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THE RENAISSANCE
STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY
BY
WALTER PATER
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1925
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First Edition 1873
Second Ediiion 1877
Third Edition 1888
Fourth Edition 1853; Ee/rinted i8gg, 1900
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DEDICATION
TO
February 1873
PREFACE
Many attempts have been made by writers on
art and poetry to/ define beau ty in the abstract, to
express it in the most general terms, to find some
universal form ula for it. The value of these
attempts has most often been in the suggestive
and penetrating things said by the way. Such
discussions help us very little to enjoy what has
been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate
between what is more and what is less excellent
in them, or to use words lik e beauty^ excel lence,
art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than
they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all
othe r qualities p resented to human experience, is
relative ; a nd the defanition of it becomes un-
meari ihg an d useless in jproportion to its abstract-
ness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract
"Hut in the most concrete terms possible, to
find not its universal formula, but the formula
which expresses most ade g^uately this or that
vii
THE RENAISSANCE
specialjnariiiestation of it, is the aim of the true
student of jesthetics.
f " To see the object as in itself it really is,"
has been justly said to be the aim of all true
criticism whatever ; and in aesthetic criticism the
first step towards seeing one's object as it really is,
is to know one's own impression as it really is,
to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The
objects with which aesthetic criticism deals —
music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of
human life — are indeed receptacles of so many
powers or forces : they possess, like the products
of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is
this song or picture, this engaging personality
presented in life or in a book, to me? What
effect does it really produce on me ? Does it
give me pleasure ? and if so, what sort or degree
of pleasure ? How is my nature modified by its
presence, and under its influence ? The answers
to these questions are the original facts with
which the aesthetic critic has to do ; and, as in
the study of light, of morals, of number, one must
realise such primary data for one's self, or not
at all.^) And he who experiences these impressions
strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination
and analysis of them, has no need to trouble
himself with the abstract question what beauty
is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or
viii
PREFACE
experience — metaphysical questions, as unprofit-
able as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He
may pass them all by as being, answerable or
not, of no interest to him.
The assthetic critic, then, regards all the
objects with which he has to do, all works of art,
and the/a irer forms of nature and human life, as
powe rs or forces producing^ leasurable sensations,
each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind;
This influence he feels, and wishes to explain,
by analysing and reducing it to its elements. To
him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging
personality in life or in a book. La Gioconday the
hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable
for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb,
a wine, a gem ; for the property each has ot
affecting one with a special, a unique, impression
of pleasure. Our education becomes complete
in proportion as our susceptibility to these im-
pressions increases in depth and variety. And
the function of the jesthetic critic is to distinguish,
to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the
virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair
personality in life or in a book, produces this
special impression of beauty or pleasure, to in-
dicate what the source of that impression is, and
under what conditions it is experienced. His
end is reached when he has disengaged that
ix
THE RENAISSANCE
virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some
natural element, for himself and others ; and
the rule for those who would reach this end is
stated with great exactness in the words of a
recent critic of Sainte-Beuve : — De se borner h
connattre de prh les belles choses, et h s'en nourrir
jn exquis amateurs^ en humanistes accomplis.
What-is .imp.or.tant, then, is not that the critic
should, possess a correct abstract definition of
beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of
temperament, the power of being deeply moved
by the presence of beautiful objects. He will
remember always that beauty exists in many
forms. To him all periods, types, schools of
taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there
have been some excellent workmen, and some
excellent work done. The question he asks is
always : — In whom did the stir, the genius, the
sentiment of the period find itself? where was
the receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its
taste ? " The ages are all equal," says William
Blake, " but genius is always above its age."
Often it will require great nicety to disengage
this virtue from the commoner elements with
which it may be found in combination. Few
artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite
cleanly, casting off all dibrisy and leaving us only
what the heat of their imagination has wholly
PREFACE
fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the
writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his
genius, entering into the substance of his work,
has crystallised a part, but only a part, of it ; and
in that great mass of verse there is much which
might well be forgotten. But scattered up and
down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire
compositions, like the Stanzas on Resolution and
Independence^ or the Ode on the 'Recollections of
Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing
a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does
not wholly search through and transmute, we
trace the action of his unique, incommunicable
faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in
natural things, and of man's life as a part of
nature, drawing strength and colour and character
from local influences, from the hills and streams,
and from natural sights and sounds. Well I that
is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth's
poetry ; and then the function of the critic of
Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle,
to disengage it, to mark the degree in which it
penetrates his verse.
The subjects of the following studies are taken
from the history of the Renaissance, and touch
what I think the chief points in that complex,
many-sided movement. I have explained in the
first of them what I understand by the word,
xi
THE RENAISSANCE
giving it a much wider scope than was intended
by those who originally used it to denote
that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth
century which was only one of many results of
a general excitement and enlightening of the
human mind, but of which the great aim and
achievements of what, as Christian art, is often
falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another
result. This outbreak of the human spirit may
be traced far into the middle age itself, with its
motives already clearly pronounced, the care for
physical beauty, the worship of the body, the
breaking down of those limits which the rehgious
system of the middle age imposed on the heart
-and the imagination. I have taken as an example
of this movement, this earlier Renaissance within
the middle age itself, and as an expression of its
qualities, two little compositions in early French ;
not because they constitute the best possible
expression of them,- but because they help the
unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance
ends also in France, in French poetry, in a phase
of which the writings of Joachim du Bellay are
in many ways the most perfect illustration. The
Renaissance, in truth, put forth in France an after-
math, a wonderful later growth, the products of
which have to the full that subtle and delicate
sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely
xii
PREFACE
decadence, just as its earliest phases have the
freshness which belongs to all periods of growth
in art, the charm of ascesis, of the austere and
serious girding of the loins in youth.
But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that
the interest of the Renaissance mainly lies, — in
that solemn fifteenth century which can hardly
tie studied too much, not merely for its positive
results in the things of the intellect and the
imagination, its concrete works of art, its special
and prominent personalities, with their profound
assthetic charm, but for its general spirit and
character, for the ethical qualities of which it is
a consummate type.
The various forms of intellectual activity
which together make up the culture of an age,
move for the most part from different starting-
points, and by unconnected roads. As products
of the same generation they partake indeed of a
common character, and unconsciously illustrate
each other ; but of the producers themselves, each
group is solitary, gaining what advantage or dis-
advantage there may be in intellectual isolation.
Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious life,
and that 'Other life of refined pleasure and action
in the conspicuous places of the world, are each of
them confined to its own circle of ideas, and those
who prosecute either of them are generally little
xiii
THE RENAISSANCE
curious of the thoughts of others. There come,
however, from time to time, eras of more favour-
able conditions, in which the thoughts of men
draw nearer together than is their wont, and the
many interests of the intellectual world combine
in one complete type of general culture. The
fifteenth century in Italy is one of these happier
eras, and what is sometimes said of the age of
Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo : — it is an age
productive in personalities, many-^sided, central-
ised, complete. Here, artists and philosophers
and those whom the action of the world has
elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation,
but breathe a common air, and catch light and
heat from each other's thoughts. There is a
spirit of general elevation and enlightenment
in which all alike communicate. The unity
of this spirit gives unity to all the various
products of the Renaissance ; and it is to this
intimate alliance with mind, this participation in
the best thoughts which that age produced, that
the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes
much of its grave dignity and influence,
I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not
incongruous with the studies which precede it,
because Winckelmann, coming in the^ghteenth
century, really belpngsjn spirit to an earlier age.
By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect
PREFACE
and the imagination for their own sake, by his
Hellenism, his life -long struggle to attain to
the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the
humanists of a previous century. He is the last
fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a strik-
ing way. its motive and tendencies.
1873.
x\r
CONTENTS
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA .
SANDRO BOTTICELLI .
LTJCA DELLA ROBBIA .
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
LEONARDO DA VINCI .
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
WINCKELMANN
CONCLUSION
PAGE
I
30
50
63
73
98
130
iSS
177
233
yet thall ye be as the wings of a dove.
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
The history of the Renaissance ends in France,
and carries us away from Italy to the beautiful
cities of the country of the Loire. But it was
in France also, in a very important sense, that
the Renaissance had begun. French writers,
who are fond of connecting the creations of
Italian genius with a French origin, who tell us
how Saint Francis of Assisi took not his name only,
but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love
which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a
French source, how Boccaccio borrowed the out-
lines of his stories from the old French fabliaux^
and how Dante himself expressly connects the
origin of the art of miniature-painting with the
city of Paris, have often dwelt on this notion of
a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and the
beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renais-
sance within the limits of the middle age itself
— a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for
human life and the human mind what was after-
wards done in the fifteenth. The word Renais-
sanccy indeed, is now generally used to denote not
B I ^
THE RENAISSANCE
merely the revival of classical antiquity which
took place in the fifteenth century, and to which
the word was first applied, but a whole complex
movement, of which .jtihat j^^^
antiquity was Hut one„.elernent or symptom. For
us the Reffeissance is the name of a many-sided
but yet united movement, in which the love of
the things of the intellect and the imagination
for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal
and* comely way of conceiving life, make
themselves felt, urging those who experience
tTTis^esire to search out first one and then
another means of intellectual or imaginative
enjoyment, and directing them not only to the
discovery of old and forgotten sources of this
enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources
thereof — ^new experiences, new subjects of poetry,
new forms of art. Of such feeling there was a
great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and the
beginning of the following century. Here and
there, under rare and happy conditions, in Pointed
architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in
the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the
middle age turns to sweetness ; and the taste for
sweetness generated there becomes the seed of the
classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to
seek after the springs of perfect sweetness in the
Hellenic world. And coming after a long period
in which this instinct had been crushed, that
true "dark age," in which so many sources
of intellectual and imaginative enjoyment had
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
actually disappeared, this outbreak is rightly
called a Renaissance, a revival.
Theories which bring into connexion with
each other modes of thought and feeling, periods
of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrow-
ness of men's minds constantly tends to oppose to
each other, have a great stimulus for the intellect,
and are almost always worth understanding. It
is so with this theory of a Renaissance within
the middle age, which seeks to establish a con-
tinuity between the most characteristic work of
that period, the sculpture of Chartres, the
windows of Le Mans, and the work of the later
Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin and Germain
Pilon, thus healing that rupture between the
middle age and the Renaissance which has so
often been exaggerated. But it is not so much
the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its
sculpture and painting — ^work certainly done in
a great measure for pleasure's sake, in which
even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays
itself — but rather its profane poetry, the poetry
of Provence, and the magnificent after-growth
of that poetry in Italy and France, which those
French writers have in view when they speak
of this medieval Renaissance. In that poetry,
earthly passion, with its intimacy, its freedom,
its variety — the liberty of the heart — makes
itself felt ; and the name of Abelard, the
great scholar and the great lover, connects the
expression of this liberty of heart with the free
3
THE RENAISSANCE
play of human intelligence around all subjects
presented to it, with the liberty of the intellect,
as that age understood it.
Every one knows the legend of Abelard, a
legend hardly less passionate, certainly not less
characteristic of the middle age, than the legend
of Tannhauser ; how the famous and comely clerk,
in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed, pleasant,
and discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live
in the house of a canon of the church of Notre-
Dame, where dwelt a girl, Heloise, believed to
be the old priest's orphan niece ; how the old
priest had testified his love for her by giving her
an education then unrivalled, so that rumour
asserted that, through the knowledge of languages,
enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of
the older world, she had become a sorceress, like
the Celtic druidesses ; and how as Abelard and
Heloise sat together at home there, to refine a little
further on the nature of abstract ideas, " Love
made himself of the party with them. " You con-
ceive the temptations of the scholar, who, in such
dreamy tranquillity, amid the bright and busy
spectacle of the " Island," lived in a world of some-
thing like shadows ; and that for one who knew so
well how to assign its exact value to every abstract
thought, those restraints which lie on the con-
sciences of other men had been relaxed. It appears
that he composed many verses in the vulgar tongue :
already the young men sang them on the quay be-
low the house. Those songs, says M. de Remusat,
4
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
were probably in the taste of the Trouveres, " of
whom he was one of the first in date, or, so to
speak, the predecessor." It is the same spirit
which has moulded the famous " letters," written
in the quaint Latin of the middle age.
At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which
the next generation raised to grace the precincts
of Abelard's school, on the " Mountain of Saint
Genevieve," the historian Michelet sees in
thought " a terrible assembly ; not the hearers of
Abelard alone, fifty bishops, twenty cardinals,
two popes, the whole body of scholastic philo-
sophy ; not only the learned Heloise, the teach-
ing of languages, - and the Renaissance ; but
Arnold of Brescia — that is to say, the revolution."
And so from the rooms of this shadowy house
by the Seine side we see that spirit going abroad,
with its qualities already well defined, its intimacy,
its languid sweetness, its rebellion, its subtle skill
in dividing the elements of human passion, its
care for physical beauty, its worship of the body,
which penetrated the early literature of Italy,
and finds an echo even in Dante.
That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine
Comedy may appear a singular omission to the
reader of Dante, who seems to have inwoven into
the texture of his work whatever had impressed
him as either effective in colour or spiritually
significant among the recorded incidents of actual
life. Nowhere in his great poem do we find the
name, nor so much as an allusion to the story of
5
THE RENAISSANCE
one who had left so deep a mark on the
philosophy of which Dante was an eager student,
of whom in the Latin Quarter, and from the lips
of scholar or teacher in the University of Paris,
during his sojourn among them, he can hardly
have failed to hear. We can only suppose that
he had indeed considered the story and the man,
and abstained from passing judgment as to his
place in the scheme of " eternal justice."
In the famous legend of Tannhauser, the
erring knight makes his way to Rome, to seek
absolution at the centre of Christian religion.
" So soon," thought and said the Pope, " as the
staff in his hand should bud and blossom, so
soon rtiight the soul of Tannhauser be saved, and
no sooner " ; and it came to pass not long after
that the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had
carried in his hand was covered with leaves and
flowers. So, in the cloister of Godstow, a
petrified tree was shown of which the nuns told
that the fair Rosamond, who had died among
them, had declared that, the tree being then
alive and green, it would be changed into stone
at the hour of her salvation. When Abelard
died, like Tannhauser, he was on his way to
Rome. What might have happened had he
reached his journey's end is uncertain ; and it is
in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the
general beliefs of his age has always remained.
In this, as in other things, he prefigures the
character of the Renaissance, that movement in
6
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
which, in various \yays, the human mind wins
for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation
and thought, not opposed to but only beyond
and independent of the spiritual system then
actually realised. The opposition into which
Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to his
career, which breakg^ his soul to pieces, is a no
less subtle opposition than that between the
merely professional, official, hireling ministers of
that system, with their ignorant worship of
system for its own sake, and the true child of
light, the humanist, with reason and heart and
senses quick, while theirs were almost dead.
He reaches out towards, he attains, modes of
ideal living, beyond the jirescribed limits of that
system, though in essential germ, it tnay be,
contained within it. As always happens, the ad-
herents of the poorer and narrower culture had
no sympathy with, because no understanding of,
a culture richer and more ample than their own.
After the discovery of wheat they would still live
upon acorns — a/>res /'invention du bli ils voulaient
encore vivre du gland; and would hear of no
service to the higher needs of humanity with
instruments not of their forging.
But the human spirit, bold through those
needs, was too strong for them. Abelard and
Heloise write their letters — letters with a
wonderful outpouring of soul — in medieval
Latin ; and Abelard, though he composes songs
in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those
7
THE RENAISSANCE
treatises in which he tries to find a ground of
reality below the abstractions of philosophy, as
one bent on trying all things by their congruity
with human experience, who had felt the hand
of Heloise, and looked into her eyes, and tested
the resources of humanity in her great and
energetic nature. Yet it is only a little later,
early in the thirteenth century, that French prose
romance begins ; and in one of the pretty
volumes of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of
the most striking fragments of it may be found,
edited with much intelligence. In one of these
thirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et
Amile, that free play of human affection, of the
claims of which Abelard's story is an assertion,
makes itself felt in the incidents of a great
friendship, a friendship pure and generous,
pushed to a sort of passionate exaltation, and
more than faithful unto death. Such comrade-
ship, though instances of it are to be found
everywhere, is still especially a classical motive ;
Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so strongly
in an antique tale, that one knows not whether
the love of both Palamon and Arcite for Emelya,
or of "those two for each other, is the chiefer
subject of the Knight's Tale —
He cast his eyen upon Emelya^
And therewithal he hleynte and cried^ ah !
As that he stongen were unto the herte.
What reader does not refer something of the
O
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
bitterness of that cry to the spoiling, already
foreseen, of the fair friendship, which had made
the prison of the two lads sweet hitherto with
its daily offices ?
The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened
by the romantic circumstance of an entire
personal resemblance between the two heroes,
through which they pass for each other again and
again, and thereby into many strange adventures ;
that curious interest of the Doppelgcinger, which
begins among the stars with the Dioscuri, being
entwined in and out through all the incidents of
the story, like an outward token of the inward
similitude of their souls. With this, again, is
connected, like a second reflection of that inward
similitude, the conceit of two marvellously
beautiful cups, also exactly like each other —
children's cups, of wood, but adorned with gold
and precious stones. These two cups, which by
their resemblance help to bring the friends
together at critical moments, were given to them
by the Pope, when he baptized them at Rome,
whither the parents had taken them for that
purpose, in gratitude for their birth. They cross
and recross very strangely in the narrative, serving
the two heroes almost like living things, and with"
that well-known effect of a beautiful object, kept
constantly before the eye in a story or poem, of
keeping sensation well awake, and giving a
certain air of refinement to all the scenes into
which it enters. That sense of fate, which
9
THE RENAISSANCE
hangs so much of the shaping of human life on
trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry handker-
chief, is thereby heightened, while witness is
borne to the enjoyment of beautiful handiwork
by primitive people, their simple wonder at it,
so that they give it an oddly significant place
among the factors of a human history.
Amis and Amile, therf, are true to their
comradeship through all trials ; and in the end it
comes to pass that at a moment of great need
Amis takes the place of Amile in a tournament
for life or death. " After this it happened that a
leprosy fell upon Amis, so that his wife would
not approach him, and wrought to strangle him.
He departed therefore from his home, and at last
prayed his servants to carry him to the house of
Amile " ; and it is in what follows that the
curious strength of the piece shows itself : —
" His servants, willing to do as he commanded,
carried him to the place where Amile was ; and
they began to sound their rattles before the court
of Amile's house, as lepers are accustomed to do.
And when Amile heard the noise he commanded
one of his servants to carry meat and bread to the
sick man, and the cup which was given to him
at Rome filled with good wine. And when the
servant had done as he was commanded, he re-
turned and said. Sir, if I had not thy cup in my
hand, I should believe that the cup which the
sick man has was thine, for they are alike, the
10
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
one to the other, in height and fashion. And
Amile said. Go quickly and bring him to me.
And when Amis stood before his comrade Amile
demanded of him who he was, and how he had
gotten that cup. I am of Briquain le Chastel,
answered Amis, and the cup was given to me by
the Bishop of Rome, who baptized me. And
when Amile heard that, he knew that it was his
comrade Amis, who had delivered him from
death, and won for him the daughter of the
King of France to be his wife. And straightway
he fell upon him, and began weeping greatly,
and kissed him. And when his wife heard that,
she ran out with her hair in disarray, weeping
and distressed exceedingly, for she remembered
that it was he who had slain the false Ardres.
And thereupon they placed him in a fair bed,
and said to him. Abide with us until God's will
be accomplished in thee, for all we have is at
thy service. So he and the two servants abode
with them.
" And it came to pass one night, when Amis
and Amile lay in one chamber without other
companions, that God sent His angel Raphael to
Amis, who said to him, Amis, art thou asleep ?
And he, supposing that Amile had called him,
answered and said, I am not asleep, fair comrade !
And the angel said to him. Thou hast answered
well, for thou art the comrade of the heavenly
citizens. — I am Raphael, the angel of our Lord,
and am come to tell thee how thou mayest be
IX
THE RENAISSANCE
healed ; for thy prayers are heard. Thou shalt
bid Amile, thy comrade, that he slay his two
children and wash thee in their blood, and so
thy body shall be made whole. And Amis said
to him. Let not this thing be, that my comrade
should become a murderer for my sake. But
the angel said. It is convenient that he do this.
And thereupon the angel departed.
" And Amile also, as if in sleep, heard those
words ; and he awoke and said. Who is it, my
comrade, that hath spoken with thee ? And
Amis answered. No man ; only I have prayed to
our Lord, as I am accustomed. And Amile
said. Not so ! but some one hath spoken with
thee. Then he arose and went to the door of
the chamber ; and finding it shut he said. Tell
me, my brother, who it was said, those words to
thee to-night. And Amis began to weep greatly,
and told him that it was Raphael, the angel of
the Lord, who had said to him, Amis, our Lord
commands thee that thou bid Amile^slay his two
children, and wash thee in their blood, and so
thou shalt be healed of thy leprosy. And Amile
was greatly disturbed at those words, and said, I
would h~ave given to thee my man-servants and
my maid-servants and all my goods, and thou
feignest that an angel hath spoken to thee that I
should slay my two children- And immediately
Amis began to weep, and said, I know that I
have spoken to thee a terrible thing, but con-
strained thereto ; I pray thee cast me not away
13
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
from the shelter of thy house. And Amile
answered that what he had covenanted with him,
that he would perform, unto the hour of his
death : But I conjure thee, said he, by the faith
which there is between me and thee, and by our
comradeship, and by the baptism we received
together at Rome, that thou tell me whether it
was man or angel said that to thee. And Amis
answered again. So truly as an angel hath spoken
to me this night, so may God deliver me from
my infirmity !
"Then Amile began to weep in secret, and
thought within himself : If this man was ready
to die before the king for me, shall I not for
him slay my children f Shall I not keep faith
with him who was faithful to me even unto
death ? And Amile tarried no longer, but departed
to the chamber of his wife, and bade her go hear
the Sacred Office. And he took a sword, and
went to the bed where the children were lying,
and found them asleep. And he lay down over
them and began to weep bitterly and said. Hath
any man yet heard of a father who of his own will
slew his children ? Alas, my children ! I am no
longer your father, but your cruel murderer.
" And the children awoke at the tears of their
father, which fell upon them ; and they looked
up into his face and began to laugh. And as
they were of the age of about three years, he
said. Your laughing will be turned into tears,
for your innocent blood must now be shed,
t3
THE RENAISSANCE
and therewith he cut off their heads. Then he
laid them back in the bed, and put the heads
upon the bodies, and covered them as though
they slept : and with the blood which he had
taken he washed his comrade, and said. Lord
Jesus Christ ! who hast commanded men to
keep faith on earth, and didst heal the leper by
Thy word ! cleanse now my comrade, for whose
love I have shed the blood of my children.
"Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy.
And Amile clothed his compariion in his best
robes ; and as they went to the church to give
thanks, the bells, by the will of God, rang of
their own accord. And when the people of the
city heard that, they ran together to see the
marvel. And the wife of Amile, when she
saw Amis and Amile coming, asked which of
the twain was her husband, and said, I know
well the vesture of them both, but I know not
which of them is Amile. And Amile said to her,
I am Amile, and my companion is Amis, who is
healed of his sickness. And she was full of
wonder, and desired to know in what manner he
was healed. Give thanks to our Lord, answered
Amile, but trouble not thyself as to the manner
of the healing.
" Now neither the father nor the mother had
yet entered where the children were ; but the
father sighed heavily, because they were dead,
and the mother asked for them, that they might
rejoice together ; but Amile said, Dame ! let
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
the children sleep. . And it was already the hour
of Tierce. And going in alone to the children
to weep over them, he found them at play in the
bed ; only, in the place of the sword-cuts about
their throats was as it were a thread of crimson.
And he took them in his arms and carried them
to his wife and said. Rejoice greatly, for thy
children whom I had slain by the commandment
of the angel are alive, and by their blood is Amis
healed."
There, as I said, is the strength of the old
French story. For the Renaissance has not only
the sweetness which it derives from the classical
world, but also that curious strength of which
there are great resources in the true middle age.
And as I have illustrated the early strength of
the Renaissance by the story of Amis and Amile,
a story which comes from the North, in which
a certain racy Teutonic flavour is perceptible,
so I shall illustrate that other element, its early
sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even, by
another story printed in the same volume of the
Biblioth£que Klzevirienne^ and of about the same
date, a story which comes, characteristically, from
the South, and connects itself with the literature
of Provence.
The central love -poetry of Provence, the
poetry of the Tenson and the Aubade, of Bernard
de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the
few, for the elect and peculiar people of the
IS
THE RENAISSANCE
kingdom of sentiment. But below this intenser ^
poetry there was probably a wide range of litera-
ture, less serious and elevated/ reaching, by light-
ness of form and comparative homeliness of
interest, an audience which the concentrated
passion of those higher lyrics left untouched.
This literature has long since perished, or lives
only in later French or Italian versions. One
such version, the only representative of its species,
M. Fauriel thought he detected in the story of
Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of
the latter half of the thirteenth century, and
preserved in a unique manuscript, in the national
library of Paris ; and there were reasons which
made him divine for it a still more ancient
ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin, as in
a leaf lost out of some early Arabian Nights}
The little book loses none of its interest through
the criticism which finds in it only a traditional
subject, handed on by one people to another ; for
after passing thus from hand to hand, its outline
is still clear, its surface untarnished ; and, like
many other stories, books, literary and artistic
conceptions of the middle age, it has come to
* Recently, Aucassin and NicoletU has been edited and translated
into English, with much graceful scholarship, by Mr. F. W.
Bourdillon. Still more recently we have had a translation — a
poet's translation — from the ingenious and versatile pen of Mr.
Andrew Lang. The reader should consult also the chapter on
" The Out-door Poetry," in Vernon Lee's most interesting Eupho-
rhn ; being Studies of the Antique and Medieval in the Renaissance,
a work abounding in knowledge and insight on the subjects of
which it treats.
IIS
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
have in this way a sort of personal history,
almost as full of risk and adventure as that of its
own heroes. The writer himself calls the piece
a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its
incidents and sentiment helped forward by songs,
inserted at irregular intervals. In the junctions
of the story itself there are signs of roughness
and want of skill, which make one suspect that
the prose was only put together to connect a
series of songs — a series of songs so moving and
attractive that people wished to heighten and
dignify their effect by a regular framework or
setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the
simplest kind, not rhymed even, but only im-
perfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty or thirty
lines apiece, all ending with a similar vowel
sound. And here, as elsewhere in that early
poetry, much of the interest lies in the spectacle
of the formation of a new artistic sense. A novel
art is arising, the music of rhymed poetry, and
in the songs of Aucassin and Nicolette, which
seem always on the point of passing into true
rhyme, but which halt somehow, and can never
quite take flight, you see people just growing
aware of the elements of a new music in their
possession, and anticipating how pleasant such
music might become.
The piece was probably intended to be recited
by a company of trained performers, many of
whom, at least for the lesser parts, were probably
children. The songs are introduced by the rubric,
c 17
THE RENAISSANCE
Or se cante (tci on chante) ; and each division of
prose by the rubric, Or dient et content et fabloient
{tci on conte). The musical notes of a portion of
the songs have been preserved ; and some of 'the
details are so descriptive that they suggested to
M. Fauriel the notion that the words had been ac-
companied throughout by dramatic action. That
mixture of simplicity and refinement which he was
surprised to find in a composition of the thirteenth
century, is shown sometimes in the turn given to
some passing expression or remark ; thus, " the
Count de Garlns was old and frail, his time was
over " — Li quens Garins de Beaucaire estoit vix et
frales ; si avoit son tans trespass}. And then, all
is so realised ! , One sees the ancient forest, with
its disused roads grown deep with grass, and the
place where seven roads meet — u a forkeut set
cemin qui s" en vont par le pais ; we hear the light-
hearted country people calling each other by
their rustic names, and putting forward, as their
spokesman, one among them who is more
eloquent and ready than the rest — // un qui plus
fu enparles des autres ; for the little book has its
burlesque element also, so that one hears the
faint, far-ofF laughter still. Rough as it is, the
piece certainly possesses this high quality of
poetry, that it aims at a purely artistic eiFect. Its
subject is a great sorrow, yet it claims to be a
thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained
not for its matter only, but chiefly for its manner ,
it is cortois, it tells us, et bien assis.
i8
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
For the student of manners, and of the old
French language and literature, it has much
interest of a purely antiquarian order. . To say
of an ancient literary composition that it has an
antiquarian interest, often means that it has no
distinct esthetic interest for the reader of to-day.
Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by
putting its object in perspective, and setting the
reader in a certain point of view, from which
what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable for
him also, may often add greatly to the charm we
receive from ancient literature. But the first
condition of such aid must be a real, direct,
aesthetic charm in the thing itself. Unless it has
that charm, unless some purely artistic quality
went to its original making, no merely antiquarian
effort can ever give it an aesthetic value, or make
it a proper subject of aesthetic criticism. This
quality, wherever it exists, it is always pleasant
to define, and discriminate from the = sort of
borrowed interest which an old play, or an old
story, may very likely acquire through a true
antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and
Nicolette has something of this quality.
Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of
Beaucaire, is passionately in love with Nicolette^
a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, bought
of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit
him to marry. The story turns on the adven-
tures of these two lovers, until at the end of the
piece their mutual fidelity is rewarded. These
19
THE RENAISSANCE
adventures are of the simplest sort, adventures
which seem to be chosen for the happy occasion
they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy,
perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant
objects, a garden, a ruined tower, the little hut
of _^flo,wers which Nicolette constructs in the
forest whither she escapes from her enemies,
as a token to Aucassin ,that she has passed that
way. AH the charm of the piece is in itS/
detailsi^n a turn of peculiar lightness and grace
givien to the situations and traits of sentiment,
^specially in its quaint fragments of early French
prose.
All through it one feels the influence of that
faint air of ov.qiwrought_delicacy, almost of
wantonness, which was so strong- a-char^cteristic
of tiie , poetry- of the Troubadours. The Trou-
badours themselves were often men of great rank ;
they wrote for an exclusive . audience, people of
much leisure and great refinement, and they
came to value a type of personal, beauty which
has in it but little of the influence of the open
air and sunshine. There is a lan guid Eas tern
deliciousness in the very scenery of the story,
the lull-blown roses, the chamber painted in some
mysterious manner where Nicolette is imprisoned,
the cool brown marble, the almost nameless
colours, the odour of plucked grass and flowers.
Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery, and
is the best illustration of the quality I mean —
the beautiful, weird, foreign girl, whom the
20
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
shepherds take for a fay, who has the knowledge
of simples, the healing and beautifying qualities
of leaves and flowers, whose skilful touch heals
Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly
leaps from the ground ; the mere sight of whose
white flesh, as she passed the place where he lay,
healed a pilgrim, stricken with ' sore disease, so
that he rose up, and returned to his own country.
With this girl Aucassin is so deeply in love that
he forgets all knightly duties. At last Nicolette
is shut up to get her out of his way, and
perhaps the prettiest passage in the whole piece
is" the fragment of prose which describes her
escape :— r
" Aucassin was put in prison, as you have
heard, and Nicolette remained shut up in her
chamber. It was summer-time, in the month of
May, when the days are warm and long and
clear, and the nights coy and serene.
" One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw
the moon shine clear through the little window,
and heard the nightingale sing in the garden,
and then came the memory of Aucassin, whom
she so much loved. She thought of the Count
Garins of Beaucaire, who mortally hated her,
and, to be rid of her;, might at any moment
cause her to be burned or drdwned. She per-
ceived that the old woman who kept her
company was asleep ; she rose and put on the
fairest gown she had ; she took the bcd-clothcs
21
THE RENAISSANCE
and the towels, and knotted them together like
a cord, as far as they would go. Then she tied
the end to a pillar of the window, and let herself
slip down quite softly into the garden, and passed
straight across it, to reach the town.
" Her hair was yellow in small curls, her
smiling eyes blue-green, her face clear and feat,
the little lips very red, the teeth small and white ;
and the daisies which she crushed in passing,
holding her skirt high behind and before, looked
dark against her feet ; the girl was so white !
" She came to the garden-gate and opened it,
and walked through the streets of Beaucaire,
keeping on the dark side of the way to be out of
the light of the moon, which shone quietly in
the sky. She walked as fast as she could, until
she came to the tower where Aucassin was. The
tower was set about with pillars, here and there.
She pressed herself against one of the pillars,
wrapped herself closely in her mantle, and putting
her face, to a chink of the tower, which was old
and ruined, she heard Aucassin crying bitterly
within, and when she had listened awhile she
began to speak."
But scattered up and down through this
lighter matter, always tinged with humour and
often passing into burlesque, which makes up
the general substance of the piece, there are
morsels of a different quality, touches of some
intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from
22
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
the profound and en^xgetic^piritjof th5,JPxDyen9al
poetry itself, to which the inspiration of the book
has been referred. Let me gather up these
morsels of deeper colour, these expressions of the
ideal intensity of love, the motive which really
unites together the fragments of the little com-
position. Dante, the perfect flower of ideal love,
has recorded how the tyranny of that " Lord of
terrible aspect " became actually physical, blind-
ing his senses, and suspending his bodily forces.
