The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 3 (of 3)
Domenico Mecherino,85 the son of a Sienese peasant, better known by the adopted name of Beccafumi, inferior to Razzi in elegance of line and suavity of colour, excelled him in energy of conception and style. Vasari, who invests Beccafumi with every excellence and virtue, of which the defect or opposite vice disgraced Razzi, still owns that he did not reach the physiognomic suavity that marks the faces of Soddoma; and after leading him from the scanty elements of Pietro Perugino to Rome, the Antique, the Chapel of M. Angelo, and the works of Raffaelle, by a kind of anticlimax brings him back to Siena to complete his studies by adopting the principles of Giannantonio. A modern writer,86 on the contrary, has discovered that the talents of Domenico, overpowered by the genius of M. Angelo, turned their current awry, and failed to produce the legitimate efforts which might have been expected from a steady adherence to the principles of Raffaelle – opinions less founded on the character of the artist and the spirit of his works than on the partiality and prejudice of the critics. Beccafumi was not of the first class, less made to lead than to follow with an air of originality; to amalgamate principles not absolutely discordant – thus, in single figures, he sometimes more than imitates, he equals M. Angelo, as in those noticed by Bottari; – and again, in larger compositions, such as those on the pavement of the Cathedral, works by which he is chiefly known, we see him on the traces of Raffaelle, and emulating the variety and graces of Polydoro: these graces frequently vanished, and correctness as often ceased with the increased size of his figures: the foreshortenings, in which he delighted, savour more of the "sotto in su," introduced by Correggio to Upper Italy, than of the principles of M. Angelo; they are generally attended by a magic chiaroscuro, like that of the figure of Justice, on which Vasari expatiates, on the ceiling of the public hall at Siena, which, from profound darkness gradually rising into light, seems to vanish in celestial splendour. He is said by Vasari to have preferred fresco and distemper to oil paint, as a purer, simpler, and of course more durable medium; and though the predominant red of his flesh-tints has more freshness than glow, such is the solidity of his impasto and the purity of his method, that his panels present us to this day less with the injuries than the improvements of time.
The style of Mecherino did not survive him: for Giorgio da Siena, his pupil, confined himself to grotesque work, in imitation of Giovanni da Udine; Giannella, or Giovanni of Siena, turned to architecture: of Marco Pino, commonly called Marco da Siena, his reputed pupil, the style, decidedly built on the principles of M. Angelo, renders all notion of his having received more than the first rudiments from Beccafumi or any other master, nugatory: but the conjecture of Lanzi, that Domenico was the master of Danielle Ricciarelli, known to have begun his studies at Siena, though unsupported by tradition, acquires an air of probability less from the supposed mutual attachments to M. Angelo, than the versatility of their talents and similarity of pursuits.
Baldassare Peruzzi,87 born in the diocese of Volterra, but in the Sienese State, and of a citizen of Siena, with considerable talents for painting, possessed a decided genius in architecture. His style of design is temperate and correct, but quantity is the element of his composition, if indeed an aggregate of fortuitous figures deserve that name. The Adoration of the Magi, preserved in various coloured copies from his original chiaroscuro, embraces every fault of ornamental painting without its only charm: it is not exaggeration to say, that the principal figures are the least conspicuous, that the leaders are sacrificed to their equipage, that the architect every where crosses the painter, and that the quadrupeds, however brutally placed or impertinently introduced, for conception, chiaroscuro, spirit and style, give to the work what merit it can claim. The same principle prevails in his fresco of the Presentation at the Pace, and both are so evidently opposite to Raffaello's system of composition, that it is not easily understood how he could be supposed to have been a pupil or imitator of that master in propriety. If he resembles him any where, it is in single expressions, as in the Judgement of Paris at the Castello di Belcaro, according to Lanzi; and still more in the prophetic countenance of the celebrated Sibyl predicting the birth of the Virgin to Augustus, at Fonte Giusta, in Siena, whose divine enthusiasm no prophetess of Raffaello has excelled, and no Sibyl of Guido or Guercino approached.
THE ROMAN SCHOOL
The Roman School comprises, besides the natives of the metropolis, those of the whole Ecclesiastic State, Bologna, Ferrara, and some part of Romagna excepted.
