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[Illustration: _Portrait of a Lady._

_From the Painting, possibly by Verrocchio, in the Poldi Museum at
Milan._]

THE
FLORENTINE PAINTERS
OF THE RENAISSANCE

WITH AN INDEX TO THEIR WORKS

BY
BERNHARD BERENSON

AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE,"
"LORENZO LOTTO," "CENTRAL ITALIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE"

THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press

COPYRIGHT, 1896
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
_Entered at Stationers' Hall, London_

COPYRIGHT, 1909
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
(For revised edition)

Made in the United States of America

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION

Years have passed since the second edition of this book. But as most of
this time has been taken up with the writing of my "Drawings of the
Florentine Painters," it has, in a sense, been spent in preparing me to
make this new edition. Indeed, it is to that bigger work that I must
refer the student who may wish to have the reasons for some of my
attributions. There, for instance, he will find the intricate Carli
question treated quite as fully as it deserves. Jacopo del Sellajo is
inserted here for the first time. Ample accounts of this frequently
entertaining tenth-rate painter may be found in articles by Hans
Makowsky, Mary Logan, and Herbert Horne.

The most important event of the last ten years, in the study of Italian
art, has been the rediscovery of an all but forgotten great master,
Pietro Cavallini. The study of his fresco at S. Cecilia in Rome, and of
the other works that readily group themselves with it, has illuminated
with an unhoped-for light the problem of Giotto's origin and
development. I felt stimulated to a fresh consideration of the subject.
The results will be noted here in the inclusion, for the first time, of
Cimabue, and in the lists of paintings ascribed to Giotto and his
immediate assistants.

B. B.

_Boston, November, 1908._

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The lists have been thoroughly revised, and some of them considerably
increased. Botticini, Pier Francesco Fiorentino, and Amico di Sandro
have been added, partly for the intrinsic value of their work, and
partly because so many of their pictures are exposed to public
admiration under greater names. Botticini sounds too much like
Botticelli not to have been confounded with him, and Pier Francesco has
similarly been confused with Piero della Francesca. Thus, Botticini's
famous "Assumption," painted for Matteo Palmieri, and now in the
National Gallery, already passed in Vasari's time for a Botticelli, and
the attribution at Karlsruhe of the quaint and winning "Nativity" to the
sublime, unyielding Piero della Francesca is surely nothing more than
the echo of the real author's name.

Most inadequate accounts, yet more than can be given here, of Pier
Francesco, as well as of Botticini, will be found in the Italian edition
of Cavalcaselle's _Storia della Pittura in Italia_, Vol. VII. The latter
painter will doubtless be dealt with fully and ably in Mr. Herbert P.
Horne's forthcoming book on Botticelli, and in this connection I am
happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Horne for having persuaded
me to study Botticini. Of Amico di Sandro I have written at length in
the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, June and July, 1899.

FIESOLE, November, 1899.

CONTENTS.

                                                    PAGE
THE FLORENTINE PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE             1

INDEX TO THE WORKS OF THE PRINCIPAL
FLORENTINE PAINTERS                                   95

INDEX OF PLACES                                      189

THE FLORENTINE PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE

I.

Florentine painting between Giotto and Michelangelo contains the names
of such artists as Orcagna, Masaccio, Fra Filippo, Pollaiuolo,
Verrocchio, Leonardo, and Botticelli. Put beside these the greatest
names in Venetian art, the Vivarini, the Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and
Tintoret. The difference is striking. The significance of the Venetian
names is exhausted with their significance as painters. Not so with the
Florentines. Forget that they were painters, they remain great
sculptors; forget that they were sculptors, and still they remain
architects, poets, and even men of science. They left no form of
expression untried, and to none could they say, "This will perfectly
convey my meaning." Painting, therefore, offers but a partial and not
always the most adequate manifestation of their personality, and we feel
the artist as greater than his work, and the man as soaring above the
artist.

[Page heading: MANYSIDEDNESS OF THE PAINTERS]

The immense superiority of the artist even to his greatest achievement
in any one art form, means that his personality was but slightly
determined by the particular art in question, that he tended to mould it
rather than let it shape him. It would be absurd, therefore, to treat
the Florentine painter as a mere link between two points in a necessary
evolution. The history of the art of Florence never can be, as that of
Venice, the study of a placid development. Each man of genius brought to
bear upon his art a great intellect, which, never condescending merely
to please, was tirelessly striving to reincarnate what it comprehended
of life in forms that would fitly convey it to others; and in this
endeavour each man of genius was necessarily compelled to create forms
essentially his own. But because Florentine painting was pre-eminently
an art formed by great personalities, it grappled with problems of the
highest interest, and offered solutions that can never lose their
value. What they aimed at, and what they attained, is the subject of the
following essay.

II.

The first of the great personalities in Florentine painting was Giotto.
Although he affords no exception to the rule that the great Florentines
exploited all the arts in the endeavour to express themselves, he,
Giotto, renowned as architect and sculptor, reputed as wit and
versifier, differed from most of his Tuscan successors in having
peculiar aptitude for the essential in painting _as an art_.

But before we can appreciate his real value, we must come to an
agreement as to what in the art of figure-painting--the craft has its
own altogether diverse laws--_is_ the essential; for figure-painting, we
may say at once, was not only the one pre-occupation of Giotto, but the
dominant interest of the entire Florentine school.

[Page heading: IMAGINATION OF TOUCH]

Psychology has ascertained that sight alone gives us no accurate sense
of the third dimension. In our infancy, long before we are conscious of
the process, the sense of touch, helped on by muscular sensations of
movement, teaches us to appreciate depth, the third dimension, both in
objects and in space.

In the same unconscious years we learn to make of touch, of the third
dimension, the test of reality. The child is still dimly aware of the
intimate connection between touch and the third dimension. He cannot
persuade himself of the unreality of Looking-Glass Land until he has
touched the back of the mirror. Later, we entirely forget the
connection, although it remains true, that every time our eyes recognise
reality, we are, as a matter of fact, giving tactile values to retinal
impressions.

Now, painting is an art which aims at giving an abiding impression of
artistic reality with only two dimensions. The painter must, therefore,
do consciously what we all do unconsciously,--construct his third
dimension. And he can accomplish his task only as we accomplish ours, by
giving tactile values to retinal impressions. His first business,
therefore, is to rouse the tactile sense, for I must have the illusion
of being able to touch a figure, I must have the illusion of varying
muscular sensations inside my palm and fingers corresponding to the
various projections of this figure, before I shall take it for granted
as real, and let it affect me lastingly.

It follows that the essential in the art of painting--as distinguished
from the art of colouring, I beg the reader to observe--is somehow to
stimulate our consciousness of tactile values, so that the picture shall
have at least as much power as the object represented, to appeal to our
tactile imagination.

[Page heading: GIOTTO]

Well, it was of the power to stimulate the tactile consciousness--of the
essential, as I have ventured to call it, in the art of painting--that
Giotto was supreme master. This is his everlasting claim to greatness,
and it is this which will make him a source of highest æsthetic delight
for a period at least as long as decipherable traces of his handiwork
remain on mouldering panel or crumbling wall. For great though he was as
a poet, enthralling as a story-teller, splendid and majestic as a
composer, he was in these qualities superior in degree only, to many of
the masters who painted in various parts of Europe during the thousand
years that intervened between the decline of antique, and the birth, in
his own person, of modern painting. But none of these masters had the
power to stimulate the tactile imagination, and, consequently, they
never painted a figure which has artistic existence. Their works have
value, if at all, as highly elaborate, very intelligible symbols,
capable, indeed, of communicating something, but losing all higher value
the moment the message is delivered.

Giotto's paintings, on the contrary, have not only as much power of
appealing to the tactile imagination as is possessed by the objects
represented--human figures in particular--but actually more, with the
necessary result that to his contemporaries they conveyed a _keener_
sense of reality, of life-likeness than the objects themselves! We whose
current knowledge of anatomy is greater, who expect more articulation
and suppleness in the human figure, who, in short, see much less naïvely
now than Giotto's contemporaries, no longer find his paintings more than
life-like; but we still feel them to be intensely real in the sense
that they still powerfully appeal to our tactile imagination, thereby
compelling us, as do all things that stimulate our sense of touch while
they present themselves to our eyes, to take their existence for
granted. And it is only when we can take for granted the existence of
the object painted that it can begin to give us pleasure that is
genuinely artistic, as separated from the interest we feel in symbols.

[Page heading: ANALYSIS OF ENJOYMENT OF PAINTING]

At the risk of seeming to wander off into the boundless domain of
æsthetics, we must stop at this point for a moment to make sure that we
are of one mind regarding the meaning of the phrase "artistic pleasure,"
in so far at least as it is used in connection with painting.

What is the point at which ordinary pleasures pass over into the
specific pleasures derived from each one of the arts? Our judgment about
the merits of any given work of art depends to a large extent upon our
answer to this question. Those who have not yet differentiated the
specific pleasures of the art of painting from the pleasures they derive
from the art of literature, will be likely to fall into the error of
judging the picture by its dramatic presentation of a situation or its
rendering of character; will, in short, demand of the painting that it
shall be in the first place a good _illustration_. Those others who seek
in painting what is usually sought in music, the communication of a
pleasurable state of emotion, will prefer pictures which suggest
pleasant associations, nice people, refined amusements, agreeable
landscapes. In many cases this lack of clearness is of comparatively
slight importance, the given picture containing all these
pleasure-giving elements in addition to the qualities peculiar to the
art of painting. But in the case of the Florentines, the distinction is
of vital consequence, for they have been the artists in Europe who have
most resolutely set themselves to work upon the specific problems of the
art of figure-painting, and have neglected, more than any other school,
to call to their aid the secondary pleasures of association. With them
the issue is clear. If we wish to appreciate their merit, we are forced
to disregard the desire for pretty or agreeable types, dramatically
interpreted situations, and, in fact, "suggestiveness" of any kind.
Worse still, we must even forego our pleasure in colour, often a
genuinely artistic pleasure, for they never systematically exploited
this element, and in some of their best works the colour is actually
harsh and unpleasant. It was in fact upon form, and form alone, that the
great Florentine masters concentrated their efforts, and we are
consequently forced to the belief that, in their pictures at least, form
is the principal source of our æsthetic enjoyment.

Now in what way, we ask, can form in painting give me a sensation of
pleasure which differs from the ordinary sensations I receive from form?
How is it that an object whose recognition in nature may have given me
no pleasure, becomes, when recognised in a picture, a source of æsthetic
enjoyment, or that recognition pleasurable in nature becomes an enhanced
pleasure the moment it is transferred to art? The answer, I believe,
depends upon the fact that art stimulates to an unwonted activity
psychical processes which are in themselves the source of most (if not
all) of our pleasures, and which here, free from disturbing physical
sensations, never tend to pass over into pain. For instance: I am in
the habit of realising a given object with an intensity that we shall
value as 2. If I suddenly realise this familiar object with an intensity
of 4, I receive the immediate pleasure which accompanies a doubling of
my mental activity. But the pleasure rarely stops here. Those who are
capable of receiving direct pleasure from a work of art, are generally
led on to the further pleasures of self-consciousness. The fact that the
psychical process of recognition goes forward with the unusual intensity
of 4 to 2, overwhelms them with the sense of having twice the capacity
they had credited themselves with: their whole personality is enhanced,
and, being aware that this enhancement is connected with the object in
question, they for some time after take not only an increased interest
in it, but continue to realise it with the new intensity. Precisely this
is what form does in painting: it lends a higher coefficient of reality
to the object represented, with the consequent enjoyment of accelerated
psychical processes, and the exhilarating sense of increased capacity in
the observer. (Hence, by the way, the greater pleasure we take in the
object painted than in itself.)

And it happens thus. We remember that to realise form we must give
tactile values to retinal sensations. Ordinarily we have considerable
difficulty in skimming off these tactile values, and by the time they
have reached our consciousness, they have lost much of their strength.
Obviously, the artist who gives us these values more rapidly than the
object itself gives them, gives us the pleasures consequent upon a more
vivid realisation of the object, and the further pleasures that come
from the sense of greater psychical capacity.

Furthermore, the stimulation of our tactile imagination awakens our
consciousness of the importance of the tactile sense in our physical and
mental functioning, and thus, again, by making us feel better provided
for life than we were aware of being, gives us a heightened sense of
capacity. And this brings us back once more to the statement that the
chief business of the figure painter, as an artist, is to stimulate the
tactile imagination.

The proportions of this small book forbid me to develop further a
theme, the adequate treatment of which would require more than the
entire space at my command. I must be satisfied with the crude and
unillumined exposition given already, allowing myself this further word
only, that I do not mean to imply that we get no pleasure from a picture
except the tactile satisfaction. On the contrary, we get much pleasure
from composition, more from colour, and perhaps more still from
movement, to say nothing of all the possible associative pleasures for
which every work of art is the occasion. What I do wish to say is that
_unless_ it satisfies our tactile imagination, a picture will not exert
the fascination of an ever-heightened reality; first we shall exhaust
its ideas, and then its power of appealing to our emotions, and its
"beauty" will not seem more significant at the thousandth look than at
the first.

My need of dwelling upon this subject at all, I must repeat, arises from
the fact that although this principle is important indeed in other
schools, it is all-important in the Florentine school. Without its due
appreciation it would be impossible to do justice to Florentine
painting. We should lose ourselves in admiration of its "teaching," or
perchance of its historical importance--as if historical importance were
synonymous with artistic significance!--but we should never realise what
artistic idea haunted the minds of its great men, and never understand
why at a date so early it became academic.