In this, Dante is but the central expression and
type of experiences known well enough to the
initiated, in that passionate age. Aucassin
represents this ideal intensity of passion —
Aucassin^ It biax. It blons^
hi gent'tx^ It amorous ; —
the slim, tall, debonair, dansellon,.?c& the singers
call him, with his curled yellow hair, and eyes
of vair^ who faints with love, as Dante fainted,
who rides all day through the forest in search
of Nicolette, while the thorns tear his flesh, so
that one might have traced him by the blood
upon the grass, and who weeps at, eventide
because he has not found her, who has the
malady of his love, and neglects all knightly
duties. Once he is induced to put himself at the
head of his people, that they, seeing him before
them, might have more heart to defend them-
selves ; then a song relates how the sweet, grave
figure goes forth to battle, in dainty, tight-laced
23
THE RENAISSANCE
armour. It is the very image of the Proven9al
love-god, no longer a child, but grown to pensive
youth, as Pierre Vidal met him, riding on a white
horse, fair as the morning, his vestment em-
broidered with flowers. He rode on through
the gates into the open plain beyond. But as
he went, that great malady of his love came upon
him. The bridle fell from his hands ; and like
one who sleeps walking, he was carried on into
the midst of his enemies, and heard them talk-
ing together how they might most conveniently
kill him.
' One of the strongest characteristics of that
outbreak of the reason and the imagination, of
that assertioh of the liberty of the heart, in the
middle age, which I have termed a medieval
Renaissance, was its antinomianism, its spirit of
rebellion and revolt against the moral and religious
ideas of the time. In their search after the
pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in
their care for beauty, in their worship of the
body, people were impelled beyond the bounds
of the Christian ideal ; and their love became
sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival
religion. It was the return of that ancient
Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time in
the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan
gods still going to and fro on the earth, under all
sorts of disguises. And this element in the
middle age, for the most part ignored by those
writers who have treated it pre-eminently as the
24
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
" Age of Faith " — this rebellious and antinomian
element, the recognition of which has made the
delineation of the middle age by the writers of
the Romantic school in France, by Victor Hugo
for instance in Notre-Dame de Parisy so suggestive
and exciting — is found, alike in ;^the history of
Abelard and the legend of Tannhauser. More
and more, as we come to mark changes aiid
distinctions of temper in what is often in one
all-embracing confusion called the middle age,;
that rebellion, that sinister claim for liberty of,
heart and thought, comes to the surface. The
Albigensian movement, connected so strangely
with the history of Proven9al poetry, is deeply
tinged with it. A touch of it maizes the Fran-
ciscan order, with its poetry, its mysticism, its
"illumination," from the point of view of
religious authority, justly suspect. It influences
the thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers,
like Joachim of Flora, strange dreamers in a
world of flowery rhetoric of that third and final
dispensation of a " spirit of freedom," in which
law shall have passed away. Of , this spirit
Aucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the most
famous expression : it is the answer Aucassin
gives when he is threatened With the pains of
hell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. A
creature wholly of affection and the senses, he
sees on the way to paradise only a feeble and
worn-out company of aged priests, "clinging
day and night to the chapel altars," barefoot or
25
THE RENAISSANCE
in patched sandals. With or even without
Nicolette, " his sweet mistress whom he so
much loves," he, for his part, is ready to start on
the way to hell, along with " the good scholars,"
as he says, and the actors, and the fine horsemen
dead in battle, and the men of fashion,^ and
" the fair courteous ladies who had two or three
chevaliers apiece beside their own true lords,"
all gay with music, in their gold, and silver, and
beautiful furs — " the vair and the grey."
But in the House Beautiful the saints too have
their place ; and the student of the Renaissance
has this advantage over the student of the eman-
cipation of the human mind in the Reformation,
or the French Revolution, that in tracing the
footsteps of humanity to higher levels, he is
not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and
antagonisms of some well-recognised controversy,
with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the
intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. The
opposition of the professional defenders of a mere
system to that more .sincere and generouS-play of
the forces of human miiid and charac ter, w hich
I have noted as the secret of Ab elard's str uggle^
is indeed always powerful. But the incompati-
bility with one another of souls really " fair " is
not essential ; and within the enchanted region
of the Renaissance, one needs not be for ever on
^ Parage, peerage : — which came to signify all that ambitious
youth affected mpst on the outside of life, in that old world of the
Troubadours, with whom this term is of frequent recurrence.
^&
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
one^s .guard. Here there are no fixed parties, no
e xclusi ons : all breathes of that unity of culture
in which "whatsoever things are comely" are
reconciled, for the elevation and adorning of our
spirits. And just in proportion as those who
took part in the Renaissance become- centrally
representative of it, just so much the more is this
condition realised in them. The wicked popes,
and the loveless tyrants, who from time to time
became its patrons, or mere speculators in its
fortunes, lend themselves easily to disputations,
and, from this side or that, the spirit of controversy
lays just hold upon them. But the painter of the
Last Supper, with his kindred, lives in a land
where controversy has no breathing-place. They
refuse to be classified. In the story of Aucassin
and Nicolette, in the literature which it represents,
the note of defiance, of the opposition of one
system to another, is sometimes harsh. Let me
conclude then with a morsel from Amis and Amile,
in which the harmony of human interests is still
entire. For the story of the great traditional
friendship, in which, as I said, the liberty of the
heart makes itself felt, seems, as we have it, to
have been written by a monk — La iiie des saints
martyrs Amis et Amile. It was not till the end
of the seventeenth century that their names
were finally excluded from the maftyrology ;
and their story ends with this monkish miracle
of earthly comradeship, more than faithful unto
death : —
27
THE RENAISSANCE
" For, as God had united them in their lives
in one accord, so they were not divided in their
death, falling together side by side, with a host
of other brave men, in battle for King Charles
at Mortara, so called from that great slaughter.
And the bishops gave counsel to the king and
queen that they should bury the dead, and build
a church in that place ; and their counsel pleased
the king greatly. And there were built two
churches, the one by commandment of the king
in honour of Saint Oseige, and the other by
commandment of the queen in honour of Saint
Peter.
"And the king caused the two chests of
stone to be brought in the which the bodies of
Amis and Amile lay ; and Amile was carried
to the church of Saint Peter, and Amis to the
church of Saint Oseige ; and the other corpses
were buried, some in one place and some in
the other. But lo ! next morning, the body
of Amile in his coffin was found lying in the
church of Saint Oseige, beside the coffin of
Amis his comrade. Behold then this won-
drous amity, which by death could not be
dissevered !
"This miracle God did, who gave to His
disciples power to remove mountains. And by
reason of this miracle the king and queen re-
mained in that place for a space of thirty days,
and performed the offices of the dead who were
slain, and honoured the said churches with great
38
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
gifts. And the bishop ordained many clerks to
serve in the church of Saint Oseige, and com-
manded them that they should guard duly, with
great devotion, the bodies of the two companionSj
Amis and Amile."
39
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
No account of the Renaissance can be complete
without some notice of the attempt made by-
certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century
to reconcile Christianity with the religion- of
ancient Greece. To reconcile forms 5f sentiment
which at first sight seem incompatible, to adjust
the various products of the human mind to one
another in one many-sided type of intellectual
culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagina-
tion to feed upon, as much as it could possibly
receive, belonged to the generous instincts of
that age. An earlier and simpler generation
had seen in the gods of Greece so many malig-
nant spirits, the defeated but still living centres
of the religion of darkness, struggling, not always
in vain, against the kingdom of light. Little by
little, as the natural charm of pagan story re-
asserted itself over minds emerging out of
barbarism, the religious significance which had
once belonged to it was lost sight of, and it
came to be regarded as the subject of a purely
artistic or poetical treatment. But it was in-
evitable that from time to time minds should
30
PICO BELLA MIRANDOLA
arise, deeply enough impressed by its beauty and
power to ask themselves whether the religion of
Greece was indeed a rival of the religion of
Christ ; for the older gods had rehabilitated
themselves, and men's allegiance was divided.
And the fifteenth century was an impassioned
age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art
that it consecrated everything with which art
had to do as a religious object. The restored
Grejek_ literature had made it familiar, at least
in Plato, with a style of expression concerning
the earlier gods, which had about it something
of the warmth and unction of a Christian hymn.
It was too familiar with such language to regard
mythology as a mere story ; and it was too
serious to play with a religion.
" Let me briefly remind the reader " — says
Heine, in the Gods in Exik^ an essay full of that
strange blending of sentiment which is charac-
teristic of the traditions of the middle age con-
cerning the pagan religions — " how the gods of
the older world, at the time of the definite
triumph of Christianity, that is, in the third
century, fell into painful embarrassments, which
greatly resembled certain tragical situations of
their earlier life. They now found themselves
beset by the same troublesome necessities to
which they had once before been exposed during
the primitive ages, in that revolutionary epoch
when the Titans broke out of the custody
of Orcus, and, piling Pelion on Ossa, scaled
31
THE RENAISSANCE
Olympus. Unfortunate gods ! They had then
to take flight ignominiously, and hide themselves
among us here on earth, under all sorts of dis-
guises. The larger number betook themselves
to Egypt, v^rhere for greater security they assumed
the forms of animals, as is generally known.
Just in the same way, they had to take flight
again, and seek entertainment in remote hiding-
places, when those iconoclastic zealots, the black
brood of monks, broke down all the temples,
and pursued the gods with fire and curses.
Many of these unfortunate emigrants, now
entirely deprived of shelter and ambrosia, must
needs take to vulgar handicrafts, as a means of
earning their bread. Under these circumstances,
many whose sacred groves had been confiscated,
let themselves out for hire as wood-cutters in
Germany, and were forced to drink beer instead
of nectar. Apollo seems to have been content
to take service under graziers, and as he had
once kept the cows of Admetus, so he lived now
as a shepherd in Lower Austria. Here, how-
ever, having become suspected on account of his
beautiful singing, he was recognised by a learned
monk as one of the old pagan gods, and handed
over to the spiritual tribunal. On the rack he
confessed that he was the god Apollo ; and
before his execution he begged that he might
be suffered to play once more upon the lyre, and
to sing a song. And he played so touchingly,
and sang with such magic, and was withal so
32
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
beautiful in form and feature, that all the women
wept, and many of them were so deeply im-
pressed that they shortly afterwards fell sick.
Some time afterwards the people wished to
drag him from the grave again, that a stake
might be driven through his body, in the belief
that he had been a vampire, and that the sick
women would by this means recover. But they
found the grave empty."
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century wasi
in many things, great rather by what it designed
than by what it achieved. Much which it
aspired to do, and did but imperfectly or mis4
takenly, was accomplished in what is called the
klaircissement of the eighteenth century, or in ourj
own generation ; and what really belongs to thej
revival of the fifteenth century is but the leading
instinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea. It is
so with this very question of the reconciliation
of the religion of antiquity with the religion of
Christ. A modern scholar ocpupied by this
problem might observe that all religions may be
regarded as natural products, that, at least in
their origin, their growth, and decay, they have
common laws, and are not to be isolated from the
other movements of the human mind in the
periods in which they respectively prevailed ; that
they arise spontaneously out of the human mind,
as expressions of the varying phases of its sentiment
concerning the unseen world ; that every intel-
lectual product must be judged from the point of
D 33
THE RENAISSANCE
view of the age and the people in which it was
produced. He might go on to observe that each
has contributed something to the development
of the religious sense, and ranging them as so
many stages in the gradual education of the
human mind, justify the existence of each. The
basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the
world would thus be the inexhaustible activity
and creativeness of the human mind itself, in
which all religions alike have their root, and in
which all alike are reconciled ; just as the fancies
of childhood and the thoughts of old age meet and
are laid to rest, in the experience of the individual.
Far different was the, method followed by the
scholars of the fifteenth century. They lacked
the veryjrudiments of the historic sense, which,
by an imaginative act, throws itself back into
a world unlike one's own, and estimates every
intellectual creation in its connexion with the
age from which it proceeded. They had no idea
of deyelopment,^.Qf the differences of. ages, of the
process by which _our .race-has been ".educated."
In their attempts to-reconcile the religions of the
world, they were thus thrown back upon the
quicksand of allegorical interpretation. The
religions of the world' weTe to be reconciled, not
as successive stages in a regular development of the
religious sense, but as subsisting side by side, and
substantially in agreement with one another. And
here the first necessity was to misrepresent the
language, the conceptions, the sentiments, it was
34
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and
Homer must be made to speak agreeably to
Moses. Set side by side, the mere surfaces
could never unite in any harmony of design.
Therefore one must go below the surface, and
bring up the supposed secondary, or still more
remote meaning, — that diviner signification held
in reserve, in recessu divinius aliquidy latent in some
stray touch of Homer, or figure of speech in the
books of Moses.
And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a
" madhouse-cell," if you will, into which we may
peep for a moment, and see it at wofk weaving
strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of
the fifteenth century 'has its interest. With its
strange w;eb_ of imagery, its quaint conceits, its
unexpected combinations and subtle . moralising,
it is an element in the local colour of a great age.
It illustrates also the faith of that age in alL
oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous
belief that nothing~whfch had ever interested the
human mind could wholly lose its vitality. It
is the counterpart, though certainly the feebler
counterpart, of that practical truce and recon-
ciliation of the gods of Greece with the Christian
religion, which is. ,see.n in the._art of the time.
And it is for his share in this work, and because
his own story is a sort of analogue or visible
equivalent to the expression of this purpose in
his writings, that something of a general interest
StiU'^eloiiigs to the name of Pico della Mirandola,
35
THE RENAISSANCE
whose life, written by his nephew Francis, seemed
worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be
translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas
More, that great lover of Italian culture, among
whose works the life of Pico, Earl of Mirandola,
and a great lord of Italy, as he calls him, may still
be read, in its quaint, antiquated English.
Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came
to Florence. It was the very day — some day
probably in the year 1482 — on which Ficino had
finished his famous translation of Plato into Latin,
the work to which he had been dedicated from
childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in furtherance
of his desire to resuscitate the knowledge of Plato
among his fellow-citizens. Florence indeed, as
M. Renan has pointed out, had always had an
afEnity for the mystic and dreamy philosophy of
Plato, while the colder and more practical philo-
sophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua, and
other cities of the north ; and the Florentines,
though they knew perhaps very little about him,
had had the name of the great idealist often on
their lips. To increase this knowledge, Cosmo
had founded the Platonic academy, with periodi-
cal discussions at the Villa Careggi. The fall
of Constantinople in 1453, and the council in
1438 for the reconciliation of the Greek and
Latin Churches, had brought to Florence many
a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was
completed, the door of the mystical temple lay
open to all who could construe Latin, and the
36
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
scholar rested from his labour ; when there was
introduced into his study, where a lamp burned
continually before the bust of Plato, as other
men burned lamps before their favourite saints, a
young man fresh from a journey, " of feature and
shape seemly and beauteous, of stature goodly
an,d high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage
lovely and fair, his colour white, intermingled
with comely reds, his eyes grey, and quick of look,
, his teeth white and even, his hair yellow and
abundant," and trimmed with more than the
usual artifice of the time.
It is thus that Sir Thomas More translates the
words of the biographer of Pico, who, even in out-
ward form and appearance, seems an image of that
inward harmony and completeness, of which he
is so perfect an example. The word mystic has
been usually derived from a Greek word which
signifies to shut, as if one shut one's lips brooding
on what cannot be uttered ; but the Platonists
themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting
the eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly.
Perhaps the eyes of the mystic Ficino, now long
past the midway of life, had come to be thus half-
closed ; but when a young man, not unlike the
archangel Raphael, as the Florentines of that age
depicted him in his wonderful walk with Tobit,
or Mercury, as he might have appeared in a paint-
ing by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo,
entered l^is chamber, he seems to have thought
there was something not wholly earthly about
37
THE RENAISSANCE
him ; at least, he ever afterwards believed that
it was not without the co-operation of the stars
that the stranger had arrived on that day. For
it happened that they fell into a conversation,
deeper and more intimate than men usually fall
into at first sight. During this conversation
Ficino formed the design of devoting his remain-
ing years to the translation of Plotinus, that new
Plato, in whom the mystical element in the
Platonic philosophy had been worked out to the
utmost limit of vision and ecstasy ; and it is in
dedicating this translation to Lorenzo de' Medici
that Ficino has recorded these incidents.
It was after many wanderings, wanderings of
the intellect as well as physical journeys, that
Pico came to rest at Florence, Born in 1463,
he was then about twenty years old?" He was
called Giovanni at baptism, Pico, like all his
ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the Emperor
Constantine, from whom they claimed to be
descended, and Mirandola from the place of
his birth, a little town afterwards part of the
duchy of Modena, of which small territory
his family had long been the feudal lords.
Pico was the youngest of the family, and his
mother, delighting in his wonderful memory,
sent him at the age of fourteen to the famous
school of law at Bologna. From the first,
indeed, she seems to have had some presenti-
ment of his future fame, for, with a faith in
omens characteristic of her time, she believed
38
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
that a strange circumstance had happened at
the time of Pico's birth — the appearance of a
circular flame which suddenly vanished away,
on the wall of the chamber where she lay.
He remained two years at Bologna ; and then,
with an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst for
knowledge, the stran^e^ confused, uncritk^^
ing of that ag^e, jpa^sed through. „^^
^'^■^^^°°^°0?y.r^~-^5'^n'^?» penetrating, as he
thought, into jEKe'lecrets, of .,gil, ancient; ,.,philoso-
phies, and many Eastern languages. And with
this flood of erudition camejthe generous hope, so
often disabused, of rjsj^onciling the philosophers
with one another, and all alike with the Church.
At last he came to Rome. There, like some
knight-errant of philosophy, he ofl"ered to defend
nine hundred bold paradoxes, drawn from the
most opposite sources, against all comers. But
the pontifical court was led to suspect the
orthodoxy of some of these propositions, and
even the reading of the book which contained
them was forbidden by the Pope. It was not
until 1493 that Pico was finally absolved, by a
brief of Alexander the Sixth. Ten years before
that date he had arrived at Florence ; an early
instance of those who, after following the vain
hope of an impossible reconciliation from system
to system, have at last fallen back unsatisfied on
the simplicities of their childhood's belief.
The oration which Pico composed for the
opening of this philosophical tournament still
39
tHE RENAISSANCE
its subject is the dignity of human
nature, the greatness of "man. ^in common with
nearly all medievaiT' speculatioOj jnjjgh , of Pico's
writing has this for its drift-; and in^common
also with it, Pico's theory of that dignity is
founded on a misconception of the place in. nature
both of the earth and of man. For Pico the
earth is the centre of the universe : and around
it, as a fixed and motionless point, the sun and
moon and stars revolve, like diligent servants or
ministers. And in the midst of all . is placed
man, nodus et vinculum mundiy the bond or copula
of the world, and the *' interpreter, of nature " :
that famous expression of Bacon's really belongs
to Pico. Tritum est in scholisy he says, esse hominem
minorem munduniy in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus
et spiritus coelestis et plantarum anima vegetalis et
brutorum sensus et ratio et angelica mens et Dei
similitudo conspicitur : — " It is a commonplace of
the schools that man is a little world, in which
we may discern a body mingled of earthy
elements, and ethereal breath, and the vegetable
life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals,
and reason, and the intelligence of angels, and
a likeness to God."
A commonplace of the schools ! But_perhaps
it had some, new significance and authority-i -when
men heard one like Pico reiterate it ; and,,false
as its basis was, the theory had its use. For this
high dignity of man, thus bringing the dust under
his feet into sensible communion with the
40
PICO BELLA MIRANDOLA
thoughts and affections of the angels, was supposed
to belong to him, not as renewed by a religious
system, but byj hiis own natu ral right. The pro-
clamation of it wasjL counterpoise to the increas-
ing tendency of medievSr religion to depreciate
mah'sjiature, to sacrifice ii^is or that element in
it", to make it ashamed of itself, to keep the degrad-
ing or painful accidents of it always in view. It
helped^ man onward tp that reassertion of himself,
that rehabilitation of human nature, the body,
the se;nses,~"the~heart, the intelligence, which the
Renaissance fulfils. And yet to read a page of one
of Pico's forgotten books is like a glance into one
of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wan-
derer in classical lands has sometimes stumbled,
with the old disused ornaments and furniture of
a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them.
That whole conception of nature is so different
from our own. ' For Pico the world is. a limited
place, bounded by actual crystal walk, and a
material firmament ; it is like a .paLnted toy, like
that map or system of the world, held, as a great
target or shield, in the hands of the creative Logos,
by whom the Father made all things, in one of
the earlier frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa.
How different from this childish dream is our
own conception of nature, with its unlimited
space, its innumerable suns, and the earth but a
mote in the beam ; how different the strange
new awe, or superstition, with which it fills our
minds 1 " The silence of those infinite spaces,"
41
THE RENAISSANCE
says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, " the
silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me " : —
Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'e^raie.
He was already almost wearied out when he
came to Florence. He had loved much and
been beloved by women, " wandering over the
crooked hills of delicious pleasure " ; but their
reign over him was over, and long before
Savonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities," he
had destroyed those love-songs in the vulgar
tongue, which would have been so great a relief
to us, after the scholastic prolixity of his Latin
writings. It was in another spirit that he com-
posed a Platonic commentary, the only work of
his in Italian which has come down to us, on
the " Song of Divine Love " — secondo la mente ed
opinione del Platonid — "according to the mind
and opinion of the Platonists," by his friend
Hieronymo Beniveni, in which, with an am-
bitious array of every sort of learning, and a
profusion of imagery borrowed indifferently
from the astrologers, the Cabala, and Homer,
and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite, he
attempts to define ' the stages by which the soul
passes from the earthly to the unseen beauty.
A change indeed had passed over him, as if the
chilling touch of the abstract and disembodied
beauty Platonists profess to long for were
already upon him. Some sense of this, perhaps,
coupled with that over-brightness which in the
popular imagination always betokens an early
42
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
death, made Camilla Rucellai, one of those
prophetic women whom the preaching of
Savonarola had raised up in Florence, declare,
seeing him for the first time, that he would
depart in the time of lilies — prematurely, that
is, like the field -flowers which are withered
by the scorching sun almost as soon as
they are sprung up. He now wrote down
those thoughts on the religious life which Sir
Thomas More turned into English, and which
another English translator thought worthy to
be added to the books of the Imitation. " It is
not hard to know God, provided one will not
force oneself to define Him " : — has been thought
a great saying of Joubert's. " Love God," Pico
writes to Angelo Politian, " we rather may,
than either know Him, or by speech utter Him.
And yet had men liefer by knowledge never find
that which they seek, than by love possess that
thing, which also without love were in vain
found."
Yet he who had this fine touch for spiritual
things did not — and in this is the enduring
interest of his story — even after his cgnyeJ^sion,
forget the old gods. He is one of the last
who seriously and sincerely entertained the
claim on men's- faith of the pagan religions ;
he is anxious to ascertain the true significance
of the obscurest legend, the lightest tradition
concerning them. With many thoughts and
many influences which led him in that direc-
43
THE RENAISSANCE
tion, he did not become a monk ; only he
became gentle and patient in disputation ; re-
taining " somewhat of the old plenty, in dainty
viand and silver vessel," he gave over the greater
part of his property to his friend, the mystical
poet Beniveni, to be spent by him in works of
charity, chiefly in the sweet charity of pro-
viding marriage-dowries for the peasant girls of
Florence. His^ end c ame in I45>4j when, amid
the prayers and sacraments of Savonarola, he
died of fever, on the very day on which Charles
the Eighth entered Florence, the seventeenth of
November, yet in the time of lilies — the, lilies of
the shield of France, as the people now said, re-
membering Camilla's prophecy. He was buried
in the conventual church of Saint Mark, in the
hood and white frock of the Dominican order.
It is because the life of Pico, thus lying
down to rest in the Dominican habit, yet amid
thoughts of the older gods, himself like one of
those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to the
new, reh^ion, buJL.still witlxJar tenderness for the
earlier life, and desirous literally to " bind the
ages each to each by natural piety ^' — it is
because this life is so perfect a parallel to the
attempt made in his writings to . reconcile
Christianitywith the idea^^^ of _paganism, that
Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of
those writings, is really interesting. Thus, in
the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of
the Creationy he endeavours to reconcile the
44
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
accounts which pagan philosophy had given
of the origin of the world with the account
given in the books of Moses — the Timaus of
Plato with the book of Genesis. The Heptaplus
is dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose
interest, the preface tells us, in the secret
wisdom of Moses is well known. If Moses
seems in his writings simple and even popular,
rather than either a philosopher or a theologian,
that is because it was an institution with the
ancient philosophers, either not to speak of
divine things at all, or to speak of them dis-
semblingly : hence their doctrines were called
mysteries. Taught by them, Pythagoras be-
came so great a " master of silence," and wrote
almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God
in his heart, and speaking wisdom only among
the perfect. In explaining the harmony be-
tween Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold on every
sort of figure and analogy, on the double mean-
ings of words, the symbols of the Jewish ritual,
the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the
later Greek mythologists. Everywhere there is
an unbroken system of correspondences. Every
object in the terrestrial world is an analogue, a
symbol or counterpart, of some higher reality in
the starry heavens, and this again of some law of
the angelic life in the world beyond the stars.
There is the element of fire in the material
world ; the sun is the fire of heaven ; and in
the super -celestial world there is the fire of
45
THE RENAISSANCE
the seraphic intelligence. "But behold how
they differ ! The elementary fire burns, the
heavenly fire vivifies, the super- celestial fire
loves." In this way, every natural object,
every combination of natural forces, every acci-
dent in the lives of men, is filled with higher
meanings. Omens, prophecies, supernatural co-
incidences, accompany Pico himself all through
life. There are oracles in every tree and moun-
tain-top, and a significance in every accidental
combination of the events of life.
I This constant tendency to symbolism and
imagery gives Pico's work a figured style, by
which it has some real resemblance to Plato's,
and he differs from other mystical writers of his
jtime by a genuine desire to know his authorities
at first hand. He reads PlatQ_in-.Greek, Moses in
Hebrew, and by this his work really belongs to
thcLiiigher culture. Above all, we have a con-
stant sense in reading him^.that his thoughts,
however little their positive value may be, are
connected with springs beneatKthjem-ofdeep. and
passionate emotion ; and when he explains the
grades or steps "by which the soul passes from the
love of a physical object to the love of unseen
beauty, and unfolds the analogies between this
process and other movements upw^ard of human
thought, there is a glow and vehemence in his
words which remind one of the manner in which
his own brief existence flamed itself away,
I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth
46
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
century was, in many things, great rather by
what it designed or aspired to do, than by what
it actually achieved. It remained for a later age
to conceive the true method of effecting a
scientific reconciliation of Christian sentiment
with the imagery, the legends, the theories about
the world, of pagan poetry and philosophy. For
that age the only possible reconciliation was an
J^rpfiginative nnp and resulted from the efforts of
artists, trained in Christian schools, to handle
pagan subjects ; and of this artistic reconciliation
work like Pico's was but the feebler counterpart.
Whatever philosophers had to say on one side or
the other, whether they were successful or not
in their attempts to reconcile the old to the new,
and to justify the expenditure of so much care
and thought on the dreams of a dead faith, the
imagery of the Greek religion, the direct charm
of its story, were by artists valued and cultivated
for their own sake. Hence a new sort' of
mythology, with a tone and qualities of its own.
When the ship-load of sacred earth from the soil
of Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay
in the Gampo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up
from it, unlike any flower men had seen before,
the anemone with its concentric rings of strangely
blended colour, still to be found by those who
search long enough for it, in the long grass of
the Maremma. Just such a strange flower was
that mythology of the Italian Renaissance, which
grew up from the mixture of two traditions, two
47
THE RENAISSANCE
sentiments, the sacred and the profane. Classical
story was regarded as so much imaginative
material to be received and assimilated. It did
not come into men's minds to ask curiously of
science, concerning the origin of such story,
its primary form and import, its meaning for
those who projected it. The thing sank into
their minds, to issue forth again with all the
tangle about it of medieval sentiment and
ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the Tribune of
the C^z//, Michelangelo Actually brings the pagan
religion, and with it the unveiled human form,
the sleepy-looking fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into
the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters
had introduced there other products of the
earth, birds or flowers, while he has given to that
Madonna herself much of the uncouth energy of
the older and more primitive " Mighty Mother."
This picturesque union of contrasts, belonging
properly to the art of the close of the fifteenth
century, pervades, in Pico della Mirandola, an
actual person, and that is why the figure of
Pico is so attractive. He will not let one
go ; he wins one on, in spite of one's self, to
turn again to the pages of his forgotten books,
although we know already that the actual solution
proposed in them will satisfy us as little as
perhaps it satisfied him. It is said that in his
eagerness for mysterious learning he once paid
a great sum for a collection of cabalistic manu-
scripts, which turned out to be forgeries ; and
48
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
the story might well stand as a parable of all he
ever seemed to gain in the way of actual know-
ledge. He had sought knowledge, and passed
from system to system, and hazarded much ; but
less for the sake of positive knowledge than
because he believed there was a spirit of order
and beauty in knowledge, which would come'
down and unite what men's ignorance had
divided, and renew what time had made dim;
And so, while his actual work has passed away,!
yet his own qualities are still active, and him-
self remains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis
et vigilibus oculis, as his biographer describes him,
and with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti rubore
interspersa^ as with the light of morning upon it ;
and he has a true place in that group of great
Italians who fill the end of the fifteenth century
with their names, he is a true humanist. For
the essence of humanism is that belief of which
he seems never to have doubted, that nothing
which has ever interested living men and women
can wholly lose its vitality — no language they
have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have
hushed their voices, no dream which has once
been entertained by actual human minds, nothing
about which they have ever been passionate, or
expended time and zeal.
1871.
49
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one con-
temporary is mentioned by name — Sandro
Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to
chance only, but to some will rather appear a
result of deliberate judgment ; for people have
begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work,
and his name, little known in the last century, is
quietly becoming important. In. the middle of
the fifteenth century he had already anticipated
much of that meditative subtlety, which is some-
timies supposed peculiar to the great imaginative
workmen, of its close. Leayjng_jthe_..simple ;
reHgipa which had occupied the jfpiLowers of
Giotto for a century, and the simple-^naturalism
which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and
flowers only, he squght-inspiratiorLTia what to
him . were, works, of the modern world, the
writings of Dante and . Boccaccio, and,Jj[L„aew
readings of his own of classical stories : Q.r,~if. he
painted religious incidents, painted-them with an
under-current of original sentirnentj^ which
touches „,you as the real matler of the picture
through the veil oTits"ostensibTe subject. What
50
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar
quality of pleasure, which his work has the pro-
perty of exciting in us, and which we cannot get
elsewhere ? For this, especially when he has to
speak of a comparatively unknown artist, is always
the chief question which a critic has to answer.
In an age when the lives of artists were
full of adventure, his life is almost colourless.
Criticism indeed has cleared away much of the
gossip which Vasari accumulated, has touched
the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia, and rehabili-
tated the character of Andrea del Castagno. But
in Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate.
He did not even go by his true name : Sandro
is a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi,
Botticelli being only the name of the goldsmith
who first taught him art. Only two things
happened to him, two things which he shared
with o^her artists : — he was invited to Rome to
paint in the Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later
life under the influence of Savonarola, passing
apparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of
religious melancholy, which lasted till his death
in 1515, according to the received date. Vasari
says that he plunged into the study of Dante,
and even wrote a comment on the Divine Comedy.
But it seems strange that he should have lived on
inactive so long ; and one almost wishes that
some document might come to light, which,
fixing the date of his death earlier, might relieve
one, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age.
51
THE RENAISSANCE
He is before all things a poetical painter,
blending the charm of story and sentiment, the
medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of
line and colour, the medium of abstract painting.
So he becomes the illustratpr,, of Dante. In a
few rare examples of the edition of 1481, the
blank spaces, left at the beginning of every canto
for the hand of the illuminator, have been filled,
as far as the nineteenth canto of the InfernOy
with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly
by way of experiment, for in the copy in the
Bodleian Library, one of the three impressions it
contains has been printed upside down, and much
awry, in the midst of the luxurious printed page.
Giotto, and the followers of Giotto, with their
almost childish religious aim, had not learned to
put that weight of meaning into outward things,
light, colour, everyday gesture, which the poetry
of the Divine Comedy involves, and befbre..„thc
fifteenth century Dante could hardly Tiave found -
an illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations are
crowded with incident, blending, with a naive
carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases
of the same scene into, .one. plate. The
grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to
painters, who forget that the words of a poet,
which only feebly present an image to the
mind, must be lowered in key when translated
into visible form, make one regret that he has
not rather chosen for illustration the more
subdued imagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the
52
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
scene of those who " go down quick into hell,"
there is an inventive force about the fire taking
hold on the upturned soles of the feet, which
proves that the design is no mere translation of
Dante's words, but a true painter's vision ; while
the scene of the Centaurs wins one at once, for,
forgetful of the actual circumstances of their
appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight
on the thought of the Centaurs themselves,
bright, small creatures of the woodland, with
arch baby faces and mignon forms, drawing tiny
bows.
Botticelli liyed in a generation of naturalists,
and he might have been a mere naturalist among
them. There are traces enough in his work of
that akrt sense of outward things, which, in the
pictures of that period, fills the lawns with
delicate living creatures, and the hillsides with
pools of water, and the pools of water with
flowering reeds. But^thisyyas.not enough for
him ; he is a visionary painter, and in his vision-
ariness, he. resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried
companion of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo
even, do but transcribe, with more"~~or less
refining, the outward image ; theyarcL-dramatic,
not visionary painters ; they are almost impassive
spectators of the action before them, ^^ut the
genius of which Botticelli is the type usurp s the
data before it as the exponent of ideas, moods,
visions of its own ; in this interest it plays fast
and loose with those data, rejecting some and
S3
THE RENAISSANCE
isqlating . others, and always combining them
anew. To him, as to Dante, the scene, the
colour, the outwa,rd irnage,.,Qr. gesture,- comes
with all its incisive and importunate reality ;Jb,ut
a%akfiS.Jn_him, moreover, by some subtle law
of his own structure, a mood v^^hich_it.^5Kakes in
no one else, of which it is the double or repeti-
tion, and which it clothes, that all may share it,
with visiBlecifcumstahce.