The origin of this school recedes into the earlier periods of modern art, if we consider Oderigi of Gubbio, a painter of miniature, contemporary with Cimabue, as one of its founders. His death, which preceded that of the Florentine at least one year, the branch of art he exercised, missal-painting, and what we know of his situation, make it extremely improbable that he owed the elements of design to that master, with whom he seems to have had little in common but the honour of rearing a pupil, who in the sequel eclipsed his name, and became the founder of another school.
Perhaps he made some scholars too at home: in 1321 we find Cecco and Puccio of Gubbio, engaged as painters to the Dome of Orvieto; and about 1324, Guido Palmerucci Eugubino, employed in the Town-hall of Gubbio; a few half figures yet remaining of this evanescent work are in a style not inferior to that of Giotto, at whose period we are now arrived.
Giotto, at Rome, gave instructions to Pietro Cavallini in painting and mosaic, and with what success we may form some idea from the wonder-working Christ in S. Paolo at Rome, the Salutation at S. Marco of Florence, and a Crucifixion at Assisi; a crowded composition of soldiers, mob, and horses, varied in dress and not ill discriminated by expression, with groups of angels hovering over them in sable robes. In vastness of conception and spirit it resembles Memmi, and in one of the crucified men, foreshortening is not unsuccessfully attempted; the colours have still a degree of freshness, especially the blue, which here and in other places of the church forms, in the metaphor of Lanzi, a ceiling of oriental sapphire.
After the demise of Cavallini, who, notwithstanding a life of eighty-five years, appears to have left taste nearly in the state he found it; a band of obscure and insignificant artists led the art in a style neither Giottesque nor Greek to the verge of the fifteenth century – that important period when the Popes, re-established at Rome, searched for the best hands to decorate its Vatican and temples. The first name that occurs, is that of Ottaviano Martis, whose Madonna in Sta. Maria Nuova at Gubbio, bears the date of 1403; she has a choir of stripling angels round her in attitudes not ungraceful, but with faces as like to each other as if they had all been cast in one mould.
The name of Gentile da Fabriano is of more consequence; it is he whose style Michael Angelo compared to his name (Gentile.) About 1417 we find him at Orvieto among the painters of its Dome, registered with the title of Magister Magistrorum. Under Martin V. he painted with Pisanello in the Lateran at Rome: what he did there perished, and so did his works in the public palace at Venice, where he resided, was pensioned, and raised to the rank of Patrician. "In that city," says Vasari, "he was the master and like a parent to Giacopo Bellini, the father of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, founders of the Venetian school and masters of Giorgione and Tizian. Of his numerous works the remains are in the Marca d'Ancona, the state of Urbino, at Gubbio and Perugia: Florence still preserves two of his pictures, one in S. Nicolo with the image and histories of that bishop, another in the sacristy of the Trinità, with an Epiphany and the date of 1423. His style resembles that of Frà Angelico da Fiesole, with the exception of forms less elegant, less female grace, and more profusion of gold lace and brocade. Antonio da Fabriano, with the date 1454, and Bartholomæus Magistri Gentilis de Urbino, 1497 and 1508, are inscriptions on pictures at Matelica, Pesaro, and Monte Cicardo, that have no other claim to attention than the relation their names seem to indicate with Gentile.
Piero della Francesca, or Piero Borghese, an Umbrian, of Borgo S. Sepolcro, is a superior name. He must have been born about 1398, as, according to Vasari, his works were about 1458; he grew blind at sixty, and died eighty-five years old. He was instructed in painting at the age of fifteen, after having laid a foundation in mathematics, and distinguished himself in both. His beginnings were minute; his master has escaped search. The first scene of his talent was the Court of Guidobaldo Feltro the old, Duke of Urbino, where the perspective of a vase drawn by him, provokes the astonishment of his biographer; but besides perspective, Painting owes to him her first notions of the effects of light, of muscular precision, and the method of preparing clay models for the study of drapery.88
He painted much at Rome, and in the Floreria of the Vatican there still exists a large fresco reputed his, representing Niccolo V. with some cardinals and prelates, whose faces interest by a character of truth. At Arezzo, he seems to have improved even upon Giotto and his school, by the novelty of his foreshortenings, vigour of tone, and powers which attended by equal grace, would have set him on a level with Masaccio.