[Page heading: GIOTTO AND VALUES OF TOUCH]

Let us now turn back to Giotto and see in what way he fulfils the first
condition of painting as an art, which condition, as we agreed, is
somehow to stimulate our tactile imagination. We shall understand this
without difficulty if we cover with the same glance two pictures of
nearly the same subject that hang side by side in the Florence Academy,
one by "Cimabue," and the other by Giotto. The difference is striking,
but it does not consist so much in a difference of pattern and types, as
of realisation. In the "Cimabue" we patiently decipher the lines and
colours, and we conclude at last that they were intended to represent a
woman seated, men and angels standing by or kneeling. To recognise these
representations we have had to make many times the effort that the
actual objects would have required, and in consequence our feeling of
capacity has not only not been confirmed, but actually put in question.
With what sense of relief, of rapidly rising vitality, we turn to the
Giotto! Our eyes scarcely have had time to light on it before we realise
it completely--the throne occupying a real space, the Virgin
satisfactorily seated upon it, the angels grouped in rows about it. Our
tactile imagination is put to play immediately. Our palms and fingers
accompany our eyes much more quickly than in presence of real objects,
the sensations varying constantly with the various projections
represented, as of face, torso, knees; confirming in every way our
feeling of capacity for coping with things,--for life, in short. I care
little that the picture endowed with the gift of evoking such feelings
has faults, that the types represented do not correspond to my ideal of
beauty, that the figures are too massive, and almost unarticulated; I
forgive them all, because I have much better to do than to dwell upon
faults.

But how does Giotto accomplish this miracle? With the simplest means,
with almost rudimentary light and shade, and functional line, he
contrives to render, out of all the possible outlines, out of all the
possible variations of light and shade that a given figure may have,
only those that we must isolate for special attention when we are
actually realising it. This determines his types, his schemes of colour,
even his compositions. He aims at types which both in face and figure
are simple, large-boned, and massive,--types, that is to say, which in
actual life would furnish the most powerful stimulus to the tactile
imagination. Obliged to get the utmost out of his rudimentary light and
shade, he makes his scheme of colour of the lightest that his contrasts
may be of the strongest. In his compositions, he aims at clearness of
grouping, so that each important figure may have its desired tactile
value. Note in the "Madonna" we have been looking at, how the shadows
compel us to realise every concavity, and the lights every convexity,
and how, with the play of the two, under the guidance of line, we
realise the significant parts of each figure, whether draped or
undraped. Nothing here but has its architectonic reason. Above all,
every line is functional; that is to say, charged with purpose. Its
existence, its direction, is absolutely determined by the need of
rendering the tactile values. Follow any line here, say in the figure of
the angel kneeling to the left, and see how it outlines and models, how
it enables you to realise the head, the torso, the hips, the legs, the
feet, and how its direction, its tension, is always determined by the
action. There is not a genuine fragment of Giotto in existence but has
these qualities, and to such a degree that the worst treatment has not
been able to spoil them. Witness the resurrected frescoes in Santa Croce
at Florence!

[Page heading: SYMBOLISM OF GIOTTO]

The rendering of tactile values once recognised as the most important
specifically artistic quality of Giotto's work, and as his personal
contribution to the art of painting, we are all the better fitted to
appreciate his more obvious though less peculiar merits--merits, I must
add, which would seem far less extraordinary if it were not for the high
plane of reality on which Giotto keeps us. Now what is back of this
power of raising us to a higher plane of reality but a genius for
grasping and communicating real significance? What is it to render the
tactile values of an object but to communicate its material
significance? A painter who, after generations of mere manufacturers of
symbols, illustrations, and allegories had the power to render the
material significance of the objects he painted, must, as a man, have
had a profound sense of the significant. No matter, then, what his
theme, Giotto feels its real significance and communicates as much of it
as the general limitations of his art, and of his own skill permit. When
the theme is sacred story, it is scarcely necessary to point out with
what processional gravity, with what hieratic dignity, with what
sacramental intentness he endows it; the eloquence of the greatest
critics has here found a darling subject. But let us look a moment at
certain of his symbols in the Arena at Padua, at the "Inconstancy," the
"Injustice," the "Avarice," for instance. "What are the significant
traits," he seems to have asked himself, "in the appearance and action
of a person under the exclusive domination of one of these vices? Let me
paint the person with these traits, and I shall have a figure that
perforce must call up the vice in question." So he paints "Inconstancy"
as a woman with a blank face, her arms held out aimlessly, her torso
falling backwards, her feet on the side of a wheel. It makes one giddy
to look at her. "Injustice," is a powerfully built man in the vigour of
his years dressed in the costume of a judge, with his left hand
clenching the hilt of his sword, and his clawed right hand grasping a
double hooked lance. His cruel eye is sternly on the watch, and his
attitude is one of alert readiness to spring in all his giant force upon
his prey. He sits enthroned on a rock, overtowering the tall waving
trees, and below him his underlings are stripping and murdering a
wayfarer. "Avarice" is a horned hag with ears like trumpets. A snake
issuing from her mouth curls back and bites her forehead. Her left hand
clutches her money-bag, as she moves forward stealthily, her right hand
ready to shut down on whatever it can grasp. No need to label them: as
long as these vices exist, for so long has Giotto extracted and
presented their visible significance.

[Page heading: GIOTTO]

Still another exemplification of his sense for the significant is
furnished by his treatment of action and movement. The grouping, the
gestures never fail to be just such as will most rapidly convey the
meaning. So with the significant line, the significant light and shade,
the significant look up or down, and the significant gesture, with means
technically of the simplest, and, be it remembered, with no knowledge of
anatomy, Giotto conveys a complete sense of motion such as we get in his
Paduan frescoes of the "Resurrection of the Blessed," of the "Ascension
of our Lord," of the God the Father in the "Baptism," or the angel in
"Zacharias' Dream."

This, then, is Giotto's claim to everlasting appreciation as an artist:
that his thorough-going sense for the significant in the visible world
enabled him so to represent things that we realise his representations
more quickly and more completely than we should realise the things
themselves, thus giving us that confirmation of our sense of capacity
which is so great a source of pleasure.

III.

[Page heading: FOLLOWERS OF GIOTTO]

For a hundred years after Giotto there appeared in Florence no painter
equally endowed with dominion over the significant. His immediate
followers so little understood the essence of his power that some
thought it resided in his massive types, others in the swiftness of his
line, and still others in his light colour, and it never occurred to any
of them that the massive form without its material significance, its
tactile values, is a shapeless sack, that the line which is not
functional is mere calligraphy, and that light colour by itself can at
the best spot a surface prettily. The better of them felt their
inferiority, but knew no remedy, and all worked busily, copying and
distorting Giotto, until they and the public were heartily tired. A
change at all costs became necessary, and it was very simple when it
came. "Why grope about for the significant, when the obvious is at hand?
Let me paint the obvious; the obvious always pleases," said some clever
innovator. So he painted the obvious,--pretty clothes, pretty faces, and
trivial action, with the results foreseen: he pleased then, and he
pleases still. Crowds still flock to the Spanish chapel in S. Maria
Novella to celebrate the triumph of the obvious, and non-significant.
Pretty faces, pretty colour, pretty clothes, and trivial action! Is
there a single figure in the fresco representing the "Triumph of St.
Thomas" which incarnates the idea it symbolises, which, without its
labelling instrument, would convey any meaning whatever? One pretty
woman holds a globe and sword, and I am required to feel the majesty of
empire; another has painted over her pretty clothes a bow and arrow,
which are supposed to rouse me to a sense of the terrors of war; a third
has an organ on what was intended to be her knee, and the sight of this
instrument must suffice to put me into the ecstasies of heavenly music;
still another pretty lady has her arm akimbo, and if you want to know
what edification she can bring, you must read her scroll. Below these
pretty women sit a number of men looking as worthy as clothes and beards
can make them; one highly dignified old gentleman gazes with all his
heart and all his soul at--the point of his quill. The same lack of
significance, the same obviousness characterise the fresco representing
the "Church Militant and Triumphant." What more obvious symbol for _the_
Church than _a_ church? what more significant of St. Dominic than the
refuted Paynim philosopher who (with a movement, by the way, as obvious
as it is clever) tears out a leaf from his own book? And I have touched
only on the value of these frescoes as allegories. Not to speak of the
emptiness of the one and the confusion of the other, as compositions,
there is not a figure in either which has tactile values,--that is to
say, artistic existence.

While I do not mean to imply that painting between Giotto and Masaccio
existed in vain--on the contrary, considerable progress was made in the
direction of landscape, perspective, and facial expression,--it is true
that, excepting the works of two men, no masterpieces of art were
produced. These two, one coming in the middle of the period we have been
dwelling upon, and the other just at its close, were Andrea Orcagna and
Fra Angelico.

[Page heading: ORCAGNA]

Of Orcagna it is difficult to speak, as only a single fairly intact
painting of his remains, the altar-piece in S. Maria Novella. Here he
reveals himself as a man of considerable endowment: as in Giotto, we
have tactile values, material significance; the figures artistically
exist. But while this painting betrays no peculiar feeling for beauty of
face and expression, the frescoes in the same chapel, the one in
particular representing Paradise, have faces full of charm and grace. I
am tempted to believe that we have here a happy improvement made by the
recent restorer. But what these mural paintings must always have had is
real artistic existence, great dignity of slow but rhythmic movement,
and splendid grouping. They still convince us of their high purpose. On
the other hand, we are disappointed in Orcagna's sculptured tabernacle
at Or Sammichele, where the feeling for both material and spiritual
significance is much lower.

[Page heading: FRA ANGELICO]

We are happily far better situated toward Fra Angelico, enough of whose
works have come down to us to reveal not only his quality as an artist,
but his character as a man. Perfect certainty of purpose, utter devotion
to his task, a sacramental earnestness in performing it, are what the
quantity and quality of his work together proclaim. It is true that
Giotto's profound feeling for either the materially or the spiritually
significant was denied him--and there is no possible compensation for
the difference; but although his sense for the real was weaker, it yet
extended to fields which Giotto had not touched. Like all the supreme
artists, Giotto had no inclination to concern himself with his attitude
toward the significant, with his feelings about it; the grasping and
presentation of it sufficed him. In the weaker personality, the
significant, vaguely perceived, is converted into emotion, is merely
felt, and not realised. Over this realm of feeling Fra Angelico was the
first great master. "God's in his heaven--all's right with the world" he
felt with an intensity which prevented him from perceiving evil
anywhere. When he was obliged to portray it, his imagination failed him
and he became a mere child; his hells are bogy-land; his martyrdoms are
enacted by children solemnly playing at martyr and executioner; and he
nearly spoils one of the most impressive scenes ever painted--the great
"Crucifixion" at San Marco--with the childish violence of St. Jerome's
tears. But upon the picturing of blitheness, of ecstatic confidence in
God's loving care, he lavished all the resources of his art. Nor were
they small. To a power of rendering tactile values, to a sense for the
significant in composition, inferior, it is true, to Giotto's, but
superior to the qualifications of any intervening painter, Fra Angelico
added the charm of great facial beauty, the interest of vivid
expression, the attraction of delicate colour. What in the whole world
of art more rejuvenating than Angelico's "Coronation" (in the
Uffizi)--the happiness on all the faces, the flower-like grace of line
and colour, the childlike simplicity yet unqualifiable beauty of the
composition? And all this in tactile values which compel us to grant the
reality of the scene, although in a world where real people are
standing, sitting, and kneeling we know not, and care not, on what. It
is true, the significance of the event represented is scarcely touched
upon, but then how well Angelico communicates the feeling with which it
inspired him! Yet simple though he was as a person, simple and
one-sided as was his message, as a product he was singularly complex. He
was the typical painter of the transition from Mediæval to Renaissance.
The sources of his feeling are in the Middle Ages, but he _enjoys_ his
feelings in a way which is almost modern; and almost modern also are his
means of expression. We are too apt to forget this transitional
character of his, and, ranking him with the moderns, we count against
him every awkwardness of action, and every lack of articulation in his
figures. Yet both in action and in articulation he made great progress
upon his precursors--so great that, but for Masaccio, who completely
surpassed him, we should value him as an innovator. Moreover, he was not
only the first Italian to paint a landscape that can be identified (a
view of Lake Trasimene from Cortona), but the first to communicate a
sense of the pleasantness of nature. How readily we feel the freshness
and spring-time gaiety of his gardens in the frescoes of the
"Annunciation" and the "Noli me tangere" at San Marco!

IV.

[Page heading: MASACCIO]

Giotto born again, starting where death had cut short his advance,
instantly making his own all that had been gained during his absence,
and profiting by the new conditions, the new demands--imagine such an
avatar, and you will understand Masaccio.

Giotto we know already, but what were the new conditions, the new
demands? The mediæval skies had been torn asunder and a new heaven and a
new earth had appeared, which the abler spirits were already inhabiting
and enjoying. Here new interests and new values prevailed. The thing of
sovereign price was the power to subdue and to create; of sovereign
interest all that helped man to know the world he was living in and his
power over it. To the artist the change offered a field of the freest
activity. It is always his business to reveal to an age its ideals. But
what room was there for sculpture and painting,--arts whose first
purpose it is to make us realise the material significance of things--in
a period like the Middle Ages, when the human body was denied all
intrinsic significance? In such an age the figure artist can thrive, as
Giotto did, only in spite of it, and as an isolated phenomenon. In the
Renaissance, on the contrary, the figure artist had a demand made on him
such as had not been made since the great Greek days, to reveal to a
generation believing in man's power to subdue and to possess the world,
the physical types best fitted for the task. And as this demand was
imperative and constant, not one, but a hundred Italian artists arose,
able each in his own way to meet it,--in their combined achievement,
rivalling the art of the Greeks.

