova. Finally, in 1531, being then past seventy, and caring more, as Vasari remarks, for a quiet 33 E LORENZO D I CREDI life than for honour or wealth, the aged painter retired to the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, an institution with which the piagnoni had always been closely associated, where Fra Bartolommeo had painted his “Last Judgment,” and Gherardo, the brother of Monte di Giovanni, was organist. Here Lorenzo di Credi made his will, and after bequeathing legacies to the niece of his old master, Verrocchio, and a few others, gave up the rest of his fortune to the hospital, on condition of receiving a pension of 36 florins, which was to be continued after his death to his old servant, Monna Caterina. Here he spent the six last years of his life in peace and quietness, and died on the 1 2th of January, 1537. 34 FRA BARTOLOMMEO I + 75- 1 S 1 7 E same Dominican convent which had numbered Fra Angelico among its brothers, gave the world another painter in the days of the full Renaissance, a painter lacking, it is true, the intense fervour and spirituality of the angelic master, but who clothed his pure and reverent thoughts in noble and gracious forms and was reckoned among the foremost artists of his day. His father, Paolo del Fattorino, was a poor muleteer of Florence, who saved enough money to buy a house near the Porta San Pier Gattolini. Here his eldest son, a boy who became known as Baccio della Porta, was born in 1475, and by the advice of the sculptor Benedetto da Majano, was placed in the shop of Cosimo Rosselli. So trustworthy and intelligent was the child, that at nine years old he was already employed by his master not only to grind colours and sweep out the shop, but to receive payments. His charming nature soon won the hearts of all his comrades, and another apprentice who was only a few months older, Mariotto Albertinelli, became his inseparable companion. “The two,” says Vasari, “were as one body and one soul.” Yet the lads were very different in character and disposition. While Baccio loved to study Masaccio’s frescoes in the quiet Chapel of the Carmine, Mariotto preferred the gay company of the youths who^copied antiques in the Medici gardens, and when the preaching of Savonarola stirred all Florence, Baccio was daily to be seen among the crowds which flocked to hear the eloquent Friar, while Mariotto openly scoffed at the piagnoni , and attached himself to the opposite faction. Yet nothing could break the tie that bound the two young artists together, and when the death of Baccio’s father left a young family of half-brothers dependent upon his exertions, he and Mariotto opened a shop on their own account. Although a number of masterly pen-and-ink studies in different public and private collections bear witness to Baccio’s facility of hand and brain, it is difficult to point with certainty to the pictures which he painted in these early years. But the delicate little panels of the “Nativity” and “Circumcision” in the Uffizi, a “Noli me Tangere” in the Louvre, and a fine panel of the Holy Family in the Visconti-Venosta Gallery at Milan, probably belong to this period. Here the colouring and landscape both recall the works of the painter Piero di Cosimo, who was foreman in 35 FRA BARTOLOMMEO Rosselli's workshop, and evidently had a large share in forming Baccio’s style. One other work of Baccio’s youth has a touching significance, the portrait of Savonarola, the beloved teacher to whom he was so deeply attached and whose words made so deep an impression upon his gentle and thoughtful nature. This portrait, which gives the head of the great Friar in all its rugged grandeur, was long preserved in the Dominican Convent of Prato, and now hangs in Savonarola’s cell at S. Marco, bearing the following inscription, which had been hidden in the days of persecution under a coat of oil-paint : Hieronymi Ferrariensis missa a Deo , prophetce effigies. Baccio della Porta took a leading part in all the chief scenes of the revival. In common with other piagnone artists, carried away by the enthusiasm of the hour, he laid his pagan studies on the Bonfire of Vanities, and on the fatal night when the convent was stormed and the great Frate dragged by his cruel enemies to prison and torture, he fought among the defenders of S. Marco. The terrible events of those days, the death of Savonarola at the stake, and the utter failure of the cause which he had held to be that of Christ and Florence, fell upon the young painter with crushing force. For a time he struggled bravely on, and undertook a commission from Gerozzo Dini to paint a fresco of the Last Judgment in the Campo Santo of the Hospital of S. Maria Nuova. In the ruined fragments which still hang on the blackened walls of the old hospital, we see how he clung with despairing grasp to those eternal realities which, now his master’s voice was silenced, were all that he had left to trust in. This grand conception of the Judge coming on the clouds of heaven to avenge his Saints, and of the great Archangel with drawn sword parting the blessed from the lost, was painted in this dark hour of his life. But in the mastery of form and technique which it reveals, in the imposing character of the design, this “ Last Judgment ” forms an important link between the old world and the new. On the one hand it takes us back to the mediaeval conceptions of the painters of the Campo Santo of Pisa, on the other, it points onward to Raphael’s “ Disputa.” But the task proved beyond Baccio’s strength, and when the upper part was painted, he left his friend Albertinelli to finish the lower portion of the fresco, and on the 26th of