Nicolo Alunno of Foligno, advanced the art still farther; this is evident on comparing a picture of his painted 1480, with another at S. Nicolo of Foligno, dated 1492. The tone of his colour, even in distemper, has novelty and vigour; his heads have vivacity, though with trivial and sometimes caricatured characters: and in gilding he is moderate. Vasari, who places him in the time of Pinturicchio, praises above all a Pietà in a chapel of the Domo, in which, he says, "there are two angels who weep with such expression of grief, that, in my opinion, no other painter, however excellent, could have done much more."
Nor was Urbino without painters at this period: Fiorillo names Lorenzo da San Severino. At Urbino some pictures still remain of Giovanni Sanzio, the father of Raphael, who by the Duchess Giovanna della Rovere is called a very ingenious artist: a foreshortened figure of St. Sebastian, painted by him for the church of that saint, has been imitated by Raphael in an early picture of Our Lady's Wedding, at Città di Castello. He subscribed himself Io. Sanctis Urbi.; viz. Urbinas. Such at least is the inscription on his Annunciation at Sinigaglia, a work of high finish, but unequal in its parts, and in the best, though less genial, approaching the style of Pietro Perugino, with whom he had for some time co-operated. But the most distinguished Urbinese artist was Bartolommeo Corradini, a Dominican, commonly called Frà Carnevale: at the Osservanza there is a picture of his, defective in perspective, with draperies frittered into the usual tatters of the time, but with faces that breathe and speak, and airs of dignity and ease: he was one of the first who introduced portrait into historic composition, a method adopted and often practised by Raphael, who at Urbino had studied his works.
Perugia laid an early claim to Art, at least as a craft. Mariotti tells of one Tullio a Perugine painter about 1219, and in a long file of quattrocentists, allots the most conspicuous places to Lorenzo di Lorenzo, Bartolommeo Caporali, whose works are dated about 1487, but above all to Benedetto Bonfigli. Yet with this abundance of home-bred artists, Perugia employed in its public works the hands of strangers, and chiefly Tuscans; it was to Florence, States and Princes looked for that master-style which could give splendour to a great commission. When Sisto IV. planned the decorations of the Sistina, the greater number of conscripts for the work were Tuscans, and Pietro Perugino the only artist drawn from his subjects among them.
Pietro Vannucci, of Città della Pieve, as he subscribed some pictures, or of Perugia, as he did others, being a citizen of that place, studied, if we believe Vasari, under a master of little eminence; but according to the more authentic researches of Mariotti,89 was a pupil, and sufficiently advanced himself by the instructions of Bonfigli and Piero della Francesca, to finish his style on the works of Giotto and Masaccio at Florence, without entering the school of Verrocchio.
Those who have contemplated the works of Pietro will without much difficulty discover two styles of composition, form, colour, and execution: the first was the result of the instructions he received in the Roman, the second, that of the impression made on his mind and hand by the Tuscan School: what he painted in oil and of small dimensions, generally belongs to the first; what he executed in fresco to the second period. There we find the hardness, the haggard forms, the miserly scantiness of drapery, the Gothic apposition and anxious finish with which he is charged, relieved by azure blues, emerald greens, violet and crimson hues, the legacies of missal-painting, and a certain air of juvenile and female grace, with suavity of countenance and colour: beauties which not only followed him in his second style, but were rendered more impressive by rudiments of that breadth which seems to be the privilege of fresco, by keeping, mellowness, tone, and approaches to composition, as in the altar-piece of the Kindred of the Saviour and the fresco in the Hall of the Change, at Perugia.
Whilst the physiognomic monotony which had hitherto dulled the human feature, began to give way to expression and character in the works of this period, it is not easy to explain why its companion, that Gothic symmetry in the arrangement of the whole, should not only have been retained but aggravated into a studied parallelism; not that pathetic repetition of attitude and gesture which forces the moment of the subject more irresistibly on the mind than the most varied contrasts, but a nearly rectilinear apposition, whose principal law was to place, by a central figure, on each side of the picture, an equal number of subordinate ones; a law that extended itself to the most minute detail, and bade buildings, flowers, clouds and pebbles, re-echo each other; and all this in the face of Giotto, whose Navicella, Death of Maria, and other works, gave evidence that his composition had, a century before, disdained to move in the trammels which were now suffered to check that of Pietro Perugino, and for no inconsiderable time the composition of Raphael himself.