In sculpture Donatello had already given body to the new ideals when
Masaccio began his brief career, and in the education, the awakening, of
the younger artist the example of the elder must have been of
incalculable force. But a type gains vastly in significance by being
presented in some action along with other individuals of the same type;
and here Donatello was apt, rather than to draw his meed of profit, to
incur loss by descending to the obvious--witness his _bas-reliefs_ at
Siena, Florence, and Padua. Masaccio was untouched by this taint.
Types, in themselves of the manliest, he presents with a sense for the
materially significant which makes us realise to the utmost their power
and dignity; and the spiritual significance thus gained he uses to give
the highest import to the event he is portraying; this import, in turn,
gives a higher value to the types, and thus, whether we devote our
attention to his types or to his action, Masaccio keeps us on a high
plane of reality and significance. In later painting we shall easily
find greater science, greater craft, and greater perfection of detail,
but greater reality, greater significance, I venture to say, never.
Dust-bitten and ruined though his Brancacci Chapel frescoes now are, I
never see them without the strongest stimulation of my tactile
consciousness. I feel that I could touch every figure, that it would
yield a definite resistance to my touch, that I should have to expend
thus much effort to displace it, that I could walk around it. In short,
I scarcely could realise it more, and in real life I should scarcely
realise it so well, the attention of each of us being too apt to
concentrate itself upon some dynamic quality, before we have at all
begun to realise the full material significance of the person before us.
Then what strength to his young men, and what gravity and power to his
old! How quickly a race like this would possess itself of the earth, and
brook no rivals but the forces of nature! Whatever they do--simply
because it is they--is impressive and important, and every movement,
every gesture, is world-changing. Compared with his figures, those in
the same chapel by his precursor, Masolino, are childish, and those by
his follower, Filippino, unconvincing and without significance, because
without tactile values. Even Michelangelo, where he comes in rivalry,
has, for both reality and significance, to take a second place. Compare
his "Expulsion from Paradise" (in the Sixtine Chapel) with the one here
by Masaccio. Michelangelo's figures are more correct, but far less
tangible and less powerful; and while he represents nothing but a man
warding off a blow dealt from a sword, and a woman cringing with ignoble
fear, Masaccio's Adam and Eve stride away from Eden heart-broken with
shame and grief, hearing, perhaps, but not seeing, the angel hovering
high overhead who directs their exiled footsteps.

Masaccio, then, like Giotto a century earlier,--himself the Giotto of an
artistically more propitious world--was, as an artist, a great master of
the significant, and, as a painter, endowed to the highest degree with a
sense of tactile values, and with a skill in rendering them. In a career
of but few years he gave to Florentine painting the direction it pursued
to the end. In many ways he reminds us of the young Bellini. Who knows?
Had he but lived as long, he might have laid the foundation for a
painting not less delightful and far more profound than that of Venice.
As it was, his frescoes at once became, and for as long as there were
real artists among them remained, the training-school of Florentine
painters.

V.

Masaccio's death left Florentine painting in the hands of three men
older, and two somewhat younger than himself, all men of great talent,
if not of genius, each of whom--the former to the extent habits already
formed would permit, the latter overwhelmingly, felt his influence. The
older, who, but for Masaccio, would themselves have been the sole
determining personalities in their art, were Fra Angelico, Paolo
Uccello, and Andrea del Castagno; the younger, Domenico Veneziano and
Fra Filippo. As these were the men who for a whole generation after
Masaccio's death remained at the head of their craft, forming the taste
of the public, and communicating their habits and aspirations to their
pupils, we at this point can scarcely do better than try to get some
notion of each of them and of the general art tendencies they
represented.

[Page heading: PAOLO UCCELLO]

Fra Angelico we know already as the painter who devoted his life to
picturing the departing mediæval vision of a heaven upon earth. Nothing
could have been farther from the purpose of Uccello and Castagno.
Different as these two were from each other, they have this much in
common, that in their works which remain to us, dating, it is true, from
their years of maturity, there is no touch of mediæval sentiment, no
note of transition. As artists they belonged entirely to the new era,
and they stand at the beginning of the Renaissance as types of two
tendencies which were to prevail in Florence throughout the whole of the
fifteenth century, partly supplementing and partly undoing the teaching
of Masaccio.

Uccello had a sense of tactile values and a feeling for colour, but in
so far as he used these gifts at all, it was to illustrate scientific
problems. His real passion was perspective, and painting was to him a
mere occasion for solving some problem in this science, and displaying
his mastery over its difficulties. Accordingly he composed pictures in
which he contrived to get as many lines as possible leading the eye
inward. Prostrate horses, dead or dying cavaliers, broken lances,
ploughed fields, Noah's arks, are used by him with scarcely an attempt
at disguise, to serve his scheme of mathematically converging lines. In
his zeal he forgot local colour--he loved to paint his horses green or
pink--forgot action, forgot composition, and, it need scarcely be added,
significance. Thus in his battle-pieces, instead of adequate action of
any sort, we get the feeling of witnessing a show of stuffed figures
whose mechanical movements have been suddenly arrested by some clog in
their wires; in his fresco of the "Deluge," he has so covered his space
with demonstrations of his cleverness in perspective and foreshortening
that, far from bringing home to us the terrors of a cataclysm, he at the
utmost suggests the bursting of a mill-dam; and in the neighbouring
fresco of the "Sacrifice of Noah," just as some capitally constructed
figures are about to enable us to realise the scene, all possibility of
artistic pleasure is destroyed by our seeing an object in the air which,
after some difficulty, we decipher as a human being plunging downward
from the clouds. Instead of making this figure, which, by the way, is
meant to represent God the Father, plunge toward us, Uccello
deliberately preferred to make it dash inward, away from us, thereby
displaying his great skill in both perspective and foreshortening, but
at the same time writing himself down as the founder of two families of
painters which have flourished ever since, the artists for dexterity's
sake--mental or manual, it scarcely matters--and the naturalists. As
these two clans increased rapidly in Florence, and, for both good and
evil, greatly affected the whole subsequent course of Florentine
painting, we must, before going farther, briefly define to ourselves
dexterity and naturalism, and their relation to art.

[Page heading: ART FOR DEXTERITY'S SAKE]

The essential in painting, especially in figure-painting, is, we agreed,
the rendering of the tactile values of the forms represented, because by
this means, and this alone, can the art make us realise forms better
than we do in life. The great painter, then, is, above all, an artist
with a great sense of tactile values and great skill in rendering them.
Now this sense, though it will increase as the man is revealed to
himself, is something which the great painter possesses at the start, so
that he is scarcely, if at all, aware of possessing it. His conscious
effort is given to the means of rendering. It is of means of rendering,
therefore, that he talks to others; and, because his triumphs here are
hard-earned and conscious, it is on his skill in rendering that he
prides himself. The greater the painter, the less likely he is to be
aware of aught else in his art than problems of rendering--but all the
while he is communicating what the force of his genius makes him feel
without his striving for it, almost without his being aware of it, the
material and spiritual significance of forms. However--his intimates
hear him talk of nothing but skill; he seems to think of nothing but
skill; and naturally they, and the entire public, conclude that his
skill is his genius, and that skill _is_ art. This, alas, has at all
times been the too prevalent notion of what art is, divergence of
opinion existing not on the principle, but on the kind of dexterity to
be prized, each generation, each critic, having an individual standard,
based always on the several peculiar problems and difficulties that
interest them. At Florence these inverted notions about art were
especially prevalent because it was a school of art with a score of men
of genius and a thousand mediocrities all egging each other on to
exhibitions of dexterity, and in their hot rivalry it was all the great
geniuses could do to be faithful to their sense of significance. Even
Masaccio was driven to exhibit his mere skill, the much admired and by
itself wonderfully realised figure of a naked man trembling with cold
being not only without real significance, but positively distracting,
in the representation of a baptism. A weaker man like Paolo Uccello
almost entirely sacrificed what sense of artistic significance he may
have started with, in his eagerness to display his skill and knowledge.
As for the rabble, their work has now the interest of prize exhibitions
at local art schools, and their number merely helped to accelerate the
momentum with which Florentine art rushed to its end. But out of even
mere dexterity a certain benefit to art may come. Men without feeling
for the significant may yet perfect a thousand matters which make
rendering easier and quicker for the man who comes with something to
render, and when Botticelli and Leonardo and Michelangelo appeared, they
found their artistic patrimony increased in spite of the fact that since
Masaccio there had been no man at all approaching their genius. This
increase, however, was due not at all so much to the sons of dexterity,
as to the intellectually much nobler, but artistically even inferior
race of whom also Uccello was the ancestor--the Naturalists.

[Page heading: NATURALISM IN ART]

What is a Naturalist? I venture upon the following definition:--A man
with a native gift for science who has taken to art. His purpose is not
to extract the material and spiritual significance of objects, thus
communicating them to us more rapidly and intensely than we should
perceive them ourselves, and thereby giving us a sense of heightened
vitality; his purpose is research, and his communication consists of
nothing but facts. From this perhaps too abstract statement let us take
refuge in an example already touched upon--the figure of the Almighty in
Uccello's "Sacrifice of Noah." Instead of presenting this figure as
coming toward us in an attitude and with an expression that will appeal
to our sense of solemnity, as a man whose chief interest was artistic
would have done--as Giotto, in fact, did in his "Baptism"--Uccello seems
to have been possessed with nothing but the scientific intention to find
out how a man swooping down head-foremost would have looked if at a
given instant of his fall he had been suddenly congealed and suspended
in space. A figure like this may have a mathematical but certainly has
no psychological significance. Uccello, it is true, has studied every
detail of this phenomenon and noted down his observations, but because
his notes happen to be in form and colour, they do not therefore
constitute a work of art. Wherein does his achievement differ in quality
from a coloured map of a country? We can easily conceive of a relief map
of Cadore or Giverny on so large a scale, and so elaborately coloured,
that it will be an exact reproduction of the physical aspects of those
regions, but never for a moment should we place it beside a landscape by
Titian or Monet, and think of it as a work of art. Yet its relation to
the Titian or Monet painting is exactly that of Uccello's achievement to
Giotto's. What the scientist who paints--the naturalist, that is to
say,--attempts to do is not to give us what art alone can give us, the
life-enhancing qualities of objects, but a reproduction of them as they
are. If he succeeded, he would give us the exact visual impression of
the objects themselves, but art, as we have already agreed, must give us
not the mere reproductions of things but a quickened sense of capacity
for realising them. Artistically, then, the naturalists, Uccello and
his numerous successors, accomplished nothing. Yet their efforts to
reproduce objects as they are, their studies in anatomy and perspective,
made it inevitable that when another great genius did arise, he should
be a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, and not a Giotto.

[Page heading: ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO]

Uccello, as I have said, was the first representative of two strong
tendencies in Florentine painting--of art for dexterity's sake, and art
for scientific purposes. Andrea del Castagno, while also unable to
resist the fascination of mere science and dexterity, had too much
artistic genius to succumb to either. He was endowed with great sense
for the significant, although, it is true, not enough to save him
completely from the pitfalls which beset all Florentines, and even less
from one more peculiar to himself--the tendency to communicate at any
cost a feeling of power. To make us feel power as Masaccio and
Michelangelo do at their best is indeed an achievement, but it requires
the highest genius and the profoundest sense for the significant. The
moment this sense is at all lacking, the artist will not succeed in
conveying power, but such obvious manifestations of it as mere
strength, or, worse still, the insolence not infrequently accompanying
high spirits. Now Castagno, who succeeds well enough in one or two such
single figures as his Cumæan Sibyl or his Farinata degli Uberti, which
have great, if not the greatest, power, dignity, and even beauty,
elsewhere condescends to mere swagger,--as in his Pipo Spano or Niccolo
di Tolentino--or to mere strength, as in his "Last Supper," or, worse
still, to actual brutality, as in his Santa Maria Nuova "Crucifixion."
Nevertheless, his few remaining works lead us to suspect in him the
greatest artist, and the most influential personality among the painters
of the first generation after Masaccio.

VI.

[Page heading: DOMENICO VENEZIANO]

To distinguish clearly, after the lapse of nearly five centuries,
between Uccello and Castagno, and to determine the precise share each
had in the formation of the Florentine school, is already a task fraught
with difficulties. The scantiness of his remaining works makes it more
than difficult, makes it almost impossible, to come to accurate
conclusions regarding the character and influence of their somewhat
younger contemporary, Domenico Veneziano. That he was an innovator in
technique, in affairs of vehicle and medium, we know from Vasari; but as
such innovations, indispensable though they may become to painting as a
craft, are in themselves questions of theoretic and applied chemistry,
and not of art, they do not here concern us. His artistic achievements
seem to have consisted in giving to the figure movement and expression,
and to the face individuality. In his existing works we find no trace of
sacrifice made to dexterity and naturalism, although it is clear that he
must have been master of whatever science and whatever craft were
prevalent in his day. Otherwise he would not have been able to render a
figure like the St. Francis in his Uffizi altar-piece, where tactile
values and movement expressive of character--what we usually call
individual _gait_--were perhaps for the first time combined; or to
attain to such triumphs as his St. John and St. Francis, at Santa Croce,
whose entire figures express as much fervour as their eloquent faces.
As to his sense for the significant in the individual, in other words,
his power as a portrait-painter, we have in the Pitti one or two heads
to witness, perhaps, the first great achievements in this kind of the
Renaissance.