July, 1500, took the vows of the Dominican Order in the Convent of Prato. For the next four years, Fra Bartolommeo, as the new-made friar was now called, never touched a brush, and it was only at the entreaty of his Superior, the Prior of S. Marco, that in the autumn of 1504, he agreed to paint an altar-piece for the Badia. That year Raphael of Urbino came to Florence for the first time. He was deeply impressed by Fra Bartolommeo’s “ Last Judgment ” and soon became intimate with the painter. “ Raphael,” writes Vasari, “ was with Fra Bartolommeo continually.” The friendship between the two masters was destined to bear rich fruit. Raphael studied the friar’s fine modelling and masterly composition, imitated his “Last Judgment” in the fresco of S. Severo at Perugia, and even adopted his style of drawing in black chalk. And under the genial influence of the young Urbinate’s companionship, Fra Bartolommeo felt his old love of art revive, and applied himself to painting with fresh ardour. The damaged fresco of the “ Madonna and Child” in Marco, bearing as it does so close a resemblance to Raphael’s “Madonna di Casa Tempi,” and the lunette of Christ and his disciples on the way to Emmaus, were evidently painted about this time ; perhaps too, the dainty little “ Nativity ” in a fair landscape, which the Prior 3 6 FRA BARTOLOMMEO of S. Marco presented to the Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, when he came to Florence in 1512, and which is now in the Mond collection. In 1508, the year in which Raphael left Florence for Rome, Fra Bartolommeo paid a visit to Venice, and, on his return, painted his two finest altar-pieces, God the Father, adored by S. Mary Magdalen, S. Katharine of Siena, and the enthroned Madonna between S. Stephen and S. John the Baptist, in the Cathedral of Lucca. Both pictures are remarkable for rich colour and tender feeling, and reveal the knowledge of chiaroscuro which Fra Bartolommeo had acquired from the study of Leonardo’s works. The Angels flying in the air, and holding a crown over the Virgin’s head, are very similar to those introduced by Raphael in his unfinished “ Madonna del Baldacchino,” while the lovely cherub playing a lute on the steps of the throne, recalls Bellini’s child-angels at Venice. In 1509, the year in which these masterpieces were finished, Fra Bartolommeo took his old friend Mariotto Albertinelli again into partnership. Now that Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael had all left Florence, the Friar was the foremost painter remaining, and found it impossible to execute all the commissions which he received. A formal agreement was drawn up between Albertinelli and the Prior of S. Marco, by which the convent was to provide the necessary materials, and the works produced were to be sold at the dissolution of the partnership, and all profits divided. The pictures which each master executed separately, are signed with the artist’s name, while those which they painted together, bear a monogram consisting of a cross between two rings. For three years the two friends worked together in perfect harmony, and many well-known pictures issued from the convent-workshop. Among the pictures executed by Fra Bartolommeo during this period, were the beautiful “ Holy Family” at Panshanger, and two large compositions of the “ Marriage of St. Katharine, which are respectively in the Louvre and Pitti galleries. The first was originally placed in the convent church, but was given by the Signoria of Florence in 151 1, to the French Ambassador, and the second, which bears the date 1512, was painted to take its place in S. Marco. The “ Enthroned Madonna” of the Pitti (No. 208), bearing the inscription often seen on the friar’s works, Orate pro Victore , 1512, was also painted for the Church of S. Marco, in the same year. Another great altar-piece, in which the ten patron Saints of Florence were all to be introduced, was commenced in 1510, for the Council Hall, but like the paintings which Leonardo and Michaelangelo had designed with the same intention, it was never finished. At that moment the Medici had once more been expelled, and the old cries of Savonarola’s days were heard again in the streets of Florence. Once more Christ was proclaimed King in Florence, and a great picture, in celebration of this event, was ordered by the Signoria for the Council Hall. Fra Bartolommeo accepted the task with joy, and sketched out the noble cartoon of the “ Virgin and Saints pleading for the liberties of Florence,” which is still preserved in the Uffizi. But before the picture was painted, the dream of liberty was over ; the Medici returned once more, and Fra Bartolommeo’s masterpiece was never completed. In all these works the painter shows himself the true child of the Renaissance. The design is symmetrical and full of grandeur, the figures are admirably drawn and modelled, and the artist’s skill in handling light and shade, and his accurate knowledge of the structure of the human frame are plain. Fra Bartolommeo, indeed, paid especial attention to this last point, and is said to have been 37 FRA BARTOLOMMEO the first to introduce the use of jointed lay-figures. But unfortunately, in his anxiety to rival Leonardo’s effects, and attain the roundness of his forms, he employed printer’s ink and bone black for the shadows, a practice which has been attended with disastrous results, and has ruined much of the lovely colour in his works. And still more unfortunately, Fra Bartolommeo fell into the mistake common to all Florentine artists of his day, of seeking to emulate Michelangelo’s style, and sacrificed his own exquisite sense of beauty and symmetry, his