Bu,t_..he is far enough from accepting the
conyentionaForthodoxy of Dante which, refer-
ring ail human action to the simple formula of
purgatory, heaven and hell, leav es an insjiluble
element jof prose in the depths of Dante's poetry.
One picture of his, with the portrait of the
donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit
or discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesi-
astical censure. This Matteo Palmieri, (two
dim figures move under that name in contem-
porary history,) was the reputed author of a
poemj still unedited. La Citta Divina, which
represented the human race as an incarnation
of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer,
were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies,
a fantasy of that earlier Alexandrian philosophy
about which the Florentine intellect in that
century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may
have been only one of those familiar composi-
tions in which religious reverie has recorded its
impressions of the yarious forms of beatified
existence — Glorias^ as they were called, like that
54
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
in which Giotto painted the portrait of Dante ;
but somehow it was suspected of embodying in
a picture the wayward dream of Palmieri, and
the chapel where it hung was closed. Artists so
entire as Botticelli are usually careless about
philosophical theories, even when the philo-
sopher is a Florentine of the fifteenth century,
and his work a poem in terza rima. But Botti-
celli, who wrote a commentary on Dante, and
became the disciple of Savonarola, may well have
let such theories come and go across him. True
or false, the story interprets much of the peculiar
sentiment witji which he infuses his profane and
sacreH persons, comely, and in a certain sense like
angels, but with a sense of displacement or loss
about them — ^the wistfulness of exiles, conscious
of a passion and energy greater than any known
issue" of them explains, which runs through all
his varied work with a sentiment- of ineffable
melancJioly.
So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike
of heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle
world in which men take no side, in great con-
flicts, and decide no great causes, and make great
refusals. He thus sets for himself the . limits
within which art, undisturbed by any moral
ambition, does its most sincere and sure:st work.
His interest is neither in the untempered good-
ness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil
of Orcagna's Inferno ; but with men and women,
in their mixed and uncertain condition, always
55
THE RENAISSANCE
attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a
character of loveliness and energy, but saddened
perpetually by the shadow upon them of the
great things from which they shrink. .„_His
morality is all sympathy ; and jt is., this
sympathy," conveying into., his work somewhat
more than is usual of the true, complexion
of humanity, which makes him, visionary as
he is, so forcible a realist.
It is this which gives to his Madonnas their
unique expression and charm. He has worked
out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definite
enough in his own mind, for he has painted it
over and over again, sometimes one might think
almost mechanically, as a pastime during that
dark period when his thoughts were so heavy
upon him. Hardly any collection of note is with-
out one of these circular pictures, into which the
attendant angels depress their heads so naively.
Perhaps you have sometimes wondered why
those peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed to
no acknowledged or obvious type of beauty,
attract you more and more, and often come back
to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins
of Fra Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrast-
ing them with those, you may have thought
that there was something in them mean or abject
even, for the abstract lines of the face have little
nobleness, and the colour is wan. For with
Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands
the " Desire of all nations," is one of those who
56
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
are neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies ;
and her choice is on her face. The white light
on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below,
as when snow lies upon the ground, and the
children look up with surprise at the strange
whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the
very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze
is always far from her, and who has already that
sweet look of devotion which men have never
been able altogether to love, and which still
makes the born saint an object almost of sus-
picion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed,
he guides her hand to transcribe in a book the
words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the
Magnificat^ and the Gaude Maria, and the young
angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from her
dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and to
support the book. But the pen almost drops
from her hand, and the high cold words have no
meaning for her, and her true children are those
others, among whom, in her rude home, the
intolerable honour came to her, with that look
of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which
you see in startled animals — gipsy children, such
as those who, in Apennine villages, still hold out
their long brown arms to beg of you, but on
Sundays become enfants du chceur, with their
thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white
linen on their sunburnt throats.
What is strangest is that he carries this
sentiment into classical subjects, its most complete
57
THE RENAISSANCE
expression being a picture in the TJffizii^ of Venus
rising from the sea, in which the grotesque
emblems of the middle age, and a landscape full
of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange
draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner
with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure
that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of
Ingres. At first,,, p.erhaps, you-a-F© -attracted only
by a quaintness of design, which seems . to recall
all at once whatever you have .read, of Florence
in the fifteenth ^century ; afterwards, you may
think that this quaintness must be incongruous
with the subject, and that the Ciolaur..is.cadaverous
or at least cold. Andjretj^ the more you come
to understand what imaginative colouring really
is, that all coloujL is no. mere . delightful-quality
ofnatural "things, but , a . . spicit, upon, them by
which they become,„ej:pressive to the -spirit, the
"Better you will like this peculiar quality of
colour ; and you will find that, quaint design of
Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek
temper than the works of the Greeks themselves
even of the finest period. Of the Greeks as they
really were, of their difference from ourselves, of
th& aspects of their outward,, life,.- we know far
more tliaiff Botticelli, _Qt his most learned con-
temporaries ; But for us long familiarity has
taken off the edge of the lesson, ind we arc
hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenic
spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's
you have a record of the first impression made
58
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
by it on minds turned back towards it, in almost
painful aspiration, from a world in which it had
been ignored so long ; and in the passion, the
energy, the industry of realisation, with which
Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact
measure of the legitimate influence over the
human mind of the imaginative system of which
this is perhaps the central myth. The light is in-
deed cold — mere sunless dawn ; hutalafefpainter
Would' have cloyed you with sunshine ; and you
can see the better for that quietness in the
morning air each long promontory, as it slopes
down to the water's edge. Men go forth to
their labours until the evening ; but she is
awake before them, and you might think that
the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the
whole long day of love yet to come. An
emblematical figure of the wind blows hard
across the grey water, moving forward the
dainty-lipped shell on which she sails, the sea
" showing his teeth," as it moves, in thin lines of
foam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling
roses, each severe in outline, plucked off short at
the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's
flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this
imagery to be altogether pleasurable ; and it was
partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable
from the art of that time, that subdued and
chilled it. But this predilection for niinpr tones
counts also ; an^ what is J^urTmrstaka^^^ the
sadness with which he has conceived the goddess
59
THE RENAISSANCE
of pleasure, as the deposkaj:^; pf_a,g.re^^^
over Itlie Kyes of jrncn.
I have said that the peculiar character of
Botticelli is the result of ~a blending lii^^ 'Kim of
a sympathy for hunianit£ in "151^^^ SPn-
dition, ii& attractiveness, its investiture at rarer
moments in a character oflpydines^ energy,
with his consciousness of. the shado^Juppn. it of
the.great.things. from which it shrinks, and, that
this conveys into his work somewhat .mo.re„than
painting usually attains of the true complexion
of humanity. He paints the story of tEe go Jdess
of^ pleasure in other episodes besides that of her
birth ifrom the sea, but neyer^ without-, some
shadow of death in the grey flesh .and^_wan
flowers. He paints Madonnas, but they shrink
from the pressure of the divine, child, and. plead
in unmistakable undertones for, a .warmer,. lower
humanity. The same figure — tradition connects
it with Simonetta, the Mistress of Giuliano de*
Medici — appears again as Judith, returning home
across the hill country, when the great deed is
over, and the moment of revulsion come, when
the olive branch in her hand is becoming a
burthen ; as Justice, sitting on a throne, but
with a fixed look of self-hatred which makes
the sword in her hand seem that of a suicide ;
and again as Veritas, in the allegorical picture of
Calumnia, where one may note in passing the
suggestiveness of an accident which identifies
the image of Truth with the person of Venus.
60
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
We might trace the same sentiment through his
engravings ; but his share in them is doubtful,
and the object of this brief study has been
attained, if I have defined aright the temper in
which he worked.
But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter
like Botticelli — a secondary painter, a proper
subject for general criticism ? There are a few
great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo,
whose work has become a force in general
culture, partly for this very reason that they
have absorbed into themselves all such workmen
as Sandro Botticelli ; and, over and above mere
technical or antiquarian criticism, general criti-
cism may be very well employed in that sort of
interpretation which adjusts the position of these
men to general culture, whereas smaller men can
be the proper subjects only of technical or anti-
quarian treatment. But, besides those great
men, there is a certain number of artists who
have a distinct faculty of their own by which
they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure
which we cannot get elsewhere ; and these too
have their place in general culture, and must
be interpreted to it by those who have felt
their charm strongly, and are often the object
of a special diligence and a consideration wholly
affectionate, just^ because there is not about them
the stress of a great "riairie and authority. Of
this select number Botticelli is one. He has the
freshness, the uncertain and diffident promise,
6i
THE RENAISSANCE
which belong to. the .earlier Renaissance, itself,
and make it perhaps the.., ni-OS.t .interesting- period
in the history of the mind. In studying his
work pni? begins to 'understand to how. great a
place in human culture the art of Italy had been
called.
1870.
62
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
The Italian ..sculptors of the earlier half of the
fifteenth, century are more than mere .forerunners
of the great masters of its close, and often reach,
perfection, within the narrow limits which they
chose to _i.mpose ..on. their work. Their sculpture
shares with the paintings of Botticelli and the
churches of Brunelleschi thaj profound _expr£ss-
iveness,. that intimate impress of an indwelling
soiil, which is the peculiar fascination of the art
of Italy in that century. Their works have
been much neglected, and often almost hidden
away amid the frippery of modern decoration,
and we come with some surprise on the places
where their fire still smoulders. One longs to
penetratd into the lives of the men who have
given expression to so much power and sweet-
ness. But it is part of the reserve, the austere
dignity and simplicity of their existence, that
their histories are for the most part lost, or told
but briefly. From their lives, as from their
work, all tumult of sound and colour has passed
away. Mino, the Raphael of sculpture, Maso
del Rodario, whose works add a further grace to
63
THE RENAISSANCE
the church of Como, Donatello even, — one asks
in vain for more than a shadowy outline of their
actual days.
Something more remains of Luca della
Robbia ; something more of a history, of out-
wardjcTiang^^ through
his work, I suppose nothing brings the real
afr of a Tuscan tpw^n so vividly to mind as those
pieces of pale blue and vvrhite earthenw^are, by
which he is best known, like fragments of the
milky sky itself, fallen into the cool streets, and
breaking into the darkened churches. And no
wojk is less imitable : like Tuscan wine, i^Jioses
its savour when moved from its birthplace, from
the crumbling walls where it was first placed.
Part of the charm of this work, its grace and
purity and finish of expression, is common to all
the Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century ;
for Luca was first of all a worker in marble,
and his works in terra cotta only transfer to a
different material the principles of his sculpture.
These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century
worked for the mqst^parxjn J_ow_j.e.lief, giving
even, to their monumental effigies something of
its depression of surface, getting into them by
this means a pathetic suggestion of the^ wasting
and etherealisation of death. They are haters. of
ail heaviness and emphasis, of strongly-opposed
light and shade, and seek their means of delinea-
tion among those last refinements of shadow,
which are almost invisible except in a strong
6a.
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
light, and which the finest pencil can hardly
follow. The whole essence of their work is
expressions the passing" of^ a smile over the face
of 'a "child, the ripple of the air on a still day
over the curtain of a window ajar.
What Js_the„pj:ecise... value, of this , system of
sculpture, this low relief? Luca della Robbia,
and the other sculptors of the school to which
he belongs, have before them the universal
problem of their art ; and thisjsystern of low
relief is the means by which they meet and
overcome the special limitation of sculpture.
That limitation results from the material and
other necessary conditions of all sculptured work,
and consists in the tendency of such work to
a hard realism, a one-sided presentment of mere
form, that solid material frame which only
motion can relieve, a thing of heavy shadows,
and an individuality of expression pushed to
caricature. Against this tendency to the hard
presentment of mere form trying vainly to com-
pete with the reality of nature itself, all noble
sculpture constantly struggles ; each great system
of sculpture resisting it in its own way/ etherealis-
ingi' spiritualising, relieving its stiffness, its heavi-
ness, and death. The use of colour in sculpture
is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by
borrowing from another art, what the nobler
sculpture effects by strictly appropriate means.
To get not colour, but the equivalent of^cglour ;
to secure the expression and the play of life ; to
THE RENAISSANCE
txpand the too firmly fixed individuality- of
pureTunrelieved, uncblourecl form : — this_is_the
problem which the three great styles in. sculpture
have solved in three different ways.
^//^f^««/^-;;^breadth,generalityjiiniv£rsa
— is the word chosen by Winckelmann, and after
him by Goethe and many German critics, to
express that law of the most excellent Greek
sculptors, of Pheidias arid his pupils" "which
prompted them constantly to seek the type ,in
the individual, to abstract and express only what
is structural and perriianent, to purge from the
individual all that belongs only to him, all the
accidents, the feelings and actions of the special
moment, all that (because in its own nature it
endures but for a moment) is apt to look like a
frozen thing if one arrests it.
In this way their works came to be like some
subtle extract or essence, or almost like ..pure
thoughts or ideas : and hence the breadth of
humanity in them, that detachment from the
conditions of a particular place or people, which
has carried their influence far beyond, the age
which produced them, and insured them uni-
versal acceptance.
That was the Greek way of relieving the
hardness and unspirituality of. pure form. But
it involved to a certain .degree . the sacrifice of
what we call expression ; and a system of abstrac-
tion which aimed always at the broad and
general type, at the purging away from the
66
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
individual of what belonged only to him, and of
the mere accidents of a particular time and place,
imposed upon the range of effects open to the
Greek sculptor limits somewhat narrowly defined.
When"~M icHelahg elo came, therefore, with a
genius spij-itualised by the reverie of the middle
age, penetrated by its spirit of inwardness and
introspection, living not a rnere outward life like
the Greek, but a life full of intimate experiences,
sorrows, consolations, a system which sacrificed
so much of what was inward and unseen could
not satisfy him. To him, lover and student of
Greek sculpture as he was, work which did not
brihg what was inward to the surface, which was
not concerned with individual expression, with
individual character and feeling, the special
history of the special soul, was not worth doing
at all.
And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar
to himself, which often is, and always seems,
the effect of accident, hc; secured for his work
individuality and intensity of expression, while he
avoided a too heavy realism, that tendency to
harden into caricature which the representation
of feeling in sculpture is apt to display. What
time and accident, its centuries of darkness under
the furrows of the "little Melian farm," have
done with singular felicity of touch for the
Venus of Melos, fraying its surface and softening
its lines, so that some spirit in the thing seems
always on the point of breaking out, as though
6j
THE RENAISSANCE
in it classical sculpture had advanced already one
step into the mystical Christian age, its expression
being in the whole range of ancient work most
like that of Michelangelo's own : — this effect
Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly_j.ll his
sculpture in a puzzling sort 'of" rricompleteness,
which suggests rather than. realises actual form.
Something of the wasting of that snow-ihiage
which he moulded at the command of Piero de'
Medici, when the snow lay one night in the
court of the Pitti palace, almost always lurks
about it, as if he had determined to make the
quality of a task, exacted from him half in
derision, the pride of all his work. Many have
wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting,
however^ that Michelangelo hirnself loved _and
was loath to change it, and feeling at the same
time that they too would lose something if._the
halfrrealised form ever quite emerged from the
stone, so rough-hewn here, so delicately finished
there ; and they have wished to fathom the
charm of this incompleteness. Well ! that
incompleteness is Michelangelo's equivalent for
colour in sculpture ; it is his ^yay of etherealising
pure form, of relieving its stiff . realism, and
communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect
lof life. It was a characteristic too which fell in
with his peculiar temper and mode of living, his
disappointments and hesitations. And it was in
reality perfect finish. In this way he. combines
the utmost amount of passion and intensity with
68
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
the sense of a yielding and flexible life rhe^ gets
not vitality merely, but a wonderful forcb of
expression.
Midway between these two systems — the
system of the Greek sculptors and the system of
Michelangelo — comes the system of Luca della
Robbia and the other Tuscan sculptors of the
fifteehtE century, partaking both of the Allgemein-
hett of the Greeks, their way of extracting certain
select elerhehts only of pure form and sacrific-
ing all the rest, and the studied incompleteness
of Michelangelo, relieving that sense of in-
tensity, passion, energy, which might other-
wise have stiffened into caricature. JLike
Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their works
with intense and individualised expression. Their'
noblest works are the careful sepulchral portraits
of particular persons — the monument of Conte
Ugo in the Badia of Florence, of the youthful
Medea CoUeoni, with the wonderful, long throat,
in the chapel on the cool north side of the
Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo —
monuments such as abound in the churches of
Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of
a subdued Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace
and refinement. And these elements of_ tran-
quillity, of repose, they unite to an intense and
individual expression by a system of convention-
alism as skilful and subtle as that of the Greeks,
repressing a,ll such curves as indicate solid form,
and throwing the whole -into low relief.
THE RENAISSANCE
The life of Luca, a life of labour and frugality,
with no adventure and no excitement except what
belongs to the trial of new artistic processes, the
struggle with ne^w ardstic difficulties, t he solu-
tion of_ purely ardstic problems , fills the fi rst
seventy years of the fifteenth century. After
producing rnariy worlcs in marble for the Duomo
and the Campanile of Florence, which place him
among the foremost masters of the sculpture of
his age, he became desirous to realise th5.„spirit
and manner of that sculpture,, in a humbler
material, to unite its science,, its . exquisite and
expressive system of low relief,, to, the homely art
of pottery, to introduce those high qualities into
common things, to adorn and cultivate dailyjiouse-
hold life. In this he is profoundly characteristic
pf the Florence of that century, of that in it which
lay below its superficial vanity and caprice, a
certain, old -world modesty, and^eriousness' and
simplicity. People had not yet begun to think
that what was good art for chuf cKes~was not
so good, or less fitted, for their" own , houses.
Luca's new work was in plain white earthen-
ware at first, a mere rough irnTtation of the
costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in
a few hours. But on this humble^^jjath he
found his way to a fresh success, to another
artistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery,
with its strange,, bright colours — colours of art,
colours not to be attained in the natural stone
— mingled with the tradition of the old Roman
70
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
pottery of the neighbourhood. The little red,
coraHike jars of Arezzb, dug up in that district
from time to time, are much prized. These
colours haunted Luca's fancy. "He still con-
tinued seeking sometHing more," his biographer
says of him ; " and instead of making his figures
of baked earth . simply white, Ihc' added the
further invention of giving them colour, to the
astonishment and delight of all who beheld
them " — Cosa singolare, e multo utile per la state !
— a curious thing, and very useful for summer-
time, full of coolness and repose for hand and
eye. Luca loved the forms of various fruits, and
wrought them into all sorts of marvellous frames
and garlands, giving;^ them jhei
only subdned a littje,.ja.-little-paler-than nature.
I said that the art of Luca della Robbia
possessed^ in an unusual measure that special
characteristic which belongs to all- the work-
men of his school, a characteristic which, even
in the absence of much positive information about
their actual history, seems to bring those work-
men themselves very near to us. They^bearjhe
impress of a personal quality, a profund.exjp,r.essive-
ness, what the FTsnch^czll- mtimite, by which is
meant some subtler sense of originality — the
seal on a man's work of what is most inward
and peculiar in his moods, and manner of
apprehension : it isu whaL^jw e call -expre ssion,
carried to its highest, intensity „..o£ — degree^
That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still
71
THE RENAISSANCE
in art, rarest of all in the abstract art of
sculpture ; yet essentially, perhaps, it is the
quality which alone makes work in the ipia-
ginative order really worth having at all. It is
because the works of the artists of the fifteenth
century possess this quality in an unmistakable
way that one is anxious to know all that can be
known about them and explain ^ to one's self the
secret of their charm.
1872.
fa
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken
as if the only characteristic of his genius were a
wonderful strength, verging, as in the things of
the imagination great strength always does, on
what is singular or strange. (|A certain strange--
ness, something of the blossoming of the aloe,
is indeed an element in all true works of art :
that they shall excite or surprise us is indispen-
sable, j) But that they shall give pleasure and exert
a charm over us is indispensable too ; and this
strangeness must be sweet also — a lovely strange-
ness. And to the true admirers of Michelangelo
this is the true type of the Michelangelesque —
sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise,
an energy of conception which seems at every
moment about to break through "all the con-
ditions of comely form, recovering, touch by
touch, a loveliness found usually only in the
simplest natural things — exforti dulcedo.
In this way he sums up for them the whole
character of medieval art itself in that which
distinguishes it most clearly from classical work,
the presence of a convulsive energy in it, be-
73
THE RENAISSANCE
coming in lower hands merely monstrous oi
forbidding, and felt, even in its most graceful
products, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque.
Yet those who feel this grace or sweetness in
Michelangelo might at the "first "moment be
puzzled if they were asked wherein precisely
such quality resided. Men of inventive tempera-
ment — Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as
in Michelangelo, people have for the most part
been attracted or repelled by the strength, while
few hajce-Jinderstood his sweetness — have some-
timeskcelieved) conceptions of merely nioral or
spiritual greatness, but with little aesthetic
charm of their own, by lovely accidents or
accessories, like the butterfly which alights on
the blood-stained barricade in Les Miserables^
or those sea-birds for whom the monstrous
Gilliatt comes to be as some wild natural
thing, so that they are no longer afraid of
him, in Les Travailleurs de la Met. But the
austere _genius of Michelangelo will not depend
for its sweetness on any m ere accesso ries like
these. The w orld of natural t hingg__ has almo st
"o_ gxistence~tor hirr i ; "When one speaks of
him," says Grimm, " woods, clouds, seas, and
mountains disappear, and only what is formed
by the spirit of man remains behind" ; and he
quotes a few slight words from a letter of his
to Vasari as the single expression in all he has
left of a feeling for nature. He has traced no
flowers, like those with which Leonardo stars
74
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
over his gloomiest rocks ; nothing like the fret-
work of wings and flames in which Blake frames
his most startling conceptions. No forest-scenery
like Titian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank
ranges of rock, and dim vegetable forms as blank
as they, asJELa^j world before the creation of the
first fiv ejays.
OTThe whole story of the creation he has
painted only the creation of the first man and
woman, and, for him at least, feebly, the creation
of light. It belongs to tlie ,q|iality^_ofhis^enius
thfusja..£filieernitself^^
inakiQg_of_iBLag. For him it is not, as in the
s tory itself, the last and crowning act o f a series
of_develop_mfiiits,— but - the fi rst and, unique act,
the creation_jB£„lifcjtselfj[n_it s supreme form ,
off-hand and hnmcdiately, in the~cqld and lifeless
stoned With him the beginning of life has all
dfeicharacteristics of resurrection ; it is like the
recovery of suspended health^r animation, with
its gratitude, its effusion, and eloquence. Fair
as the young men of the Elgin marbles, the
Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a
total abs ence of that balance and completen ess
which express so well the sentiment of a self-
contained, independent life. In_ that languid
figure there is something rude and satyr -lik e,
scSHethliiglLEiirTo''tHenniig^^ on wHTch
it lies. His whole form is gathered into an
e3cpression2of_mere_ex^ ;
henas hardly strengthenough to lift his finger
75
THE RENAISSANCE
to touch the finger of the creator ; yet a touch
-ef the finger-tips will suffice.
rhis_creation of Jife— life coming always as
relief or recovery, and always in strong contrast
/with the. roughrhewn mass in which 1^ is kindled
-is in various ways the motive of all his work,
whether" TEs~ immediate subject be Pagan or
Christian, legend or allegory ; and this, although
at least one-half of his work was designed for the
adornment of tombs — the tomb of Julius, the
tombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment but
the Resurrection is the real subject of his last
work in the Sistine Chapel ; and his favouriite
Pagan subject is the legend of Leda, the delight
of the world breaking from the egg of a bird.
As I have already pointed out, he secures that
ideality of expression which in Greek sculpture
depends on a delicate system of abstraction, and
in early Italian sculpture on lowness of relief,
by an incompleteness, which is surely not always
undesigned, and which, as I think, no one regrets,
and trustSuJ n the spec tator to complet e the ha lf-
emerge-nt-fe-r-m. An3~ariHr'pefsonsTiave some-
thing of the unwrought stone about them, so,
as if to realise the expression by which the old
Florentine records describe a sculptor — master
of live stone — with him the very rocks seem to
havejif?. They have but to cast away the dust
and(scurf) that they may rise and stand on their
feet. He loved the very quarries of Carrara,
those strange grey peaks which even at mid-day
76
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
convey into any scene from which they are
visible something of the solemnity and stillness
of evening, sometimes wandering among them
month after month, till at last their pale ashen
colours seem to have passed into his painting ;
and on the crown of the head of the David there
still remains a morsel of uncut stone, as if by one
touch to maintain its connexion with the place
from which it was hewn.
And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life
that the secret of that sweetness of his is to be
found. He gives us indeed no Ipyely natural
objects like Leonardo or Titian, but only the
coldest, most elementary shadowing of rock or
tree ; no lovely draperies and comely gestures of
life, but onl y the austere truths of human natur e ;
" simple persgns "-=r:as he~replied iiniIi~rough
way to the Q querul ou|> criticism of Julius the
Second, that there was no gold on the figures of
the Sistine Chapel — " simple persons, who wore
no gold on their garments " ; but he penetrates
us with a feeling of that power which we
associate with all the warmth and fulness of the
world, the sense of which brings into one's
thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers and insects.
The brooding spirit of life itself i s there ; and
the summer niay_burst out in a moment. ~^~
^T^re~was born in an interval"of~a rapid mid-
night journey in March, at a place in the neigh-
bourhood of Arezzo, the thin, clear air of which
was then thought to be favourable to the
77
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birth of children of great parts. He came of a
race of grave and dignified men, who, claiming
kinship with the family of Canossa, and some
colour of imperial blood in their veins, had,
generation after generation, received honourable
employment under the government of Florence.
His mother, a girl of nineteen years, put him
out to nurse at a country house among the hills
of Settignano, where every other inhabitant is a
worker in the marble quarries, and the child
early became familiar with that strange first
stage in the sculptor's art. To this succeeded
the influence of the sweetest and most placid
master Florence had yet seen, Domenico Ghir-
landajo. At fifteen he was at work among the
curiosities of the garden of the Medici, copying
and restoring antiques, winning the condescend-
ing notice of the great Lorenzo. He knew too
how to excite strong hatreds ; and it was at this
time that in • a quarrel with a fellow-student he
received a blow on the face which deprived him
for ever of the comeliness of outward form.
It was through an accident that he came to
study those works of the early Italian sculptors
which suggested much of his own grandest work,
and impressed it with so deep a sweetness. He
believed in dreams and omens. One of his friends
dreamed twice that' Lorenzo, then lately dead,
appeared to him in grey and dusty apparel. To
Michelangelo this dream seemed to portend the
troubles which afterwards really came, and with
78
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
the suddenness which was characteristic of all
his movements, he left Florence. Having
♦i^casion to pass through Bologna, he neglected
to procure the little seal of red wax which the
stranger entering Bologna must carry on the
thumb of his right hanH. He had no money
to pay the fine, and would have been thrown
into prison had not one of the magistrates inter-
posed. He remained in this man's house a
whole year, rewarding his hospitality by readings
from the Italian poets whom he loved. Bologna,
with its endless colonnades and fantastic leaning
towers, can never have been one of the lovelier
cities of Italy. But about the portals of its vast
unfinished churches and its dark shrines, half
hidden by votive flowers and candles, lie some of
the sweetest works of the early Tuscan sculptors,
Giovanni da Pisa and Jacopo della Quercia, things
as (winsom^ as flowers ; and the year which
Michelangelo spent in copying these works was
not a lost year. It was now, on returning to
Florence, that he put forth that unique present-
ment of Bacchus, which expresses, not the mirth-
fulness of the'godT of wine, but his. slee py serjou s-
ness, jiis_enthujias m, his cap acuy~^r_^oTound
dreainingt No one ever expressed more _truly
ihaa^MkhiekngHb^^^
faces cha|g;:e4„ with .dreams. A vast fragment of
rnarblehad long lain below the Loggia of Orcagna,
and many a sculptor had had his thoughts of a
design which should just fill this famous block of
79
THE RENAISSANCE
stone, cutting the diamond, as it were, without
loss. Under Michelangelo's hand it became the
David which stood till lately on the steps of the
Palazzo Vecchioy when it was replaced below the
Loggia. Michelangelo was now thirty years old,
and his reputation was established. Three great
works fill the remainder of his life — three works
often interrupted, carried on through a thousand
hesitations, a thousand disappointments, quarrels
with his patrons, quarrels with his family, quarrels
perhaps most of all with himself — the,„,-Sistine
Chapelj^Jiic-Mausoleum of Julius the Second,
and thdvSacrist^ of San Lorenzo.
In the stpryipf Michelangelo's life the strength,
often turning to bitterness, is not far , to seek. A
discordant note sounds through out it w hiclLalmost
spoils the^jnusic. He "treats the Pope as the
King ofT ranee himself would not dare to treat
him " : he goes along the streets of Rome " like
an executioner," Raphael says of him. Once he
seems to have shut himself up with the intention
of starving himself to death. As we come, in
reading his life, on its harsh, untempered incidents,
the thought again and again arises that he is one
of those who ^incui) the judgment of Dante, as
having "vyilfuU y lived in_^sa dness /' Even his
tenderness and pity are (embittered ^ by their
strength. What passionate weeping in that
mysterious figure which, in the Creation of Adam^
crouches below the image of the Almighty, as
he comes with the forms of things to be, woman
80
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
and her progeny, in the fold of his garment !
What a sense of wrong in those two captive
youths, who feel the chains like scalding water
on their proud and delicate flesh I The idealist
who became a reformer with Savonarola, and a
republican superintending the fortification of
Florence — the nest where he was born, il nido
ove naqqu'tOy as he calls it once, in a sudden throb
of afFection^-::rilL-its_Jsit.,struggle for liberty, yet
believed- always that he had imperial blood in
his ..veins and was of the kindred of the great
Matilda, had within thie depths of his nature
sorneje^ref^spiffig of mdigna^^^^ or sQrrp:w. We
know little of his youth, but all tends to make
one believe in the vehemence of its passions.
Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets there
is latenFa ' ^et\> deligh^ in carnal form and colour.
There~lLhd sfilT more in the r^adrigal^^i^'oiten
falls into^the language of less tranquil affections ;
while some of them have tliejGQlflaiiLo£-f«nitence,
as from a wanderer returning home. He who
spoke so decisively of the supremacy in the
imaginative world of the unverle'd human fdfhi
had not been always, we may think, a mere
Platonic lover. Vague and wayward his_JnKes
may have been ; but they partook of the strength
of his nature, and sometimes, it may be, would
by no means bec,Qmg.jnusic, so that the comely
order of fils^^days was quite put out : par che
amaro ogni mio dolce io senta.
But his genius is in harmony with itself ; and
G 8i
THE RENAISSANCE
just as in the products of his att .we find resources
of sweetness within their exceeding strength, so
in his own sitory also, bitter as the ordinary sense
of it may be, there are select pages shut in among
the rest — pages one might easily turn over too
lightly, but which yet sweeten the whole yolume.
The interest of Michelangelo's poems is that
they niake us spectators of this struggle ; the
struggle of a strong nature to adorn and attune
itself; the struggle of a desolating passion, which
yearns to be resigned and sweet and pensive, as
Dante's was. It is a consequence of the occasional
and informal character of his poetry, that it„.brings
us hearer to himself, his own mind and temper,
than any work done only to support a literary
reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us
little that is worth knowing about him — a few
poor quarrels about money and commissions.
But it is quite otherwise with these songs and
■sonnets, written down at odd moments, some-
times on the margins of his sketches, themselves
often unfinished sketches, arresting some (^lentT
feeling or unpremeditated idea as it passed. And
it happens that a true study of these has become
within the last few years for the first time possible.
A few of the sonnets circulated widely in manu-
script, and became almost within Michelangelo's
own lifetime a subject of academical discourses.
But they were first collected in a volume in 1623
by the great-nephew of Michelangelo, Michel-
angelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted
82
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
much, re-wrote the sonnets in part, and some-
times compressed two or more compositions into
one, always losing something of the force and
incisiveness of the original. So the book remained,
neglected even by Italians themselves in the last
century, through the influence of that French
taste which despised all compositions of the
kind, as it despised and neglected Dante. " His
reputation will ever be on the increase, because
he is so little read," says Voltaire of Dante. —
But in 1858 the last of the Buonarroti bequeathed
to the municipality of Florence the curiosities of
his family. Among them was a precious volume
containing the autograph of the sonnets. A
lear-n^djtalian, Signor Cesare Guasti, undertook
tOMjollate this autograph with other manuscripts
at the Vatican and elsewhere, and in 1863 pub-
lished a true version of Michelangelo's poems,
with dissertations and a paraphrase.-^
People have often spoken of these poems as if
they were a mere cry of distress, a lover's com-
plaint over the obduracy of Vittoria Colonna. But
those who speak thus forget that though it is quite
possible that Michelangelo had seen Vittoria, that
somewhat shadowy figure, as early as 1537, yet
their closer intimacy did not begin till about the
year 1 542, when Michelangelo was nearly seventy
years old. Vittoria herself, an ardent neo-catholic,
vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news
^ The sonnets have been translated into English, with much
«|cill and poetic taste, by Mr. J. A. Symonds.