[Page heading: FRA FILIPPO LIPPI]

No such difficulties as we have encountered in the study of Uccello,
Castagno, and Veneziano meet us as we turn to Fra Filippo. His works are
still copious, and many of them are admirably preserved; we therefore
have every facility for judging him as an artist, yet nothing is harder
than to appreciate him at his due. If attractiveness, and attractiveness
of the best kind, sufficed to make a great artist, then Filippo would be
one of the greatest, greater perhaps than any other Florentine before
Leonardo. Where shall we find faces more winsome, more appealing, than
in certain of his Madonnas--the one in the Uffizi, for instance--more
momentarily evocative of noble feeling than in his Louvre altar-piece?
Where in Florentine painting is there anything more fascinating than the
playfulness of his children, more poetic than one or two of his
landscapes, more charming than is at times his colour? And with all
this, health, even robustness, and almost unfailing good-humour! Yet by
themselves all these qualities constitute only a high-class illustrator,
and such by native endowment I believe Fra Filippo to have been. That he
became more--very much more--is due rather to Masaccio's potent
influence than to his own genius; for he had no profound sense of either
material or spiritual significance--the essential qualifications of the
real artist. Working under the inspiration of Masaccio, he at times
renders tactile values admirably, as in the Uffizi Madonna--but most
frequently he betrays no genuine feeling for them, failing in his
attempt to render them by the introduction of bunchy, billowy,
calligraphic draperies. These, acquired from the late Giottesque painter
(probably Lorenzo Monaco) who had been his first master, he seems to
have prized as artistic elements no less than the tactile values which
he attempted to adopt later, serenely unconscious, apparently, of their
incompatibility. Filippo's strongest impulse was not toward the
pre-eminently artistic one of re-creation, but rather toward expression,
and within that field, toward the expression of the pleasant, genial,
spiritually comfortable feelings of ordinary life. His real place is
with the _genre_ painters; only his _genre_ was of the soul, as that of
others--of Benozzo Gozzoli, for example--was of the body. Hence a sin of
his own, scarcely less pernicious than that of the naturalists, and
cloying to boot--expression at any cost.

VII.

[Page heading: NATURALISM IN FLORENTINE ART]

From the brief account just given of the four dominant personalities in
Florentine painting from about 1430 to about 1460, it results that the
leanings of the school during this interval were not artistic and
artistic alone, but that there were other tendencies as well, tendencies
on the one side, toward the expression of emotion (scarcely less
literary because in form and colour than if in words), and, on the
other, toward the naturalistic reproduction of objects. We have also
noted that while the former tendency was represented by Filippo alone,
the latter had Paolo Uccello, and all of Castagno and Veneziano that the
genius of these two men would permit them to sacrifice to naturalism
and science. To the extent, however, that they took sides and were
conscious of a distinct purpose, these also sided with Uccello and not
with Filippo. It may be agreed, therefore, that the main current of
Florentine painting for a generation after Masaccio was naturalistic,
and that consequently the impact given to the younger painters who
during this period were starting, was mainly toward naturalism. Later,
in studying Botticelli, we shall see how difficult it was for any one
young at the time to escape this tide, even if by temperament farthest
removed from scientific interests.

Meanwhile we must continue our study of the naturalists, but now of the
second generation. Their number and importance from 1460 to 1490 is not
alone due to the fact that art education toward the beginning of this
epoch was mainly naturalistic, but also to the real needs of a rapidly
advancing craft, and even more to the character of the Florentine mind,
the dominant turn of which was to science and not to art. But as there
were then no professions scientific in the stricter sense of the word,
and as art of some form was the pursuit of a considerable proportion of
the male inhabitants of Florence, it happened inevitably that many a lad
with the natural capacities of a Galileo was in early boyhood
apprenticed as an artist. And as he never acquired ordinary methods of
scientific expression, and never had time for occupations not
bread-winning, he was obliged his life long to make of his art both the
subject of his strong instinctive interest in science, and the vehicle
of conveying his knowledge to others.

[Page heading: ALESSIO BALDOVINETTI]

This was literally the case with the oldest among the leaders of the new
generation, Alessio Baldovinetti, in whose scanty remaining works no
trace of purely artistic feeling or interest can be discerned; and it is
only less true of Alessio's somewhat younger, but far more gifted
contemporaries, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea Verrocchio. These also we
should scarcely suspect of being more than men of science, if Pollaiuolo
once or twice, and Verrocchio more frequently, did not dazzle us with
works of almost supreme art, which, but for our readiness to believe in
the manifold possibilities of Florentine genius, we should with
exceeding difficulty accept as their creation--so little do they seem to
result from their conscious striving. Alessio's attention being largely
devoted to problems of vehicle--to the side of painting which is
scarcely superior to cookery--he had time for little else, although that
spare time he gave to the study of landscape, in the rendering of which
he was among the innovators. Andrea and Antonio set themselves the much
worthier task of increasing on every side the effectiveness of the
figure arts, of which, sculpture no less than painting, they aimed to be
masters.

[Page heading: POLLAIUOLO AND VERROCCHIO]

To confine ourselves, however, as closely as we may to painting, and
leaving aside for the present the question of colour, which, as I have
already said, is, in Florentine art, of entirely subordinate importance,
there were three directions in which painting as Pollaiuolo and
Verrocchio found it had greatly to advance before it could attain its
maximum of effectiveness: landscape, movement, and the nude. Giotto had
attempted none of these. The nude, of course, he scarcely touched;
movement he suggested admirably, but never rendered; and in landscape
he was satisfied with indications hardly more than symbolical, although
quite adequate to his purpose, which was to confine himself to the human
figure. In all directions Masaccio made immense progress, guided by his
never failing sense for material significance, which, as it led him to
render the tactile values of each figure separately, compelled him also
to render the tactile values of groups as wholes, and of their landscape
surroundings--by preference, hills so shaped as readily to stimulate the
tactile imagination. For what he accomplished in the nude and in
movement, we have his "Expulsion" and his "Man Trembling with Cold" to
witness. But in his works neither landscape nor movement, nor the nude,
are as yet distinct sources of artistic pleasure--that is to say, in
themselves life-enhancing. Although we can well leave the nude until we
come to Michelangelo, who was the first to completely realise its
distinctly artistic possibilities, we cannot so well dispense with an
enquiry into the sources of our æsthetic pleasure in the representation
of movement and of landscape, as it was in these two directions--in
movement by Pollaiuolo especially, and in landscape by Baldovinetti,
Pollaiuolo, and Verrocchio--that the great advances of this generation
of Florentine painters were made.

VIII.

[Page heading: REPRESENTATION OF MOVEMENT]

Turning our attention first to movement--which, by the way, is not the
same as motion, mere change of place--we find that we realise it just as
we realise objects, by the stimulation of our tactile imagination, only
that here touch retires to a second place before the muscular feelings
of varying pressure and strain. I see (to take an example) two men
wrestling, but unless my retinal impressions are immediately translated
into images of strain and pressure in my muscles, of resistance to my
weight, of touch all over my body, it means nothing to me in terms of
vivid experience--not more, perhaps, than if I heard some one say "Two
men are wrestling." Although a wrestling match may, in fact, contain
many genuinely artistic elements, our enjoyment of it can never be quite
artistic; we are prevented from completely realising it not only by our
dramatic interest in the game, but also, granting the possibility of
being devoid of dramatic interest, by the succession of movements being
too rapid for us to realise each completely, and too fatiguing, even if
realisable. Now if a way could be found of conveying to us the
realisation of movement without the confusion and the fatigue of the
actuality, we should be getting out of the wrestlers more than they
themselves can give us--the heightening of vitality which comes to us
whenever we keenly realise life, such as the actuality itself would give
us, _plus_ the greater effectiveness of the heightening brought about by
the clearer, intenser, and less fatiguing realisation. This is precisely
what the artist who succeeds in representing movement achieves: making
us realise it as we never can actually, he gives us a heightened sense
of capacity, and whatever is in the actuality enjoyable, he allows us to
enjoy at our leisure. In words already familiar to us, he _extracts the
significance of movements_, just as, in rendering tactile values, the
artist extracts the corporeal significance of objects. His task is,
however, far more difficult, although less indispensable:--it is not
enough that he should extract the values of what at any given moment is
an actuality, as is an object, but what at no moment really is--namely
movement. He can accomplish his task in only one way, and that is by so
rendering the one particular movement that we shall be able to realise
all other movements that the same figure may make. "He is grappling with
his enemy now," I say of my wrestler. "What a pleasure to be able to
realise in my own muscles, on my own chest, with my own arms and legs,
the life that is in him as he is making his supreme effort! What a
pleasure, as I look away from the representation, to realise in the same
manner, how after the contest his muscles will relax, and rest trickle
like a refreshing stream through his nerves!" All this I shall be made
to enjoy by the artist who, in representing any one movement, can give
me the logical sequence of visible strain and pressure in the parts and
muscles.

It is just here that the scientific spirit of the Florentine naturalists
was of immense service to art. This logic of sequence is to be attained
only by great, although not necessarily more than empiric, knowledge of
anatomy, such perhaps as the artist pure would never be inclined to work
out for himself, but just such as would be of absorbing interest to
those scientists by temperament and artists by profession whom we have
in Pollaiuolo and, to a less extent, in Verrocchio. We remember how
Giotto contrived to render tactile values. Of all the possible outlines,
of all the possible variations of light and shade that a figure may
have, he selected those that we must isolate for special attention when
we are actually realising it. If instead of figure, we say figure in
movement, the same statement applies to the way Pollaiuolo rendered
movement--with this difference, however, that he had to render what in
actuality we never can perfectly isolate, the line and light and shade
most significant of any given action. This the artist must construct
himself out of his dramatic feeling for pressure and strain and his
ability to articulate the figure in all its logical sequences, for, if
he would convey a sense of movement, he must give the line and the
light and shade which will best render not tactile values alone, but the
sequences of articulations.

[Page heading: "BATTLE OF THE NUDES"]

It would be difficult to find more effective illustration of all that
has just been said about movement than one or two of Pollaiuolo's own
works, which, in contrast to most of his achievements, where little more
than effort and research are visible, are really masterpieces of
life-communicating art. Let us look first at his engraving known as the
"Battle of the Nudes." What is it that makes us return to this sheet
with ever renewed, ever increased pleasure? Surely it is not the hideous
faces of most of the figures and their scarcely less hideous bodies. Nor
is it the pattern as decorative design, which is of great beauty indeed,
but not at all in proportion to the spell exerted upon us. Least of all
is it--for most of us--an interest in the technique or history of
engraving. No, the pleasure we take in these savagely battling forms
arises from their power to directly communicate life, to immensely
heighten our sense of vitality. Look at the combatant prostrate on the
ground and his assailant bending over, each intent on stabbing the
other. See how the prostrate man plants his foot on the thigh of his
enemy, and note the tremendous energy he exerts to keep off the foe,
who, turning as upon a pivot, with his grip on the other's head, exerts
no less force to keep the advantage gained. The significance of all
these muscular strains and pressures is so rendered that we cannot help
realising them; we imagine ourselves imitating all the movements, and
exerting the force required for them--and all without the least effort
on our side. If all this without moving a muscle, what should we feel if
we too had exerted ourselves! And thus while under the spell of this
illusion--this hyperæsthesia not bought with drugs, and not paid for
with cheques drawn on our vitality--we feel as if the elixir of life,
not our own sluggish blood, were coursing through our veins.

[Page heading: "HERCULES STRANGLING DAVID"]

Let us look now at an even greater triumph of movement than the Nudes,
Pollaiuolo's "Hercules Strangling Antæus." As you realise the suction of
Hercules' grip on the earth, the swelling of his calves with the pressure
that falls on them, the violent throwing back of his chest, the stifling
force of his embrace; as you realise the supreme effort of Antæus, with
one hand crushing down upon the head and the other tearing at the arm of
Hercules, you feel as if a fountain of energy had sprung up under your
feet and were playing through your veins. I cannot refrain from
mentioning still another masterpiece, this time not only of movement, but
of tactile values and personal beauty as well--Pollaiuolo's "David" at
Berlin. The young warrior has sped his stone, cut off the giant's head,
and now he strides over it, his graceful, slender figure still vibrating
with the rapidity of his triumph, expectant, as if fearing the ease of
it. What lightness, what buoyancy we feel as we realise the movement of
this wonderful youth!

IX.

[Page heading: VERROCCHIO AND LANDSCAPE]

In all that concerns movement, Verrocchio was a learner from Pollaiuolo,
rather than an initiator, and he probably never attained his master's
proficiency. We have unfortunately but few terms for comparison, as the
only paintings which can be with certainty ascribed to Verrocchio are
not pictures of action. A drawing however like that of his angel, in the
British Museum, which attempts as much movement as the Hercules by
Pollaiuolo, in the same collection, is of obviously inferior quality.
Yet in sculpture, along with works which are valuable as harbingers of
Leonardo rather than for any intrinsic perfection, he created two such
masterpieces of movement as the "Child with the Dolphin" in the
courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Colleoni monument at
Venice--the latter sinning, if at all, by an over-exuberance of
movement, by a step and swing too suggestive of drums and trumpets. But
in landscape Verrocchio was a decided innovator. To understand what new
elements he introduced, we must at this point carry out our
determination to enquire into the source of our pleasure in landscape
painting; or rather--to avoid a subject of vast extent for which this is
not the place--of landscape painting as practised by the Florentines.