instinctive grace and tender feeling, to this vain and futile endeavour. This mistaken effort to attain grandiose and statuesque forms, is especially evident in the works of Fra Bartolommeo’s last period, from 1512 to 1517. In January, 1512, owing in all probability to a change of Priors at S. Marco, the partnership with Albertinelli was dissolved and the sum of 425 gold florins, produced by the sale of the two masters’ joint works, was divided between Mariotto and the convent. In 1514, Fra Bartolommeo went to Rome, where he stayed with Fra Mariano Fetti, at the Dominican convent of S. Silvestro, on Monte Cavallo, and met Raphael and Michelangelo once more. On his return, he painted his colossal “ S. Mark ” of the Pitti, a work evidently inspired by the sight of Buonarotti’s prophets in the Sistina, a nude S. Sebastian, which excited scruples in the hearts of the Dominicans of S. Marco, who sold the picture to the French king’s agent, Giovanni Battista della Palla. The Annunciation of the Louvre, and the S. Peter and S. Paul of the Quirinal, which the artist gave as a present to his host, Fra Mariano, were both painted in 1515. So was the “Madonna della Misericordia ” at Lucca, with its lovely groups of women and children taking shelter under the blue mantle of the Virgin Mother. But in spite of his ceaseless activity. Fra Bartolommeo’s health was rapidly failing. In October, 1515, a return of fever, which had driven him away from Rome the year before, made him seek rest and country air at Pian di Mugnone, where he painted several frescoes in the hospital attached to S. Marco. On his way back to Florence he visited his relatives at his father’s native village of Suffignano, and while staying with these humble folk, received a pressing invitation from Francis I. to visit his court. But he was detained in Florence by work for his convent, and, in his failing health, may well have shrunk from the journey. That winter Leo X. came to Florence, and when the friars of S. Marco laid a request for the canonisation of Fra Angelico’s friend, S. Antonino, before His Holiness, Fra Bartolommeo recorded the event by painting a littl'e picture of the burial of the good Archbishop, which is now at Panshanger. Another gem of the same pure colour and miniature-like finish, is the “ Holy Family” in the Corsini Gallery in Rome, which he finished in the same year for Angelo Doni, the patron of Raphael and Michelangelo. The large “ Salvator Mundi ” in the Pitti, and the prophets Isaiah and Job in the Uffizi, originally formed part of a large altar-piece that was ordered in 1516 by a wealthy Florentine merchant, Salvator Billi, for the Annunziata Church, and bought by the Medici in 1663. Both the fine “Presentation in the Temple” at Vienna, which hung for over two hundred years in the chapel of the novices at S. Marco, and the famous “ Deposition ” of the Pitti, the most popular of all Fra Bartolommeo’s works, belong to the last year of his life. The shadow of the coming end may have served to heighten the reverent feeling and deep pathos which give this finely designed composition so high a place among the sacred 38 FRA BARTOLOMMEO pictures of the sixteenth century, when art was already on the verge of decadence. On the 14th of June, 1517, the painter wrote to the Duke of Ferrara, sending him a picture of the Virgin and Saints, and a head of Christ for the Duchess, Lucrezia Borgia. He spent the summer months at Pian Mugnone, where he painted a last fresco of the Magdalen, but after his return to Florence, had another attack of fever which soon carried him off. He died on the 6th of October, at the age of forty-two, to the grief of the whole community, who lamented in him the last of the monastic painters. 39 MARIOTTO ALBERTINELLI 1+74-1515 ARIOTTO ALBERTINELLI, the life-long friend and companion of Fra Bartolommeo, was born in Florence on the 13th of October, 1474, and after being apprenticed to a gold-beater for some years, entered Cosimo Rosselli’s atelier. Here he first met Baccio della Porta, and formed the friendship which influenced his whole future. While his friend became a zealous piagnone , Mariotto openly proclaimed himself a partisan of the Arrabbiati , and received his first commissions from Madonna Alfonsina Orsini, the wife of Piero de’ Medici. But in spite of this difference of opinion, Albertinelli lived with Baccio in his father’s house near the gate of S. Pier Gattolini, and formed his style so entirely on that of his friend that it became difficult to distinguish the works of the two artists. Albertinelli was, as Vasari says, another Fra Bartolommeo. The portraits and other pictures which he painted for Alfonsina de’ Medici, were sent by her to Rome, where they fell into Cassar Borgia’s hands and afterwards disappeared. A picture of the “Annunciation” in the Duomo at Volterra, and a lovely little triptych of the Virgin and Child between S. Barbara and S. Katharine, in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum at Milan, are the only early works by his hand now in existence. This little picture, which bears the date 1500, was long ascribed to Fra Bartolommeo, and is marked by the same delicate finish as that painter’s small diptych in the Uffizi. When Baccio della Porta joined the Dominican Order, Mariotto came to the help of his friend, who was distressed at the thought of breaking his contract with Gerozzo Dini, and finished his fresco of the “ Last Judgment ” at Santa Maria Nuova. He introduced portraits of the Spedalingo or Master of the Hospital, and of Fra Angelico among the blessed, and represented himself and his assistant, Bugiardini, among the dead, who