Invention was not the element of Pietro. His crucifixions, depositions, burials, ascensions, and assumptions, are the brothers and sisters of one family. He was blamed for this sterility even in his own time, and defended himself by saying that, if he possessed little, he owed nothing, and that what had pleased in one place could not displease in another. It does not indeed offend to find the scenery of his St. Peter receiving the keys in the Sistina, repeated in the Wedding of our Lady at Perugia, and to meet the beauties here concentrated which he had singly scattered over various places.
Pietro had vigour of constitution and length of life, and if he profited by the works of Raphael, whom he outlived, might have done so by those of Lionardo and Buonarroti. In few men so many contradictory qualities seem to have united: ridiculed for a degree of avarice, which, it was said, made him withhold the necessary drapery from his figures, he is yet allowed by Vasari to have been greedier to accumulate than sordid in the use of wealth, and to have pleased himself by marrying "a beautiful damsel, whom he so much delighted in seeing elegantly dressed both abroad and at home, that he was often suspected of having dressed her himself." By her he had children, but no records enable us to judge of him as a parent. That he was a good and kind master, is proved by the numerous scholars he reared, and still more by the pride which the most eminent and best of them took, by introducing him more than once in his works, to perpetuate with his own gratitude the memory of his master. With this kindness for his pupils, Pietro connected intolerance of rivals and a mordacity of language, which provoked Michael Agnolo to call him publicly a dunce (goffo) in art. His life was spent in receiving commissions from the clergy, in meditating and composing subjects of devotion; and yet, if we believe his biographer, he carried infidelity to a degree which resisted all arguments for the immortality of the soul, and with words dictated by an obstinacy worthy of his marble brains,90 rejected all invitations to better information. Of the numerous scholars whom he had reared, the greater part followed his manner with servile attachment; hence many of their works have been ascribed to him, by those who did not form their judgment at Perugia, or at Florence in Sta. Chiara and the Ducal palace: thus he pays forfeit for many a holy family of Guerino da Pistoia, Rocco Zoppo, or some other of his Tuscan scholars. The best and least enthralled of his pupils belong to the Roman school: Bernardino Pinturicchio, less praised by Vasari than he deserves, without the correctness of his master, and with more Gothic profusion of gold-lace and brocade, possesses magnificence of plan, expression of countenance, and propriety of composition. Familiar with Raphael, who was his assistant at Siena, he made attempts to imitate his grace, and sometimes not without success: at Rome, the Vatican and Araceli Temple possess some of his works; at Siena he painted, in ten pictures, the history of Pio II. and added one of Pio III. his employer, and these, with what he left in the Dome of Spello, are the best of his labours.
Of at more independent and grander spirit was Andrea Luigi, of Assisi, surnamed L'Ingegno, the Genius. He assisted Pietro in the Change-hall at Perugia, and there and in his Prophets and Sibyls at Assisi, aggrandized and mellowed the style of his master to a degree, which led Sandrart, with others, to ascribe the latter work to Raphael; but blindness checked his career in the bloom of life, and left the art to Raphael without a rival.
Domenico di Paris Alfani added, likewise, some improvements to the style of Pietro. His name was nearly sunk in that of his son or brother Orazio, and time and dates alone have re-asserted its right to some excellent works long adjudged to the other; and which, were it not for an insipid sweetness of tone bordering on that of Baroccio, seem to have been inspired by the principles of Raphael.
Of Pietro's many ultramontane pupils, Giovanni Spagnuolo, a Spaniard, called Lo Spagna, who settled at Spoleto, is considered by Vasari as the most eminent. But all these names united confer less celebrity on Pietro, than the felicity of having reared the powers of Raffaello Sanzio, if not the founder, the great establisher of the Roman School.
Raffaello Sanzio, born at Urbino on Holy Friday, April 1483, was the son of Giovanni Sanzio, named among the contemporaries and occasional helpers of Pietro, in whose school, after having imparted the first rudiments of Art to his son, conscious of his own inferiority, he had the modesty to place him. Here his progress was so rapid that he soon rendered himself completely master of Vannucci's style, soon became his favourite pupil, soon his co-adjutor, and in a short period more than his competitor: for though the pictures which he painted at Cività di Castello and Perugia, and are so amorously dwelt on by Lanzi, still betray in composition, design, and colour, the principles of the master, they exhibit symptoms of that expression, that beauty, those simple graces, that refinement and precision of finish, which not only had remained unknown to Pietro, but in their purity were never attained by any subsequent artist. – Some of these are perceivable already, if scantily, in the Procession to Golgotha, preceded by horsemen and attended by the Madonna and her female train; and still less perceptibly in one of its predelle which exhibits the Saviour held extended by his Mother, Magdalen and John: they cannot be mistaken in the predelle which represents him among the sleeping disciples praying in the garden, – performances of his puerility, and most probably before he left the school of Pietro.