[Page heading: LANDSCAPE PAINTING]

Before Verrocchio, his precursors, first Alessio Baldovinetti and then
Pollaiuolo, had attempted to treat landscape as naturalistically as
painting would permit. Their ideal was to note it down with absolute
correctness from a given point of view; their subject almost invariably
the Valdarno; their achievement, a bird's-eye view of this Tuscan
paradise. Nor can it be denied that this gives pleasure, but the
pleasure is only such as is conveyed by tactile values. Instead of
having the difficulty we should have in nature to distinguish clearly
points near the horizon's edge, we here see them perfectly and without
an effort, and in consequence feel great confirmation of capacity for
life. Now if landscape were, as most people vaguely believe, a pleasure
coming through the eyes alone, then the Pollaiuolesque treatment could
be equalled by none that has followed, and surpassed only by Rogier van
der Weyden, or by the quaint German "Master of the Lyversberg Passion,"
who makes us see objects miles away with as great a precision and with
as much intensity of local colour as if we were standing off from them a
few feet. Were landscape really this, then nothing more inartistic than
gradation of tint, atmosphere, and _plein air_, all of which help to
make distant objects less clear, and therefore tend in no way to
heighten our sense of capacity. But as a matter of fact the pleasure we
take in actual landscape is only to a limited extent an affair of the
eye, and to a great extent one of unusually intense well-being. The
painter's problem, therefore, is not merely to render the tactile values
of the visible objects, but to convey, more rapidly and unfailingly than
nature would do, _the consciousness_ of an unusually intense degree of
well-being. This task--the communication by means purely visual of
feelings occasioned chiefly by sensations non-visual--is of such
difficulty that, until recently, successes in the rendering of what is
peculiar to landscape as an art, and to landscape alone, were accidental
and sporadic. Only now, in our own days, may painting be said to be
grappling with this problem seriously; and perhaps we are already at the
dawn of an art which will have to what has hitherto been called
landscape, the relation of our music to the music of the Greeks or of
the Middle Ages.

[Page heading: VERROCCHIO'S LANDSCAPES]

Verrocchio was, among Florentines at least, the first to feel that a
faithful reproduction of the contours is not landscape, that the
painting of nature is an art distinct from the painting of the figure.
He scarcely knew where the difference lay, but felt that light and
atmosphere play an entirely different part in each, and that in
landscape these have at least as much importance as tactile values. A
vision of _plein air_, vague I must grant, seems to have hovered before
him, and, feeling his powerlessness to cope with it in full effects of
light such as he attempted in his earlier pictures, he deliberately
chose the twilight hour, when, in Tuscany, on fine days, the trees stand
out almost black against a sky of light opalescent grey. To render this
subduing, soothing effect of the coolness and the dew after the glare
and dust of the day--the effect so matchlessly given in Gray's
"Elegy"--seemed to be his first desire as a painter, and in presence of
his "Annunciation" (in the Uffizi), we feel that he succeeded as only
one other Tuscan succeeded after him, that other being his own pupil
Leonardo.

X.

[Page heading: GENRE ARTISTS]

It is a temptation to hasten on from Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio to
Botticelli and Leonardo, to men of genius as artists reappearing again
after two generations, men who accomplished with scarcely an effort what
their precursors had been toiling after. But from these it would be even
more difficult than at present to turn back to painters of scarcely any
rank among the world's great artists, and of scarcely any importance as
links in a chain of evolution, but not to be passed by, partly because
of certain qualities they do possess, and partly because their names
would be missed in an account, even so brief as this, of Florentine
painting. The men I chiefly refer to, one most active toward the middle
and the other toward the end of the fifteenth century, are Benozzo
Gozzoli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Although they have been rarely coupled
together, they have much in common. Both were, as artists, little more
than mediocrities with almost no genuine feeling for what makes painting
a great art. The real attractiveness of both lies entirely outside the
sphere of pure art, in the realms of _genre_ illustration. And here the
likeness between them ends; within their common ground they differed
widely.

[Page heading: BENOZZO GOZZOLI]

Benozzo was gifted with a rare facility not only of execution but of
invention, with a spontaneity, a freshness, a liveliness in telling a
story that wake the child in us, and the lover of the fairy tale. Later
in life, his more precious gifts deserted him, but who wants to resist
the fascination of his early works, painted, as they seem, by a Fra
Angelico who had forgotten heaven and become enamoured of the earth and
the spring-time? In his Riccardi Palace frescoes, he has sunk already to
portraying the Florentine apprentice's dream of a holiday in the country
on St. John's Day; but what a _naïf_ ideal of luxury and splendour it
is! With these, the glamour in which he saw the world began to fade away
from him, and in his Pisan frescoes we have, it is true, many a quaint
bit of _genre_ (superior to Teniers only because of superior
associations), but never again the fairy tale. And as the better
recedes, it is replaced by the worse, by the bane of all _genre_
painting, non-significant detail, and positive bad taste. Have London
or New York or Berlin worse to show us than the jumble of buildings in
his ideal of a great city, his picture of Babylon? It may be said he
here continues mediæval tradition, which is quite true, but this very
fact indicates his real place, which, in spite of his adopting so many
of the fifteenth-century improvements, is not with the artists of the
Renaissance, but with the story-tellers and costumed fairy-tale painters
of the transition, with Spinello Aretino and Gentile da Fabriano, for
instance. And yet, once in a while, he renders a head with such
character, or a movement with such ease that we wonder whether he had
not in him, after all, the making of a real artist.

[Page heading: GHIRLANDAIO]

Ghirlandaio was born to far more science and cunning in painting than
was current in Benozzo's early years, and all that industry, all that
love of his occupation, all that talent even, can do for a man, they did
for him; but unfortunately he had not a spark of genius. He appreciated
Masaccio's tactile values, Pollaiuolo's movement, Verrocchio's effects
of light, and succeeded in so sugaring down what he adopted from these
great masters that the superior philistine of Florence could say: "There
now is a man who knows as much as any of the great men, but can give me
something that I can really enjoy!" Bright colour, pretty faces, good
likenesses, and the obvious everywhere--attractive and delightful, it
must be granted, but, except in certain single figures, never
significant. Let us glance a moment at his famous frescoes in Santa
Maria Novella. To begin with, they are so undecorative that, in spite of
the tone and surface imparted to them by four centuries, they still
suggest so many _tableaux vivants_ pushed into the wall side by side,
and in tiers. Then the compositions are as overfilled as the sheets of
an illustrated newspaper--witness the "Massacre of the Innocents," a
scene of such magnificent artistic possibilities. Finally, irrelevant
episodes and irrelevant groups of portraits do what they can to distract
our attention from all higher significance. Look at the "Birth of John";
Ginevra dei Benci stands there, in the very foreground, staring out at
you as stiff as if she had a photographer's iron behind her head. An
even larger group of Florentine housewives in all their finery
disfigures the "Birth of the Virgin," which is further spoiled by a _bas
relief_ to show off the painter's acquaintance with the antique, and by
the figure of the serving maid who pours out water, with the rush of a
whirlwind in her skirts--this to show off skill in the rendering of
movement. Yet elsewhere, as in his "Epiphany" in the Uffizi, Ghirlandaio
has undeniable charm, and occasionally in portraits his talent, here at
its highest, rises above mediocrity, in one instance, the fresco of
Sassetti in Santa Trinità, becoming almost genius.

XI.

[Page heading: LEONARDO]

All that Giotto and Masaccio had attained in the rendering of tactile
values, all that Fra Angelico or Filippo had achieved in expression, all
that Pollaiuolo had accomplished in movement, or Verrocchio in light and
shade, Leonardo, without the faintest trace of that tentativeness, that
painfulness of effort which characterised his immediate precursors,
equalled or surpassed. Outside Velasquez, and perhaps, when at their
best, Rembrandt and Degas, we shall seek in vain for tactile values so
stimulating and so convincing as those of his "Mona Lisa"; outside
Degas, we shall not find such supreme mastery over the art of movement
as in the unfinished "Epiphany" in the Uffizi; and if Leonardo has been
left far behind as a painter of light, no one has succeeded in conveying
by means of light and shade a more penetrating feeling of mystery and
awe than he in his "Virgin of the Rocks." Add to all this, a feeling for
beauty and significance that have scarcely ever been approached. Where
again youth so poignantly attractive, manhood so potently virile, old
age so dignified and possessed of the world's secrets! Who like Leonardo
has depicted the mother's happiness in her child and the child's joy in
being alive; who like Leonardo has portrayed the timidity, the newness
to experience, the delicacy and refinement of maidenhood; or the
enchantress intuitions, the inexhaustible fascination of the woman in
her years of mastery? Look at his many sketches for Madonnas, look at
his profile drawing of Isabella d'Este, or at the _Belle Joconde_, and
see whether elsewhere you find their equals. Leonardo is the one artist
of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched
but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the
cross-section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of
muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever
transmuted it into life-communicating values; and all without intention,
for most of these magical sketches were dashed off to illustrate purely
scientific matter, which alone absorbed his mind at the moment.

And just as his art is life-communicating as is that of scarcely
another, so the contemplation of his personality is life-enhancing as
that of scarcely any other man. Think that great though he was as a
painter, he was no less renowned as a sculptor and architect, musician
and improviser, and that all artistic occupations whatsoever were in his
career but moments snatched from the pursuit of theoretical and
practical knowledge. It would seem as if there were scarcely a field of
modern science but he either foresaw it in vision, or clearly
anticipated it, scarcely a realm of fruitful speculation of which he
was not a freeman; and as if there were hardly a form of human energy
which he did not manifest. And all that he demanded of life was the
chance to be useful! Surely, such a man brings us the gladdest of all
tidings--the wonderful possibilities of the human family, of whose
chances we all partake.

Painting, then, was to Leonardo so little of a preoccupation that we
must regard it as merely a mode of expression used at moments by a man
of universal genius, who recurred to it only when he had no more
absorbing occupation, and only when it could express what nothing else
could, the highest spiritual through the highest material significance.
And great though his mastery over his craft, his feeling for
significance was so much greater that it caused him to linger long over
his pictures, labouring to render the significance he felt but which his
hand could not reproduce, so that he rarely finished them. We thus have
lost in quantity, but have we lost in quality? Could a mere painter, or
even a mere artist, have seen and felt as Leonardo? We may well doubt.
We are too apt to regard a universal genius as a number of ordinary
brains somehow conjoined in one skull, and not always on the most
neighbourly terms. We forget that genius means mental energy, and that a
Leonardo, for the self-same reason that prevents his being merely a
painter--the fact that it does not exhaust a hundredth part of his
energy--will, when he does turn to painting, bring to bear a power of
seeing, feeling, and rendering, as utterly above that of the ordinary
painter as the "Mona Lisa" is above, let us say, Andrea del Sarto's
"Portrait of his Wife." No, let us not join in the reproaches made to
Leonardo for having painted so little; because he had much more to do
than to paint, he has left all of us heirs to one or two of the
supremest works of art ever created.

XII.

[Page heading: BOTTICELLI]

Never pretty, scarcely ever charming or even attractive; rarely correct
in drawing, and seldom satisfactory in colour; in types, ill-favoured;
in feeling acutely intense and even dolorous--what is it then that makes
Sandro Botticelli so irresistible that nowadays we may have no
alternative but to worship or abhor him? The secret is this, that in
European painting there has never again been an artist so indifferent to
representation and so intent upon presentation. Educated in a period of
triumphant naturalism, he plunged at first into mere representation with
almost self-obliterating earnestness; the pupil of Fra Filippo, he was
trained to a love of spiritual _genre_; himself gifted with strong
instincts for the significant, he was able to create such a type of the
thinker as in his fresco of St. Augustin; yet in his best years he left
everything, even spiritual significance, behind him, and abandoned
himself to the presentation of those qualities alone which in a picture
are _directly_ life-communicating, and life-enhancing. Those of us who
care for nothing in the work of art but what it represents, are either
powerfully attracted or repelled by his unhackneyed types and quivering
feeling; but if we are such as have an imagination of touch and of
movement that it is easy to stimulate, we feel a pleasure in Botticelli
that few, if any, other artists can give us. Long after we have
exhausted both the intensest sympathies and the most violent
antipathies with which the representative elements in his pictures may
have inspired us, we are only on the verge of fully appreciating his
real genius. This in its happiest moments is an unparalleled power of
perfectly combining values of touch with values of movement.

Look, for instance, at Botticelli's "Venus Rising from the Sea."
Throughout, the tactile imagination is roused to a keen activity, by
itself almost as life heightening as music. But the power of music is
even surpassed where, as in the goddess' mane-like tresses of hair
fluttering to the wind, not in disorderly rout but in masses yielding
only after resistance, the movement is directly life-communicating. The
entire picture presents us with the quintessence of all that is
pleasurable to our imagination of touch and of movement. How we revel in
the force and freshness of the wind, in the life of the wave! And such
an appeal he always makes. His subject may be fanciful, as in the "Realm
of Venus" (the "Spring"); religious, as in the Sixtine Chapel frescoes
or in the "Coronation of the Virgin"; political, as in the recently
discovered "Pallas Taming a Centaur"; or even crudely allegorical, as in
the Louvre frescoes,--no matter how unpropitious, how abstract the idea,
the vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life-communicating movement
is always there. Indeed, at times it seems that the less artistic the
theme, the more artistic the fulfilment, the painter being impelled to
give the utmost values of touch and movement to just those figures which
are liable to be read off as mere empty symbols. Thus, on the figure
representing political disorder--the Centaur--in the "Pallas,"
Botticelli has lavished his most intimate gifts. He constructs the torso
and flanks in such a way that every line, every indentation, every boss
appeals so vividly to the sense of touch that our fingers feel as if
they had everywhere been in contact with his body, while his face gives
to a still heightened degree this convincing sense of reality, every
line functioning perfectly for the osseous structure of brow, nose, and
cheeks. As to the hair--imagine shapes having the supreme life of line
you may see in the contours of licking flames, and yet possessed of all
the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to
its own desire!