are seen rising from their tombs. Albertinelli’s reputation was greatly increased by the skill and care with which he discharged the task left him by his friend, and he now opened a shop in the Via Gualfonda, where, in 1503, he painted his best-known work, the famous “Visitation” of the Uffizi. A round of the “ Madonna adoring the Child ” in the Pitti, which bears evident marks of Lorenzo di Credi’s influence, belongs to the same period, while a “Madonna” in the Louvre and the fine fresco of the “Crucifixion” in the Chapter-house of the Certosa of Val d’ Ema, three miles 40 M ARIOTTO ALBERTINELLI from Florence, were both painted in 1506. This work is executed in Fra Bartolommeo’s style, but the figures of the Magdalen and S. John, as well as the angels who hover in the air to receive the blood from the Saviour’s wounds, are distinctly Peruginesque in feeling. At the foot of the Cross we read the following inscription: Mariotti Florentini opus, pro quo, patre, Deus orandus est , A.D. , MCCCCCVI., Mens. Sept. Albertinelli’s natural hatred of monks and friars, however, had been only strengthened by the loss of his friend Baccio, and the good Carthusians found him and his noisy band of associates very troublesome inmates. They played tricks on the poor brothers and secretly carried off the meagre pittance daily allotted to each member of the community, until in their anxiety to be rid of their tormentors, the Carthusians agreed to double the rations of the artists, if only they would finish their work as speedily as possibly, which accordingly was effected, Vasari says, not without much mirth and laughter. During that year, Albertinelli seems to have renewed his old relations with Fra Bartolommeo, and entered into an agreement by which he took charge of the friar’s half-brother Piero, a youth of feeble intellect and vicious propensities, who was a source of constant trouble to his brother. But, instead of learning painting, Piero was always escaping from Albertinelli’s house and getting into mischief, and, in 1512, through the intervention of the Prior of S. Marco, Fra Bartolommeo’s friend, Santi Pagnini, he was finally placed in the Hospital of the Innocents. In 1509, Albertinelli entered into partnership with Fra Bartolommeo, and worked as his chief assistant during the next three years, in the shop of S. Marco. As a rule the Friar seems to have supplied the designs of alt the pictures which were painted by Albertinelli at this time. Three of the best of these, all bearing the date of 1510, an “Annunciation,” a “Madonna and Saints,” and a picture of the “Holy Trinity,” are now in the Academy of Florence, while among the works which fell to his share in 1513, were an “Adam and Eve” and a “Sacrifice of Abraham,” both of which are now at Castle Howard. After the final dissolution of the partnership, Mariotto’s indignation and disgust with friars and monks knew no bounds. He declared that he was sick of painting and would never touch a brush again. Accordingly, he married a wife named Antonia di Ugolino, whose father kept a wine-shop and himself opened a tavern near the gate of San Gallo, which Vasari describes as a bellissima osteria. Here, at least, the wayward artist declared, he would lead a gay and joyous life, free from the worry of perspective and anatomy, and would hear his customers praising his good wine, instead of blaming his bad drawing. But he soon grew tired of this new trade and went back to his old calling. In March, 1513, he accepted a commission to paint a coat of armorial bearings, adorned with the figures of Faith, Hope, and Charity, for the Medici Palace, in honour of Leo the Tenth’s accession to the papacy, and after Fra Bartolommeo’s visit to Rome in 1514, was invited to paint an altar-piece in the Dominican Church of S. Silvestro. Here he fell ill and was brought home in a litter to Florence, where he died on the 5th of November, 1515. Fra Bartolommeo was in the country when the news of Albertinelli’s illness reached him, but he hastened to his old friend’s bedside and remained with him to the end. The painter of the “ Visitation ” was buried in the ancient church of S. Pietro Maggiore. He left a son who died very young, and of his many pupils Giuliano Bugiardini and Franciabigio, the friend of Andrea del Sarto, were the only ones who attained any distinction. 4i ANDREA DEL SARTO 1486-1531 NDREA DEL SARTO, or Andrea d’Agnolo, as he generally signed himself, was the son of a tailor named Agnolo, and was born in Florence on the 17th of July, i486. At the age of seven he entered a goldsmith’s shop, but his decided bent for drawing induced his father to apprentice him to the painter, Piero di Cosimo. The influence of Leonardo and Michelangelo, however, exerted a more lasting effect upon his style, and he soon became known as the cleverest of the young artists who studied the great cartoons by these masters that were exhibited in 1506. In 1508 Andrea was enrolled as a member of the Painters’ Guild, and together with his friend Franciabigio, opened a workshop in the Piazza del Grano. In the following year, Fra Mariano, the sacristan of the Servi Brothers, recognising Andrea’s rare talents, gladly availed himself of this opportunity to secure an artist of promise at a small cost, and engaged him to paint a series of frescoes in the Court of the Annunziata for ten florins a-piece. Franciabigio was also employed to paint a fresco of the “ Marriage of the Virgin,” and the two friends took up their abodes in the neighbouring building of the Sapienza, and devoted themselves to their new task. In these days the old Guilds of Painters were fast losing their religious