83
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had reached her, seventeen years before, that her
husband, the youthful and princely Marquess of
Pescara, lay dead of the wounds he had received in
the battle of Pavia, was then no longer an object
of great passion. In a dialogue written by the
painter, Francesco d' Ollanda, we catch a glimpse
of them together in an empty church at Rome,
one Sunday afternoon, dicussing indeed the
characteristics of various schools of art, but still
more the writings of Saint Paul, already follow-
ing the ways and tasting the sunless pleasures of
weary people, whose care for external things is
slackening. In a letter still extant he regrets
that when he visited her after death he had
kissed her hands only. He made, or set to work
to make, a crucifix for her use, and two drawings,
perhaps in preparation for it, are now in Oxford.
From allusions in the sonnets, we may divine
that when they first approached each other he
had debated much with himself whether this
last passion would be the most unsoftening, the
most desolating of all — un dolce amaro, un si e no
mi muovi. Is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino
stato (of Plato's ante-natal state) // raggio ardente ?
The older, conventional criticism, dealing with
the text of 1623, had lightly assumed that all or
nearly all the sonnets were actually addressed to
Vittoria herself; but Signor Guasti finds only
four, or at most five, which can be so attributed
on genuine authority. Still, there are reasons
which make him assign the majority of them to
84
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
the period between 1 542 and 1 547, and we may
regard the volume as a record of this resting-place
in Michelangelo's story. We know how Goethe
escaped from the stress of sentiments too strong
for him by making a book about them ; and
for Michelangelo, to write down his passionate
thoughts at all, to express them in a sonnet, was
already in some measure to command, and have
his way with them —
La vita del mia amor non e il cor mio,
Ch' amor^ di quel cW to t' amo, e senza core.
It was just because Vittoria raised no great
passion that the space in his life where she reigns
has such peculiar suavity ; and the spirit of the
sonnets is lost if we once take them out of that
dreamy atmosphere in which men have things
as they will, because the hold of all outward
things upon them is faint and uncertain. Their
prevailing tone is a calm and meditative sweetness.
The cry of distress is indeed there, but as a mere
residue, a trace of bracing gh^ybeate) salt, just
discernible in the song which rises like a clear,
sweet spring from a charmed space in his life.
This charmed and temperate space in Michel-
angelo's life, without which its excessive strength
would have been so imperfect, which saves him
from the judgment of Dante on those who " wil-
fully lived in sadness," is then a well-defined
period there, reaching from the year 1542 to
the year 1 547, the year of Vittoria's death. In
85
THE RENAISSANCE
it the lifelong effort to tranquillise his vehement
emotions by withdrawing them into the region
of ideal sentiment, becomes successful ; and the
significance of Vittoria is, that she realises for
him a type of affection which even in disappoint-
ment may charm and sweeten his spirit.
In this effort to tranquillise and sweeten life
by idealising its vehement sentiments, there were
two great traditional types, either of which an
Italian of the sixteenth century might have
followed. There was Dante, whose little book
of the Fita Nuova had early become a pattern of
imaginative love, maintained somewhat feebly by
the later followers of Petrarch ; and, since Plato
had become something more than a name in
Italy by the publication of the Latin translation
of his works by Marsilio Ficino, there was the
Platonic tradition also. Dante's belief in the
resurrection of the body, through which, even
in heaven, Beatrice loses for him no tinge of
flesh-colour, or fold of raiment even ; and the
Platonic dream of the passage of the soul through
one form of life after another, with its passionate
haste to escape from the burden of bodily form
altogether ; are, for all effects of art or poetry,
principles diametrically opposite. Now it is the
Platonic tradition rather than Dante's that has
moulded Michelangelo's verse. In many ways
no sentiment could have been less like Dante's
love for Beatrice than Michelangelo's for Vittoria
Colonna. Dante's comes in early youth : Beatrice
86
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
is a child, with the wistful, ambiguous vision of a
child, with a character still unaccentuated by the
influence of outward circumstances, almost ex-
pressionless. Vittoria, on the other hand, is a
woman already weary, in advanced age, of grave
intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece of
figured work, inlaid with lovely incidents. In
Michelangelo's poems, frost and fire are almost
the only images — the refining fire of the gold-
smith ; once or twice the phoenix ; ice melting at
the fire ; fire struck from the rock which it after-
wards consumes. Except one doubtful allusion to
a journey, there are almost no incidents. But
there is much of the bright, sharp, unerring skill,
with which in boyhood he gave the look of age
to the head of a faun by chipping a tooth from its
jaw with a single stroke of the hammer. For
Dante, the amiable and devout materialism of the
middle age sanctifies all that is presented by hand
and eye ; while Michelange lo is always pressing
forward frorrTthe^utward Beauty — tT'EeT'S^TJuor
cJi£~aglt^ccIif~pface, ~to~_appge£end tli e_ unse en
beauty ; trascenda nella forma universale — that
abstract form of beauty, about which the
Platonists reason. And this gives the impres-
sion in him of something flitting and unfixed, of
the houseless and complaining spirit, almost
clairvoyant through the frail and yielding flesh.
He accounts for love at first sight by a previous
state of existence — la dove io f amai prima.
And yet there are many points in which he
87
THE RENAISSANCE
is really like Dante, and comes very near to the
original image, beyond those later and feebler
followers in the wake of Petrarch. He learns
from Dant^^-rath^ than from Plato, that for
lovers, thd^surfeitihgjpf desire — ove gran de sir gran
copia affrenuy is a state less happy than poverty
with abundance of hope — una miseria di speranza
plena. He recalls him in the repetition of .the
words gentile and cortesia, in the personification of
Amor^ in the tendency to dwell rninutely.oji the
physical effects of the presence of a beloved object
on the pulses and the heart. Above all, he
resembles Dante in the warmth and intensity of
his political utterances, for the lady of one of his
noblest sonnets was from the first understood to
be the city of Florence ; and he avers that all
must be asleep in heaven, if she, who was created
" of angelic form," for a thousand lovers, is appro-
priated by one alone, some Piero, or Alessandro
de' Medici. Once and again he introduces Love
and Death, who dispute concerning him. For,
like Dante and all the nobler souls of Italy, he
is much occupied with thoughts of the grave,
and his true _mistress js_death. — death at first as
the worst of all sorrows and disgraces, with a
clod of the field for its brain ; afterwards, death
in its high distinction, its detachment from
vulgar needs, the angry stains of life and action
escaping fast.
Some of those whom the gods love die young.
This man, because the gods loved him, lingered
88
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
on to be of immense, patriarchal age, till the
sweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him
was found at last. Out of the strong came
forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo. The world had
changed around him. The "new Catholicism"
had taken the place of the Renaissance. The
spirit of the Roman Church had changed : in the
vast world's cathedral which his skill had helped
to raise for it, it looked stronger than ever. Some
of the first members of the Oratory were among
his intimate associates. They were of a spirit
as unlike as possible from that of Lorenzo, or
Savonarola even. The opposition of the Refor-
mation to art has been often enlarged upon ; far
greater was that of the Catholic revival. But
in thus fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy, the
Roman Church had passed beyond him, and
he was a stranger to it. In earlier days, when
its beliefs had been in a fluid . s tate, he too
might have been drawn into the controversy.
He might have been for spiritualising the papal
sovereignty, like Savonarola ; or for adjusting
the dreams of Plato and Homer with the words
of Christ, like Pico of Mirandola. But things
had moved onward , and such adjustments were
no longer possible. fTFoj. .hin^&elJL he had^long
since f allen back on t hat divine ij ealj_wjaich
a bove the wear and tear of creeds ha s been forrn-
ing_jtself for ages as the posse ssion qf _aflbler
souls. And nowTie~began~To"leer the sooth ing
influence which since that timg ^ the Rom an
89
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Ch urch ,h| |_o ften exerted oyer spiriLs„_tQO. i.nde-
pendent to _be~lH'luBf^ct^37H~"BroughT:3ri
tlTentiHgH5ourKooa~5f"itT action ; "consoted^nd
tranquittiseaTas a tTavelieTmight be, resting for
one evening in a strange city, by its stately
aspect and the sentiment of its many fortunes,
just because with those fortunes he has nothing
to do. So he lingers on ; a revenant, as th6~~
French say, a ghost out of another age, in a
world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities
very closely ; dreaming, in a worn-out society,
theatrical in its life, theatrical in its art, theatrical
even in its devotion, on the morning of the world's
history, on the primitive form of man, on the
images under which that primitive world had^
conceived of spiritual forces.
I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo
as thus lingering beyond his tirne in a world not
his own, because, if one is to distinguish the
peculiar savour of his work, he must _be ap-
proached, not through his followers, but through
his predecessors ; not through the marbles of
Saint Peter'sy but through the work of the
sculptors of the fifteenth century over the tombs
and altars of Tuscany. He is the last of the
Florentines, of those on whom the peculiar
sentiment of the Florence of Dante and Giotto
descended : he is the consummate representative
of the form that sentiment took in the fifteenth
century with men like Luca Signorelli and Mino
00
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
da Fiesole. Up to him the tradition of senti-
ment is unbroken, the progress towards surer
and more mature methods of expressing that
sentiment continuous. But his professed disciples
did not share this temper ; they are in love with
his strength only, and seem not to feiel his grave
and temperate sweetness. - Theatricality is their
chief characteristic ; and that is a quality as little
attributable to Michelangelo as to Mino or Luca
Signorelli. With him, as with them, all is
serious, passionate, impulsive.
This discipleship of Michelangelo, this de-
pendence, of his on the tradition of the Florentine
schools^ is nowhere seen more clearly than in his
treatment of the Creation. The Creation of Man
had haunted the mind ., of the middle .ag^C- like a
dream ; and weaving it into a hundred carved
ornaments of capital or doorway, the Italian
sculptors had early impressed upon it that preg-
nancy of expression which seems to give it many
veiled meanings. As with other artistic con-
ceptions of the middle age, its treatment became
alniost conventional, handed on from artist to
artist, with slight changes, till it came to have
almost an independent and abstract existence of its
own. it was characteristic of the rhedieval mind
thus to give an independent traditional existence
to a special pictorial conception, or to a legend,
like that of Tristram or Tannhduser., or even to
the very thoughts and substance of a book, like
the Imitation^ so that.no single workman could
91
THE RENAISSANCE
claim it as his own, and the book, the image, the
legend, had itself'a legend," and its fortunes, and
a personal history; and it is a sign .o£_thc
medievalism of Michelangelo, that he thus re-
ceives -firpm tradition his central conception, and
does but a;dd- the last touches^ in transferring it
to the frescoes of the Sistinc Chapel.
But there was another tradhion of those earlier,
more serious Florentines, of which Michelangelo
is the inheritor, to which he gives the final
expression, and which centres in the sacristy of
San Lorenzo, as the tradition of the Creation
centres in the Sistine Chapel. It has been said
that all the great Florentines, were preoccupied
witb,,death. Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe 1 — is the
burden of their thoughts, from Dante to Savona-
rola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio
gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them
in the mouths of a party of people who had taken
refuge in a country-house from the danger of
death by plague. It was to this inherited senti-
ment, this practical decision that to be pre-
occupied with the thought of death was in itself
dignifying, and a note of high quality, that the
seriousness of the great Florentines of the fifteenth
century was partly due ; and it was reinforced in
them by the actual sorrows of their times. How
often, and in what various ways, had they seen
life stricken down, in their streets and houses
La bella Simonetta dies in early youth, and is
borne to the grave with uncovered face. The
92
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
young Cardinal Jacopo di Portogallo dies on a
visit to Florence — insignis forma fui et mirabili
modestia — his epitaph dares to say. Antonio
Rossellino carves his tomb in the church of San
Miniato, with care for the shapely hands and
feet, ani^acred attire ; Luca della Robbia puts
his ^i^esh works there ; and the tomb of
the youthful and princely prelate became the
strangest and most beautiful thing in that strange
and beautiful place. After the execution of the
Pazzi conspirators, Botticelli is employed to paint
their portraits. This preoccupation with serious
thoughts and sad images might easily have
resulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy
villages of the Rhine, or in the overcrowded
parts of medieval' Paris, as it still does in many
a village of the Alps, in something merely
morbid or grotesque, in the Danse Macabre of
many French and German painters, or the grim
inventions of Diirer. From such a result the
Florentine masters of the fifteenth century were
saved by the nobility of their Italian culture,
and still more by their tender pity for the thing
itself. They must often have leaned over the
lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and
smoothed out. After death, it is said, the traces
of slighter and more superficial dispositions dis-
appear ; the lines become rhore "simple and
dignified ; only the abstract lines remain, in a
great indifference. They came thus to see.death
in fts distinction. Then following it perhaps one
93
THE RENAISSANCE
stage further, dwelling for a moment on the
point where all this transitory dignity must
break up, and discerning with no clearness a
new body, they paused just in time, and abstained,
with a sentiment of profound pity.
Of all this sentiment Michelangelo is the
achievement ; jmd^ Jirst of all, of pity. Piet^y
pity, the pity of theVirgiA.. Mother over the
dead body of Christ, expanded into the pity__of
all mothers over all dead sons, the entombment,
with its cfud2*Ii^d stones " : — this is the subject
of his ^redilectionlx He has left it in many
forms, sketches, half- finished designs, finished
and unfinished groups of sculpture ; but always
as ahopelesSjj;ayless, almost h eathen sorrow— no
divlnesorTow7burine re"^ity~a^ stifi'
lirnbs an^'xolourless_lips. There is a~~3ra wing
oFTiis at X)xforf, in which the dead body has
sunk to the earth between the mother's feet,
with the arms extended over her knees. The
tombs in the sacristy of San Z'Orenzo are
memorials, not of any of the nobler and^ greater
Medici, but of Giuliano, and Lorenzo the
younger, noticeable chiefly for their somewhat
early death. It is merg,, human nature therefore
which has prompted the sentiment here. The
titles assigned traditionally to the four sjpibolical
figures. Night and Day, The Twilight\vaA The
Dawn, are far too definite for them ; fop-these
figuT5§j2siiMLXQ]Ji.ch. neater_tnJiiejcQindMid;jpijit
of th.eir,author, and are ^jnore-j direct expres sion
94
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
of his thoughts, than any merely syjnbolical con-
c^£tionsjcouW~pu5SlWjfha^^
centrate~~an3~~5Xpress^ less by way of definite
conceptions than by the touches, the promptings
of a piece of music, all those vague fancies,
misgivings, presentiments, which shift and mix
and are defined and fade again, whenever the
thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity
on the conditions and surroundings of the dis-
embodied spirit. I suppose no one would come
to the sacristy of San Lorenzo for consolation ;
for seriousness, for solemnity, for dignity of im-
pression, pei-haps, but not for cbrisolation. It is a
place neitlier^of consoling nor of terrible thoughts,
but of vague and wistful.. speculation. ,Here,
again, Michelangelg is the disciple not so much
of Dante as of the Platonists. Dante's belief in
immortality is formal, precise and firm, almost
as much so as that of a child, who thinks the
dead will hear if you cry loud enough. But in
Michelangelo you have maturity, the mind of
the grown man, dealing cautiously and, dispassion-
ately with serious things ; and what hope he has
is based on the consciousness of ignorance — ignor-
ance of man, ignorance of the nature of the
mind, its origin and capacities. Michelangelo
is so ignorant of the spiritual world, of the new
body and its laws, that he does not surely know
whether the coaa^crated Host may not be the
body of Christ. I And of all that range of senti- j
ment he is the ^pSet, a poet still alive, and in '
95
THE RENAISSANCE
possession of our inmost thoughts — dumb inquiry
over the relapse after death into the formlessness
which preceded life, the change, thc_reYslt from
that change, then the correcting, h^lowing* ^°^~
soling rush o f^pitv ; at kst, far off, thin and
vague, yet not more vagueman^tno most definite
thoughts men have had through three centuries
on a matter that has been so near their hearts,
the new body — a passing light, a mere intangible,
external effect, over those too rigid, or too
formless faces ; a dream that lingers a moment,
retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, help-
less ; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory,
faint power of touch ; a breath, a flame in the
doorway, a feather in the wind.
The qualities of the great masters in art or
literature, the combination of those qualities, the
laws by which they moderate, support, relieve
each other, are not peculiar to them ; but most
often typical standards, or revealing instances of
the laws by which certain aesthetic effects are
produced. The old masters indeed are simpler ;
their characteristics are written larger, and are
easier to read, than the analogues of them in all
the mixed, confused prod uctions of _the_jiiQdern
mind. Butwhen once we have succeeded in de-
fining for ourselves those characteristics, and the
law of their combination, we have .acquired a
standard or measurc^which helps us to put in its
right place many V^yagrant/ genius, many an un-
classified talent, many precious though imperfect
96
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
products of art. It is so with the components
of the true character of Michelangelo. ^JThat
strang-e_4atgj:fiis£n:^- of sweetness- and strength is
not to befouild— hf those who claimed to be his
followers ; but it is. found in. many, of those who
worked before him, and in many others down to
our own time, in William Blake, for instance,
and Victor Hugo, who, though not of his school,
and unaware, are his true sons, and help us to
understand him, as he in turn interprets and
justifies them. Perhaps this is the chief use in
studying old masters.
1871.
97
LEONARDO DA VINCI
HOMO MINISTER ET INTERPRES .NATURE
In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now
read it there are some variations from the first
edition. There, the painter who has fixed^the
outwa rd ty pe ofChrist for succeeding centuries
was a bold speculator, holding lightly by other
men's beliefs, s etting phi losophy above Chris-
tianity. Words of his,~trenchant enough to
Justify this impression, are not recorded, and
would have been out of keeping with a genius
of which one characteristic is the tendency to
lose itself in a refined and graceful mystery.
The suspicion was but the time-honoured mode
in which the world stamps its appreciation of one
who has thoughts for himself alone, his high
indifference, his intolerance of the common forms
of things ; and in the second edition the image
was changed into something fainter and more
conventional. BuHt^is still hiy_a_certairLmystery
in his work,. and something enigmaticaLJbeyond
the usual measure of great men, that he fascinates,
or perhaps~half fepeTs. His life is one of sudden
98
LEONARDO DA VINCI
revolts, with intervals in which he works not at
all, or apart from the main scope of his work.
By a strange fortune the pictures on which his
more popular fame r ested disappeareH jearly from
the world, like the Battle of the Standard ; or are
mixed obscurely with the product of meaner hands,
like the Last Supper. His type of beauty is so
exotic that it fascinates a "TargeF number than it
delights, and s^einsimDre .than -that of -any other
artist to reflect idea s and view.s_aja4-SOiiie.-Scheme
of ^the world with in ; so tEathe seemed to his
contemporaries to be the possesso r of some un=-
sanctified and secret wis dom ; as to Michelet and
othersToTiave anticipated modern ideas. He
trifles with his genius, and crowds all his chief
work into a few tormented years of later life ;
yet he is so possessed by his genius that he passes
unmoved through the most tragic events, over-
whelming his country and friends, like one who
comes across them by chance on some secret
errand.
His legend^ as the French say, with the anec-
dotes which every one remembers, is one of the
most brilliant chapters of Vasari. Later writers
merely copied it, until, in 1804, Carlo Amoretti
applied to it a criticism which left hardly a date
fixed, and not one of those anecdotes untouched.
The various questions thus raised have since that
time become, one after another, subjects of special
study, and mere antiquarianism has in this direction
little more to do. For others remain the editing of
99
THE RENAISSANCE
the thirteen books of his manuscripts, and the
separation by technical criticism of what in his
reputed works is really his, from what is only
half his, or the worlc of his pupils. But aj ^over
of strange_soulsjnay^tillanaly^eJoiLi^^ the
impression ma deon him by _those works, and try
to reach through it a definition of the chief
elements of Leonardo's genius. The legend, as
corrected and enlarged by its critics, may now
and then intervene to support the results of this
analysis.
His l ife h as_ three divi sions — thirty years at
Florence, nearly twenty^ j^^ears at^^CIan, then
nineteen years^of^ wandering, till he sinks to rest
under the protection of Francis the First at the
Chiteau de Clou. The dishonour of illegitimacy
hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, his father,
was of a noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the
Val d^Arno, and Leonardo, brought up delicately
among the true children of that house, was the
love-child of his youth, with the keen, puissant
nature such children often have. We see him
in his boyhood<^scinatin|j all men^by his beauty,
4^TOVisin^ music~'andr^ngs, buying the caged
Diras~andrs6tting them~fr^ asjie_walked the
streets of Fte gHeg7~fond~M"|^"8g3^rigm) dresses
and (Spirited horse^ ^^^^
FronniIs~eajliest years he designed many
objects, and constructed models in relief, of
which Vasari mentions some of women smiling.
His father, pondering over this promise in the
lOO
LEONARDO DA VINCI
child, took him to the wnrksh-op-joCAadrea- del
y^Tocchio, then the most famous artist in
Florence. Beautiful objects lay about there —
reliquaries, pyxes, silver images for the pope's
chapel at Rome, strange fancy-work of the
middle age, keeping odd company with fragments
of antiquity, then but lately discovered. Another
student Leonardo_may_have jeen there — a lad
into whose soul the level light and aerial J.llusions
of Ita liarTsunsetsTiad pa?sec^ in^ fterHays famous
as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artilt~of the
earlier Florentine type, carver, painter, and
worker in metals, in one ; designer, not of
pictures only, but of all things for sacred or
household use, drinking-vessels, ambries, instru-
ments of music, making them all fair to look
upon, filling the cornmon ways of li fe with the
reflexion of some far-off brightness ; and years
of patience had refined ^is hand" till his work
was now sought after from distant places.
It happened that Verrocchio was employed by
the brethren of Vallombrosa to paint the Baptism
of Christ, and Leonardo was allowed to finish an
angel in the left-hand corner. It was one of
those moments in whi c h the progr ess of a
thing' — here, that of the art of^ Italy — /presses^
hard on the happin ess ot an jndividual, tnfc
whose discouragement and decrease, humanity,
in more'' fbituiiaIe~"p^rsons7^ omes~T step^ nearer
to its final success.
'Fofbeneath the cheerful exterior of the mere
— roi ~"
THE RENAISSANCE
well-paid craftsman, chasing brooches for the
copes of Santa Maria Novella^ or twisting metal
screens for the tombs of the Medici, lay the
ambitiou s .ib&ii:e^..tD-.„expa.nd _ jhg.:^J £^^ o ^
ItatiSn "art by a larger knowJ^ ge and insight
in to Jhinj;s^,a pur^
" st UI ■Unconscipus--^ irgQse ; and~^eS5B^;;;;^ur"the
.modelling of (drapery^') or of a lifted arin^ or of
(hair cas^ back rreHv-the face, thefe-eame^to him
something of the freer manner and richer
humanity of a later age. But in this Baptism
the pupil had surpassed the master ; and Ver-
rocchio turned away as one stunned, and as if
his sweet earlier work must thereafter be dis-
tasteful to him, from the brig ht animat ed^angel
of Leonardo's hand.
The angel^tay still be seen in Florence, a
space of ( sunlight/' in the cold, laboured old
picture ; but-therlegend is true only in sentiment,
for painting had always been the art by which
Verrocchio set least store. And as in a sense he
anticipates Leonardo, so to the last Leonardo
recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of
beautiful toys, such as the vessel of water for
a mirror, and lovely needle-work about the
implicated hands in the Modesty and Vanity ^ and
of reliefs, like those cameos which in the Virgin
of the Balances hang alT round the girdle of Saint
Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as
the agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic
preciseness and grace, as of a sanctuary swept and
103 ~~
LEONARDO DA VINCI
g^njished. Ami d all the cunning and intricacy of
' his. J^siobaidL i3uanfxlJbi&-aey€r4eft him. Much
of it there must have been in that lost picture of
Paradise^ which he prepared as a cartoon for
tapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders.
It was the perfection of the older Florentine
style jof mitrfatnif^paintingV^lth patient putting
of each leaFlipbn the trees and each flower in the
grass, where the first man and wjoman were
standing.
And because it was, ..the,_pexfection of that
style, it awoke in Leonardo soine seed of^djs-.,
content wliTcK lay "inTtlie secret places of his
nature. For the way to perfection is through a
series of disgusts ; and this picture-^all-.-£hat he
had„done. .so. far,^.in ,.his life . at Florence.-:^ was
after all in the old slight manner. His art, if it.
was to be something in the worI37~Siust be
weigKted with more of the meaning of nature
and'^rpose .. of humamty. Nature was "the
true mistress of higher intelligences." He
plun^dj^^then, into „the_ study.. p.f.natures*_-Aad
in Hping this h&.fQllowed- -the..- manner of the
older__students ; he brooded-, .over. ,the hidden
virtues of plants and crystals, the lines traced by
the s^js , as ,,they:_moved in the sky, over the
correspondences which exist betvy^ejri tjig. different
or.dgrs . ojf living things, through which, to eyes
opened, they interpret each other ; and for years
he seemed to those about him as one listening to
a voice, silent for other men.
103
THE RENAISSANCE
■^ He learixed—bprp: thfi-^cL-ofLgmiig- deep, of
tracking the sources of expression to their subtlest
retreats, the power of an intimate presence in the
things he handled. He did not at once or
entirely desert his art ; only hfcJS3ias„no_lpnger
the chcerfu;lfe,^Qbigctive painter, through whose
soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of
Florentine life, only made a little mellower and
more pensive by the transit, passed on to the
white wall. He wasted many days in curious
tricks of design, seeming to lose himself in the
spinnrng_,DZ.intricate. devices of line"and;_CQjQiir.
He_was smitten, with a lpY;e...o£-,.th^ .^U^ossibT^
— the]^€rforatiQn*^f^4noun tains, charigihg thti'
courseof^rivers, (i'aisIng}gTeat^bijil.diiig,s,^such as
the church of Sak:Gi(Sa^i, in th e air ; all those
feats for the performance of which natural magic
professed to have the key. Later writexs^indeed,
see in these . efforts. aR^.JLRticipat-ion" of modern
mechanics ; in him they were rather dreams,
thrown off by the overwrought and labouring
brain. Two ideas were^esgeciallyjconfirmed m
him, as r eHexel"'orThing£that^had, touclied h is
brain in "chiidhood be yon d jths...djeplh- of othe r
motion ot great waters. / ~t-.-— —j
And in such studies some (jijiter fujifl^ of-^he ;
extremes of beauty a nd terror sjKgped itself, as an
image that rmght be seen and touched, in the
mind of this gracious youth, so fixed that for the
rest of his life it never left him. As if catching
104 r-
LEONARDO DA VINCI
glimpses of it in the strange eyes or hair of
chance people, he would follow such about the
streets of Florence till the sun went down, of
whom many sketches of his remain. Some of
these are full of a curio us beauty,, that remote
beauty which. .^jaa.y„^Jbj;„^.|L^ only by
those wbfi„hay.c„saught. it, caxefuily. ; who, start-
ing with acknowledged types, of beauty, have
refine'd^raOkc'.wpon m as these refine upon
the world of common forms. But mingled
(Z) inextricably w ith this^thiejs,, J5,_^ain,^e&ment of
mockery also ; so that, whether in sorrow or
sdofri^ he caricatures Dante even. X»egions of
groteaipies.,swjeep-.=.4jftd^ 4jis haad4-iar-4ias not
natur£_tooher(grotesqu^;3-the rent rock, the
distQrtingnG[gEtsoF^TS7ening on lonely roads, the
funveiled^structure of man in the embryo, or the
All these swarming fancies unite in the
Medusa of -the TJffizii. Vasari's story of an
earlier MeduSa, painted on a wooden shield, is
perhaps an invention ; and yet, properly .told,
has more of the air of truth about it than any-
thing else in the whole legend. For its real
subject is not the serious work of a man, but
the experiment of a child. The lizards and
glow-worms _ and o ther strange small creatures
which haunt an Italian~virreyard bring before
one the^^EoIe pIctufe~-of a child's "life^ in a
Tuscan dwelling ^— half castleTTialFnfarm — and
are as triieTo nature ~as~fh~e pretended astonish-
105
THE RENAISSANCE
ment of the father for whom the boy has
prepared a surprise. It was not in play that
he painted that other Medusa, the one great
picture which he left behind him in Florence.
The s ubject has b een treated invarious ways ;
Leonardoal one cuts to its centre~-~lie al one
realise s it as the head of_a_coxpse, exercising
its p owers through all the circumstances o f
je ath. WhaiTlnay be calleji,,,tlie fascination
6f~~^Trv^tioi^ penet^lS&esI^"'"*^^^^ touch its
3uisitelv fimsned Beai
exquisitely finished Keauty^ About the dainty
liner"or''"£he' cheek the bat flits unheejied.
The delicate snakes seem literally strangling
each other in terrified struggle to escape from
the Medusa brain. The hue which violent
death always brings with it is in the features ;
features singularly massive and grand, as we
catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshorten-
ing, crown foremost, like a great calm stone
against which the wave of serpents breaks. ^
^ The 5£ienGe-"of~that~age~was all divination,)
clairvoyance^3i^isuhjjex:le4.;Jt£,^our exact modern
formulas, seeking' in" an instant of vision to con-
centrate a thousand experiences. Later writers,
thinking only of the well-ordered treatise on
painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du
Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled
from Leonardo's bewildered manuscripts, written
strangely, as his manner was, from right to left,
have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries.
But this rigid order would have been little in
io6
LEONARDO DA VINCI
accordance with the res tlessness nf his char-
acter ; and ifSj^ tKinlc' oPKiiii "as' 'the mere
reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and,
composition to mathematical rules, we shall
hardly have that impression which those around
Leonardo received from him. Poring over
his crucibles, making experiments with colour,
trying, by a strange variation of the alchemist's
dream, to discover the,.— secret, not of an
elixir t o make man^s (jiaturap life~Tmm ortal,
bu t of giving immortaliTy ^ to the s ubtlest
an d most delicate (gffectsj of'painti'ng, he seemed
to them^rather the "sorcerer or the magician,
possesse.ci.x>f- curious secrets and a hidden know-
ledge, living in a world of which he alone
possessed the key. What his philosophy seems
to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or
Cardan ; and much of the spirit of the older
alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence
in short cuts and odd byways to knowledge.
To him philosop hjrj was to be som £thing--giving
strange^jwijftness and doubk sight^^divini^^ the
sources of springs beneath the earth;^or'5fexpres-
ston-jjeneath the human (^duntena^^^clairvoy ant
of ^jcdrilTgifts iri^ pmmoH of "unebmmoh Thln^ P
in tferreed^at the brook-side, or the star which
draws near to us but once in a century. How,
in this way, the clear purpose was overclouded,
the fine chaser's hand perplexed, we but dimly
see ; the mystery which at no point quite lifts -
from LeonardoVfife is deepest here. But it is
107
THE RENAISSANCE
certain .thaj:,,,j^^ oi_his^)4fy._^Jhe had
almost, ceased to b e^an a rtist.
The year335— ^^ 7^*^ °^ *^® '^^^^^ .°^
Raphael and the thirty-first of Leonardo's life
— is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by
the letter in which he recommends himself to
Ludovico Sforza, and offers to tell him, for a
price, strange secrets in the art of war. It was
that Sforza who murdered his young nephew by
slow poison, yet was so susceptible of religious
impressions that he blended mere earthly passion
with a sort of religious sentimentalism, and who
took for his device the mulberry-tree — symbol,
in its long delay and sudden yielding of flowers
and fruit together, of a wisdom which economises
all forces for an opportunity of sudden and sure
eifect. The fame of Leonardo had gone before
him, and he was to model a colossal statue of
Francesco, the first Duke of Milan. As for
Leonardo himself, he came not as an artist at all,
or careful of the fame of one ; but as a player
on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his own
construction, shaped in some curious likeness to
a horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico
was susceptible also to the power of music, and
Leonardo's nature had a kind of spell in it.
Fascination is always the word descriptive of
hinis. No portrait of his youth remains ; but
all tends to make us believe that up to this time
some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough
to balance the disadvantage of his birth, had
io8
LEONARDO DA VINCI
played about him. His physical strength was
great ; it was said that he could bend a horse-
shoe like a coil of lead.
The Duomo, work of artists from beyond the
Alps, so fantastic to the eye of a Florentine used
to the mellow, unbroken surfaces of Giottdvand
Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness ; ^nd
below, in the streets of Milan, moved a peojple
as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike. To Leo-
nardo least of all men could there be anything
poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment
which grew there. It was a life of brilliant
sins and exquisite amusements : Leonardo became
a jjjddbiratcdjdfisignex.Qf .J^geants flLndTt "suited
the quality of his genius, composed, in almost
equal parts, of curiosity and the desire of beauty,
to take things as they came.
Curiosity_andjthe desire of beauty — these are
the two elementary forces in Le_oiwdo's genius ;
curiosity often in conflict with the desire of
beau'ty, but generating, in union with it, a type
of subtle^and curious ^race.
The movement of th e fifteenth century was
twofold ; partly the Renaissance, partly also the
coming of what ii^caire'd the " modern spirit,"
with its realism, its appeal to experience. It
comprehended a return to antiquity, and a return
to nature. Raj)hael represents the return to
antiquity, and Leonardq. the, return to nature.