[Page heading: LINEAL DECORATION]

In fact, the mere subject, and even representation in general, was so
indifferent to Botticelli, that he appears almost as if haunted by the
idea of communicating the _unembodied_ values of touch and movement. Now
there is a way of rendering even tactile values with almost no body, and
that is by translating them as faithfully as may be into values of
movement. For instance:--we want to render the roundness of a wrist
without the slightest touch of either light or shade; we simply give the
movement of the wrist's outline and the movement of the drapery as it
falls over it, and the roundness is communicated to us almost entirely
in terms of movement. But let us go one step further. Take this line
that renders the roundness of the wrist, or a more obvious example, the
lines that render the movements of the tossing hair, the fluttering
draperies, and the dancing waves in the "Birth of Venus"--take these
lines alone with all their power of stimulating our imagination of
movement, and what do we have? Pure values of movement abstracted,
unconnected with any representation whatever. This kind of line, then,
being the quintessence of movement, has, like the essential elements in
all the arts, a power of stimulating our imagination and of directly
communicating life. Well! imagine an art made up entirely of these
quintessences of movement-values, and you will have something that holds
the same relation to representation that music holds to speech--and this
art exists, and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro
Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but
in Europe never. To its demands he was ready to sacrifice everything
that habits acquired under Filippo and Pollaiuolo,--and his
employers!--would permit. The representative element was for him a mere
_libretto_: he was happiest when his subject lent itself to translation
into what may be called a lineal symphony. And to this symphony
everything was made to yield; tactile values were translated into values
of movement, and, for the same reason--to prevent the drawing of the eye
inward, to permit it to devote itself to the rhythm of the line--the
backgrounds were either entirely suppressed or kept as simple as
possible. Colour also, with almost a contempt for its representative
function, Botticelli entirely subordinated to his lineal scheme,
compelling it to draw attention to the line, rather than, as is usual,
away from it.

This is the explanation of the value put upon Botticelli's masterpieces.
In some of his later works, such as the Dresden _predelle_, we have, it
is true, bacchanals rather than symphonies of line, and in many of his
earlier paintings, in the "_Fortezza_," for instance, the harness and
trappings have so disguised Pegasus that we scarcely know him from a
cart horse. But the painter of the "Venus Rising from the Sea," of the
"Spring," or of the Villa Lemmi frescoes is the greatest artist of
lineal design that Europe has ever had.

XIII.

[Page heading: POPULARISERS OF ART]

Leonardo and Botticelli, like Michelangelo after them, found imitators
but not successors. To communicate more material and spiritual
significance than Leonardo, would have taken an artist with deeper
feeling for significance; to get more music out of design than
Botticelli, would have required a painter with even greater passion for
the re-embodiment of the pure essences of touch and movement. There were
none such in Florence, and the followers of Botticelli--Leonardo's were
all Milanese, and do not here concern us--could but imitate the patterns
of their master: the patterns of the face, the patterns of the
composition, and the patterns of the line; dragging them down to their
own level, sugaring them down to their own palate, slowing them down to
their own insensitiveness for what is life-communicating. And although
their productions, which were nothing but translations of great man's
art into average man's art, became popular, as was inevitable, with the
average man of their time, (who comprehended them better and felt more
comfortable in their presence than in that of the originals which he
respectfully admired but did not so thoroughly enjoy), nevertheless we
need not dwell on these popularisers nor on their popularisations--not
even on Filippino, with his touch of consumptive delicacy, nor
Raffaelino del Garbo, with his glints of never-to-be-fulfilled promise.

[Page heading: FRA BARTOLOMMEO]

Before approaching the one man of genius left in Florence after
Botticelli and Leonardo, before speaking of Michelangelo, the man in
whom all that was most peculiar and much that was greatest in the
striving of Florentine art found its fulfilment, let us turn for a
moment to a few painters who, just because they were men of manifold
talent, might elsewhere almost have become masters. Fra Bartolommeo,
Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and Bronzino were perhaps no less gifted as
artists than Palma, Bonifazio Veronese, Lotto, and Tintoretto; but their
talents, instead of being permitted to flower naturally, were scorched
by the passion for showing off dexterity, blighted by academic ideals,
and uprooted by the whirlwind force of Michelangelo.

Fra Bartolommeo, who in temperament was delicate, refined, graceful, and
as a painter had a miniaturist's feeling for the dainty, was induced to
desert his lovely women, his exquisite landscape, and his gentleness of
expression for figures constructed mechanically on a colossal scale, or
for effects of the round at any cost. And as evil is more obvious than
good, Bartolommeo, the painter of that masterpiece of colour and light
and shade, of graceful movement and charming feeling, the "Madonna with
the Baptist and St. Stephen" in the Cathedral at Lucca, Bartolommeo, the
dainty deviser of Mr. Mond's tiny "Nativity," Bartolommeo, the artificer
of a hundred masterpieces of pen drawing, is almost unknown; and to most
people Fra Bartolommeo is a sort of synonym for pomposity. He is known
only as the author of physically colossal, spiritually insignificant
prophets and apostles, or, perchance, as the painter of pitch-dark
altar-pieces: this being the reward of devices to obtain mere relief.

[Page heading: ANDREA DEL SARTO]

Andrea del Sarto approached perhaps as closely to a Giorgione or a
Titian as could a Florentine, ill at ease in the neighbourhood of
Leonardo and Michelangelo. As an artist he was, it is true, not endowed
with the profoundest sense for the significant, yet within the sphere of
common humanity who has produced anything more genial than his "Portrait
of a Lady"--probably his wife--with a Petrarch in her hands? Where out
of Venetia can we find portraits so simple, so frank, and yet so
interpretive as his "Sculptor," or as his various portraits of
himself--these, by the way, an autobiography as complete as any in
existence, and tragic as few? Almost Venetian again is his "St. James"
caressing children, a work of the sweetest feeling. Even in colour
effect, and technique, how singularly close to the best Venetian
painting in his "Dispute about the Trinity"--what blacks and whites,
what greys and purplish browns! And in addition, tactile values peculiar
to Florence--what a back St. Sebastian's! But in a work of scarcely less
technical merit, the "Madonna of the Harpies," we already feel the man
not striving to get the utmost out of himself, but panting for the grand
and magnificent. Even here, he remains almost a great artist, because
his natural robustness comes to his rescue; but the "Madonna" is too
obviously statuesque, and, good saints, pray why all these draperies?

The obviously statuesque and draperies were Andrea's devices for keeping
his head above water in the rising tide of the Michelangelesque. As you
glance in sequence at the Annunziata frescoes, on the whole so full of
vivacity, gaiety, and genuine delight in life, you see from one fresco
to another the increased attention given to draperies. In the Scalzo
series, otherwise masterpieces of tactile values, the draperies do their
utmost to smother the figures. Most of these paintings are closed in
with ponderous forms which have no other purpose than to serve as a
frame, and as clothes-horses for draperies: witness the scene of
Zacharias in the temple, wherein none of the bystanders dare move for
fear of disturbing their too obviously arranged folds.

Thus by constantly sacrificing first spiritual, and then material
significance to pose and draperies, Andrea loses all feeling for the
essential in art. What a sad spectacle is his "Assumption," wherein the
Apostles, the Virgin herself, have nothing better to do than to show off
draperies! Instead of feeling, as in the presence of Titian's "Assunta,"
wrapt to heaven, you gaze at a number of tailor's men, each showing how
a stuff you are thinking of trying looks on the back, or in a certain
effect of light. But let us not end on this note; let us bear in mind
that, despite all his faults, Andrea painted the one "Last Supper" which
can be looked at with pleasure after Leonardo's.

[Page heading: PONTORMO]

Pontormo, who had it in him to be a decorator and portrait-painter of
the highest rank, was led astray by his awe-struck admiration for
Michelangelo, and ended as an academic constructor of monstrous nudes.
What he could do when expressing _himself_, we see in the lunette at
Poggio a Caiano, as design, as colour, as fancy, the freshest, gayest,
most appropriate mural decoration now remaining in Italy; what he could
do as a portrait-painter, we see in his wonderfully decorative panel of
Cosimo dei Medici at San Marco, or in his portrait of a "Lady with a
Dog" (at Frankfort), perhaps the first portrait ever painted in which
the sitter's social position was insisted upon as much as the personal
character. What Pontormo sank to, we see in such a riot of meaningless
nudes, all caricatures of Michelangelo, as his "Martyrdom of Forty
Saints."

[Page heading: BRONZINO]

Bronzino, Pontormo's close follower, had none of his master's talent as
a decorator, but happily much of his power as a portrait-painter. Would
he had never attempted anything else! The nude without material or
spiritual significance, with no beauty of design or colour, the nude
simply because it was the nude, was Bronzino's ideal in composition, and
the result is his "Christ in Limbo." But as a portrait-painter, he took
up the note struck by his master and continued it, leaving behind him a
series of portraits which not only had their effect in determining the
character of Court painting all over Europe, but, what is more to the
point, a series of portraits most of which are works of art. As
painting, it is true, they are hard, and often timid; but their air of
distinction, their interpretive qualities, have not often been
surpassed. In his Uffizi portraits of Eleanora di Toledo, of Prince
Ferdinand, of the Princess Maria, we seem to see the prototypes of
Velasquez' queens, princes, and princesses: and for a fine example of
dignified rendering of character, look in the Sala Baroccio of the
Uffizi at a bust of a young woman with a missal in her hand.

XIV.

[Page heading: MICHELANGELO]

The great Florentine artists, as we have seen, were, with scarcely an
exception, bent upon rendering the material significance of visible
things. This, little though they may have formulated it, was the
conscious aim of most of them; and in proportion as they emancipated
themselves from ecclesiastical dominion, and found among their employers
men capable of understanding them, their aim became more and more
conscious and their striving more energetic. At last appeared the man
who was the pupil of nobody, the heir of everybody, who felt profoundly
and powerfully what to his precursors had been vague instinct, who saw
and expressed the meaning of it all. The seed that produced him had
already flowered into a Giotto, and once again into a Masaccio; in him,
the last of his race, born in conditions artistically most propitious,
all the energies remaining in his stock were concentrated, and in him
Florentine art had its logical culmination.

[Page heading: ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ART]

Michelangelo had a sense for the materially significant as great as
Giotto's or Masaccio's, but he possessed means of rendering, inherited
from Donatello, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio and Leonardo,--means that had
been undreamt of by Giotto or even by Masaccio. Add to this that he saw
clearly what before him had been felt only dimly, that there was no
other such instrument for conveying material significance as the human
nude. This fact is as closely dependent on the general conditions of
realising objects as tactile values are on the psychology of sight. We
realise objects when we perfectly translate them into terms of our own
states, our own feelings. So obviously true is this, that even the least
poetically inclined among us, because we keenly realise the movement of
a railway train, to take one example out of millions, speak of it as
_going_ or _running_, instead of _rolling on its wheels_, thus being no
less guilty of anthropomorphising than the most unregenerate savages. Of
this same fallacy we are guilty every time we think of anything
whatsoever with the least warmth--we are lending this thing some human
attributes. The more we endow it with human attributes, the less we
merely know it, the more we realise it, the more does it approach the
work of art. Now there is one and only one object in the visible
universe which we need not anthropomorphise to realise--and that is man
himself. His movements, his actions, are the only things we realise
without any myth-making effort--directly. Hence, there is no visible
object of such artistic possibilities as the human body; nothing with
which we are so familiar; nothing, therefore, in which we so rapidly
perceive changes; nothing, then, which if represented so as to be
realised more quickly and vividly than in life, will produce its effect
with such velocity and power, and so strongly confirm our sense of
capacity for living.

[Page heading: VALUE OF THE NUDE IN ART]

Values of touch and movement, we remember, are the specifically artistic
qualities in figure painting (at least, as practised by the
Florentines), for it is through them chiefly that painting directly
heightens life. Now while it remains true that tactile values can, as
Giotto and Masaccio have forever established, be admirably rendered on
the draped figure, yet drapery is a hindrance, and, at the best, only a
way out of a difficulty, for we _feel_ it masking the really
significant, which is _the form underneath_. A mere painter, one who is
satisfied to reproduce what everybody sees, and to paint for the fun of
painting, will scarcely comprehend this feeling. His only significant is
the obvious--in a figure, the face and the clothing, as in most of the
portraits manufactured nowadays. The artist, even when compelled to
paint draped figures, will force the drapery to render the nude, in
other words the material significance of the human body. But how much
more clearly will this significance shine out, how much more
convincingly will the character manifest itself, when between its
perfect rendering and the artist nothing intervenes! And this perfect
rendering is to be accomplished with the nude only.