character, and the Company of the Paiuolo or Cooking-Pot, to which Andrea and his associates belonged, is described by Vasari as a society of boon companions, whose meetings were spent in mirth and festivities of the gayest and most varied kind. But Andrea, at least, did not neglect his work. The five subjects from the life of S. Filippo Benizzi, the founder of the Servite Order, were completed by the end of 1510, and the painter was induced to add two more frescoes, a “ Nativity ” and “ Adoration of the Magi ” for an additional sum of forty-two florins. These beautiful frescoes, executed by the young master when he was little over twenty, are familiar to all visitors to Florence. They are painted with the greatest lightness and animation, and at the same time with rare mastery of design and colour. The influence of Michelangelo is clearly seen in the modelling of the forms and flowing lines of the drapery, while that of Leonardo and Fra Bartolommeo is no less evident in the harmonious colouring and soft blending of tints. The fine and varied landscape in the fresco of -the “ Gamblers Struck by Lightning,” recalls the style ANDREA DEL SARTO of Piero di Cosimo, and the skill with which the actors in the scene are distributed over hill and valley, rivals Titian’s art. The last subject from S. Filippo’s life, “ Children Healed by Touching the Saint’s Clothes,” is a lovely study of colour and light and shade; but the finest of the whole series is the “Birth of the Virgin,” which was not completed until 1514. It is interesting to compare this subject with Ghirlandajo’s well-known fresco in Santa Maria Novella, which Andrea evidently had in his mind at the time. The same motives of the mother receiving friends at her bedside, and of the maids washing the child in a basin by the fire, are reproduced, but the elegance of the woman, the Cupids on the mantelpiece and richly-carved frieze and cornices of the room belong to the art of a later day. Andrea’s reputation was now firmly established. Commissions reached him from all quarters, and he became known in Florence as the faultless painter — Andrea senz' errori. The Medici honoured him with their patronage, and when, in 1515, Pope Leo X. visited Florence, Andrea was employed to plan the street decorations, which were on a splendid scale. With the help of his friend, the architect, Sansovino, he constructed a temporary fa$ade for the Duomo, with chiaroscuro statues and reliefs, which excited the utmost admiration, and was pronounced by the Pope to be as fine as a marble front. The next important series which he executed were the ten chiaroscuro subjects from the life of the Baptist, divided by allegorical figures of the Virtues, in the cloisters of the Scalzo Confraternity. These were commenced in 1515, but only completed in 1526, after Andrea’s return from France. Here several of the figures are borrowed directly from Albert Durer’s engravings, but the lively and dramatic character of the composition is marred by the voluminous draperies with which the figures are loaded. The baneful effect of Michelangelo’s influence is still more apparent in the otherwise beautiful lunette of the Madonna del Sacco, which he painted in 1525, in the cloisters of the Annunziata. Besides these frescoes, Andrea del Sarto painted a large number of easel pictures for the churches and convents of Florence. The earliest, and one of the finest, is the Annunciation in the Pitti (No. 124), which he finished in 1512 for the Convent of S. Gallo. Here the timid action of the shrinking Virgin is finely rendered, and the splendid Renaissance portico in the background gives the familiar subject a new character. In the “ Dispute on the Trinity,” another picture executed for the monks of S. Gallo, now in the Pitti, the Saints grouped around S. Augustine, listening to his impassioned eloquence, are examples of Andrea’s faultless drawing, combined with Venetian richness of colour. This masterpiece, together with the “ Madonna delle Arpie,” in the Tribune of the Uffizi, mark the height of Andrea’s art. Both were painted before his memorable journey to France in 1518, and about the time of his marriage to Lucrezia del Fede, the wife who proved the evil genius of his life. Vasari, who was himself at one time the pupil of Andrea and had a personal dislike to his wife, has painted Lucrezia in the blackest colours, but although his language may be exaggerated the main facts of his story have never been refuted. The beautiful woman, whose face appears not only in her husband s charming portraits but in almost every Madonna and Virgin-saint that he ever painted, was the wife of Carlo di Recanati, a hatter in the Via S. Gallo. Early in his life Andrea was fascinated by her charms and introduced her as one of the chief figures in his fresco of the 43 ANDREA DEL SARTO “Birth of the Virgin” in the outer court of the Annunziata. On the 17th of September, 1516, her husband died and Lucrezia soon afterwards became the painter’s wife. But the fulfilment of his long-cherished wish brought Andrea no peace. Lucrezia’s violent and overbearing temper drove away all his apprentices, amongst others his favourite scholar, Pontormo, who was still living when Vasari wrote. Her vanity attracted other admirers, whose presence excited the susceptible artist’s jealousy, while her extravagance involved him in continual difficulties and, if Vasari's story is to be credited, led him to neglect his own parents, who died in miserable poverty. Yet Andrea’s devotion to the woman he loved never wavered, and Lucrezia’s charms and strength of will completely subdued his weak nature. In the summer of 1518, he accepted a