In t his re turn to nature, he was seeking to satisfy
a boundless curiosity hy her perpetual siirprises,
" 169' '" '"
THE RENAISSANCE
a microscopic sense of finish by her ^nesje, or
delicacy of operation, that subtiUias naturae which
i^Bacon notices. So we find him often in intimate
relations with men of science, — with Fra Luca
Paccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist
Marc Antonio della Torre. His_ob,servations
and experiments fill thirteen yqlurnes pf manu-
script ; and those who can judge describe him
the later. ide.as^pi'^jcienqe,. He explained the
obscure light of the unilluminated part of the
moon, knew that the sea had once covered the
mountains which contain shells, and of the gather-
ing of the equatorial waters above the polar.
/^He who thus penetrated into the most secret
parts of nature preferred always the more to the
less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an
instance of law more refined, the construction
about things of a peculiar atmosphere and mixed
lights^ He paints flowers with such curious
felicity that different writers have attributed to
him a fondness for particular flowers, as Clement
the cyclamen, and Rio the jasmin ; while, at
Venice, there is a stray leaf from his portfolio
dotted all over with studies of violets and the
wild rose. InJ[ijm first. appears, th,(^^ for
* wh;|tjLS^j^ir!Z|firr;rg^.pj;,^gf^^^ ; hollow
places full of the green shadow of bituminous
rocks, ridged reefs of trap-rock which cut the
water into quaint sheets of light, — their exact
antitype is in our own western seas ; all the
no
LEONARDO DA VINCI
solemn effects of moving water. You may follow
it spfrngihg from its distant source among the
rocks on the heath of the Madonna of the Balances^
passing, as a little fall, into the treacherous calm
of the Madonna of the hake, as a goodly river
next, below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks,
washing the white walls of its distant villages,
stealing out in a network of divided streams in
La Gioconda to the seashore of the Saint Anne —
that delicate place, where the wind passes like
the hand of some fine etcher over the surface,
and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the
sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the
waves never rise, are green with grass, grown
fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams
or of fancy, but , of placcis far withdrawn, ^ and
hours, selected from a. thousand with a miracle
of finesse. /[TErough. iLeonardoU .strange veil of
"sight things reach him so ; in no ordinary night
or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some
brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or_
through deep water.
~ And not into ^aturt^ only ; but he plunged
alsq_jntoJhjumgj3_perspn
all a painter of portraits^, faces, of a modelling
more^^ilful than,^^ been seenbjefore or since,
embodied with a reality which, almost amounts
to illusion, on the dark air. To.„^^e a character
as it was, and delicately sound its Estops, suited
one so curious in observation, curious in inven-
tion. He painted thus the portraits of Ludovico's
III
THE RENAISSANCE
mistresses, Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani
the poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess
Beatrice. The portrait of Cecilia Galerani is
lost, but that of Lucretia Crivelli has been
identified with La Belle Feroniere of the Louvre,
and Ludovico's pale, anxious face stiU'remains in
the Ambrosian library. Opposite is the portrait
of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to
have caught some presentiment of early death,
painting her precise and grave, full of the
refinement^ of the dead, in sad earth -coloured
raiment, set with pale stones.
S ometim es.ibis^.C.ui:io.sit,y came in conflict with
the desire of beauty ; it tended to make him go
topTaJTbeTowlthaf p^ art
really begins and ends. Thisj^fxuggle between the
rea§on, iiSl.lteJbdeas,^and -the^^
beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life at Milan —
his restlessness, his eridless re-t6uchings,.his odd
, expefiments with colour. Ho w much must he
leave unfinished, how much recommence ! CHis
-probiem''was~TKe (tfan ^mutation ) of ideas into
images."'. What_he had attained so far had been
the niastejg!:.Qf that ear ISrT^ style, with
its naive and-^4imited sensuousness. Now he
was to entertain in this narrow medium those
divinations of T'TTumanlty too wide for it, that
larger visioltToT^h'e'ogefring wbirlrd,; jvKjSfTTs only
not " tob miich ' for \ the great, irregular art of
Shakjespeare ; and everywhere the effort is visible
in the work of his hands. This agitation, this
112
LEONARDO DA VINCI
perpetual delay, give him an air of weariness
and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming at
an impossible effect, to do something that art,
that painting, can never do. Often the expression
of physical beauty at this or that point seems
strained and marred in the effort, as in those
heavy German foreheads — too heavy and German
for perfect beauty.
For ilierc_was^ a^touch of Ger^ in that
genius3[hich, as Goethe said, had "thought itself
weary" — miide sich gedacht. What an anticipa-
tion of modern Germany, for instance, in that
debate on the question whether sculpture or
painting is the nobler art ! ^ Butjhere is this
difference between him and the German, that,
, with JaII~ffiat curious science, the German
would have thought nothing more was needed.
The^iiamelof' Goethe himself reminds one how
great for the artist may be the danger of over-
much science ; how Goethe, who, in the 'Elective
Affinities and the first part of Fausty does trans-
mute ideas into images, who wrought many such
transmutations, did not invariably find the spell-
word, and in the second part of Faust presents us
with a mass of science which has almost no
artistic character at all. But Leonardo will never
worl^. till the happy moment comes — that
■ moment of bien-etre^ which to imaginative men is
a moment of invention. On this he waits with
^ How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer,
Quanto piu, un' arte porta secofattca di corpo, tanto pih i vile!
I 113
THE RENAISSANCE
a perfect patience ; other moments are but a
preparation, or after-taste of it. Few men
distinguish between them as jealously as he.
Hence so many flaws even in the choicest work.
But for Leonardo the distinction is absolute, and,
n the moment of bien-etre^ the'^^l chemy ^coni^
_ lete : the idea is stricken into^colour and
imagery : a cloudy mysticism is refined to a
subdued and graceful mystery, and painting
pleases the eye while it satisfies the soul.
This curious .beauty is seen above, all in his
drawingSj,,, and,. .in, these chiefly in the abstract
grace of the bqunding lines. Let us take some
of these drawings, and pause over them awhile ;
and, first, one of those at Florence — the heads of
a woman and a little child, set side by side, but
each in its own separate frame. First of all,
there is much pathos in the reappearance, in the
fuller curves of the face of the child, of the
sharper, more chastened lines of the worn and
older face, which leaves no doubt that the heads
are those of a little child and its mother. A
feeling for maternity is indeed always character-
istic of Leonardo ; and this feeling is further
indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of
the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child.
You may note a like pathetic power in drawings
of a young man, seated in a stooping posture, his
face in his hands, as in sorrow ; of a slave sitting
in an uneasy inclined attitude, in some brief
interval of rest ; of a small Madonna and Child,
114
LEONARDO DA VINCI
peeping sideways in half-reassured terror, as a
tnighty griffin with batlike wings, one of
Leonardo's finest inventions^ descends suddenly
from the air to snatch up a great wild beast
wandering near them. But note in these, as that
which especially belongs to art, the contour of
the young man's hair, the poise of the slave's
arm above his head, and the curves of the head
of the child, following the little skull within,
thin and fine as some sea-shell worn by the wind.
Take again another head, still more full of
sentiment, but of a different kind, a little draw-
ing in red chalk which every one will remember
who has examined at all carefully the drawings
by old masters at the Louvre. It is a face of
doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own
hair, the cheek-line in high light against it,
with something voluptuous_„and full in the eye-
lids and the lips. Another drawing might pass
for the same face in childhood, with parched and
feverish lips, but much sweetness in the loose,
short-waisted childish dress, with necklace and
SullUf and in the daintily bound hair. We
might take the thread of suggestion which these
two drawings oiFer, when thus set side by side,
and, following it through the drawings at
Flore nce, Venice, an d Milan, construcr^ jort of
Imics^ ill ustrating better t han anything else
'i;€^^xdc)^£^^^&^^^£^^w^^^^^5e^^v^. Daughters ~X
of Herodias, with their fantasfTc head-dresses
knotted and folded so strangely to leave thp
us
THE RENAISSANCE
dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not
of the Christian family, or of Raphael's. They
are the clairvoyants, through whom, as^ through
delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the
subtler forces of nature, and the modes of their
action, all that is magnetic in it, all those finer
conditions wherein material things rise to that
subtlety of operation which constitutes them
spiritual, where only the final nerve and the
keener touch can follow. It is as if in certain
significant examples we actually saw those forces
at their work on human flesh. Nervous, electric,
faint always. , witlx . -somfi-^inexplicjable faintness,
these pepple^seera-,,tQ-.>he^ ,s.ubj ect to exceptional
conditions, to feql^powers at work in the common
air unfeit by others, to become, as it were, the
receptacle of thpiji, and pass them on to us in a
chain of .secret influences. ^
But among the more youthful heads there is
one at Florence which Love chooses for its own
— the head of a young man, which may well be
the likeness of Andrea Salaino, beloved of Leon-
ardo for his curled and waving hair — belli capelli
ricci e inanellati — and afterwards his favourite
pupil and servant. Of all the interests in living
men and women which may have filled his life
at Milan, this attachment alone is recorded. And
in return Salaino identified himself so entirely
with Leonardo, that the picture oi Saint Anne^ in
the Louvre, has been attributed to him. It
illustrates Leonardo's usual choice of pupils, men
116
LEONARDO DA VINCI
of some natural charm of person or intercourse
like Salaino, or men of birth and princely habits
of life like Francesco Melzi — men with just
enough genius to be capable of initiation into his
secret, for the sake of which they were ready to
efface their own individuality. Among them,
retiring often to the villa of the Melzi at Canonica
al Vaprio, he worked at his fugitive manuscripts
and sketches, working for the present hour, and
for a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself.
Other artists have been as careless of present or
future applause, in self-forgetfulness, or because
they set moral or political ends above the..sjDLds„ of
jxt.; but in him this solitary culture of beauty
seems to have hung upon a kind of self-love, and
a carelessness in the work of art of all but art
itself. Out of the secret places of a uniqutf
temperamenPTTe brought~strange blossonis"^ and
fruitTliitherto unknown •'~and~for him, theTTovel
impression conveyed; the exquisite .effect woven,
counted as an end init&elfzrra^perfect end.
And thesep.upils,.of his. acquired, his manner
so thoroughly, that though the number of Leon-
ardo's authentic works is very small indeed,
there is a n vultitude of other men's pictur es
through whicli we un doubtedly see him, a nd
com e ver y near to his gen ius. Sometimes, as in
the little picture of the Madonna of the Balancesy
in which, from the bosom of His mother, Christ
weighs the pebbles of the brook against the sins
of men, we have a hand, rough enough by
117
THE RENAISSANCE
contrast, working upon some fine hint or sketch
of his. Sometimes, as in the subjects of the
Daughter of Herodias and the Head of John the
Baptist^ the lost originals have been re-echoed
and varied upon again and again by Luini and
others. At other times the original remains, but
has been a mere theme or motive, a type of
which the accessories might be modified or
changed ; andjh gse variations hav^ _b ut brou ght
out the more the purpose, ox _ejcprPssinn of the
original. It is so with the so-called Saint fohn
the Baptist of the Louvre — one of the few naked
figures Leonardo painted — whose delicate brown
flesh and woman's hair no one would go out
into the wilderness to seek, and whose treacherous
smile wouldL..ia3KLJU!S-Juad£rstaflyd_ far
beyond tjhLe..jQu.tga:rd„..gest ure or circum stance.
But the long, reedlike cross in the hand, which
suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in
a copy at the Ambrosian Library, and disappears
altogether in another version, in the Palazzo Rosso
at Genoa. Returning from the latter to the
original, we are no longer surprised by Saint John's
strange likeness to the Bacchus which hangs near
it, and which set Theophile Gautier thinking of
Heine's notion of d ecayed gods, who, to ma intain
themselves, afte r the fall j f_jaganismr took
em plOTrnenTin the new re ligionT We recognise
one of those symbolical inventions in which the
osten.sible,mbjeci,jj,4iSi£d,JiDt.A&4iia^^^^
pictorial realisation, JDutj^the starting-point of a
1x8
LEONARDO DA VINCI
train of sentiment, subtle and vague as a piece of
music. ^No one ever rule d over the mere su bject
i n hand m^e entirely than Leonardo, or benTI t
m ofe'dexterousjy to purely artistic ends./ And so
it comes Jtp_4)a&s, that. though he, handles sacred
subjects _conjtiaually, he is the most profane of
painters ; the given person or subject. Saint John
in the Desert, or the Virgin on the knees of Saint
Anne, is often merely the -pretext for a kind of
work- which, carries one altogether beyond the
range ofits conventional associations.
About the Last Supper, its decay and restora-
tions, a whole literature has risen up, Goethe's
pensive sketch of its sad fortunes being perhaps
the best. The death in childbirth of the Duchess
Beatrice was followed in Ludovico by one of
those paroxysms of religious feeling which in
him were constitutional. The low, gloomy
Dominican church of Saint Mary of the Graces
had been the favourite oratory of Beatrice. She
had spent her last days there, full of sinister
presentiments ; at last it had been almost necessary
to remove her from it by force ; and now it was
here that mass was said a hundred times a day
for her repose. On the damp wall of the re-
fectory, oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo
painted the Last Supper. Effective anecdotes were
told about it, his retouchings and delays. They
showJiixn_XQfuMnigJ»-w-0rk-exccpt~at--t'he moment
of invention, scornful -of any one- who supposed
that art could b.e^,a work-of m^rejndustry and rule,
"9
THE RENAISSANCE
often coming the whole length of Milan to give
a single touch. He painted it, not in fresco,
Ivhere all must be impromptu. Hut in oils, the new
method which he_ha.d been one Q£-."lK£'fifsrto
Weteme, because it allowed of so many after-
thoughts, so refined a workiujg _out p.£.,perJf?£tion.
It tuf fied" ouT'that on" a*pTastered wall no process
could have been less durable. Within fifty years
it had fallen into decay. And now we have to
turn back to Leonardo's own studies, above all to
one drawing of the central head at the Brera,
which, in a uniop,,pf te^^derness.-And''^^ in
the face4ines, reminds pne„,Q/ the monumental
work of Mino da.,Fjesole, to trace it as it
was.
Here was anothex^ortjolifj^^given subject
out of, th? range^r o|",,.,ks.,traditi«naLZassoGiations.
Strange, after all the mystic developments of
the middle age, was the effort to see the
Eucharist, not as the pale Host of the altar, but
as one taking leave of his friends. Five years
afterwards the -, young Raphael,.,, at I^|orence,
painted it with sweet and solemij effect' in the
refectory of Saint Onofrio ; but still with all
the mystical unreality of the school of Perugino.
Vasari pretends that the central head was never
finished. But finished or unfinished, or owing
part of its effect to a mellowing decay, the head
of Jesus does but consummate the sentiment of
the whole company — ghosts through which
you see the wall, faint as the shadows of the
120
LEONARDO DA VINCI
leaves upon the wall on autumn afternoons.
This figure is but the faintest, the most spectral
of them all.
The Last Supper was finished in 1 497 ; in
1498 the French entered Milan, and whether or
not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for
their arrows, the model of Francesco Sforza
certainly did not survive. What, in that age,
such work was capable of being — of what
nobility, amid what racy truthfulness to fact — we
may judge from the bronze statue of Bartolomeo
Colleoni on horseback, modelled by Leonardo's
master, Verrocchio (he died of grief, it was said,
because, the mould accidentally failing, he was
unable to complete it), still standing in the
piazza of Saint John and Saint Paul at Venice.
Some traces of the thing may remain in certain
of Leonardo's drawings, and perhaps also, by a
singular circumstance, in a far-off town of France.
For Ludovico became a prisoner, and ended his
days at Loches in Touraine. After many years
of captivity in the dungeons below, where
all seems sick with barbarous feudal memories,
he was allowed at last, it is said, to breathe
fresher air for awhile in one of the rooms of
the great tower still shown, its walls covered
with strange painted arabesques, ascribed by
tradition to his hand, amused a little, in this
way, through the tedious years. In those
vast helmets and human faces and pieces of
armour, among which, in great letters, the
121
THE RENAISSANCE
motto Infelix Sum is woven in and out, it is
perhaps not too fanciful to see the fruit of a
wistful after-dreaming over Leonardo's sundry
experiments on the armed figure of the great
duke, which had occupied the two so much
during the days of their good fortune at
Milan.
The remaining years of^JLeqnardo's life are
more or less yeai"s"~or wandering. From his
brilliant life at courtTie ^had saved nothing, and
he returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps
necessity kept his spirit excited: the next four
years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of in-
vention. He painted now the pictures of the
Louvre, his most authentic works, which came
there straight from the cabinet of Francis the
First, at Fontainebleau. One picture of his,
the Saint Anne — not the Saint Anne of the Louvre,
but a simple cartoon, now in London — revived
for a moment a sort of appreciation more common
in an earlier time, when good pictures had still
seemed miraculous. For two days a crowd of
people of all qualities passed in naive excitement
1 through the chamber where it hung, and gave
Leonardo a taste of the " triumph " of Cimabue.
But his work was less with the saints than with
th£__liying women of Fl^r£jq£e. For he lived
""Sti H - in t Ec - p oK§fied-society imaF he loved, and in
the houses of Florence, left perhaps a little
subject to light thoughts by the death of
Savonarola — the latest gossip (1869) is of an
122
LEONARDO DA VINCI
undraped Monna Lisa, found in some out-of-the-
way corner of the late Orleans collection — he
saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third
wife of Francesco del Giocondo. As we have see n
him using incidents of sacregLjJiaryyXiot-^f&r -their
own s akeToTaS^ m ere subj ects for pictorial realisa-
tion, but as^ cryptic language for fancies all his
own, so jDj^jHtJie fp4Ja4-au,.XejitJ&irJiis-thought in
takine^p5^r«f thessuJanguid wo^^ raising
her, ^Lea^oFPbmon^ as Modesty or Vanity^
to t^V^^!W||Jli I^^biSii^^ of- symbolical expres-
sion.
^^.^MSSSds^ is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's
ma&|gtpj-ec£, the revea ling insta nce of his mode
oFthoughtand^worE^ In suggestiveness, only
the Melancholia of Diirer is comparable to it ;
and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of
its s ubdued and graceful mystery. We all
know the face arid hands ot tEelfigure, set in
its marble chair, in that circle of fantastic rocks,
as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of
all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.^
I As often happens with works in which invention
seems to reach its limit, there is an element in
it given to, not invented by, the master. In
that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the
possession of Vasari, were certain designs by
Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty
that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them
' Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the
lips and cheeks, lost for us.
123
THE RENAISSANCE
many times. It_^s hard . not tp coxineet with
these designs of „the_ elder, by-past_jnaster, as
^mihr-iTS^^fmmzl^^ tLeJIunfathomable
smile,^ always, with a touch of something- sinister
in it, which plays over" all Leonardo's work.
Besides, the picture-i? a portrait. " TFrom child-
hood we see' this image defining itself on the
fabric of his dreams ; and but for express
historical testimony, we might fancy that this
was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at
last. What was the relationship of a living
Florentine to this creature of his thought ? By
what strange affinities had the dream and the
person grown up thus apart, and yet so closely
together ? Present from the first incorporeally
in Leonardo's brain, dimly traced in_th.e--.de.§igns
of Verrocchio-,. she is found present at last in II
Giocondo*s house. ThajE__there_is ..much of. mere
portraiture in the picture is .attested by the
legend that by"~aftificial means, the presence
of minies and Jute-playexs, that subtle expres-
sion^^was protracted on the face. Again, was
it in four years and by renewed labour never
really completed, or in four months and as
by stroke of magic, that the image was pro-
>7The presence that rose thus so strangely
bajgide the waters, is expressive of what in the
ways of a thousand years men had come to desire.
Hers is the_hiead upon whjcli all '^^^ ends of
che world are come," and the eyelids are a little
124
LEONARDO DA VINCI
weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within
upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of
strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and ex-
quisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one
of those white Greek- goddesses or beautiful
women of antiquityj and how would they be
troubled by this beauty, mto which thejipul with
all its-maladies. .T5as~"passe^ ! Al^ibe.. thoughts
and experi ence of „^the world have etched and
moulded there, in that which they have of power
to refine and make expressive the outward form,
the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the
mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual
ambition and imaginative loves, the return of
the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgijis. She
is older than the rock§'~anTOlTg'lyEich she sits ;
like the vampire, she has teen dead many times,
and learned the secrets _of the. grave ; and has
been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen
day about her ; and t£aliicked for strange webs
with Eastern merchants . and, as Leda, was the
mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the
mother of Mary ; and all this has been to her but
as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the
delicacy with which it has moulded the changing
pjineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.
The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together
^ten t housan d experiences, is an old one ; and
modern philosophy has conceived the idea of
humanity as wrought upon by, and summing
up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Cer-
125
THE RENAISSANCE
tainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodi-
ment oCthe old fancy, the symbol of the modern
idea, f ' ' '^- ,
During these years at Florence Leonardo's
history is the history of his art ; for himself, he
is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward
history begins again in 1502, with a wild journey
through central Italy, which he makes as the
chief engineer of Cassar Borgia. The biographer,
putting together the stray jottings of his manu-
scripts, may follow him through every day of
it, up the strange tower of Siena, elastic like a
bent bow, down to the seashore at Piombino,
each place appearing as fitfully as in a fever
dream.
"One other great work was left for him to do,
a work all trace of which soon vanished, T/ie
Battle of the Standard, in which he had Michel-
angelo for his rival. The citizens of Florence,
desiring to decorate the walls of the great
council-chamber, had offered the work for com-
petition, and any subject might be chosen from
the Florentine wars of the fifteenth century.
Michelangelo chose for his cartoon an incident
of the war with Pisa, in which the Florentine
soldiers, bathing in the Arno, are surprised by
the sound of trumpets, and run to arms. His
design has reached us only in an old engraving,
which helps us less perhaps than our remem-
brance of the background of his Holy Family in
the Uffizii to imagine in what superhuman form,
i?6
LEONARDO DA VINCI
such as might have beguiled the heart of an
earlier world, those figures ascended out of
the water. Leonardo chose an incident from the
battle of Anghiari, in which two parties of
soldiers fight for a standard. Like Michel-
angelo's, his cartoon is lost, and has come to
us only in sketches, and in a fragment of
Rubens. Through the accounts given we
may discern some lust of terrible things in it,
so that even the horses tore each other with
their teeth. And yet one fragment of it, in
a drawing of his at Florence, is far different
— a waving field of lovely armour, the chased
edgings running like lines of sunlight from
side to side. Michelangelo was twenty-seven
years old ; Leonardo more than fifty ; and
Raphael, then nineteen years of age, visiting
Florence for the first time, came and watched
them as they worked.
We catch a glimpse of Leonardo again, at
Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and
viafe—andr^funiaces, making strange toys that
seemed alive of wax and quicksilver. The
hesitation which had haunted him all through
life, and made him like one under a spell, was
upon him now with double force, ^{ oone had
eve r carried ^.political . indifferentism farther ; it
had always been his philosophy to "fly^before
the ^sJtorm " ; he is for the Sforzas, or agajasf
them, as the tide of their fortune turns. Yet
now, in the political society of Rome, he came
127
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to be suspected of secret French jymgathies.
It paralysed hirTtoTina'hTmself among enemies ;
and he turned whol l y to France, which had
long courted him.
France was about to become an Italy more
Italian than Italy itself. Francis the First, like
Lewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted by
thcjinesse oi Leonardo's work ; La Gioconda was
already in his cabinet, and he offered Leonardo
the little Ghdteau de CloUy with its vineyards and
meadows, in the pleasant valley of the Masse,
just outside the walls of the town of Amboise,
where, especially in the hunting season, the court
then frequently resided, yi Monsieur Lyonard,
peinteur du Roy pour Amboyse — so the letter of
Francis the First is headed. It opens a prospect,
one of the most interesting in the history of art,
where, in a peculiarly blent atmosphere, Italian
art dies away as a French exotic.
Two questions remain, after much busy anti-
quarianism, concerning Leonardo's death — the
question of the exact form of his religion, and the
question whether Francis the First was present
at the time. They are of about equally little
irnportance in the estimate of Leonardo's genius.
The directions in his will concerning the thirty
masses and the great candles for the church of
Saint Florentin are things of course, their real
purpose being immediate and practical ; and on no
theory of religion could these hurried offices be of
much consequence. We forget them in specu-
128
LEONARDO DA VtNCI
lating how one who_ha^ been always. ^so desirous
of beauty, but desired it always in such jjrecise and
definite formsfas Tiands^or flowers or hair, looked
forward^now into tHe vague land, and experienced
the last curiosity.
1869.
129
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
It is^the mistake of much popular criticism to
regard poetry, music, arid pairitiagG:^, all the
various products pf art—- as but translations into
different languages of one and the same fixed
quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented
by certain technical qualities of colour, in paint-
ing ; of sound, in music ; of rhythmical words, in
poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in
art, and with it almost everything in art that is
essentially artistic, is made a matter of indiffer-
ence ; and a clear apprehension of the opposite
principle— that ^he sensuous material of each art
brings with it a special phase or quality of
beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any
otherjTan order of impressions distinct in kind —
is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism.
For, as aft addfe'sses riot pure sense, still less the
pure intellect, but the "imaginative reason"
through the senses, there are differences of kind
^n aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differ-
lences in kind of the gifts of sense themselves.
Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and
Untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own
130
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
special mode of reaching , the imagination, its
own "special responsibilities to its material. One
of the functions of assthetic criticism is to define
these limitations ; to estimate the degree in
which a given work of art fulfils its responsi-
bilities to its special material ; to note in a
picture that true pictorial charm, which is
neither a mere poetical thought or sentiment,
on the one hand, nor a mere result of com-
municable technical skill in colour or design,
on the other ; to define in a poem that true
poetical quality, which is neither descriptive nor
meditative merely, but comes of an inventive
handling of rhythmical language, the element
of song in the singing ; to note in music the
musical charm, that essential music, which
presents no words, no matter of sentiment or
thought, separable from the special form in
which it is conveyed to us.
To such a philosophy of the variations of the
beautiful, Lessing's analysis of the spheres of
sculpture and poetry, in the Laocoony was an im-
portant contribution. But a true appreciation
of these things is possible only in the light of a
whole system of such art-casuistries. Now paint-
ing is the art in the criticism of which this truth
most needs enforcing, for it is in popular judg-
ments on pictures that the false generalisation
of all art into forms of poetry is most prevalent.
To suppose that all is mere technical acquire-
ment in delineation or touch, working through
131
THE RENAISSANCE
and addressing itself to the intelligence, on the
one side, or a merely poetical, or what may be
called literary interest, addressed also to the pure
intelligence, on the other : — this is the way of
most spectators, and of many critics, who have
never caught sight all the time of that true
pictorial quality which lies between, unique
pledge, as it is, of the possession of the pictorial
gift, that inventive or creative handling of pure
line and colour, which, as almost always in Dutch
painting, as often also in the works of Titian
or Veronese, is quite independent of anything
definitely poetical in the subject it accompanies.
It is it^...JTJi:mJig-' — the desigiT'pfBJected from
that peculiar" pictdrial tempeirament or con-
stitution, in. whiehj.,.js:hileuit."may^^ be
ignorant of ^,^XIMS^^J^^ proportions, all
things whatever, all poetry, jlIJ. iie.as,. however
abstracf or obscure, float up. as visible scene or
image : it is the colouring — that weaving of
light, as of just perceptible gold threads, through
the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian's
Lace-girly that staining of the whole fabric of
the thing with a new, delightful physical
quality. This .(qui> also — a n influen ce, a
spirit or type in art, active in men so different as
those to whom many of his supposed works are
really assignable. A veritabl e school^ . ip - fact,
grew together out of ,alX.tJjQse..faacijia,tiag works
righ^»jQr...wrongly,,.attrib^^^^^ ;.put of
many^ copi^r_fSm.»jo.i:...yjanatiDns on him, by un-
known or uncertain workmen, whose drawings
and designs were, for various reasons, prized as his ;
out of the immediate impression he made jupon
his conteinporaries, and with which he continued
in men's rninds ; out of maay trad.itions„of subject
and treatment, which really descend from him
to,ou£ ojsKSPtime, and by retracing which we fill
out the original image. Glnrgln.ne thJiS-be-
conaes^so|tJ)f-imp«Xsp;RationjpiJV^
its projected reflex or ideal, all that was intense
or desirable in it crystallising about the memory
of this wonderful young man.
And now, finally, let me illustrate some of
the^haracte^risd.C&.~oX^this-.&>4oflZ~^^ as
we may call it, which, for most of us, notwith-
standing all that negative criticism of the " new
Vasari," will still identify itself with those famous
pictures at Florence, at Dresden and Paris. A
certain artistic ideal is there defined for us — the
conception of a peculiar aim and procedure in art,
which we may understand as the Giorgione sque,
148
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
wherever we find it, whether in Venetian work
generally, or in work of our own time. Of this
the Concert^ that undoubted work of Giorgione in
the Fitti Palace, is the typical instance, and a
pledge authenticating the connexion of the school,
and the spirit of the school, with the master.
I have spoken of a certain interpenetration of
the matter or subject of a work of art with the
form of it, a condition realised absolutely only in
musis^,as the condition to which every form of
art is perpetually aspiring. In the art of painting,
the.. attainiiient-9£ this ideal cofldTtiorij this perfect
interpenetration of the subject with the ^elements
of colour and design, depends, of course, in great
measure,- on-4exterous -choice, oi JhaCsupject, or
phase ...jsf—subj ect • and such^ choice, is.- one of
the secrets of Giorgiong's school. It is the
scl^ioLjaL^jJSf^, and em,pLQy$^ itself mainly with
" pamteHHiHyTis," but, in the production of this
pictof iaTTp^try^^exercises a^^w tact in the
selecting,- of, -such matter as, lends itself most
readily and e ntirely to pictorial form, to complete
exprei(SiQjP;,by -drawing and coKur. For although
its productions are painted poems, they belong
to a soH^pf poetry which tells itself TO'SSour'an
articulated story. Th e maste r . .is. j^re-eminent
for the resolution, the ease and quickness, with
which he re produces instantaneous motion — the
lacing-on of armour,~wit-h TEe~Headr~bent back
so stately — the fainting lady — the embrace, rapid
as the kiss, caught with death itself from dying
149
THE RENAISSANCE
lips — some momentary conjunction of mirrors and
polished armour and still water, by which all the
sides of a solid image are exhibited at once,
solvm^_that_ casuistical question whether painting
can present ^n obje^t^as-xoa^lietriy'as sculpt
The suSdeh act. the rapid transition of thought.
the passing ejmression— tJusKf^affesflWith that
vivacrty'^whicn"Vasari has attributed to him, il
fuoco Giorgionesco^ as he terms it. Now it is^ part
of the ideality„o^f the hig^^ dramatic
poetryj that-.it -.pr€seiiits.jyis,, with a kind pf pro-
foundly^ignificant and animatedinstants, a mere
gesture, a looK^a smile, perhaps — some brief and
wholly concrete moment — into which, however,
all the motives, all the interests and effects of a
long history, have condensed themselves, and
which seem to jibsorb past and futur e in an
intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal
instants the school o? Giorgione select^, wISE~lts
admirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuously
coloured world of the old citizens of Venice —
exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus,
we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of
existence, and which are like some consummate
extract or quintessence of life.
It is to the h.w or condition.^j^LjDDiiisic, as
I said, tKajt jali art Jike t^ rjeally_aspiring ;
and, in the school of Giorgione, the~_j>grfect
moments of music itself, the making..pr hearing
of music-, song or—its- -aGGOBapaakneatj are them-
selves pr.omiaent—^is~sttfejeet«. On that back-
ISO
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
ground of the silence of Venice, so impressive to
the modern visitor, the ^^^rld_ja£J[talian music
wai__then__Jorming. In choice of subject, as
in all besides, the Concert of the Piiti Palace is
typical of everything that Giorgione, himself
an admirable musician, toucKeHT^ithhis Tnflu-
cnce. In~sk~etch "or "finished picture, in various
collections, we may follow it through many
intricate variations — men faintiijg. . at music;
music^at_ jhe_pgpl-s.ide while people fish, or
mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the
well, or heard across running water, or ^rnong
the flocks ; the tuning .„of instruments ■;' people
with intent faces, as if listening, like those
described by Plato in an ingenious passage of
the RepubliCy to detect the smallest interval of
musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air,
or feeling for music in thought on a stringless
instrument, ear and finger refining themselves
infinitely, in the appetite for sweet sound ; a
momentary touch of an instrument in the
twilight, as one passes through some unfamiliar
room, in a chance company.