If draperies are a hindrance to the conveyance of tactile values, they
make the perfect rendering of movement next to impossible. To realise
the play of muscle everywhere, to get the full sense of the various
pressures and resistances, to receive the direct inspiration of the
energy expended, we must have the nude; for here alone can we watch
those tautnesses of muscle and those stretchings and relaxings and
ripplings of skin which, translated into similar strains on our own
persons, make us fully realise movement. Here alone the translation,
owing to the multitude and the clearness of the appeals made, is
instantaneous, and the consequent sense of increased capacity almost as
great as can be attained; while in the draped figure we miss all the
appeal of visible muscle and skin, and realise movement only after a
slow translation of certain functional outlines, so that the sense of
capacity which we receive from the perception of movement is increased
but slightly.

We are now able to understand why every art whose chief preoccupation is
the human figure must have the nude for its chief interest; why, also,
the nude is the most absorbing problem of classic art at all times. Not
only is it the best vehicle for all that in art which is directly
life-confirming and life-enhancing, but it is itself the most
significant object in the human world. The first person since the great
days of Greek sculpture to comprehend fully the identity of the nude
with great figure art, was Michelangelo. Before him, it had been
studied for scientific purposes--as an aid in rendering the draped
figure. He saw that it was an end in itself, and the final purpose of
his art. For him the nude and art were synonymous. Here lies the secret
of his successes and his failures.

[Page heading: MICHELANGELO]

First, his successes. Nowhere outside of the best Greek art shall we
find, as in Michelangelo's works, forms whose tactile values so increase
our sense of capacity, whose movements are so directly communicated and
inspiring. Other artists have had quite as much feeling for tactile
values alone,--Masaccio, for instance; others still have had at least as
much sense of movement and power of rendering it,--Leonardo, for
example; but no other artist of modern times, having at all his control
over the materially significant, has employed it as Michelangelo did, on
the one subject where its full value can be manifested--the nude. Hence
of all the achievements of modern art, his are the most invigorating.
Surely not often is our imagination of touch roused as by his Adam in
the "Creation," by his Eve in the "Temptation," or by his many nudes in
the same ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel,--there for no other purpose, be
it noted, than their direct tonic effect! Nor is it less rare to quaff
such draughts of unadulterated energy as we receive from the "God
Creating Adam," the "Boy Angel" standing by Isaiah, or--to choose one or
two instances from his drawings (in their own kind the greatest in
existence)--the "Gods Shooting at a Mark" or the "Hercules and the
Lion."

And to this feeling for the materially significant and all this power of
conveying it, to all this more narrowly artistic capacity, Michelangelo
joined an ideal of beauty and force, a vision of a glorious but possible
humanity, which, again, has never had its like in modern times.
Manliness, robustness, effectiveness, the fulfilment of our dream of a
great soul inhabiting a beautiful body, we shall encounter nowhere else
so frequently as among the figures in the Sixtine Chapel. Michelangelo
completed what Masaccio had begun, the creation of the type of man best
fitted to subdue and control the earth, and, who knows! perhaps more
than the earth.

[Page heading: LAST WORKS OF MICHELANGELO]

But unfortunately, though born and nurtured in a world where his
feeling for the nude and his ideal of humanity could be appreciated, he
passed most of his life in the midst of tragic disasters, and while yet
in the fulness of his vigour, in the midst of his most creative years,
he found himself alone, perhaps the greatest, but alas! also the last of
the giants born so plentifully during the fifteenth century. He lived on
in a world he could not but despise, in a world which really could no
more employ him than it could understand him. He was not allowed,
therefore, to busy himself where he felt most drawn by his genius, and,
much against his own strongest impulses, he was obliged to expend his
energy upon such subjects as the "Last Judgment." His later works all
show signs of the altered conditions, first in an overflow into the
figures he was creating of the scorn and bitterness he was feeling, then
in the lack of harmony between his genius and what he was compelled to
execute. His passion was the nude, his ideal power. But what outlet for
such a passion, what expression for such an ideal could there be in
subjects like the "Last Judgment," or the "Crucifixion of
Peter"--subjects which the Christian world imperatively demanded should
incarnate the fear of the humble and the self-sacrifice of the patient?
Now humility and patience were feelings as unknown to Michelangelo as to
Dante before him, or, for that matter, to any other of the world's
creative geniuses at any time. Even had he felt them, he had no means of
expressing them, for his nudes could convey a sense of power, not of
weakness; of terror, not of dread; of despair, but not of submission.
And terror the giant nudes of the "Last Judgment" do feel, but it is not
terror of the Judge, who, being in no wise different from the others, in
spite of his omnipotent gesture, seems to be _announcing_ rather than
_willing_ what the bystanders, his fellows, could not _unwill_. As the
representation of the moment before the universe disappears in
chaos--Gods huddling together for the _Götterdämmerung_--the "Last
Judgment" is as grandly conceived as possible: but when the crash comes,
none will survive it, no, not even God. Michelangelo therefore failed in
his conception of the subject, and could not but fail. But where else
in the whole world of art shall we receive such blasts of energy as from
this giant's dream, or, if you will, nightmare? For kindred reasons, the
"Crucifixion of Peter" is a failure. Art can be only life-communicating
and life-enhancing. If it treats of pain and death, these must always
appear as manifestations and as results only of living resolutely and
energetically. What chance is there, I ask, for this, artistically the
only possible treatment, in the representation of a man crucified with
his head downwards? Michelangelo could do nothing but make the
bystanders, the executioners, all the more life-communicating, and
therefore inevitably more sympathetic! No wonder he failed here! What a
tragedy, by the way, that the one subject perfectly cut out for his
genius, the one subject which required none but genuinely artistic
treatment, his "Bathers," executed forty years before these last works,
has disappeared, leaving but scant traces! Yet even these suffice to
enable the competent student to recognise that this composition must
have been the greatest masterpiece in figure art of modern times.

That Michelangelo had faults of his own is undeniable. As he got older,
and his genius, lacking its proper outlets, tended to stagnate and
thicken, he fell into exaggerations--exaggerations of power into
brutality, of tactile values into feats of modelling. No doubt he was
also at times as indifferent to representation as Botticelli! But while
there is such a thing as movement, there is no such thing as tactile
values without representation. Yet he seems to have dreamt of presenting
nothing but tactile values: hence his many drawings with only the torso
adequately treated, the rest unheeded. Still another result from his
passion for tactile values. I have already suggested that Giotto's types
were so massive because such figures most easily convey values of touch.
Michelangelo tended to similar exaggerations, to making shoulders, for
instance, too broad and too bossy, simply because they make thus a more
powerful appeal to the tactile imagination. Indeed, I venture to go even
farther, and suggest that his faults in all the arts, sculpture no less
than painting, and architecture no less than sculpture, are due to this
self-same predilection for salient projections. But the lover of the
figure arts for what in them is genuinely artistic and not merely
ethical, will in Michelangelo, even at his worst, get such pleasures as,
excepting a few, others, even at their best, rarely give him.

[Page heading: CONSTANT AIMS OF FLORENTINE ART]

In closing, let us note what results clearly even from this brief
account of the Florentine school, namely that, although no Florentine
merely took up and continued a predecessor's work, nevertheless all,
from first to last, fought for the same cause. There is no opposition
between Giotto and Michelangelo. The best energies of the first, of the
last, and of all the intervening great Florentine artists were
persistently devoted to the rendering of tactile values, or of movement,
or of both. Now successful grappling with problems of form and of
movement is at the bottom of all the higher arts; and because of this
fact, Florentine painting, despite its many faults, is, after Greek
sculpture, the most serious figure art in existence.

INDEX TO THE WORKS OF THE PRINCIPAL FLORENTINE PAINTERS.

NOTE.

The following lists make no claim to absolute completeness, but no
genuine work by the painters mentioned, found in the better known public
or private collections, has been omitted. With the exception of three or
four pictures, which he knows only in the photographs, the author has
seen and carefully studied every picture indicated, and is alone
responsible for the attributions, although he is happy to acknowledge
his indebtedness to the writings of Signor Cavalcaselle, of the late
Giovanni Morelli, of Signor Gustavo Frizzoni, and of Dr. J. P. Richter.
For the convenience of students, lists of the sculptures, but the more
important only, have been appended to the lists of pictures by those
artists who have left sculptures as well as paintings.

Public galleries are mentioned first, then private collections, and
churches last. The principal public gallery is always understood after
the simple mention of a city or town. Thus, Paris means Paris, Louvre,
London means London, National Gallery, etc.

An interrogation point after the title of a picture indicates that its
attribution to the given painter is doubtful. Distinctly early or late
works are marked E. or L.

It need scarcely be said that the attributions here given are not based
on official catalogues, and are often at variance with them.

MARIOTTO ALBERTINELLI.

1474-1515. Pupil of Cosimo Rosselli and Pier di Cosimo; influenced by
    Lorenzo di Credi; worked in partnership with Fra Bartolommeo.

Agram (Croatia).
    STROSSMAYER COLLECTION. Adam and Eve driven from Paradise. E.
Bergamo.
    LOCHIS, 203. Crucifixion.
    MORELLI, 32. St. John and the Magdalen. E.
Cambridge.
    FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, 162. Madonna and infant John. 1509.
Chartres.
    MUSÉE. Tabernacle: Madonna and Saints, Crucifixion, etc. E.
Florence.
    ACADEMY, 63. Trinity.
    167. Madonna and four Saints.
    169. Annunciation. 1510.
    PITTI, 365. Holy Family.
    UFFIZI, 71. Last Judgment (begun in 1499 by Fra Bartolommeo).
    1259. Visitation, with _Predella_. 1503.
    CORSINI, 160. Holy Family (in part). 1511.
    CERTOSA (near Florence). Crucifixion. 1505.
Geneva.
    MUSÉE. Annunciation. 1511.
Gloucester.
    HIGHNAM COURT, SIR HUBERT PARRY, 7. Nativity.
    24. Scenes from the Creation. E.
The Hague.
    306. Holy Family with infant John (on Fra Bartolommeo's cartoon).
Madrid.
    DUKE OF ALBA. Madonna.
Milan.
    POLDI-PEZZOLI, 477. Triptych. 1500.
Munich.
    1057. Annunciation and the two Saints.
New York.
    MR. SAMUEL UNTERMEYER. Female Saint.
Paris.
    1114. Madonna and Saints (begun by Filippino, who laid in the St.
        Jerome. Albertinelli was assisted by Bugiardini in the execution
        of the rest, especially in the Child and landscape). 1506.
Pisa.
    S. CATERINA. Madonna and Saints (on Fra Bartolommeo's cartoon).
        1511.
Rome.
    BORGHESE, 310. Madonna and infant John (on Fra Bartolommeo's
        cartoon). 1511.
    421. Head of Christ.
Scotland.
    GOSFORD HOUSE, EARL OF WEMYSS. Madonna.
Siena.
    564. St. Catherine. 1512.
    565. The Magdalen. 1512.
Stuttgart.
    242, 243, 244. Coronation and two _putti_ (top of Fra Bartolommeo's
        altar-piece at Besançon). 1512.
Venice.
    SEMINARIO, 18. Madonna.
Volterra.
    DUOMO. Annunciation. E.

ALUNNO DI DOMENICO.

Descriptive name for Florentine painter whose real name appears to have
    been Bartolommeo di Giovanni. Flourished last two decades of
    fifteenth century. Assistant of Ghirlandajo; influenced by Amico di
    Sandro.

Aix-en-Provence.
    MUSÉE. Madonna and infant John adoring Child.
Arezzo.
    MUSEO, SALA II, 4. Tabernacle: Magdalen and St. Antony at foot of
        Cross.
Dresden.
    17 and 18. _Tondi_: SS. Michael and Raphael.
Florence.
    ACADEMY, 67. _Pietà_ and Stories of Saints.
    268. St. Thomas Aquinas, Gabriel, and a Prophet.
    269. Madonna with St. Dominic and a Prophet.
    278. St. Jerome.
    279. St. Francis receiving the Stigmata.
    280. Entombment.
    UFFIZI, 85. _Tondo_: Madonna and infant John. 1208. St. Benedict
        and two Monks.
    MUSEO DI SAN MARCO, SMALL REFECTORY. Crucifixion with SS. Peter,
        Andrew, the Magdalen, and two other Saints.
    MARCHESE MANELLI RICCARDI. _Pietà_.
    INNOCENTI, GALLERY, 63-70. Seven _Predelle_ to Ghirlandajo's
        altarpiece in church, in which he painted also the "Massacre of
        the Innocents." 1488.
Horsmonden (Kent).
    CAPEL MANOR, MRS. AUSTEN. Two _Cassone_-fronts: Centaurs and
        Lapithæ.
Liverpool.
    WALKER ART GALLERY, 17. Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.
    18. Bishop dining with a Woman.
London.
    MR. BRINSLEY MARLAY. Four _Cassone_-fronts: Stories of Joseph and
        of The Taking of Troy.
    SIR KENNETH MUIR MACKENZIE. Madonna and infant John.
Longleat (Warminster).
    MARQUESS OF BATH. Two _Cassone_-fronts: Feast and Flight.
Lovere (Lago d'Iseo).
    GALLERIA TADINI, 29. Madonna and infant John.
Milan.
    BORROMEO. _Pietà_
Narni.
    MUNICIPIO. Two compartments of the _Predelle_ to Ghirlandajo's
        Coronation of Virgin: SS. Francis and Jerome. 1486.
New Haven (U. S. A.).
    JARVES COLLECTION, 47. St. Jerome.
Oxford.
    CHRIST CHURCH LIBRARY, 22. Madonna and infant John.
Palermo.
    BARON CHIARAMONTE-BORDONARO, 118. St. Jerome.
Paris.
    1416A. Marriage of Peleus and Thetis.
    1416B. Triumph of Venus.
    M. JEAN DOLLFUS, 1519. Frame to a Trecento Madonna.
    M. JOSEPH SPIRIDON. Scene from the Tale of Nastagio degli Onesti.
        1483.
Rome.
    COLONNA, 11. Reconciliation between Romans and Sabines.
    14. Rape of Sabines.
Scotland.
    LANGTON (NEAR DUNS), HON. MRS. BAILLIE-HAMILTON. _Cassone_-front:
        Story of Io.
Vienna.
    DR. A. FIGDOR. Large Cross with SS. Jerome and Francis.
    COUNT LANCKORONSKI. Several Martyrdoms, including the Decapitation
        of the Baptist beside a Well.
Warwick Castle.
    EARL OF WARWICK. Two small _Tondi_: St. Stephen; A Bishop.