pressing invitation to the court of France, where two of his best pictures, the “ Holy Family ” of the Louvre and a “ Pieta ” now at Vienna, had been already sent. He found a generous patron in Francis I. for whom he painted the well-known “Charity” in the Louvre, and who was anxious to retain him permanently in his service. But Lucrezia became impatient in her husband’s absence, and wrote letters urging him to return, “ being more anxious,” remarks Vasari, “ to profit by his gains than to see him again.” At length Andrea induced the king to give him leave of absence for two months, and returned to Florence, with a sum of money which Francis I. gave him to spend in buying works of art for his palace at Fontainebleau. But once at home again, Andrea seems to have lost all sense of honour and loyalty. He lavished presents upon Lucrezia and her sisters, and spent the king’s gold in building himself a house, in a street at the back of the Annunziata, after which he was naturally too much afraid of that monarch’s just anger to return to France. But he found work enough in Florence, where his fame stood higher than ever, and no artists of note were left to be his rivals. His old friends, the Servi friars and Scalzo brothers, welcomed him gladly and gave him new commissions. Ottaviano de’ Medici, who had also been one of his first patrons, employed him to decorate Pope Leo the Tenth’s villa at Poggio a Caiano, near Florence. There he painted a fresco of Cajsar receiving tribute, a gay and animated scene of envoys in Florentine costume bringing parrots, giraffes, and monkeys as offerings to the victor, with nothing Roman about it excepting the name. The work, however, was interrupted by the Pope’s death, and Andrea left his fresco unfinished, and returned to work at his paintings in the Scalzo cloisters. In 1524, during an outbreak of the plague in Florence, he painted his well-known “Deposi- tion,” in the Pitti, for the nuns of S. Piero, in Val Mugello, a masterpiece of drawing and colouring, but which falls far short of Perugino or Fra Bartolommeo’s rendering of. the subject in point of feeling and expression. The same lack of elevation and spiritual meaning strikes us still more forcibly in the “Last Supper,” which Andrea painted, in 1526, for the Vallombrosan monks, in the refectory of their house at S. Salvi, outside the Porta della Croce. The heads of the Apostles are vigorous and animated ; the colouring as usual is full of charm ; but there is nothing ideal or noble about the Christ, and no attempt is made to realise the solemn meaning of the scene. As years went on, Andrea’s style became more and more artificial. He painted one picture after another with increasing facility and corresponding mannerism of style. In such works as the “Virgin Saints at Pisa” and the “Holy Family” (No. 81 in the Pitti) we see the same 44 ANDREA DEL. SARTO heavy draperies, the same fair women with gentle soulless faces, and the same stereotyped expression. Even his colouring lost its charm in a great measure, and the once masterly fusion ot tints gave place to a curious greyness of tone. Where he still succeeded best was in small subjects of a decorative nature, such as the boy-angels of the altar-piece which he painted in 1528, for the hermitage on the rocky heights of Vallombrosa, or the scenes from the story of Joseph with which he adorned the cassoni of Margherita Borgherini’s bridal chamber. And one of his most attractive works is the group of S. James caressing two children, wearing white hoods of the order,, in the processional banner which he painted for the confraternity of S. Jacopo del Nicchio. Andrea’s portraits are remarkable for their truth and refinement. One admirable example is- “ The Sculptor,” in the National Gallery, while nothing can be more charming than the picture of his wife, wearing a blue robe, and holding a volume of Petrarch open in her hand — now in the Uffizi ; or that at Berlin, where she appears as a handsome matron, wearing a striped bodice with yellow sleeves, and a white handkerchief loosely twisted among the coils of her chestnut hair.. But it is melancholy to trace the gradual deterioration in his own portraits, from the graceful youth with the sensitive lips, dark eyes, and long brown curls, who meets us in the earlier ones,, down to the coarse, middle-aged man of the Uffizi picture, which he painted in the last year of his life. Andrea’s technical skill in this branch of art is strikingly displayed in the copy of Raphael’s great portrait of Leo X. and his Cardinals, which he painted, in 1524, for Ottaviano de Medici. Pope Clement VII., it appears, had desired his kinsman to send the famous Raphael,, which hung over a door of the Medici Palace, as a present to Federigo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua,, upon which Ottaviano, naturally reluctant to part from so valued a possession, employed Andrea del Sarto to copy the picture, and sent his work to Mantua as the original. So admirable was Andrea’s work that Giulio Romano, who had himself assisted Raphael in painting the original,, was completely deceived until Vasari, many years later, betrayed the secret, and confessed that he had seen Andrea at work upon the copy. In spite, however, of his untiring industry and of the great reputation which he enjoyed in Florence, Andrea del Sarto was neither wealthy nor prosperous, and never attained the position to- which his talents entitled him. During the siege of Florence he suffered many privations, and was glad to accept a commission from the Signoria to paint the effigies of certain men who were hung as traitors — on the walls of the Podesta, but