In these then, the favourite incidents of
Giorgione's school, music or the musical intervals
in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort
of listening — listening to music, to the reading of
Bandello's novels, to the sound of water, to time
as it flies. Often such moments are really our
moments of- -play, 'and- we are surprised at the
unexpected, blessedn&sjs of _ what ^^^ seem our
151
THE RENAISSANCE
leastjmportant part of time ; not merely because
play is in many instances that to which people
really apply their own best powers, but also
because at such times, the stress of our servile,
everyday, .attentiy-ejiۤL.b?ing^relaxedj. thehappier
powers in thing-s -without- are permitted free
passage, and have their way with us — And-so,
from .music,, 4he sc£aoI^^fX?ioi§iene~passes"aften
t'pjhe_play„jyhich is. Jike. music; to those
rriasques in which men avowedly do but play
at real life, like children "dressing up," dis-
guised in the strange old-JLtalian.. dresses,- parti-
coloured, or faatastiG with embroidery and furs,
of which -the- master-„w;3i|!^a^ eurieus a designer,
and which, above all the spod©sj-white~Jinen at
wrist and Jthr^jijtie^iaiiiteii^a^exterousl^
But when people are happy in this thirsty
land water will n ot be faj^jF ; and in the school
of (jiorgione, the[]pTes^encj_jgf_water- — the well,
or marble-rimmed pool, the drawing or pouring
of water, as the woman pours it from a pitcher
with her jewelled hand in the F^fe ChampStre^
listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it falls,
blent with the music of the pipes — is__as_char-
acter|stic,_ and almost as suggest! vcj^, as, .jthat of
musig_J:^elf., And._,t3ie,Jandscape^^^^^^^ is
^^^j^^J^3>9>z:-^^^^^Mi^P%...^iXi. of , ciearnessy of
the effects of water, of fresh rain newly passed
through the air, and collected into the grassy
channels. Tbeair, jnoreover, in the_sdK)ol of
Giorgione,seems^as vivid as the people whobreathe
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
it, and literally empyrean, all impurities being
burpt eut of it, and no taint, no floating particle
of anything but its own proper elements allowed
to subsist within it.
Its^^ljery^ is such as in England we call
" park scen ery," with some elusive refinement
felt about the rustic bviiidings, the choice grass,
the grouped trees, the undulations deftly econo-
mised for graceful effect. Only, in Italy all
natural things are_.as.. it ..were , woven through
and through with gold thread, even the cypress
revealing it among tfie folds of its blackness.
And it is with gold dust, or gold thread, that
these Venetian painters seem to work, spinning
its fine filaments, through the solemn human
flesh, away into the white plastered walls of the
thatched huts. The harsher details of the
mountains_recede_to_a harmonious distance, the
one peak of rich blue above the horizon remaining
but as the sensible warrant of that due coolness
which is all we need ask here of the Alps, with
their dark rains and streams. Yet what^gal,
airy space, as the eye jiasses from level to level,
throiigK~tfie long-d^rawn^vaMey in which Jacob
embraces Rachel among the flocks ! Nowhere
is there a truer instance of that ^balance, that
niodula^d["umson^j)f^^^
the~ human image and its accessories — already
noticed as cKai^^teristic of the Vejnetian , sjghool,
so tliat, in_it, ,neither,-personage nor scenery is
ever a mere pretext for. the other.
153
THE RENAISSANCE
Something like this seems to me to be the
vrate verity about Giorgione, if I may adopt a
serviceable expression, by which the French
recognise those more liberal and durable im-
pressions which, in respect of any really con-
siderable person or subject, anything that has
at all intricately occupied men's attention, lie
beyond, and must supplement, the narrower
range of the strictly ascertained facts about it.
In this, Giorgione is but an illustration of a
valuable general caution we may abide by in
all criticism. As regards Giorgione himself, we
have indeed to take note of all those negations
and exceptions, by which, at first sight, a " new
Vasari " seems merely to have confused our
apprehension of a delightful object, to have
explained away in our inheritance from past
time what seemed of high value there. Yet it
is not with a full understanding even of those
exceptions that one can leave off just at this
point. Properly qualified, such exceptions are
but a salt of genuineness in our knowledge ;
and beyond all those strictly ascertained facts,
we must take note of that indirect influence by
which one like Giorgione, for instance, enlarges
his permanent efficacy and really makes himself
felt in our culture. In a just impression of
that, is the essential truth, the vraie virite^ con-
cerning him.
1877.
154
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
In th5._jniddl£_ojLtk?-idxiC^ when
the^jpirit _Q£„,thje, ,Ilena^i§s
and_geople. had„.b,egu.n..to look hack with distaste
on . the,.mQxks of thq inid(i,le,^ge, the. old Gothic
manner had still one chance more, in borrowing
soiSietKm^'liTrojtii !th^^^ was about to
supplant it. In this way there was produced,
chiefTy in France, a new and peculiar phase of
taste wItTi~q^^^^^^ and a charm of its own,
blending the som&what attenuated grace of Italian
ornaunier^.jKith.lhe...general JDUtlines of Northern
design. It created the Chdteau de . Gailloriy as
you may still see it in the delicate engravings of
Israel,_SiIvestre — a Gothic donjon veiled faintly
by a surface_ of dainty Italian traceries — Chenon-
ceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the church of Brou.
In painting, there came from Italy workmen
like Maitre Roux and the masters of the school
of Fontainebleau, to _ have . their- later Italian
voluptuousness attempered Jby_ ..the__naiYe- and
silvery qualities, of the native style ; and it was
characteristic of these painters that they were
most ^successful in jp^ain ting on glass, an art so
lis
THE RENAISSANCE
essentially medieval. Taking. -it up_-where the
niiHaie age Had left it, thej found their whole
work among the last subtleties of colour and
line; ^hS' 'Tte^y^'^X^m^^ of
their material, they got^^mtc a jnew^or^er of
effecj^ from it, and felt their way t o refine ments
on^^olour never dreamed of by TKose" older
workmen, the glass-painters of Chartres or Lc
Mans. Wh3tjss^^::^^^BMMMm&^ France
is thuis not sp_.roji2x-tbe -introductiQn.,Q£AJKliolly
new taste rea^y;y_,,,!Uid,tmghl_it. a jrhangefulness
and variety of metre which kecjp the curiosity
always excited, so" that the veiry aspect" of it^ as it
1 58
JOACHIM DU BELL AY
lies writtenon the page, carries the eye lightly
onwards, and of which this is a good instance : —
yfvril, lu grace, et It ris
De Cypris,
Le flair et la douce haleine;
jivriL, le parfum des dieux,
^ui, des deux,
Sentent Vodeur de la plaine ;
(Test toy, courtois et gentily
^i, d^exil
Retire ces passageres,
Ces arondelles qui vant,
Et qui sent
Du printemps les messageres.
That is not by Ronsard, but by Remy Belleau,
for Ro nsard spoiL j£amg^ ta, ..haye a ..school. Six_
other_jx)ets threw in _ their . lot _ ..with - him in
his iiteraqL.„rje.Y.Qlu.tion,' — this Remy Belleau,
Antoine de Baif, Pontus de Tyard, ^tienne
Jodelle, Jean Daurat, and l^.ly_JpachiBn - du
Bell^jL; and with that^strange.iQ.v.c^o£L£mblems
whichjs characteristic ,Qff.hel^
all the_ . w.oxks „of . Francis the JEirst-with the
sa lam ander, and all the works of Jieniy^ .the
Sa^j^lwith the douhlfc^xresccnt, and all the
works of Anne of Brittany with the knotted
cord, they calLdLjJiem.selKes,lhe-^4?i?<3^^ seven in
all, although, as happens with the celestial Pleiad,
if you scrutinise this constellation of poets more
carefully you may find there a great number of
minor stars.
The first note .,e,£jthis=Etaraiy'r6vx3lutron" was
159
THE RENAISSANCE
®^'"^i£^_^Lj£?^^i51.,_4Hi,_??^lyL.B.-'i_i^^-t^i5 tract
wrmen_airtE£liiJiy::>^e=HS twenty-four, which
coming to us through three centuries seems of
yesterday, so full i s it of those j .elicate crit ical
di stinctio ns which are sometimes supposed
peculiar to modern writers. The piece has for
its title La_JDe^nse_ et Illustration de la I sMue
EzanQoyse ; and its_pxoblein Js hyo^_tajll^^
or ennoble the French 4,g^Rgttage.,.XQ..giK£dl^
We are accustomed to speak of the varied critical
and creative movement of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries as the Renaissance, and because
we have a single name for it we may sometimes
fancy^-^that There jjii^as'ffio^^^ the thing
itself thaji"|Eere^re.ally was. Even the Reforma-
tion, that other great movement of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, had far less unity, far less
of combined action, than is at first sight supposed ;
and the 'Renaissance was infinitely less united,
less conscious of combined action, than the
Reformation. But _ if anywhere the Re naissance
became conscious, as a German philosopher
might say, if ever it wasjmdg^toodjisjijyste^^^
movement by those jyho.toolt, part-in 4ti- it is in
thmrftleTbook" of Joachim du Bellay's, which it
islmpCTSsible'Td read without feeling the excite-
ment, the animation, of change, of discovery.
" It is a remarkable fact," says„M. 5ainte-Beuve,
"and an inversion of wHat is true of other
languages, that, in FtsBchv-prjase has always had
the precedence over poetry." Du Bellay's prose
"i'6o'
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
is pfi rfectly trans parent^ 6gjQJlL?x_fLP^ -£b?.?.t^: In
many_ways it is a more characteristic example of
the cijhure of the Pleiad thajj any,,. of ...its., verse ;
and those who love the whole movement of which
the Pleiad is a part, for a weird foreign grace in it,
and may be looking about for^jtrue specimen of
itj^cannot h£v;eji Jbetter than Joach
and thisTittle treatise of hisr
Du Beflai^ s object is to adjust the existing
French" cvffHir£3o .J^'^^J^ffis^d
culture^'^ancl in discussing this problem, and
developing the theories of the Pleiad, he has
^ig^i.9ijftEsa».pjMy..EanciEie4^1p,a^
and aj)^l|cability. There were some who despaired
of the French language altogether, who thought
it naturally incapable of the fulness and elegance
of Greek and Latin — ceite elegance et copje aui est.
en la langue Greque et Romame-^^^^t^zt science could"
be adequately discussed, and poetry nobly written,
only iri the dead languages. " Those who speak
thusr*"says"Du 'Bellay, " make me think of the
relics which one may only see through a little
pane of glass, and must not touch with one's
hands. That is what these people do with all
branches of culture, which they keep shut up
in Greek and Latin books, not permitting one to
see them otherwise, or transport them out of
dead words into those which are alive, and wing
their way daily through the mouths of men."
" LgJiguages," he says again, " are not born like
plants an(ftfees^;"TOme naturally feeble andsickly,
u i6i
THE RENAISSANCE
others healthy and strong and apter to bear the
weight of men's conceptions, but all their virtue
is generated in the world of cEoice^^and men's
freewfli concerning them. Therefore, I cannot
blame too strongly tlie rashness of some of our
countrymen, who being anything rather than
Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject with more
than stoical disdain everything written in French ;
nor can I express my surprise at the odd opinion
of some learned men who think that our vulgar
tongue is wholly incapable of erudition and good
literature."
It was an age _of^translations. Du Bellay
himself translatecf two Fooks of the Mneid, and
other poetry, old and new, and there were some
who thought that the translation of the classical
literature was the true means of ennobling the
French language : — strangers are ever favourites
with us — nous favorisons toujour s les etr angers.
Du Bellay moderates their expectations. " I d o
not believe that one can learn the right use of
them ^*-^^^^^eTs "speaking " of 'figures and ornament
in language — " frQm_ Jranslatipns, because it is
impossijjle to, reproduce jhem.w the same
grace with which the original author used them.
For each Janguage has I know not what peculi-
arity of hs own ; and if youjforce. _yx)urself to
express the-naturalness (/? natf) of this in another
language, observing the law of translation, —
not to expatiate beyond the limits of the
author himself, your words will be constrained,
\€'i
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
cold and ungraceful." Then he fixes the test of
all good translation : — " To prove this, read me
Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and
Virgil in French, and see whether they produce
in you the same affections which you experience
in reading those authors in the original."
In this effort ^o ennoble the Frenph
to give i t grace, number, perfection, and as
painters doTdtKeir'pictures, that last, so desirable,
touch — ceiie derntere main que nous desirons — what
Du Bellay is really pleading for is his rnpther-
tongue, the language, that is, in which one will
have the utmost degree of what is moving and
passionate. He recognised of what force the
music and dignity of languages are, how they
enter into the inmost part of things ; and in plead-
ing for the cultivation of the French language,
he is pleadm'g ior no merely scholastic interest,
but for Tfeedom, impulse, reality, not in litera-
tur'e"'^!^ but in daily communion of speech.
After all, it was impossible to have this impulse
in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut up in
books as in reliquaries — peris et mises en reli-
quaires de livres. By aid of this starveling
stock — pauvre plante et vergette — of the French
language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if
he is ever to speak so at all : that, or none,
must be for him the medium of what he calls, in
one of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses
mondaines — that discourse about affairs which
decides men's fates. And it is his patriotism
163
THE RENAISSANCE
not to despair of it ; he sees it already perfect in
all elegance and beauty of words — parfait en toute
ilegance et 'oinusti de paroles.
Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year
1525, the year of the battle of Pavia, and the
captivity of Francis the First. His parents
died early, and to him, as the younger son, his
mother's little estate, ce petit Lire, the beloved
place of his birth, descended. He was brought
up by a brother only a little older than himself ;
and left to themselves, the two boys passed their
lives in day-dreams of military glory. Their
education was neglected ; " The time of my
youth," says Du Bellay, "was lost, like the flower
which no shower waters, and no hand cultivates."
He was just twenty years old when the elder
brother died, leaving Joachim to be the guardian
of his child. It was with regret, with a shrink-
ing sense of incapacity, that he took upon him
the burden of this responsibility. Hitherto he
had looked forward to the profession of a soldier,
hereditary in his family. But at this time a
sickness attacked him which brought him cruel
sufferings, and seemed likely to be mortal. It
was then for the first time that he read the
Greek and Latin poets. These studies came too
late to make him what he so much desired to
be, a trifler in Greek and Latin verse, like so
many others of his time now forgotten ; instead,
they made him a lover of his own homely native
tongue, that poor starveling stock of the French
164
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
language. It was through this fortunate short-
coming in his education that he became national
and modern ; and he learned afterwards to look
back on that wild garden of his youth with only
a half regret. A certain Cardinal du Bellay
was the successful member of the family, a man
often employed in high official business. To
him the thoughts of Joachim turned when
it became necessary to choose a profession,
and in 1552 he accompanied the Cardinal to
Rome. He remained there nearly five years,
burdened with the weight of affairs, and
languishing with home-sickness. Yet it was
under these circumstances that his genius yielded
its best fruits. From Rome, so full of pleasur-
able sensation for men of an imaginative
temperament such as his, with all the curiosities
of the Renaissance still fresh in it, his thoughts
went back painfully, longingly, to the country
of the Loire, with its wide expanse of waving
corn, its homely pointed roofs of grey slate,
and its far-ofi" scent of the sea. He reached
home at last, but only to die there, quite
suddenly, one wintry day, at the early age of
thirty-five.
Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather
the age and school to which he belonged than
his own temper and genius. As with the
wriHngg bf Rbnsard and the other poets of the
Pleiad, its interest j^pjends,no.t. so jnuoh on the
impress of individual genius upon it, as onjthe
THE RENAISSANCE
cjicjimstaiire jhatvit .was pnce poetry: /i la mode^
that_it is j)art of the manne a time — a time
which made much of manner, and carried it to
a high degree ofperfection. .Xt_iS-.Qne--i?-f the
decorations ofan age. :^jSE threw -a^l-ar^-part of
its energy into the work of decoration. WeJael
a pensive pleasure ingaiiiiiig on these faded adorn-
ments, and observing how a ^roup qf.act]ixal men
and women pleased them^elveslong ago. Ronsard^
poems„arsLa .kinjd.pf fipitomcjo£hisag£u „Q£one side
of that, age, it is true, of .the.,stEenuous,-the pro-
gressive,^ the -serious..jnovemeat,^vKhich-was-^ea.
going. 9Ji,thereis„Jlittk.; . J>ut..o£thejcatholiG side,
the losing. s.ide^the^,.forlorn hope, hjuaUy^jL^figure
is ahsgjlt. , The Queen of Scots, at whose desire
Ronsard published his odes, reading him in her
northern prison, felt that he was bringing back
to her the true flavour of her early days in the
court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic
Italian gaieties. ThjQS.e„5siJ0!«disliked,that.poetry,
disliked.it because they found 'that "age itself
di&tastefdtr- The postiy-ef-Malherbe came, with
its sustained style and weighty sentiment, but
with nothing that set people singing ; and the
lovers of such poetry saw in the poetry of the
Pleiad only the latest trumpery of the middle
age. But the time arrived when the school of
Malherbe also had had its day ; and the Romanti-
cistSf who in their eagerness for excitement, for
strange music and imagery, went back to the
works of the middle age, accepted the Pleiad too
i66
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
with the rest ; andinJhat_iie}BL.middle age which
the^r^genius has evoked, the poetry of the Pleiad
has-Sun3[ its place. At first,"Imthl7MaIherbe,
you maythink it,Jike thejTchitecture, the whole
mode oFrrfeTthe very dresses of that time, fan-
tastic, faded, rococo. But if jou look long^ enough
to ^nderstari3f I t, to conceive its sentiment, you
will..find that_thpje,jK9R^ a spirit
giudjng thdr_,ca|)_rlces^_J^^ ;
onejtem£er_ has shaped the whole ; and every-
thing that has style," that has been done as no
other man or age could have done it, as it could
never, for all our trying, be done again, has its
true value and interest. Let us dwell upon it-
for a moment, and try to gather from it that
special flower, ce Jleur particulier, which Ronsard
himself tells us every garden has.
It is T^ioctx^^^^(^^oj^.th&,:^m^l&r^^i~i real passionsinsinug.te^heni-
selveSjj£d atleast Jfl^? Jeahty of death^^^Jj^ir
deiection "afThe thought of leaving^'this fair
abode of our common daylight — le beau sejour
du commun jour — is «pressed_by— ^hem w^l^
almost wearisome reiteration. But ^xsdth-^ this
sen^irKn'ri^J^SsX^3r?I^^^ *° ^^i^^- "^^^
imagery of death serves for delicate ornament,
and they weave into the airy nothingness of
their verses their trite reflections on^ the vanity
"TSgT
THE RENAISSANCE
ofJ[ife. Just so the grotesque details of the
charnel-house nest themselves, together with
birds and flowers and the fancies of the pagan
mythology, in the traceries of the architecture
of that time, which wantons in its graceful
arabesques with the images of old age and
death.
Ronsard became deaf at sixteen ; and it was
this circiiiSistance which finally determined him
to be a man of letters instead of a diplomatist,
significantly, one might fancy, of a certain pre-
mature agedness, and of the tranquil, temperate
sweetness appropriate to that, in the school of
poetry which he founded. Its charm is that of
a thing not vigorous or original, but full of the
grace which comes of long study and reiterated
refinements, and many steps repeated, and many
angles worn down, with an exquisite faintness,
une fadeur exquisCy a certain tenuity and caducity,
as for those who can bear nothing vehement or
strong ; for princes weary of love, like Francis
the First, or of pleasure, like Henry the Third,
or of action, like Henry the Fourth. IteJR^titS-
are those of the py,rr-^raqe„jaii4 Jjai§h,„.peifect
in minute detail. For these people are a little
jaded, and have a constant desire for a subdued
and delicate excitement, to warm their creeping
fancy a little. They love a constant change of
rhyme in poetry, and in their houses that strange,
fantastic interweavin'g of thin, reed -like lines,
which are a kind of rhetoric in architecture.
I/O
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
to the^ physiognomy of its„j^e,™but~^ its
country^^ir? pays du Vendomois — the nam,^s and
iS^nery of which so often recur in it : — the great
Loire, with its long spaces of white sand ; the
little river Loir ; the heathy, upland country,
with its scattered pools of water and waste road-
sides, and retired manors, with their crazy old
feudal defences half fallen into decay ; La Beauce,
where the vast rolling fields seem to anticipate
the great western sea itself. It is full of the
traits of that country. We see Du Bellay and
Ronsard gardening, or hunting with their dogs,
or watch the pastimes of a rainy day ; and with
all th is is connected a domesticity, a homeliness
an d siinpIe"- gQodneIv"h"y -j^ JI'Torthern
countFy-gatns-"up©n- the South. They have the
love of the aged for warmth, and understand
th e poetry o T"wliite'r f 'fsf ~T±rey "*^re not far
from the Atlantic, and the west wind which
comes up from it, turning the poplars white,
spares not this new Italy in France. So the
fireside often appears, with the pleasures of
the frosty season, about the vast emblazoned
chimneys of the time, and with a bonhomie as of
little children, or old people.
It is in Du Bellay's Olive^ a collection of
sonnets in praise of a half-imaginary lady, Sonnetz
a la louange d'Olvue, that these characteristics are
most abundant. Here is a perfectly crystallised
example : —
171
THE RENAISSANCE
D^ amour ^ de grace^ et de haulte valeur
Les feux divins estoient ceinctz et les cieulx
S'estoient vestuz d'un manteau precieux
A ra'iT. ardens de diverse couleur :
Tout estoit plein de beaute, de bonheur.
La mer tranquille, et le vent gracieulxy
^and celle la nasquit en ces has lieux
^i a pilli du monde tout I'honneur.
Elr prist son teint des beux lyx blanchissanSy
Son chefde Por, ses deux levres des rozeSy
Et du soleil sesyeux resplandissans :
Le del usant de liieralitSy
Mist en T esprit ses semences encloses.
Son nom des Dieux prist Vimmortaliti.
That he is thus a characteristic spe cime n of
the poeHcaI3asH^"^|31^3L~-^E,?j-.i?...,i^^ ^^
Bellay's'cEieF interest. But iif his work is to
have- the "highest sort or interest, if it is to do
something more than satisfy curiosity, if it is
to have an assthetic as distinct_fip,jij_.Aa-Jli§torical
value, it is not enough for j. poet, .ta^-have been
the true child of his age, to have conformed to
its aesthetic conditions, and by so conforming to
have charmed and stimulated that age ; it is
necessary that there should be perceptible in his
work soniething .individual* , inventivg,.jtijiiiiue,
the~impress there of the writer's own temper
and^j>er§snality. This impress M. Sainte-Beuve
thought he found in the Antiquitis de RomCy and
the Regrets f which he ranks as what has been
called pohie intime, that intensely modern sort of
poetry in which the writer has for his_aim the
portraitur e of his ow n mos t intimate moods, and
■' 172 ""-'*""■
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
to take th e rea der into his confidence. That
age had other^TnstarTces of this intimacy of
sentiment : Montaigne's Essays are full of it,
the carvings of the church of Brou are full of it.
M. Sainte-Beuve has perhaps exaggerated the
influence of this quality in Du Bellay's Regrets ;
but the very name of the book has a touch of
Rousseau about it, and reminds one of a whole
generation of self-pitying poets in modern times.
It was in the atmosphere of Rome, to him so
strange and mournful, that these pale flowers
grew up. For that journey to Italy, which he
deplored as the greatest misfortune of his life,
put him in full possession of his talent, and
brought out all its originality. And in efi^ect
you do fi nd intimacy, wtimi t^jherc. The trouble
o fhiT life is analysed, and the sentimen't'bf it
conveyed directly to our minds ; not_ a great
sorrow or pa.ssion, but only the sense of loss in
passing days, tTie^«^a/ of a dream,ei:._whp must
plunge into the world's affairs, the opposition
betweef T actu j.rhfeaJlC.tlie ideal,~a "longing for
rest, nostalgia, home-sickness — that pre-eminently
childish, but so suggestive sorrow, as significant
of the final regret of all human creatures for the
familiar earth and limited sky.
The feeling for landscape is often described as
a modern^ne .f ^till-more .50 'is that for antiquity,
the^enfiment of .ruins. -.D.u_ Bellay Jias_this senti-
m^ent*- The duration of the hard, sharp outlines
of things is a grief to him, and passing his weari-
173
THE RENAISSANCE
some days among the ruins of ancient Rome, he is
consoled by the thought that all must one day
end, by the sentiment of the grandeur of nothing-
ness — la grandeur du rien. With a strange touch
of far-off mysticism, he thinks that the great
whole — le grand tout — into which all other things
pass and lose themselves, ought itself sometimes
to perish and pass away. Nothing less can
relieve his weariness. From the stately aspects
of Rome his thoughts went back continually to
France, to the smoking chimneys of his little
village, the longer twilight of the North, the
soft climate of Anjou — la douceur Angevine ; yet
not so much to the real France, we may be sure,
with its dark streets and roofs of rough-hewn
slate, as to that other country, with slenderer
towers, and more winding rivers, and trees like
flowers, and with softer sunshine on more
gracefully-proportioned fields and ways, which
the fancy of the exile, and the pilgrim, and of
the schoolboy far from home, and of those kept
at home unwillingly, everywhere builds up
before or behind them.
He came home at last, through the Grisons,
by slow journeys ; and there, in the cooler air of
his own country, under its skies of milkier blue,
the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up.
There have been poets whose whole fame has
rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in
a Country Churchyard^ or Ronsard's, as many
critics have thought, on the eighteen lines of
174
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been
the poet of one poem ; and thisone poem of
hinr'an" Italian product transplanted into that
green countfy'orAnJ61ur;"but of the Latin verses
of Andrea Navagero, into French^ _But..it is a
composition__iji _ jyhich tH(r"matter is almost
nothiflgj_and_the^form d ; and
the 'fc)rm_of the poem as it stands, written in old
Fi:ench,^_is all Du Bellay's own. It._is_j, .song
which tbe™wi-niiow€rs~ar.e--^upposed to sing as
they^,.ma»OJy.«"the - CDjn,„aad . ..they invoke the
winds tolie lightly on the grain.
D'UN VANNEUR DE BLE AUX VENTS>
A vous trouppe leglre
^ui £aile passagire
Par le monde volez,
Et (Pun siffiant murmure
Uomhrageuse verdure
DouUement esbranlez.
foffre ces violettes,
Ces lis & ces fleuretteSy
Et ces roses icy^
Ces vermeilUttes roses
Sont freschement kloses,
Et ces aelliets aussi.
'A graceful translation of this and some other poems of the
Pleiad may be found in Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, by
Mr. Andrew Lang.
THE RENAISSANCE
De vostre doulce haleine
Eventez ceste plaint
EvenU% ce sejour ;
Ce pendant que fahanne
A mon bli que je vanne
A la chdleur du jour.
That has, in the highest degree, the qualities,
the valuej'-of the whole Pleiad- schJooi of. poetry,
of the whole phase of taste from which that
school derives — a c ertain s ihLeryLgrAC£- of . fanc y,
ne%rly.an th£ pkasure of whic^
at tb_e happy..and dgjftjexQiis^^atay in.5^^
slight in itself is.. haundled. The sweetness of it
is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you
crush wild herbs to get at their perfume. One
seems to hear the measured motion of the fans,
with a child's pleasure on coming across the
incident for the first time, in one of those great
barns of Du Bellay's own country, Im Beauce,
the granary of France. A sudden light trans-
figures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a wind-
mill, a winnowing fan, the dust in the barn door.
A moment— and the thing has vanished, because
it was pure effecTf bu^t iFTeaves a felishfteMM it,
a longing that the accident may fi^appen_ again.
1872.
xjh
WINCKELMANN
ET EGO IN ARCADIA FUI
Goethe's fragments of art- criticism contain a
few pages of strange pregnancy on the character
of Winckelmann. He speaks of the teacher who
had made his career possible, but whom he had
never seen, as of an abstract type of culture,
consummate, tranquil, withdrawn already into
the region of ideals, yet retaining colour from
the incidents of a passionate intellectual life.
He classes him with certain works of art,
possessing an inexhaustible gift of suggestion,
to which criticism may return again and again
with renewed freshness. Hegel, in his lectures
on the Philosophy of Art ^ estimating the work of
his predecessors, has also passed a remarkable judg-
ment on Winckelmann's writings : — " Winckel-
mann, by contemplation of the ideal works of the
ancienfs7~receiveff*lL Toffof'Tnspirali^ through
^-^^^^^g^„^-„^^g ^ -.^^^ sense for, the-.,study of
artr— He is to be regarded as one of those who,
in the sphere of art, have known how to initiate
a new organ for the human spirit." That it has
N 177
THE RENAISSANCE
given a new sense, that it has laid open a new
organ, is the highest that can be said of any.
critical effort. It is interesting then to ask what
kind of man it was who thus laid open a new
organ. Under what conditions was that effected ?
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born at
Stendal, in Brandenburg, in the year ^212* '^^^
child of a poor tradesman, he passed through
many struggles in early youth, the memory of
which ever remained in him as a fitful cause of
dejection. In 1763, in the full emancipation of
his spirit, looking over the beautiful Roman
prospect, he writes — " One gets spoiled here ;
but God owed me this ; in my youth I suffered
too much." Destmedjg, a,sjfii:tand.iatju::pK^
charm of the Hellenic„jpirit, he served first a
painful apprentkeship^in the tarnished intellectual
world_^o£lSermany in ithe 'Hrlier""haTr of the
eighteenth century. Passing out of that into the
happy light of the antique, he had a sense of
exhilaration almost physical. We find him as a
child in the dusky precincts of a German school,
hungrily feeding on a few colourless books. The
master of this school grows blind ; Winckelmann
becomes his famulus. The old man would have
had him study theology. Winckelmann, free of
the master's library, chooses rather to become
familiar with the Greek classics. Herodotus and
Homer win, with their " vowelled " Greek, his
warmest enthusiasm ; whole nights of fever arc
devoted to them ; disturbing dreams of an
178
WINCKELMANN
Odyssey of his own come to him. " He felt in
himself," says Madame de Stael, "an ardent
attcaction — towar ds — th€~-"«outh. linT"" tjerraan
imaginations even now traces are often to be
found of that love of the sun, that weariness of
the North {cette fatigue du nord), which carried
the northern peoples away into the countries
of the South. A fine sky brings to birth senti-
ments not unlike the love of one's Fatherland."
To most of us, after all our steps towards it,
the antique world, in spite of its intense outlines,
its own perfect self-expression, still remains faint
and remote. To him, closely limited except on
the side of the ideal, building for his dark poverty
" a house not made with hands," it early came
to seem more real than the present. In the
fantastic plans of foreign travel continually
passing through his mind, to Egypt, for instance,
and to France, there seems always to be rather a
wistful sense of something lost to be regained,
than the desire of discovering anything new.
Goethe has told us how, in his eagerness actually
to handle the antique, he became interested in
the insignificant vestiges of it which the neigh-
bourhood of Strasburg afforded. So we hear
of Winckelmann's boyish antiquarian wanderings
among the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. Such
a conformity between himself and Winckel-
mann, Goethe would have gladly noted.
At twenty- one he enters the University of
Halle, to study theology, as his friends desire ;
179
THE RENAISSANCE
instead, he becomes the enthusiastic translator of
Herodotus. The condition of Greek learning
in German schools and universities had fallen,
and there were no professors at Halle who could
satisfy his sharp, intellectual craving. Of his
professional education he always speaks with
scorn, claiming to have been his own teacher
from first to last. His appointed teachers did
not perceive that a new source of culture was
within their hands. Homo vagus et inconstans !
— one of them pedantically reports of the future
pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side his
irony was whetted. When professional education
confers nothing but irritation on a Schiller, no
one ought to be surprised ; for Schiller, and such
as he, are primarily spiritual adventurers. But
that Winckelmann, the votary of the gravest of
intellectual traditions, should get nothing but an
attempt at suppression from the professional
guardians of learning, is what may well surprise
us.
In 1743 he became master of a school at
Seehausen. This was the most wearisome period
of his life. Notwithstanding a success in dealing
with children, which seems to testify to something
simple and primeval in his nature, he found the
work of teaching very depressing. Engaged in
this work, he writes that he still has within him
a longing desire to attain to the knowledge of
beauty — sehnlich wunschte zur Kenntniss des SchSnen
zu gelangen. He had to shorten his nights,
180
WINCKELMANN
sleeping only four hours, to gain time for reading.
And here Winckelmann made a step forward
in culture. He multiplied his intellectual force
by detaching from it all flaccid interests. He
renounced mathematics and law, in which his
reading had been considerable,— r^all but the
literature of the arts. Nothing was to enter into
his~life"Tinpehetrated by its central enthusiasm.
At this time he undergoes the charm of Voltaire.
Voltaire belongs to that flimsier, more artificial,
classical tradition, which Winckelmann was one
day to supplant, by the clear ring, the eternal
outline, of the genuine antique. But it proves
the authority of such a gift as Voltaire's that it
allures and wins even those born to supplant it.
Voltaire's impression on Winckelmann was never
effaced ; and it gave him a consideration for
French literature which contrasts with his
contempt for the literary products of Germany.
German literature transformed, siderealised, as
we see it in Goethe, reckons Winckelmann
among its initiators. But Germany at that
time presented nothing in which he could
have anticipated Iphigenie^ and the formation of
an effective classical tradition in German
literature.
Under this purely literary influence,
Winckelmann protests against Christian Wolif
and the philosophers. Goethe, in speaking of
this protest, alludes to his own obligations to
Emmanuel Kant. Kant's influence over the
i8i
THE RENAISSANCE
culture of Goethe, which he tells us could not
have been resisted by him without loss, consisted
in a severe limitation to the concrete. But he adds,
that in born antiquaries, like Winckelmann, a
constant handling of the antique, with its eternal
outline, maintains that limitation as effectually
as a critical pihilosophy. Plato, however, saved
so often for his redeeming literary manner, is
excepted from Winckelmann's proscription of
the philosophers. The modern student most
often meets Plato on that side which seems to
pass beyond Plato into a world no longer pagan,
based upon the conception of a spiritual life. But
the element of afHnity which he presents to
Winckelmann is that which is wholly Greek,
and alien from the Christian world, represented
by that group of brilliant youths in the Lysis^
still uninfected by any spiritual sickness, finding
the end of all endeavour in the aspects of the
human form, the continual stir and motion of a
comely human life.