After an enumeration of Raffaello's juvenile works at Cività di Castello and at Perugia, we are told that he who ascribed Sanzio's art to length of study and not to nature, was not acquainted with the powers of his mind.91
That such was the verdict of Michael Agnolo, is recorded by Condivi; and from aught that appears, it does not seem either invidious or incompetent. If Art be a complete system of invariable rules, he only is a master of Art who substantiates its precepts by equal uniformity of execution and taste; and till he arrives at that point, he can only be said to have seized more or less of its parts in making approaches to the whole, and to be indebted to "study" and not to "nature," if he put himself at last in possession of it.
Such was the progress of Raffaello; he arrived by degrees at style in design, by degrees at style in composition, by degrees at invention, expression, and at what appeared to him colour. His genius emancipated him from the shackles of prescription and fashion, rapidly, if we compare his progress with the shortness of his life or the progress of the rest of his contemporaries, but slowly, if we compare him with Michael Angelo, whose system of Art seems to have been born with him, whose infancy, virility, age, exhibit one uniform principle. Every element of the system displayed in the Capella Sistina and on the tombs in S. Lorenzo, may be traced in his essays at the garden of the Medici and in the Holy Family painted for Angelo Doni: but what eye will discover the future painter of the Heliodorus, or the composer of the Cartoons in the bridal arrangements of our Lady's Wedding at Cività di Castello, or even in the Cartoons for the sacristy of the Duomo at Sienna?
Though the commission of painting in that place a series of the most memorable events in the life of Pope Pio II. (a Siennese celebrated by the name of Enea Silvio,) had been given to Pinturicchio, who had sufficient modesty and taste to avail himself of the superior and growing powers of his friend, – it has been asked what enterprise of equal magnitude had in that infant state of Art ever been consigned to a single hand, without considering that the co-operation of Raffaello was adventitious, and less owing to the opinion which he had established of himself in the public mind than to the modesty of Pinturicchio. And had not Luca Signorelli singly been entrusted with a work at Orvieto, whose tremendous and universally interesting subjects beyond comparison excelled whatever the embassies, the poetic and papal honours, the canonization of a nun, the ceremonies of a council, the death of the hero himself, and the transportation of his corpse from Ancona to Rome, however varied by character, impressed by the sensibility of the artist, or raised above the heraldry of the times, could pretend to achieve beyond the precincts of Sienna?
Whether Raffaello furnished the whole of the Cartoons for that work, or only part, cannot be ascertained from the contradictory account of Vasari,92 who in the life of Pinturicchio asserts the first, and in that of Raffaello, the second. As he, however, did not leave Sienna for Florence till 1504, it is probable that he continued to assist his friend in completing the whole historic series: the work itself is in perfect preservation, and though better informed eyes than those of Bottari93 might not be competent to discriminate the parts which exclusively belong to Raffaello, it is certain that in the progress of the pictures there is an evident progress toward style.
Aggrandisement of style might reasonably be supposed to have been the motive that drew Raffaello to Florence. The David of M. Angiolo was placed; he had begun his cartoon, which from its very inaccessibility, and the high character of the artist whom it opposed, must have been an object of eager curiosity to the public, and of tremulous expectation to the student. Florence was, no doubt, at that period divided into two technic factions, Vinciists and Bonarotists; it does not, however, appear that Raffaello adhered to either of the two leaders; neither the learning and energy of Bonaroti, nor the magic chiaroscuro of Lionardo, could divert the future painter of the passions from his course; he therefore attached himself to the study of Masaccio, as a more direct guide to the drama. The implicit application of that master's conceptions in the same or similar subjects, when he was in the vigour of his powers, if it be the most celebrated proof of this, is a less convincing one than the similarity of taste and vein of thought which pervades their works, and might, to men of bolder conjecture than I pretend to, prove that Masaccio might have been what Raffaello was, had time and means conspired.