was so ashamed of the task and fearful of consequences, that he executed the work behind a hoarding, and went to and fro by night. All through his later years, Vasari tells us, he never ceased to look back with regret to the time which he had spent in France, and he made more than one effort to recover Francis the First’s favour.. His “ Boy-Baptist ” of the Pitti was painted with this intention, but was ultimately bought by Ottaviano de’ Medici. In 1529, however, the French king’s Florentine agent, Giovanni Battista della Palla, eager to secure Andrea’s services for his master, engaged him to paint a picture of the “ Sacrifice of Isaac.” In his anxiety to regain his old patron’s good graces, Andrea exerted himself to the utmost, and the picture that he produced on this occasion is truer in feeling and finer in execution than any of his later works. Unfortunately the painting never reached its destination. Della Palla, who had taken an active part in the siege of Florence, was thrown into prison by the 45 ANDREA DEL SARTO Medici after their final triumph, and died there miserably ; and the “ Sacrifice of Isaac ” remained in Andrea’s studio. After his death, his widow sold the picture to Filippo Strozzi, and the Medici afterwards placed it in the Tribune of the Uffizi. In 1640, it was exchanged for Correggio’s Riposo,” and became the property of the Duke of Modena, with whose chief treasures it passed eventually into the Dresden Gallery. Andrea himself fell ill soon after the siege, and died on January 22, 1531, forsaken even by his wife, who fled from his bedside in terror, lest her husband’s illness might prove to be the plague. He was buried in the Church of the Annunziata, which he had adorned with many of his finest works. Lucrezia survived him nearly forty years, and only died in January, 1571. It is said that one day, when Jacopo de Empoli sat in the Court of the Annunziata, copying Andrea del Sarto’s fresco of the Birth of the Virgin, an old woman, on her way to church, stopped at his side and pointed out the figure of the handsome young woman in the centre of the picture. That, she told him, was her portrait, and she herself was Lucrezia del Fede, the wife of the artist who had painted the fresco. She had vexed him in his lifetime, and neglected him on his death-bed, but after all it was still her pride to remember that she had been the wife of the famous painter, Andrea senza errori. 46 MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI 1 47 + - 1 S 64 ICHELANGELO, the last great Florentine artist of the Renaissance, was born at the castle of Caprese, in the Apennines, above Arezzo, on March 6, 1474. His father, Lodovico Buonarroti, who held the office of Podesta at the time, and belonged to a good old Florentine family, evidently opposed the boy’s wish to become an artist, and only consented when he saw further remonstrance to be useless. At nineteen, Michelangelo entered Ghirlandajo’s workshop, and his clever copies of antiques in the Medici gardens soon attracted the notice of the Magnificent Lorenzo, who took the boy into his house and brought him up with his own children. But in 1492 Lorenzo died, and the young sculptor went to Bologna, where he carved the kneeling angel on the Area of S. Domenico. On his return to Florence, he made the Sleeping Cupid, which was sold by a dealer as an antique to Cardinal Riario, in Rome. The fraud was discovered, and the Cardinal invited Michelangelo to Rome, where he spent the next five years, and executed the beautiful marble Pieta in S. Peter’s. In 1501, he came back to Florence, and carved the colossal statue of David, which was set up on the steps of the Palazzo pubblico. Before it was finished, orders for important works reached him from all sides. Hitherto he had been known almost exclusively as a sculptor, but he had never given up painting, and two panel pictures, the only genuine works of the kind in existence,, belong to these early years. One is the fine unfinished “Entombment” in the National Gallery. The other, the “Holy Family,” which he painted in 1504, for his friend, Angelo Doni, and which is now in the Tribune of the Uffizi. The authorship of the latter work has never been disputed, but many critics have thrown doubts on the genuineness of the “ Entombment,” which formerly belonged to Cardinal Fesch, and was only discovered, fifty years ago, in a dealer’s shop in Rome. The modelling of the former, however, and a certain severity of grandeur in the composition, are clear proofs of its origin, and there can be little doubt that in this striking conception we have an early work of Michelangelo, executed, in all probability, before he left Florence for Rome. The gentle and simple figure of one of the Maries on the right recalls the types of Ghirlandajo’s women, and reminds us that he was Michelangelo’s first 47 MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI teacher, while the noble form; of the dead Christ bears a strong likeness to the marble Pieta in S. Peter’s. In 1504, Michelangelo was ordered to paint a fresco in the Council Hall of the Palazzo pubblico, opposite the one on which Leonardo was already engaged. The subject which he chose on this occasion was an incident in the war with Pisa, when a party of Florentine soldiers were surprised while bathing in the Arno, and victoriously repulsed the assailants. These groups of men, in every variety of attitude, some still sleeping on the ground, others climbing up the banks -and running to arms, others again already engaged in a hand to hand fight, were exactly suited to Michelangelo’s genius, and the mastery with which he accomplished the task excited