This new-found interest in Plato's dialogues
could not fail to increase his desire to visit • the
countries of the classical tradition. "It is my
misfortune," ^e writes, " that I was not born to
great place, wherein I might have had cultivation,
and the opportunity of following my instinct and
forming myself." A visit to Rome probably
was already designed, and he silently preparing
for it. Count Biinau, the author of a historical
work then of note, had collected at Nothenitz a
182
WINCKELMANN
valuable library, now part of the library of
Dresden. In 1748 Winckelmann wrote to
Bunau in halting French : — He is emboldened,
he says, by Bunau's indulgence for needy men
of letters. He desires only to devote himself to
study, having never allowed himself to be dazzled
by favourable prospects in the Church. He hints
at his doubtful position " in a metaphysical age,
by which humane literature is trampled under
foot. At present," he goes on, "little value is
set on Qreek literature, to which I have devoted
myself so far as I could penetrate, when good
books are so scarce and expensive." Finally^ he
desires a place in some corner of Biinau's library.
" Perhaps, at some future time, I shall become
more useful to the public, if, drawn from
obscurity in whatever way, I can find means to
maintain myself in the capital."
Soon afterwards we find Winckelmann in the
library at Nothenitz. Thence he made many
visits to the collection of antiquities at Dresden.
He became acquainted with many artists, above
all with Oeser, Goethe's future friend and master,
who, uniting a high culture with the practical
knowledge of art, was fitted to minister to
Winckelmann's culture. And now a new channel
of communion with the Greek life was opened
for him. Hitherto he had handled the words
only of Gr£ek_£oeti^,jstirred indeed and roused
by them, yet divining beyond the words some
unexpressed pulsation of sensuous life. Suddenly
183
THE RENAISSANCE
he is in contact with that life, still fervent in the
relics of plastic art. Filled as our culture is with
the classical spirit, we can hardly imagine how
deeply the human mind was moved, when, at
the Renaissance, in the midst of a frozen world,
the buried fire of ancient art rose up from under
the soil. Winckelmann here reproduces for us
the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance. On a
sudden the imagination feels itself free. How
facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of
the senses and the understanding, when once we
have apprehended it ! Here, surely, is that more
liberal mode of life we have been seeking so long,
so near to us all the while. How mistaken and
roundabout have been our efforts to reach it by
mystic passion, and monastic reverie ; how they
have deflowered the flesh ; how little have they
really emancipated us ! Hermione melts from
her stony posture, and the lost proportions of life
right themselves. Here, then, in vivid realisation
we see the native tendency of Winckelmann to
escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the
exercise of sight and touch. Lessing, in the
Laocoon, has theorised finely on the relation of
poetry to sculpture ; and philosophy may give us
theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculpture
should be the niQst_siiicsxeiad exact expression of
the G^reek ideal. By a hag^:^unperplexed dex-
terity, Winckelmann §plKesjth£gu^
cret'e.' It is'wliat Goethe calls his Geivahrwerden
der griechischen Kunsty \ii% finding of Greek art.
WINCKELMANN
Through_ th^^tu^mult^^^^^ of Goethe's
culture, th^JnflueQse, p£ Vi^inckeimann is always
discerniW5,.35^the-StrQng,^ regulative under-current
of a clear, antique motive. " One iearns nothing
from "TiimT*" lie says to Eckermann, "but one
becomes something." If we ask what the secret
of this influence was, Goethe himself will tell
us — wholenfissuinity_B;itl( .one's self, intellectual
integrity. And yet these expressions, because they
fit Goethe, with his universal culture, so well,
seem hardly to describe the narrow, exclusive
interest of Winckelmann. Doubtless Winckel-
mann's perfection is a nj.rrow:_per|'e.cfi^ : his
feverish nursing of thie one motive of his life is
a cc^trast_jEQl5^QetHe*sL . various energy. But
whaL_affeGt^-G©ethe, what instructed him and
ministered to his culture, was jh£_Jntegrityj_the
truth to its type, of the given force. The develop-
ment of jln,s„TgrceT.was~dEi€-^single in of
Windkelmann, unembarrassed by anything else
in him. Other interests, practical or intellectual,
those slighter talents and motives not supreme,
which in most men are the waste part of nature,
and drain away their vitality, he plucked out and
cast from him. The protracted longing of his
youth is not a vague, romantic longing : he knows
what he longs for, what he wills. Within its
severe limits his enthusiasm burns like lava.
" You know," says Lavater, speaking of Winckel-
mann's countenance, " that I consider ardour and
indifference by no means incompatible in the
i8s
THE RENAISSANCE
same character. If ever there was a striking
instance of that union, it is in the countenance
before us." " A lowly childhood," says Goethe,
"insufficient instruction in youth, broken, dis-
tracted studies in early manhood, the burden of
school-keeping ! He was thirty years old before
he enjoyed a single favour of fortune : but so
soon as he had attained to an adequate condition
of freedom, he appears before us consummate
and entire, complete in the ancient sense*"
But his hair is turning grey, and he has not
yet reached the south. The Saxon court had
become Roman Catholic, and the way to favour
at Dresden was through Roman ecclesiastics.
Probably the thought of a profession of the
papal religion was not new' to Winckelmann.
At one time he had thought of begging his way
to Rome, from cloister to cloister, under the
pretence of a disposition to change his faith. In
1 75 1, the papal nuncio ^ Archinto, was one of the
visitors at Nothenitz. He suggested Rome as
the fitting stage for Winckelmann's accomplish-
ments, and held out the hope of a place in the
Pope's library. Cardinal Passionei, charmed
with Winckelmann's beautiful Greek writing,
was ready to play the part of Maecenas, if
the indispensable change were made. Winckel-
mann accepted the bribe, and visited the nuncio
at Dresden. Unquiet still at the word "pro-
fession," not without a struggle, he joined the
Roman Church, July the nth, 1754.
186
WINCKELMANN
Goethe boldly pleads that Winckelmann was
a pagan, that the landmarks of Christendom
meant nothing to him. It is clear that he
intended to deceive no one by his disguise ; fears
of the inquisition are sometimes visible during
his life in Rome ; he entered Rome notoriously
with the works of Voltaire in his possession ; the
thought of what Count Biinau might be thinking
of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty.
On the other hand, he may have had a sense of
a certain antique and as it were pagan grandeur
in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning
from the crabbed Protestantism, which had been
the ennui of his youth, he might reflect that
while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renais-
sance, the Protestant principle in art had cut off
Germany from the supreme tradition of beauty.
And yet to that transparent nature, with its
simplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of
absolute sincerity must have been a real loss.
Goethe understands that Winckelmann had made
this sacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest
criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann may be absolved.
The insincerity of his religious profession was
only one incident of a culture in which the
moral instinct, like the religious or political, was
merged in the artistic. But then the artistic
interest was that, by desperate faithfulness to
which Winckelmann was saved from the medio-
crity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves
ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one
187
THE RENAISSANCE
chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect.
There have been instances of culture developed
by every high motive in turn, and yet intense at
'every point ; and the aim of our culture should
be to attain not only as intense but as complete
A life as possible. But often the higher life is
only possible at all, on condition of the selection
of that in which one's motive is native and strong ;
and this selection involves the renunciation of a
crown reserved for others. Which is better? —
to lay open a new jense^^f o_initiate. a. new organ
for the~&urnan 'spirit, c»:,..to., cultivate many types
of perfecfibri iip to a point _which. leaves us still
beyond the_rang,e--of their transforming power ?
Savsnarsla. is one type of success ; Winckelmann
is another ; criticism^ca^ rejf,gl..^
each is true to^itself, Winckelmann himself
explamslHernotive of his life when he says, " It
will be my highest reward, if posterity acknow-
ledges that I have written worthily."
For a time he remained at Dresden. There
his first ho^^^^^3M.^^r Thoughts on the Imitation
of GreekW^rkTof Art in Painting and Sculpture.
Full of obscurities'as if "was, obscurities which
baffled but did not offend Goethe when he first
turned to art-criticism, its purpose was direct —
an appeal from the artificial classicism of the
day to the study of the antique. The book was
well received, and a pension supplied through
the king's confeSsor. In September 1755 he
started for Ronie, in the company of a young
188
WINCKELMANN
Jesuit. He was introduced to Raphael Mengs,
a painter then of note, and found a home near
him, in the artists' quarter, in a place where he
could " overlook, far and wide, the eternal city."
At first he was perplexed with the sense of being
a stranger on what was to him, spiritually, native
soil. " Unhappily," he cries in French, often
selected by him as the vehicle of strong feeling,
" I am one of those whom the Greeks call
o^fri/xaOeK. — I have come into the world and into
Italy too late." More than thirty years after-
wards, Goethe also, after many aspirations and
severe preparation of mind, visited Italy. In
early manhood, just as he too w^s^nding Greek art,
the rumour of that true artist's life of Winckel-
mann in Italy had strongly moved him. At
Rome, spending a whole year drawing from the
antique, in preparation for Iphigeniey he finds the
stimulus of Winckelmann's memory ever active.
Winckelmann's Roman life was simple, primeval,
Greek. His delicate constitution permitted him
the use only of bread and wine. Condemned by
many as a renegade, he had no desire for places
of honour, but only to see his merits acknow-
ledged, and existence assured to him. He was
simple without being niggardly ; he desired to
be neither poor nor rich.
Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all
the elements of an intellectual situation of the
highest interest. The beating of the soul
against its bars, the sombre aspect, the alien tradi-
189
THE RENAISSANCE
tions, the still barbarous literature of Germany,
are afar off; before him are adequate conditions
of culture, the sacred soil itself, the first tokens
of the advent of the new German literature,
with its broad horizons, its boundless intellectual
promise. Dante, passing from the darkness of
the Inferno, is filled with a sharp and joyful sense
of light, which makes him deal with it, in the
opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully touch-
ing and penetrative wiay. Hellenism, which is
the principle pre-eminently of intellectual light
(our modern culture may have more colour, the
medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but
Hellenism is pre-eminent for light), has always
been most effectively conceived by those who
have crept into it out of an intellectual world in
which the sombre elements predominate. So it
had been in the ages of the Renaissance. This
repression, removed at last, gave force and glow
to Winckelmann's native affinity to the Hellenic
spirit. "There had been known before him,"
says Madame de Stael, " learned men who might
be consulted like books ; but no one had, if I may
say so, made himself a pagan for the purpose of
penetrating antiquity.""""" One is always, a poor
executant of conceptions not " one*s ~ own." — On
execute niat ce qiHon n*a pas congu sot-mime^ —
are true in their measure of every genuine
enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, — that, in the broad
Platonic sense of \ht PfCdedrusy was the secret of
• Words of Charlotte Corday before the Cenvetitm.
190
WINCKELMANN
hi s divinatory power aver jhe He\li^n{c. world.
This enthusiasm, dependent as it. is. to a great
deg^e on~^Bo311y temperament, has -a--p0wer
or re-enforcing t h e purer emgtiQns of the
intellect with an almost physical..,,.excitement.
That nis aSmity_^_with JHp.ile was not
merely~intellectual, that the subtler threads of
temperanienf 'were inwoven in it, is proved by
his rdmantf c^ Fervent friendships with .young men.
He has known, he says, many young men more
beautiful than Guide's archangel. These friend-
ships, bringing him into contact with the pride of
human form, and staining the thoughts with its
bloom, perfected his reconciliation to the spirit
of Greek sculpture. A letter on taste, addressed
from Rome to a young nobleman, Friedrich von
Berg, is the record of such a friendship.
" I shall excuse my delay," he begins, " in
fulfilling my promise of an essay on the taste for
beauty in works of art, in the words of Pindar.
He says to Agesidamus, a youth of Locri —
ISia re koKov, &pa re KSKpafi^vov whom he had kept
waiting for an intended ode, that a debt paid
with usury is the end of reproach. This may
win your good-nature on behalf of my present
essay, which has turned out far more detailed
and circumstantial than I had at first intended.
" It is from yourself that the subject is taken.
Our intercourse has been short, too short both
for you and me ; but the first time I saw you,
the affinity of our spirits was revealed to me :
191
THE RENAISSANCE
your culture proved that my hope was not
groundless ; and I found in a beautiful body a
soul created for nobleness, gifted with the sense
of beauty. My parting from you was therefore
one of the most painful in my life ; and that this
feeling continues our common friend is witness,
for your separation from me leaves me no hope
of seeing you again. Let this essay be a
memorial of our friendship, which, on my side,
is free from every selfish motive, and ever re-
mains subject and dedicate to yourself alone."
The following passage is characteristic —
" As it is confessedly the beauty of man which
is to be conceived under one general idea, so I
have noticed that^ those who^ are observant of
beauj j only in women, and are move3~Tltde or
not at all by jthe feeauty^fjm
impartial, vital, inborn fristinct for beauty in art.
To such pejsQAs,,the-..beauty.,pf Greek art will
ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty
is rather irtiilfe thanffetni'ilie.' But tlie b eauty of art
demands a higher sensibility thanj^ip[ie...b.eauty
of jnattife;" bec ause tfie beauty o f art, like-tears
shed at^jilay, gives no pain, isjvithou,t_.life».-and
musT be awakened"' aricP^ „by, culture.
Now, as the jniojtjdt cukiureis much-more ardent
in yottJ;^.jliaain. manhood, the instinct of which
I am speaking must b e exercised and direct ed to
what Js beautiful, before jthat^age isjieached, at
which one"wouI3"K alraid to confess that one
had no taste for it."
192
WINCKELMANN
Certainly, of that beauty of living form which
regulated Winckelmann's friendships, it could
not be said that it gave no pain. One notable
friendship, the fortune of which we may trace
through his letters, begins with an antique,
chivalrous letter in French, and ends noisily in a
burst of angry fire. Far from reaching the
quietism, the bland indifference of art, such
attachments are nevertheless more susceptible
than any others of equal strength of a purely
intellectual culture. Of passion, of physical
excitement, they contain only just so much as
stimulates the eye to the finest delicacies of colour
and form. These friendships, often the caprices
of a moment, make Winckelmann's letters, with
their troubled colouring, an instructive but bizarre
addition to the History of Art, that shrine of grave
and mellow light around the mute Olympian
family. The impression which Winckelmann's
literary life conveyed to those about him was
that of excitement, intuition, inspiration, rather
than the contemplative evolution of general
principles. The quick, susceptible enthusiast,
betraying his temperament ev6n in appearance,
by his olive complexion, his deep-seated, piercing
eyes, his rapid _m£yements,^jLppXfih,ended the
subtlesjt principles of tbcHellenic manner, not
througli the understanding^^butby Jnstinct or
touch'. A German' Hograpirer^oF"Winckelmann
has compared him to Columbus. That is not
the aptest of comparisons ; but it reminds one of
o 193
THE RENAISSANCE
a passage in which Edgar Quinet describes the
great discoverer's famous voyage. His science
was often at fault ; but he had a way of esti-
mating at once the slightest indication of land,
in a floating weed or passing bird ; he seemed
actually to come nearer to nature than other
men. And that world in which others had
moved with so much embarrassment, seems to
call out in Winckelmann new senses fitted to
deal with it. He is in touch with it ; it
penetrates him, and becomes part of his tempera-
ment. He remodels his writings with constant
renewal of insight ; he catches the thread of a
whole sequence of laws in some hollowing of the
hand, or dividing of the hair ; he seems to
realise that fancy of the reminiscence of a
forgotten knowledge hidden for a time in the
mind itself; as if the mind of one, lover and
philosopher at once in some phase of pre-
existence — ^i\o£ro<^^o-os Trore fih-' epatToi — fallen into
a new cycle, were beginning its intellectual
career over again, yet with a certain power of
anticipating its results. So comes the truth of
Goethe's judgments on his works ; they are a
life, a living thing, designed for those who are
alive — ein Lebendiges filr die Lebendigen geschrieben^
ein Leben selbst.
In 1758 Cardinal Albani, who had formed in
his Roman villa a precious collection of antiqui-
ties, became Winckelmann's patron. Pompeii
had just opened its treasures ; Winckelmann
194
WINCKELMANN
gathered its first-fruits. But his pAan_pf.a visit
to Greece_rsmained.unfulfilledv Fr^^ first
arrivaHn^omeJbehad kept^^^
-^'■^_..?Yer.in view. All hi'fe otHer'writings were
a pfefafatiOTifQr._that.~'~If~appe^edi "filially, in
1764 ; but even after its publication Winckel-
mann was still employed in perfecting it. It is
since his time that many of the most significant
examples of Greek art have been submitted to
criticism. He^hadjegaJittlej^rnothing of what
we ascribe to the age pi.^Eheidias.; and his con-
cept ion oTGreeK ar t tendSj therefore, to put the
mere elegance o f the imperial society of ancient
Rome m place oFtHeVevere and chastened grace
of~the palaestra. For the most^art he_.had to
penetrat£ to Greek art tl^^
and latejr^R,pman art itself; and it is not surpris-
ingtKat this turbid medium has left in Winckel-
mann's actual results much that a more privileged
criticism can correct.
He had been twelve years in Rome. Admir-
ing Germany had made many calls to him. At
last, in 1768, he set out to revisit the country of
his birth ; and as he left Rome, a strange, inverted
home-sickness, a strange reluctance to leave it at
all, came over him. He reached Vienna. There
he was loaded with honours and presents : other
cities were awaiting him. Goethe, then nine-
teen years old, studying art at Leipsic, was
expecting his coming, with that wistful eager-
ness which marked his youth, when the news
»95
THE RENAISSANCE
of WInckelmann's murder arrived. All his
" weariness of the North " had revived with
double force. He left Vienna, intending to
hasten back to Rome, and at Trieste a delay of
a few days occurred. With characteristic open-
ness, Winckelmann had confided his plans to a
fellow-traveller, a man named Arcangeli, and had
shown him the gold medals received at Vienna.
Arcangeli's avarice was aroused. One morning
he entered Winckelmann's room, under pretence
of taking leave. Winckelmann was then writing
" memoranda for the future editor of the History
of Art " still seeking the perfection of his great
work. Arcangeli begged to see the medals once
more. As Winckelmann stooped down to take
them from the chest, a cord was thrown round
his neck. Some time afterwards, a child with
whose companionship Winckelmann had beguiled
his delay, knocked at the door, and receiving
no answer, gave the alarm. Winckelmann was
found dangerously wounded, and died a few hours
later, after receiving the last sacraments. It
seemed as if the gods, in reward for his devotion
to them, had given him a death which, for its
swiftness , and its opportunity, he might well
have desired. " He has," says Goethe, " the
advantage of figuring in the memory of posterity,
as one eternally able and strong ; for the. image
in which one leaves the world is that in which
"one moves among the shadows." Yet, perhaps,"
It is not fanciful to regret that his proposed
196
WINCKELMANN
meetijig_witlLfioeLhe.never_tflLQk.-place. Goethe,
then in all the pregnancy of his wonderful youth,
still unruffled by the " press and storm " of his
earlier manhood, was awaiting Winckelmann
with a curiosity of the worthiest kind. As
it was, Winckelmann became to him something
like what Virgil was to Dante. And Winckel-
mann, with his fiery friendships, had reached
that age and that period of culture at which
emotions hitherto fitful, sometimes concentrate
themselves in a vital, unchangeable relation-
ship. German literary history seems to have
lost the chance of one of those famous friend-
ships, the very tradition of which becomes a
stimulus to culture, and exercises an imperishable
influence.
In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raphael
has commemorated the tradition of the Catholic
religion. Against a space of tranquil sky, broken
in upon by the beatific vision, are ranged the
great personages of Christian history, with the
Sacrament in the midst. Another fresco of
Raphael in the same apartment presents a very
different company, Dante alone appearing in
both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek
mythology, under a thicket of laurel, sits
Apollo, with the sources of Castalia at his feet. '
On either side are grouped those on whom the
spirit of Apollo descended, the classical and
Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of Castalia
197
THE RENAISSANCE
come down, a river making glad this other " city
of God." In this fresco it is the classical tra-
dition, the orthodoxy of taste, that Raphael
commemorates. Winckelmann's intellectual
history authenticates the claims of this tradition
in human culture. In the countries where that
tradition arose, where it still lurked about its
own artistic relics, and changes of language had
not broken its continuity, national pride might
sometimes light up anew an enthusiasm for
it. Aliens might imitate that enthusiasm, and
classicism become from time to time an intel-
lectual fashion. But Wincke lmann was not
further removed by language, than by local
aspects and associations, from those vestiges of
the classical spirit ; and he liyed.AJt„a.. time -when,
in Germany, classical studies were out of favour.
Yet, remote in time and place, he feels after the
Hellenic world, divines those channels of ancient
art, in which its life still circulates, and, like Scyles,
the half-barbarous yet Hellenising king, in the
beautiful story of Herodotus, is irresistibly attracted
by it. This testimony to the authority of the
Hellenic tradition, its fitness to satisfy some vital
requirement of the intellect, which Winckelmann
contributes as a solitary man of genius, is offered
also by the general history of the mind. The
spiritual forces of the past, which have prompted
and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live,
indeed, within that culture, but with an absorbed,
underground life. The_ Hellenicclement alone
198
WINCKELMANN
has not been so absorbed, or content with this
underground life ; from time to^tmie it. has started
to thejsurfac?,.; culture, J5.as^ been drawn back to
its squrceaJto.be clarified and- corrected, ^.^^ellen-
ism is aiotljner.ely„,an absorbed element in our
intellectual life ; it is a conscious tradition in it.
Again, individual genius works ever under
conditions ., of. time,, and place: its products are
coloured by the varying aspects of nature, and
type of human form, and outward manners of
life. There is thus an element of change in art ;
criticism must never for a moment forget tha^
" the artist is the child of his time." But besides
these conditions _of_time and place, andjndepen-j
dent of them^iJthere is ^Is^o^ an element ...o
perniangnce,, a. standard of taste, which geniu^
confesses, ibiis- standard . is , maintained in d
purely „ intellectual ,tradition. It acts upgn the
artist, not as one of the influences of his own
age, but through_ those .artistic , pro of the
previous generation -which first excited, while
they directed into a particular channel,, his
sense of beauty. The supreme artistic products
of succeeding generations^t-husform a series or
elevated, points, taking each from- each .the re-
flection of a strange, light, thg. source of w^^ is
not in the atmosphere around and above them,
but in a stage of society remote from ours. The
standa£d_Qif -taste, then, was fixed in Greece, at a
definite historical period. A tradition for all suc-
ceeding generations, it originates in a spontaneous"
199
THE RENAISSANCE
growth out of the influences of Greek society.
What were the conditions under which this
ideal, "this standard^^of a^^^ was
generated ? How was Greece enabled to force
its thought uponJEurope ?
Gfeeik" aft, when we .iirst catch sieht of it,
is entanffled with Greek religion. We are ac-
customed to think of Greek religion as the
religion of art and beauty, the religion of which
the Olympian Zeus and the Athena Polias are
the idols, the poems of Homer the sacred books.
Thus Cardinal Newman speaks of " the classical
polyri^^j^m which was gay and graceful, as was
naturaiT in a civilised age." Yet such a view is
on ly a partial one. In it the eye isTixed on the
sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture, but
loses sight of the sombre world across which it
strikes. Greek. religion, where we can observe
it most distinctly, is at once a r^;^ gni.fi ^ent
ritualistic system, aad_a ^ycle of poetij ial con-
ceptions. " Religions^ as they grow by natural
laws out of man's life,_are modified by whatever
mgdifieslhisirfei ~THey brigliten under a bright
sky, they become liberal as the social range
widens, they grow intense and shrill in the clefts
of human life, where the spirit is narrow and
confined, and the stars are visible at noonday ;
and a fine analysis of these differences is one of
the gravest functions of religious criticism. Still,
the__brgad_ foundation, in mere humanjiature, of
all religions as they^exisn^t^^
200
WINCKELMANN
is a universal pagan sentiment, a paganism which
existedJje^torejheGxFeE'feirglo^nTajiS^^
far pnwa rd into the Chri^tian"wodd^Qera^^
like some persistent vegetable growth, because
its seedj s an element of the ysry.soilijutof which
it springs.
This pagan sentiment measures the sadness
with which the human" "mind~is -filled, whenever
its thou||5ts-j^aiidef/fervfrom whjit is here, and
n o wi' ■< "'Uisbeset by notions of irresistible natural
powers, for the most part ranged against man,
but the secret also of his fortune, making the
earth golden and the grape fiery for him. He
ma kes gods in his own image, gods smiHng
and flower -crowne37"or°°BleeHrng by some sad
fatality, to console him by their wounds, never
closed from generation to generation. It is
with a rus^ of-homfi.-si,^ne,ss that the thought
of de ath p resents itself. He would remain at
home for ever on the earth if he could. As it
loses its colour and the senses fail, he clings ever
closer to it ; but since the moulderingof bones
and fles h must go on to the end,' he is careful for
charms and talismans, which may chance to have
some frTendiy powerm them, when "the inevitable
shipwxeck comes. Suc h se ntiment „i.s.,.a.^part of
the eternal bas is of all religions, modified indeed
by change of time^n^ j>lace,^urindestfiictible,
because its_ root is so deep in tKe'^^rtirof man's
natgjLe. The" breath oTrefigTouFTmliSloiT^
over them ; a few " rise up with wings as eagles,"
20I
THE RENAISSANCE
but the broad level of religious life is not per-
manently changed. Religious progress, like all
purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few.
This sentiment attaches itself in the earliest times
to certain usages of patriarchal life, the kindling
of fire, the washing of the body, the slaughter of
the flock, the gathering of harvest, holidays and
dances. Here are the beginnings of a ritual, at
first as occasional and unfixed as the sentiment
which it expresses, but destined to become the
permanent element of religious life. The usages
of patriaxchal-life change-- but this germ of ritual
remains, promoted now with a consciously religious
motive, losing its domes.tjc.cha.ra(Cter,.and therefore
becoming more and more inexplicable with each
generatidfi7''°~Sljcnpagan worship, in spite of local
variations, essentially one, is an element in all
religions. It JA..the ani)dyTie_which the religious
principle, like one administering opiates to the
incurable, has' addled to" thie' law which makes
life sombre for the vasrm^ of mankind.
More definite ^religious conceptions come from
other sources, «and„fix-.themselves upon this ritual
in various, ways, changing it^ and giving it new
"^^,^ffi"gs- In Qm?£S».i£^W«£ei-e;-.^epivedfrom
i^J^&Qbgy, itse lf not d ue to^a^religiousjouree at
all, but deve]5ping_ijgLil^,CPjiu:js&..60ime into a
body..of,rdigiaBS,CQnc,ep,tiQiis^entirely4^^ in
foTJ^a^axid character. To the unprqgressive ritual
element it brought these conceptions, itself —
7 irrepov SvvafM^, the power of the wing — an element
303
WINCKELMANN
of refinement, of ascension, with the promise of
an endless destiny. While, the -ritual remains
unchanged, the assthetic element, only accidentally
connected^ with it, expands with the freedom and
mobility of the things of thejntellect. ,_AljvaySj^
the fixeot' element ialBie.Teiigipus observance ; the
fluid, unfixed element is the myth, the religious
conception. This religion is itself pagan, and has
in any broad view of it the pagan sadness. It
does not at once, and for the majority, become the
higher Hellenic religion. The country people,
of course, cherish the unlovely idols of an earlier
time, such as those which Pausanias found still
devoutly preserved in Arcadia. Athenasus tells
the story of one who, coming to a temple of
Latona, had expected to find some worthy pre-
sentment of the mother of Apollo, and laughed
on seeing only a shapeless wooden figure. The
wilder people have wilder gods, which, however,
in Athens, or Corinth, or Lacedaemon, changing
ever with the worshippers in whom they live and
move and have their being, borrow something of
the lordliness and distinction of human nature
there. Greek religion too has its mendicants,
its purifications, its antinomian mysticism, its
garments ofifered to the gods, its statues worn
with kissing, its exaggerated superstitions for the
vulgar only, its worship of sorrow, its addolorata,
its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild or
melancholy note of the medievaT"church but was
anticipated by Greek poljrth'elsiii T' ' Wbat should
"203
THE RENAISSANCE
we have thought of the vertiginous prophetess
at the very centre of Greek religion ? The
supreme Hellenic culture is a sharp edge of
light across this gloom. The fiery, stupefying
wine becomes in a happier climate clear and
exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo,
rational, chastened, debonair, with his unbroken
daylight, always opposed to the sad Chthonian
divinities, is the aspiring element, by force and
spring of which Greek religion sublimes itself.
Out of Greek religion, under, happy conditions,
arises. .Greek„.ar,t, .to^ minister tojhuman culture.
It was the privilege, of Greek religion to be able
to transform itself into ,an_ artigtigjideal.
Fo£. the thoughts of the Greeks aboiit them-
selves, and their relation to-ihe world generally,
were ever in the happiest readiness to be trans-
formed into objects for the senses. In this, lies
the-main-distinct-ien-between GTeek"'art"ahd the
mystical, ait-of the Christian middle:age,. which
is abyay5..strugglij3g_ to.„cxpr.ess. thoughts -beyond
itself— Take, for instance, a characteristic work
of the middle age, Angelico's Coronation of the
Virgin, in theclDiste^ of A!?^/«/*2tftfri'j at Florence.
In some strange halo of a moon Jesus and the
Virgin Mother are seated, clad in mystical white
raiment, half shroud, half priestly linen. Jesus,
with rosy nimbus and the long pale hair — tanquam
lana alba et tanquam nix — of the figure in the
Apocalypse, with slender finger-tips is setting
a crown of pearl on the head of Maryi who,
204
WINCKELMANN
corpse-like in her refinement, is bending forward
to receive it, the light lying like snow upon her
forehead. Certainly, it cannot be said of Angelico's
fresco that it throws into a sensible form our
highest thoughts about man and his relation to
the world; but it did not do this adequately
even for Angelico. For him, all that is outward
or sensibte'iii 'his work — the hair like wool, the
rosy nimbus, the crown of pearl — is only the
sym bol or ty pe of a really inexpressible world,
to which_he wishes to direct the thoughts ; he
would^hav^JshFuTik ffom the notion that what
the eye apprelenHedVasalir Such forms of art,
then, are madequate to the matter they clothe ;
they remain ever below its level. ^Something of
this kind is true also of oriqntal art. ,A£lia the
middle age" from an eixaggerated mwardness, so
in thelEa^tTrom a vagueness, a want of definition,
in thought, the matter presented to art is un-
manageable, "and the Torms of sense struggle
vainly w;ith it. The many-headed gods of the
East, the orientalised, many-breasted Diana of
Ephesus, like Angelico's fresco, are at best over-
charged symbols, a means of hinting at an idea
which art cannot fitly or completely express,
which still remains in the world of shadows.
Melos. That is in no sense a_symbol, a sugges-
tion, of anything^'beyond Tts own victorious fair-
ness. "The rhind _begins and ends with the finite •
image, yet loses no part oFtlie ^ntual motive.
THE RENAISSANCE
That motive is not lightly and loosely attached
to the sensuous form, as its meaning to an
allegory, but saturates and is identical with it
The Greek mind had advanced to a particular
stage of self-reflexion, but was careful not to pass
beyond it. In oriental thought there is a vague
conception of life everywhere, but no true
appreciation of itself by the mind, no knowledge
of the distinction of man's nature : in its con-
sciousness of itself, humanity is still confused
with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the
_animal and vegetable world. InjGrjegk thought,
on the other hand, the "lordship_of„thfi..smi1 " is
recognised ; that lordship gives authority and
divinity to human eyes and hands and feet ; in-
animate nature is thrown into the background.
But just there Greek^thQught_fi£ds_^^
limit ; it has not yet become top inward ; the mind
has npt.yet learned to boast its independence of the
flesh ; the spirit- has. npj_yet,abjSorJbfid. everything
with its emotions, nor -reflected its own colour
everywhere. It hasxnds.e$i.jg,Qmmitted itself to a
train .of xeiiexion which must end in defiance of
form, of all that is outward,, in- an exaggerated
idealism. But that end is still distant : it has not
jrerplungedintdthadepths of reii^^^
'^ This;ideal^!artj in which the thought does not
outstrip or lie beyond the proper range of its
sensible embodiment, co uld not h ave,.arisen out of
^ £]^3.se of life,that was. uncomely ^r poor. That
delicate pause in Greek reflexion was jflined J?y
206
WINCKELMANN
some supreme good luck, to ^the perfec t^jinimal
nature of the Greeks. Here are the two condi-
tions of an artistic ideal. The influences which
perfected the animal riature of the Greeks are part
of the process hj which " the ideal "was evolved. '
Those "Mothers" who, in the second part of
Fausty mould and remould the typical forms that ^
appear in human history, preside, at the beginning
of Greek culture,^ver sucH a concourse of happy
physical conditions as ever generates by natural
laws To'me~'rare type of intellectual or spiritual
lifen That delicate air, "nimbly and sweetly
recommending itself" to the senses, the finer
aspects of nature, the finer lime and clay of the
human form, and modelling of the dainty frame-
work of the human countenance : — these are the
good luck of the Greek when he enters upon
life. Beauty becomes a distinction, like genius,
or npble place'.""
" By ' no-"people," says^^Winckelmann, " has
beauty been so highly esteemed as 6y the Greeks.