general admiration. Cellini tells us that nothing in ancient or modern art has ever reached the same height of excellence, and declares the design to have surpassed the frescoes of the Sistina. Unfortunately, the fresco was never painted, and the cartoon, after hanging during many years in the Sala del Papa, where it was admired and studied by every artist of the day, was removed to the Medici Palace, and disappeared during the confusion which prevailed at the time of Giuliano ■ de’ Medici’s death. Early in 1505, Michelangelo was called to Rome by the newly-elected Pope Julius II., and •entered on the second period of his career. During the remainder of his long life he laboured for a succession of imperious pontiffs, and wasted many of the best years of his existence in planning gigantic schemes that were never destined to be realised. First of all, he was employed to quarry marbles for the colossal monument of Julius II., an elaborate structure which was never completed. The Tragedy of the Tomb, as Condivi calls it, dragged on its weary course through forty years, and embittered Michelangelo’s whole life. Then, at Julius II.’s bidding, he modelled the bronze statue of that Pontiff, which was placed over the great door of S. Petronio, at Bologna, and destroyed three years afterwards in a popular tumult. In March, 1508, the great sculptor came back to Rome, intehding to work at the statues for the Tomb of Julius II., but the Pope ordered him to leave this work for the present, and paint the vault of the Sistine Chapel. In vain Michelangelo declared that painting was not his trade, and that Raphael was the proper man for the work. Julius II. would have his way, and in spite of many difficulties, the mighty task was accomplished in the space of four and a half years. Michelangelo’s letters during this time reveal a piteous tale of the petty troubles and vexations which he had to endure. His enemies were always plotting against him, his assistants and servants cheated and annoyed him in a hundred different ways. The Pope was absent from Rome, and left him ill-supplied with funds. At home his brothers were quarrelsome and wasteful, and treated their old father unkindly. Every one seemed to conspire to vex and thwart him. “ I am living here in discontent,” he wrote home in June, 1508; “never well, and undergoing great fatigues; without money or friends.” And again, in July, 1512: “I am ill, and suffering greater hardships than ever man endured. Still, I put up with it all, if only I may reach the desired end.” Six months later the whole work was completed, the last half of the vault was uncovered, and all Rome flocked to see the results of the great master’s labours. That day Michelangelo’s triumph was complete, and he wrote home to tell his old father that the Pope was entirely satisfied. The 48 MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI work was, indeed, magnificent, alike in design and execution. On the central vault, the whole drama of Creation, of the Fall and Deluge was set forth in nine large compartments. On the spandrels at the corners, four subjects — the Brazen Serpent, the Triumph of Mordecai and Esther over Haman, David slaying Goliath, and Judith bearing the head of Holofernes — were represented as types of the redemption of the world. In the spaces between the windows, twelve Sibyls and Prophets were placed as witnesses of the coming of Christ, and the lunettes above were filled with family groups of the royal line of David. But the great master’s labours did not end here. After unfolding the tale of the great Christian epic on the stone vault, he further adorned every angle, curve, and cornice with nude figures of youths and children, in every possible variety of attitude. And prominent among that marvellous array of living figures, he placed those twenty incomparable genii which reveal the noblest ideal of human form to which any modern painter has attained. The frescoes of the Sistina were the grandest achievement of Michelangelo in painting. In them we see the fullest manifestation of his mighty creative faculties and splendid technical powers, and in them we also recognise the final and logical culmination of Florentine art. All that had gone before, the successive attempts of Giotto and Masaccio, of Donatello and Verrocchio, of Botticelli and Leonardo, to solve the different problems of form and movement, are gathered up here. When Pope Julius II. called him to paint the frescoes of the Sistina, he complained that painting was not his trade, and that, as he always maintained, sculpture was his true vocation, in proof of which he invariably signed himself Michelangelo, scultore. And there can be no doubt that the finest qualities in his painting, the purity of outline, the vigour of the modelling, the plastic poetry of the forms, were all borrowed from the sister art. More than this, he realised, what men such as Signorelli and Piero della Francesca had only dimly felt before, that the most complete rendering of life and movement can only be attained by means of the nude. And in the perfect types of strength and beauty, which look down from the vault of the Sistina, he succeeds in showing us a vision of humanity more glorious than had ever been held up before the world, since the great days of Greek sculpture. Unfortunately, just at the moment of his fullest development, Michelangelo’s powers were frittered away upon architectural and engineering schemes, which consumed the most precious years of his life. Four months after the completion of the Sistina frescoes, Julius II. died, and the new Pope, Leo X., summoned Michelangelo to Florence to erect a fa