The priests of a youthful Jupiter at ^gae, of the
Ismenian Apollo, and the priest who at Tanagra
led the procession of Mercury, bearing a lamb
upon his shoulders, were always youths to whom
the prize of beauty had been awarded. The
citizens of Egesta erected a monument to a
certain Philip, who was not their fellow-citizen,
but of Croton, for his distinguished beauty ;
and the people made offerings at it. In an
ancient song, ascribed to Simonides or Epichar-
207
THE RENAISSANCE
mus, of four wishes, the first was health, the
second beauty. And as beaiijj^^jyas ..so. longed
for and prized by the Greeks, every beautiful
person sought to become known to the whole
people by this distinction, and above all to
approve himself to the artists, because they
« awarded the prize ; and this was for the artists
an occasion for having supreme beauty ever
before their eyes. Be auty even g ave a right to
fame ; and we find in Greek histories the most
beautiful people distinguished. Some were
famous for the beauty of one single part of their
form ; as Demetrius Phalereus, for his beautiful
eyebrows, was called Charito-blepharos. It seems
even to have been thought that the procreation
of beautiful children might be promoted by
prizes. This is shown by the existence of contests
for beauty, which in ancient times were estab-
lished by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, by the river
Alpheus ; and, at the feast of Apollo of Philas, a
prize was oflFered to the youths for the deftest
kiss. This was decided by an umpire ; as also
at Megara, by the grave of Diodes. At Sparta,
and at Lesbos, in the temple of Juno, and among
the Parrhasii, there were contests for beauty
among women. The general esteem for beauty
went so far, that the Spartan women set up in
their bedchambers a Nireus, a Narcissus, or a
Hyacinth, that they might bear beautiful
children."
So, from a few stray antiquarianisms, a few
20g
WINCKELMANN
faces cast up sharply from the waves, Winckel-
mann, as his manner was, divines the tempera-
ment of the antique world, and that in which it
had delight. It has passed away with that distant
age, and we may venture to dwell upon it.
What sharpness and reality it has is the sharpness
and reality of sixddenlyarreste^^^^^ 'The Greek
system of gymnastics originated as 'part of a
religious" ritual. The worshipper was to recom-
mend himself to the gods by becoming fleet
and fair, white and red, like them. The beauty of
the palaestra^ and the beauty of the artist's work-
shop, reacted on one another. The youth tried
to rival his gods ; and his increased beauty passed
back into them. — " I take the gods to witness, I
had rather have a fair body than a king's crown "
— 'Ofivvin •n-dvTa^ deoixi fiij ekiadai &.v rrfv fiaaiXio)^ o.pyr)v
ainl rov KoXbi elvai. — that is the form in which one
age of the world chose the higher life. — A perfect
world, if the gods could have seemed for ever only
fleet and fair, white and red ! Let us not regret
that this unperplexed_yQutiuof -humanity, satisfied
with the vision of itself, passed, at the due moment,
into a mournful maturity ; for already the deep
joy was in store for the spirit, of finding the ideal
of that youth still red with life in the grave.
It followed that the Greek ideal expressed
itself pfe^emfhently in ;scu^^^ _A11 art-has a
sensuous^ dement, colour, form, sound-— injjoetry
a dexterous recalling of these, together with the
profound, joyful sensuousness of motion, and each
F 209
THE RENAISSANCE
of them may be _a me dium for the ideal : it is
partly accident which in any individual case
makes the born artist, poet, or painter rather than
sculptor. But as the mind itself has had an
historical development, one form of art, by the
very limitations _of its- material, may be more
adequate than another for the., expression _of.jtny
one phase of that developrjient. D.iffei:ent..atti-
tuderoT''me::lmi^aaon,.haye,,a . nati-KfiL^affinity
with -different ty^es, of jensuojas^fgrjia, so jh
combine together,,, with completeness and ease.
The arts may thus be ranged., in a rSerieaj.which
corresponds to a series of deyelopments in the
human .mind itself. . Arclii?eeiure, which ..begins-
in a practical need, can only express by vague hint
or symbpr the^i.rit or mind , of .,t^ artist. He
clqs.es_his_sadness over him, or^ WMiders in the
perplexed intricacies of~"tHings, or projects his
purpose from him clean-cut and sincere, or bares
himself to the sunlight. But these_apiritualities,
felt rather than seen, can but lurk about archi-
tectural form as volatile effects, to be gathered
from it by reflexion. Their_express,iQn.is, indeed,
^o|J]£3llX.^I§&§}i9LV!IJtl!,.all. ■^*»fe«tnan-'form is not
the subject with which_itdeals,..srGhitecture is the
mode iii"wEicK the artistic effort centres, when
the thoughts^of jgnan^concern^^ still
indjstinct, wKen he is. still little^preoecupied with
thoscTiarmpnies, storms, jyictQries, .of. the junseen
and intellectual wo.rid»-^^ichr wrought- out into
the bodily forrn, give at_,an interest and signifi-
2 ID
WINCKELMANN
cance communicable to it alone. The art of Egypt,
witE~Tts supreme. architeC.tural-effects7isracco>d-
ing to Hegel's beautiful conjparison, a Memnon
waiting for the day, the day of the Greek spirit,
the humanistic spirit, with its pbwer^ofspeech. '
Again, pamtingj;;;musi^^^^^^ their
eiidl^s£powcr^f complexity^are _ th,?,,5pecisl arts
of the rom^tic "aiidT'^^rnoH^ern ages. Into these,
withHhe utmosF attenuation of detail, may be
translated every delicacy of thought and feeling,
incidental to a consciousness brooding with
delight over itself. Throu^their.gra.4ations of
shade, thdr, exquisite, intervals, they project in
an ejftema^form. that which is most inward in
passion, or sep^^menl,. Between architecture and
those romantic jarts of. iiaintin:g,.mvisi£^3n3rpoetry,
comejjcuj^U£e^,which,.unlil^^^^^
immedh^ely with rnaii,.,wi^^^ contrasts with
the roman^c^aria, hejcause_iMs_ n^
It has..la.^a.m.Qi:e. exclusi.vely-.4han-any-ather art
with^thehmnan,foriij, itself^qne entiremedium of
spiritual expression, tremblmg, blusKing, melting
into dewjwitkinward gxcitQment. That spiritu-
ality which only lurks about architecture as a
volatile effect, in sculpture takes up the whole
given material, and penetrates it with an imagin-
ative motive ; and at fii:st,sight sculpjt,Hrj;, with its
soUdi ty-vfly[Jgjrmjjeems^a^ things m and full
than-thjsjfain^ab^tract worid^
Still the fact is the reverse. Di scourse__a mLaction
sho\v^man aTlfo rsj 'nior-e-directly_ jh of
211
THE RENAISSANCE
the muscles and the moulding of the flesh j^ and
overtKese poetry Eai^Mmmand. Painting, by the
flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of light
in the eye — music, by its subtle range of tones —
can refine most delicately upon a single moment
of passion, unravelling its subtlest threads.
Bujt why shpxild sculpture thus limit itself
to pure form ? Because,, bv this limitation, it
becomes, a, pgrfect, medium of, expression for one
pecaliar-.-mGtive, pX,,t;be,.ipiaginative- intellect. It
therefore renounces all those attributes of its
material _ which "do" not forwaf 3^ that "^ motive.
It has_had^indeed,.ff-om'ihe-S€giBHing an unfixed
claim to colour ; but this_elementjof, colour in it
has always .be,en. nxpre, or less .conjjsjitlonal, with
no rnelting. or modulatioa-of tones, neverj»erniit-
ting rnpre than a ve^; Jimjted...realisni. It was
maintained chiefly as a religious tradition. ,._In.
proportion as the art of sculptureTpeased' to be
merely decorative, and su^ordmate, to architecture,
it threw, itself upon pure form. I t renou nces the
power of e3qjressioa,%_lpwerior_h£igJitened tones.
In it,_no_member of t he h uinan form is more
significant than tKe rest ; the eye is wide, and
without pupil ; the lips and brow are hardly less
.significant than hands, and breasts, and feet. But
the limitation of its resources is part of its pride :
it has np_backgrounds, no sky or atrnospherje,..tp
suggesLanJiliHterpret^-train "^ ; a liJile.
of su^esjted..miation, and much of pur£ light on
its gleaming surfaces, witiupuf ,e fbriji-^^cinly these.
212 I
WINCKELMANN
And It gains morejthan it loses by this. limitation
to it£own!Histm.gp.isHing motives ; it unveils man
in the .rep.QS£„p£^his-micJiangin.g,,p,harac^^^
That white light. Purged from the angry, blood-
like stains of action and passion^^yeals, not what
is accidental in man, but the .tranquil ..godship in
him, as opposed to the restless .accidents of life.
The art of sculpture records the,first naive, unper-
plexed recognition of man by himselfj; and Jt is a
proof of fh'e^igh^H^^
that they apprehended and remained true to these
exquisite limitations, yet, in spite oLihem, gave
to their, creations^ a mobile, a vital, individuality.
Heiterkeit — blithene ss o r,repose, and Allgemein-
y^zV'— generality or brea(Jth,'ar(f,'then, the supreme
charactM;istics~qf;;t^^ ideal. "" But that
generality or breadth has nothing in common
with the lax observation, the unlearned thought,
the flaccid execution, which have sometimes
claimed superiority in art, on the plea of being
" broad " or " general." Hellenic breadth and
generality come of a culture minute, severe,
constantly renewed, rectifying and concentrating
its impressions into certain pregnant types.
The basis of all artistic genius lies in the power
of conceiving humanity in a new and striking- way,
of putting a happy world of its own creation in
place of the meaner world of our common days,
generating around itself an atmosphere with a
novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming,
recombininjg the images, it transmits, according to
213
THE RENAISSANCE
the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exer-
cising this power, painting and poetry have a
variety of subject almost unlimited. The range
of characters or persons open to them is as various
as life itself; no character, however trivial, mis-
shapen, or unlovely, can resist their magic. That
is because those arts can accomplish their function
in the choice and development of some special
situation, which lifts or glorifies a character, in
itself not poetical. To realise this situation, to
define, in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus
where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite
and begin to burn, the artist may have, indeed, to
employ the most cunning detail, to complicate
and refine upon thought and passion a thousand-
fold. Let us take a brilliant example from the
poems of Rob^rt^_B£owning._ His poetry is
pre-eminently the poetry of situations. ; The
characters themselves are always of secondary
imjportance ; often they are characters in them-
selves of little interest ; they seem to come to
him by strange accidents from the ends of the
world. His gift is shown by the way in which
he accepts such a character, throws it into some
situation, or apprehends it in some delicate pause
of life, in which for a moment it becomes ideal.
In the poem entitled Le' Byron de nos Jours^ in
his Dramatis Personaey we have a single moment
of passion thrown into relief after this exquisite
fashion. Those two jaded Parisians are not intrinsic-
ally interesting : they begin to interest us only
214
WINCKELMANN
when thrown into a choice situation. But to
discriminate that moment, to make it appreciable
by us, that we may " find " it, what a cobweb of
allusions, what double and treble reflexions of
the mind upon itself, what an artificial light is
constructed and broken over the chosen situation ;
on how fine a needle's point that little world of
passion is balanced ! Yet, in spite of this intricacy,
the poem has the clear ring of a central motive.
We receive from it the impression of one
imaginative tone, of a single creative act.
To produce such effects at all requires all the
resources of_^inting, with its power of indirect
expression, ofiuBordinatc but significant detail,
its atmosphere, its_fQrggrounds aiid Tjackgrounds.
To produce them in a pre-eminent degree
requires all the resources of poetry, language in
its most purged form, its remote associations and
suggestions, its double and treble lights. These
appliances sculpture cannot command. In it,
therefore, not the special situation, but the type,
the general character of the subject to be
delineated, is all -important. Jin poetry__and
painting^^, .the . situation. ..predQ.minates.„jiv£r_.the
^character ; in sculpture,, the_jchai:acjter „OKeX-Jthe
situat ion. ~ Excluded by the proper limitation, of
its material' from the-' development of exquisite
situations, it has to choose from a select number
of types intrinsically, interesting— ^interesting,
that" is, independently_of ^ny^ special_situation
into which they may" be thrown. Sculpture
2x5
THE RENAISSANCE
finds the secret of its power in presenting these
types, in their broad, central, incisive lines.
This it eg6cts..nQt_by accumulation of detail, but
by._al^raj;ting from it. All that is_ accidental,
all that distracts the simple effect upon us of the
supreme types of humanity, all traces in them of
the commonness of the world, it gradually purges
away.
\f Works, of art produced, under this law, and
Nonly these, are really characterised by Hellenic
generality or breadth. In every idirectionit is a
law^f restraint. It keeps _passion always below
that degree of intensity at which it must
necessarily be transitory, never winding up the
features to one note of anger, or desire, or
surprise. In some of the feebler allegorical
designs of the middle age, we_^nd_isQlated
qualities portrayed as by so many masks ; its
religious art has familiarised us with faces fixed
immovably into blank types of placid reverie.
-Men and women, again, in the hurry of life, often
wear the sharp_i mpress of one ab sorbing_motive,
from which it is said death sets their features
free. All such instances may be ranged under
the grotesque ; and the Hellenic ideal has nothing
in common with the grotesque. It allows passion
to play lightly over the surface of the individual
form, losing _ thereby nothing of its central
impassivity, its depth and repose. To all but
the highest culture, the reserved faces of the gods
will ever have something of insipidity.
216
WINCKELMANN
Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the archaic
immobility has been stirred, its forms are in
motion ; but it is a motion everEepTlSTxiserve,
and _ve^;^„seJdom committed to any definite
action....;. Endless as ■are"the~atHtuaes~"6F'"Greek
sculpture, exquisite as is the invention of the
Greeks in this direction, thcacnoHjL^tLjLtuations
it permit^s^are^simple and fpjy. There is no
Greek Madonna ; the goddesses are always
ohildless. T^'ac^ijon s selected"'ar e those which
womd^e^mthout^i^nificanc in. a divine
perspn — bindingjonjLsandal or preparing for the
bathi^ When a more complex and significant
action is perjffitte.d,Xti& most -often repres^
as just finished, so that . eager .expectancy is
excluded, as in the image of Apollo just after the
slaughter of the Python, or of Venus with the
apple of Paris already in her hand. The Laocoon,
with all that patient science through" wtifch it
has triumphed over an almost unmanageable
subject, marks a period in which sculpture has
begun to aim___aL_£ffects__legitimate, because
delightful, only in painting.
The hair, so nch""a source of expression in
painting, because, relatively to the eye or the lip,
it is mere drapery, is withdrawn from attention ;
its texture, as well as its colour, is lost, its
arrangement but faintly and severely indicated,
with no broken or enmeshed light. The eyes are
wide and directionless, not fixing anything with
their gaze, nor riveting the brain to any special
ai7
THE RENAISSANCE
external object, the brows without hair. Again,
Greek sculp ture deals almo§t.,.,g3cdjJsively_with
ys^ith, where the mouIHing of the bodily organs
is still as if suspended between growth and com-
pletion, indicated but not emphasised ; where the
traRsitionjQ:om~^ui5«Ee~lQ,£jArye. Js-so'-^delicate and
elusive, that Winckelmann compares it to a quiet
sea, which, although we understand it to be in
motion, we nevertheless regard as an image of
repose ; where, therefore, the exact degree of
development is so hard to apprehend. If a single
product only o f Hellenic art were to be saved in
the wrfidTot atl hesi'de, on e rmg hf"'rfinnse perhaps
from the "beaut iful itiulti tBde^lofjdac^aaathenaic
frieze, that line of youths on horseback, with
their level glances, their proud, patient lips, their
chastened reins, their whole bodies in exquisite
service. This colourless, unclassified purity of life,
with its blending and interpenetration of in-
tellectual, spiritual, and physical elements, still
folded together, pregnant with the possibilities
of a whole world closed within it, is the highest
expression of the indifference which lies beyond
all that is relative or partial. Everywhere there
is the effect of an awaking, of a child's sleep just
disturbed. All these effects are united in a single
instance — the adorante of the museum of Berlin,
a youth who has gained the wrestler's prize, with
hands lifted and open, in praise for the victory.
Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image of a man as he
springs first from the sleep of nature, his white light
218
WINCKELMANN
taking no colour from any one-sided experience.
He is characterless, so far as character involves
subjection to the accidental iijfluences of life.
" This sen^"_says_Ji6gfiU.'5.far the consum-
mate modelling of divine and human forms was
pre-cmineMl^;;ar hSffi^jr^^^^ In its poets
and orators, its historians and philosophers,
Greece cannot be conceived from a central point,
unless one brings, as a key to the understanding
of it, ah insight into the ideal forms of sculpture,
and regards the images of statesmen and
philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes,
from the artistic point of view. For those who
act, as well as those who create and think, have,
in those beautiful days of Greece, this plastic
character. They are great and free, and have
grown up on the soil of their own individuality,
creating themselves out of themselves, and
moulding themselves to what they were, and
willed to be. The age of Pericles was rich in
such characters ; Pericles himself, Pheidias,
Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides also,
Xenophon and Socrates, each in his own order,
the perfection of one remaining undiminished by
that of the others. They are ideal artists of
themselves, cast each in one flawless mould,
works of art, which stand before us as an
immortal presentment of the gods. Of this
modelling also are those bodily works of art, the
victors in the Olympic games ; yes ! and even
Phryne, who, as the most beautiful of women,
219
THE RENAISSANCE
ascended naked out of the water, in the presence
of assembled Greece."
This key to the understanding of the Greek
spirit, Winckelmann possessed in his own nature,
itself like a relic of classical antiquity, laid open
by accident to our alien, modern atmosphere.
To the criticism of that consummate Greek
modelling he brought not only his culture but
his temperament. We have seen how definite
was the leading motive of that culture ; how, like
some central root-fibre, it maintained the well-
rounded unity of his life through a thousand dis-
tractions. Interests not his, nor meant for him,
never disturbed him. In morals, as in criticism,
he followed the clue of instinct, of an unerring
instinct. Penetrating into the antique world by
his passion, his temperament, he enunciated no
formal principles, always hard and one-sided.
Minute and anxious as his culture was, he never
became one-sidedly self-analytical. Occupied
ever with himself, perfecting himself and
developing his genius, he was not content, as
so often happens with such natures, that the
atmosphere between him and other minds should
be thick and clouded ; he was ever jealously
refining his meaning into a form, express, clear,
objective. This temperament he nurtured and
invigorated by friendships which kept him always
in direct contact with the spirit of youth. " The
beaU-tyjQ£-th£j3j£ek- Statues was a sexless beauty :
the statues of the gods had the least traceTof
220
WINCKELMANN
Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of
ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a true
beauty and significance of its own.
One result of this temperament is a serenity
— ^/?«r^r>f«if::^=which<;haracteriser'Winckelmann's
handling of the sensuous side of Greek art.
This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, a
negative quality : it is the absence of any sense
of ..Kant, or corruption,'"6F'sKamer 'Wiith' "the
sensuous eleiiient in^^Greek art he deat^ln^'t^^
pagan mahnef J'^nd what is implied in that?
rt'iias-been sometimes said that art is a means of
escape from "the tyranny of the senses." It
may be so for the spectator : he may find that
the spectacle of supreme works of art takes from
the life of the senses something of its turbid
fever. But this is possible for the spectator only
because the artist, in producing those works, has
gradually sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideas
in sensuous form. He may live, as Keats lived,
a pure life ; but his soul, like that of Plato's false
astronomer, becomes more and more immersed
in sense, until nothing which lacks the appeal to
sense has interest for him. How could such an
one ever again endure the greyness of the ideal
or spiritual world ? The spiritualist is satisfied
as he watches the escape of the sensuous elements
from his conceptions ; his interest grows, as the
dyed garment bleaches in the keener air. But the
artist steeps his thought again and again into the
fire of colour. To the Greek this immersion in
221
THE RENAISSANCE
the sensuous was, religiously, at least, indifferent.
Greek sensuousness, therefore^ does not jfever the
consci ence : it is sham eless _and childlike.
ChfisSan asceticism, on the other han3, discredit-
ing the slightest touch of sense, has from time to
time provoked into strong emphasis the contrast
or antagonism to itself, of the artistic life, with its
inevitable sensuousness. — I did but taste a little
honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand,
and lo I I must die. — It has sometimes seemed hard
to pursue that life without something of conscious
disavowal of a spiritual world ; and this imparts
to genuine artistic interests a kind of intoxication.
From th is inte3a€atioB-Winckelmann-is iiree : he
fingers those pagan marbles withjinsinged Jiands,
wMrTitr3ense-Trf'^ham'e~oFToss. ThatisiJ^Ldeal
The longer we contemplate that Hellenic
ideal, in which man is at unity with himself,
with his physical nature, with the outward
world, the more we may be inclined to regret
that he should ever have passed beyond it, to
contend for a perfection that makes the blood
turbid, and frets the flesh, and discredits the
actual world about us. But if he was to be
saved from the ennui which ever attaches itself
to realisation, even the realisation of the perfect
life, it was necess^j that a conflict should come,
that .sora«^liai^er-£5t-£~^BgFE^d'='griev^-4fee:£tdst-'
ing hannonyr-aad the spirit chafed by it beat
out at last only a larger and profounder music.
222
WINCKELMANN
In Qreekjra^edjcjius conflict has begun : man
findyTiimself face to face with rival claims.
Greek tragedy shows how such a conflict may be
tr;eated with serenity, how the evolution of it may
l/e a spectacle of the dignity, not of the impotence,
if the human spirit. But it is not only in tragedy
ihat the Greek spirit showed itself capable of thus
wringing joy out of matter in itself full of dis-
couragements. Theocritus too strikes often a
4ote of romantic sadness. But what a blithe and
steady poise, above these discouragements, in a
clpar and sunny stratum of the air 1
' Into-this-stage-ef-GFeek-aGhievemjentcJS^inckel-
mann didjriot^gnter. Supreme as he is where
his true interest lay, his insight into the typical
unity and repose of the highest sort of sculpture
seems to have involved limitation in another
direction. His conception of art excludes that
bolder type of it which deals confidently and
serenely with life, conflict, evil. Living in a
world of exquisite but abstract and colourless
form, he could hardly have conceived of the
subtle and penetrative, yet somewhat grotesque
art of the modern world. What would he have
thought of Gilliatt, in Victor Hugo's Travailleurs
de la Mer, or of the bleeding mouth of Fantine
in the first part of Les Misirables^ penetrated as
those books are with a sense of beauty, as lively
and transparent as that of a Greek ? Nay, a sort
of preparation for the romantic temper is notice-
able even within the limiHHtKetjHclTiH^ itself,
THE RENAISSANCE
which for his part Winckelma mi ..fjHlctd to see.
For U-reelcjxligIcmJias_noi~^^
mysteries of Adonis, of HyaontHus, of Demeter,
but it is conscious also of the fall of earlier divine
dynasties. "TTypenon~""gives~ way to Apollo,
Oceanus to Poseidon. Around the feet of that
tranquil Olympian family still crowd the weary
shadows of an earlier, more formless, divine world.
The placid minds even of Olympian gods are
troubled with thoughts of a limit to duration, of
inevitable decay, of dispossession. Again, the
supreme and colourless abstraction of those divine
forms, which is the secret of their repose, is also
a premonition of the fleshless, consumptive refine-
ments of the pale, medieval artists. That high
indifference to the outward, that impassivity, has
already a touch of the corpse in it : we see already
Angelico and the Master of the Passion in the
artistic future. The suppression of the sensuous,
the shutting of the door upon it, the ascetic interest,
may be even now foreseen. Those abstracted gods,
" ready to melt out their essence fine into the
winds," who can fold up their flesh as a garment,
and still remain themselves, seem already to feel
that bleak air, in which like Helen of Troy, they
wander as the spectres of the middle age.
Graduallyras*-the wtJ^rld cam«4ato^e^hmrh,
an artistic interest, native in the human soul,
reasserted itS: claims. But ChrjstiaiLartwas still
dependertt""aH:"~pa'gatr -exaijiples, building --the
224 '
WINCKELMANN
shafts of pagan temples into its churches,
perpetuating the form of the basilica, in later
times working the disused amphitheatres as stone
quarries. The sensuous expression of ideas
which_unre&ery£ffi^3isiii!3&!t^
was^ the^delicate .prohLem. .j«w.hich- -Christian art
had before it. If we think of medieval painting,
as it ranges from the early German schools, still
with something of the air of the charnel-house
about them, to the clear loveliness of Perugino,
we shall see how that problem was solved.
In the very "worship £f sorrow" the. i^
blitheniss^oF'^T asserled'j^^^^
spirit, as'^HegeTsays, " smiled through its tears."
So perfectly did the young Raphael infuse that
Heiterkeity that pagan blitheness, into religious
works, that his picture of Saint Agatha at
Bologna became to Goethe a step in the evolution
of Iphigenie} But.in proportion as the gift of
smiling was found once more, there came also an
aspiration towards . that lost , antique art, some
i:^(;]ijc§_^f^jhich..C buried in itself,
read^jto work wonders when their day came.
The ffi^ory"Tif3^;^tei|31ffi^ed.--aS'-'mtich as
any history by j^enchant...aiuL absolute" ^divisions.
Pagan arid Christian art are somctimeA..harshly
opposed, and..the Renaissance is represented as a
fashion.jy;hich seFTn at ar"defin it"e'pe Hod;^. That
is the supei£ciar2SwX^^J^~<^cpc'* ^^^^ ^^ ^"^^
which preserves the identity of European culture.
1 Itali'anischt Reise. Bologna, 19 Oct. 1776.
Q 225
THE RENAISSANCE
The tw o are really c ontinuous ; and there^ isa
sense^whiqlLit inay;. be. said that the.Renaissance
was" an uninterrupted effort of the middle age,
that if was ey^iLfaiKin^^ actual
relics oFthe antique were restored to the world,
in the view of the Christian ascetic it was as if
an ancient plague-pit had been opened. All the
world took the contagion of the life of nature
and of the senses. And now it was seen that the
medieval spirit too had done, jsomething for the
new fortunes o^ the antique. By hastening the
decline^ of art, by withdrawing^interest from it
and yef^'^'^^^^^^^jtl^xoSSn.Zuie thread af its
traditions, it J^a^ .suffexed.-.the.- human Mtnind to
repose itseif,,f hst, w-hen-.day- eame-it might awake,
with"eyes refreshed, to those ancient, ideal forms.
Thc'^- ai mr'trf "a T ight" criti^ place
WinckehELaan«.Hi««a«-4>at©lle€t-ual"-perspective, of
w hich Goejtha JjLJtheJbxeground. EojCy-jafber all,
h^sjnfinitelyj[es§ jJ^g|i,jGoethe ; and it is chiefly
because at certain points he comes in contact
with Goethe, that criticism entertains considera-
tion of him. His relation to modern culture is a
peculiar one. He is not of the modern world ; nor
is he wholly of the eighteenth century, although
so much of his outer life is characteristic of it.
But that note of revolt against the eighteenth
century, which we detect in Goethe, was struck
by Winckelmann. Goethe illustrates a union of
the Romantic spirit, in its adventure, its variety,
its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hellenism,
226
WINCKELMANN
in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of
beauty — that marriage of Faust and Helena, of
which the art of the nineteenth century is the
child, the beautiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe
conceives him, on the crags, in the " splendour of
battle and in harness as for victory," his brows
bound with light.^ Goethe illustrates, too, the
preponderance in this marriage' of the Hellenic
element ; and that element, in its true essence,
was made known to him by Winckelmann.
Breadth, centradity, wijh_b|ithsfle.ss.a^ repose,
are the^miarks^prrH^^ cultured Is such
culture alost art ? The local, accidentdk:qLDuring
of iilot?B-agS Jias.p^i§.gMLOiB,it ; and the great-
ness that is dead looks greater when every link
with what is sligt)it„andj;ulgaiyia&Jbieear«^
We can only «ee-it-atall inthe reflected, refined
light which^.j.,^gj;gatjeducatio^^ for us.
Can^vte,^^bring^^^ gaudy^
per]pk3Ee3!lightSjmL0AeffiJi£e..?
Certainly, for us of the modern world, with-i
its conflicting claims, its entangled interests,
distracted by so many sorrows, with many pre-
occupations, so bewildering an experience, the
problem of unity with* ourselves, in blitheness
and repose, is farjiardeif'than it was for the Grejek
within the simple^rt"erms.«-0^^ life, -.^et,
not .less, than — ^ev^^j-^^the^Jjitdj^at^ d^^
com^etenessi -centriUty. It is this which
Winckelmann imprints on the imagination of
1 Faust, Th. it. Act. 3.
227
THE RENAISSANCE
Goethe, at the beginning of life, in its original
and simplest form, as in a fragment of Greek art
itself, stranded on that littered, indeterminate
shore of Germany in the eighteenth century. In
Winckelmann, this type comes to him, not as
in a book or a theory, but more importunately,
because in a passionate life, in a personality. For
Goethe, possessing all modern interests, ready
to be lost in the perplexed currents of modern
thought, he defines, in clearest outline, the
eternal problem of culture — balance, unity with
one's self, consummate Greek modelling.
It could no longer be solved, as in Phryne
ascending naked out of the water, by perfection
of bodily form, or any joyful union with the
external world : the shadows had grown too long,
the light too solemn, for that. It could hardly be
solved, as in Pericles or Pheidias, by the direct
exercise of any single talent : amid the manifold
claims of our modern intellectual life, that could
only have ended in a thin, one-sided growth.
Goethe's Hellenism was. of another order, the
Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeity the completeness and
serenity, of a watchful, exigent intellectualism.
Im Ganzen, GuteUy Wahreriy resolut zu leben : — ^is
Goethe's description of his own higher life ; and
what is meant by life in the whole — im Ganzen ?
It means the life of one for whom, over and over
again, what was once precious has become
indifferent. Every one who aims at the life of
culture is met by many forms of it, arising out
228
WINCKELMANN
of the intense, laborious, one-sided development
of some special talent. They are the brightest
enthusiasms the worid has to show : and it is not
their part to weigh the claims which this or that
alien form of genius makes upon them. But the
proper instinct of self-culture cares not so much
to reap all that those various forms of genius can
give ,,.as to find in th em its own strength. The
demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It
must see into the laws, the operation, the
intellectual reward of every divided form of
culture ; but only that it may measure the
relation between itself and them. ^.It struggles
with those forms till its secret is won from each,
and then lets each fall back into its place, in the
supreme, artistic view of life. With a kind of
passionate coldness, such natures rejoice to be
away from and past their former selves, and above
all, they are jealous of that abandonment to one
special gift which really limits their capabilities.
It would have been easy for Goethe, with the
gift of a sensuous nature, to let it overgrow him.
It comes easily and naturally, perhaps, to certain
" other-worldly " natures to be even as the Schbne
Seele, that ideal of gentle pietism, in Wilhelm
Meister : but to the large vision of Goethe, this
seemed to be a phase of life that a man might
feel all round, and leave behind him. Again, it
is easy to indulge the commonplace metaphysical
instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one
of those things which we must renounce, if we
229
THE RENAISSANCE
mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection.
Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift
of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by
suggesting questions which help one to detect
the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic con-
trasts of life.
But Goethe's culture did not remain "behind
the veil " : it ever emerged in the practical
functions of art, in actual production. For him
the problem came to be : — Can the blitheness
and universality of the antique ideal be com-
municated to artistic productions, jyjiich shall
contain the fulness of the experience of the
modem world f We have seen that the develop-
ment of the various forms of art has corresponded
to the development of the thoughts of man
concerning humanity, to the growing revelation
bf the mind to itself. Sculpture corresponds to
the unperplexed, emphatic outlihes of Hellenic
humanism ; painting to the mystic depth and
intricacy of the middle age ; music and poetry
have their fortune in the modern world.
Let us understand by poetry all literary pro-
duction which attains the power of giving pleasure
by its form, as distinct from its matter. Only in
this varied literary form can art command that
width, variety, delicacy of resources, which will
enable it to deal with the conditions of piodern
life. . What modern_art has to do in thft sprviVp
of ,.cultu5sJs,io_.tQJtearran ge the details of modern
JifejoJoj:^g£UI»JtbatJ]Umayjati^^^^
-230
WINCKELMANN
And w hat does the spirit need in the face of
modern KfeJ^^ The^ sense ofjFreedpni. That
naive, rough sense of"Tree3oni, which supposes
man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will
stronger than his, he can never have again.
The attempt to represent it in art would have so
little verisimilitude that it would be flat and
uninteresting. Tjie:cHeffactqr jn. the thoughts
of the modern mind concerning itself is the
intricacy, the uhTversality "of natural law, even in
the mdfal order. For us, necessity is not, as of
old; a 's5rt""df mythological personage without us,
with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a
magic web woven through and through us, like
"that magnetic system of which modern science
speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler
than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the
central forces of the world. Can jLrt^represent.men
and women in these bewildering toils so as to give
the spirits Jejtstan'equivalent for the sense of free-
-dom ? Certainly, in Goethe's romances, and even
more in the romances of Victor Hugo, we have
high examples of modern art dealing thus with
modem life, regarding that life as the modern mind
must regard it, yet reflecting upon it blitheness
and repose. Natural laws we shall never modify,
embarrass us as they may ; but therie is still
something in the nobler or less_jnoble attitude
with which We wafcK'tEeirJata^ combinations.
In those romances of Goethe and Victor Hugo,
in some excellent work done after them, this
231
THE RENAISSANCE
entanglement, this network of law, becomes the
tragic situation, in which certain groups of noble
men and women work out for themselves a
supreme Denouement. Who, if he saw through
all, would fret against the chain of circumstance
which endows one at the end with those great
experiences ?
1867.
•W
CONCLUSION!
Aeyet irov 'HjaaKAeiTOS ori jravro X<»/>