AMICO DI SANDRO.

An artistic personality between Botticelli and Filippino Lippi.

Altenburg.
    LINDENAU MUSEUM, 100. Profile Portrait of Caterina Sforza.
Bergamo.
    MORELLI, 21. Profile Portrait of Giuliano de' Medici.
Berlin.
    82. Madonna.
    HERR EDWARD SIMON. Bust of Young Man.
Budapest.
    52. Madonna in Landscape with St. Antony of Padua and kneeling
        Monk.
Chantilly.
    MUSÉE CONDÉ. _Cassone_-front: Story of Esther.
Florence.
    PITTI, 336. "_La Bella Simonetta._"
    353. Death of Lucretia.
    UFFIZI, 23. Madonna and three Angels (from S. Maria Nuova). E.
    1547. Madonna adoring Child.
    CENACOLO DI FOLIGNO (VIA FAENZA), 100. Madonna and infant John
        adoring Child.
    CORSINI GALLERY, 340. The Five Virtues.
Horsmonden (Kent).
    CAPEL MANOR, MRS. AUSTEN. Madonna and Angel (version of lost
        original by Botticelli). E.
London.
    1124. Adoration of Magi.
    1412. Madonna and infant John.
    VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, IONIDES BEQUEST. Portrait of Esmeralda
        Bandinelli. E.
    MR. ROBERT BENSON. Tobias and the Angel.
Meiningen.
    GRAND DUCAL PALACE. Nativity.
Milan.
    PRINCE TRIVULZIO. Profile of Lady.
Naples.
    Madonna and two Angels. E.
    MUSEO FILANGIERI, 1506 bis. Portrait of Young Man.
Oxford.
    CHRIST CHURCH LIBRARY, 4, 5. Two panels with Sibyls in Niches.
Paris.
    1662A. _Cassone_-front: Death of Virginia.
    1663. Portrait of Young Man.
    COMTE PASTRE: _Cassone_-front: Story of Esther.
    BARON SCHLICHTING. Madonna (version of Filippo's Madonna at
        Munich).
Philadelphia.
     MR. JOHN G. JOHNSON. Portrait of Man.
Rome.
    COUNT GREGORI STROGANOFF. Two Angels swinging Censers.
Scotland.
    NEWBATTLE ABBEY (DALKEITH), MARQUESS OF LOTHIAN. Coronation of
        Virgin (lunette).
St. Petersburg.
    STROGANOFF COLLECTION. Nativity and Angels in Landscape.
Turin.
    113. Tobias and the three Archangels.
Vienna.
    PRINCE LIECHTENSTEIN. Bust of Young Man. Two _Cassone_ panels with
        Story of Esther.

ANDREA (Vanucci) DEL SARTO.

1486-1531. Pupil of Pier di Cosimo; influenced by Fra Bartolommeo and
    Michelangelo.

Berlin.
    240. Bust of his Wife.
    246. Madonna and Saints. 1528.
Dresden.
    76. Marriage of St. Catherine. E.
    77. Sacrifice of Isaac.
Florence.
    ACADEMY, 61. Two Angels. 1528.
    75. Fresco: Dead Christ.
    76. Four Saints. 1528.
    77. _Predelle_ to 76.
    PITTI, 58. Deposition. 1524.
    66. Portrait of Young Man.
    81. Holy Family.
    87, 88. Life of Joseph. 1516.
    124. Annunciation.
    172. Dispute over the Trinity. 1517.
    184. Portrait of Young Man.
    191. Assumption. 1531.
    225. Assumption. 1526.
    272. The Baptist.
    476. Madonna.
    UFFIZI, 93. "Noli me Tangere." E.
    188. Portrait of his Wife.
    280. Fresco: Portrait of Himself.
    1112. "Madonna dell' Arpie." 1517.
    1176. Portrait of Himself.
    1230. Portrait of Lady.
    1254. St. James.
    CORSINI GALLERY. Apollo and Daphne. E.
    CHIOSTRO DELLO SCALZO. Monochrome Frescoes: Charity, 1512-15.
        Preaching of Baptist, finished 1515. Justice, 1515. St. John
        Baptising, 1517. Baptist made Prisoner, 1517. Faith, 1520. Dance
        of Salome, 1522. Annunciation to Zacharias, 1522. Decapitation
        of Baptist, 1523. Feast of Herod, 1523. Hope, 1523. Visitation,
        1524. Birth of Baptist, 1526.
    SS. ANNUNZIATA, ENTRANCE COURT. Frescoes: Five to L. with the Story
        of St. Filippo Benizzi, 1509-1510. R., Adoration of Magi, 1511.
        Birth of Virgin, 1514.
      CHAPEL TO L. OF ENTRANCE. Head of Christ.
      INNER CLOISTER, OVER DOOR. Fresco: "Madonna del Sacco." 1525.
    S. SALVI. Fresco: Four Evangelists. 1515. Fresco: Last Supper,
        begun in 1519.
    POGGIO A CAJANO (Royal Villa near Florence). Fresco: Cæsar
        receiving Tribute. 1521 (finished by A. Allori).
London.
    690. Portrait of a Sculptor.
    HERTFORD HOUSE. Madonna and Angels.
    MR. ROBERT BENSON. _Tondo_: Madonna with infant John. L.
    MR. LEOPOLD DE ROTHSCHILD. Madonna and infant John.
Madrid.
    383. Portrait of his Wife.
    385. Holy Family and Angel.
    387. Sacrifice of Isaac. 1529.
Naples.
    Copy of Raphael's Leo X.
Paris.
    1514. Charity. 1518.
    1515. Holy Family.
Petworth House (Sussex).
    LORD LECONFIELD, 333. Madonna with infant John and three Angels
        (?). E.
Rome.
    BORGHESE, 336. Madonna and infant John. E.
St. Petersburg.
    24. Madonna with SS. Elizabeth and Catherine. 1519.
Vienna.
    39. _Pietà_.
    42. Tobias and Angel with St. Leonard and Donor. E.
    52. Madonna and infant John (in part).
Windsor Castle.
    Bust of Woman.

FRA ANGELICO DA FIESOLE.

1387-1455. Influenced by Lorenzo Monaco and Masaccio.

Agram (Croatia).
    STROSSMAYER COLLECTION, St. Francis receiving Stigmata; Death of
        St. Peter Martyr.
Altenburg.
    LINDENAU MUSEUM, 91. St. Francis before the Sultan.
Berlin.
    60. Madonna and Saints.
    60A. Last Judgment. L.
    61. SS. Dominic and Francis.
    62. Glory of St. Francis.
    (Magazine.) Head of Saint.
Boston (U. S. A.).
    MRS. J. L. GARDNER. Death and Assumption of Virgin.
Brant Broughton (Lincolnshire).
    REV. ARTHUR F. SUTTON. A Bishop.
Cortona.
    S. DOMENICO, OVER ENTRANCE. Fresco: Madonna and Saints.
    GESÙ. Annunciation. E.
      Two _Predelle_. E.
      Triptych: Madonna with four Saints, etc.
Düsseldorf.
    AKADEMIE, 27. Head of Baptist.
Florence.
    ACADEMY, 166. Deposition (three pinnacles by Lorenzo Monaco).
    227. Madonna and six Saints.
    234-237. Fourteen scenes from Life of Christ. 1448.
    240. Madonna enthroned (but not the Trinity above).
    243. Story of SS. Cosmas and Damian (in part).
    246. Entombment.
    250. Crucifixion.
    251. Coronation of Virgin.
    252-254, Sixteen scenes from Life of Christ and Virgin, except the
        "Legge d'Amore." 1448.
    258. Martyrdom of SS. Cosmas and Damian.
    265. Madonna with six Saints and two Angels.
    266. Last Judgment (not the Damned nor the Inferno).
    281. Madonna and eight Saints and eight Angels. 1438 (ruined).
    283. _Predella_: _Pietà_ and Saints. L. (ruined).
    UFFIZI, 17. Triptych: Madonna with Saints and Angels; _Predella_.
        1433.
    1162. _Predella_ to No. 1290: Birth of John.
    1168. _Predella_ to No. 1290: _Sposalizio_.
    1184. _Predella_ to No. 1290: Dormition.
    1290. Coronation of Virgin.
    1294. Tabernacle: Madonna, Saints, and Angels. 1443.
    MUSEO DI SAN MARCO. Frescoes, all painted from between about 1439
        to no later than 1445.
      CLOISTER. St. Peter Martyr; St. Dominic at foot of Cross; St.
          Dominic (ruined); _Pietà_; Christ as Pilgrim with two
          Dominicans; St. Thomas Aquinas.
      CHAPTER HOUSE. Large Crucifixion.
      UPPER FLOOR, WALLS. Annunciation; St. Dominic at foot of Cross;
          Madonna with eight Saints.
      ROOMS, NO. 1. "Noli me Tangere."
        2. Entombment.
        3. Annunciation.
        4. Crucifixion.
        5. Nativity.
        6. Transfiguration.
        7. Ecce Homo.
        8. Resurrection.
        9. Coronation of Virgin.
        10. Presentation in Temple.
        11. Madonna and Saints.
        15-23. Crucifixions (some ruined).
        24. Baptism.
        25. Crucifixion.
        26. _Pietà_.
        28. Christ bearing Cross.
        31. Descent to Limbo.
        32. Sermon on the Mount.
        33. Betrayal of Judas. Panels: Small Madonna and Angels; Small
            Coronation.
        34. Agony in Garden. Panel: Small Annunciation.
        35. Institution of the Eucharist.
        36. Nailing to Cross.
        37. Crucifixion.
        38. Adoration of Magi, and _Pietà_.
        42, 43. Crucifixions.
    S. DOMENICO DI FIESOLE (near Florence) Madonna and Saints
        (architecture and landscape by Lorenzo di Credi).
      SACRISTY OF ADJOINING MONASTERY. Fresco: Crucifixion.
Frankfort a./M.
    HERR ADOLF SCHAEFFER. Madonna enthroned and four Angels.
London.
    663. Paradise.
    MRS. J. E. TAYLOR. Small panel.
Lyons.
    M. EDOUARD AYNARD. Madonna with SS. Peter, Paul, and George, with
        Angels and kneeling Donor.
Madrid.
    PRADO, 14. Annunciation.
    DUKE OF ALBA. Madonna and Angels.
Munich.
    989-991. Legends of Saints.
    992. Entombment.
Orvieto.
    DUOMO, CHAPEL OF S. BRIZIO. Ceiling Frescoes: Christ as Judge;
        Prophets (assisted by Benozzo Gozzoli). 1447.
Paris.
    1290. Coronation of Virgin.
    1293. Martyrdom of SS. Cosmas and Damian.
    1294. Fresco: Crucifixion.
    M. GEORGES CHALANDON. Meeting of Francis and Dominic.
    M. NOEL VALOIS. Crucifixion with Cardinal (probably) John
        Torquemada, as Donor. L.
Parma.
    429. Madonna and four Saints.
Perugia.
    SALA V, 1-18. Altarpiece in many parts.
Pisa.
    SALA VI, 7. Salvator Mundi.
Rome.
    CORSINI, SALA VII, 22. Pentecost.
    23. Last Judgment.
    24. Ascension.
    VATICAN, PINACOTECA. Madonna; two _Predelle_ with Legend of St.
        Nicholas.
      MUSEO CRISTIANO, CASE Q. V. St. Francis receiving Stigmata.
      CHAPEL OF NICHOLAS V. Frescoes: Lives of SS. Stephen and
          Lawrence. 1447-1449.
    COUNT GREGORI STROGANOFF. Small Tabernacle.
St. Petersburg.
    HERMITAGE, 1674. Fresco: Madonna with SS. Dominic and Thomas
        Aquinas.
Turin.
    103, 104. Adoring Angels.
Vienna.
    BARON TUCHER. Annunciation (in part).

BACCHIACCA (Francesco Ubertini).

About 1494-1557. Pupil of Perugino and Franciabigio; influenced by
    Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo.

Asolo.
    CANONICA DELLA PARROCCHIA. Madonna with St. Elizabeth.
Bergamo.
    MORELLI, 62. Death of Abel.
Berlin.
    267. Baptism.
    267A. Portrait of Young Woman.
    (MAGAZINE.) Decapitation of Baptist.
    HERR EUGEN SCHWEIZER. Leda and the Swan.
Boston (U. S. A.).
    MRS. J. L. GARDNER. Head of Woman.
Brocklesby (Lincolnshire).
    EARL OF YARBOROUGH. Madonna and St. Anne.
Budapest.
    70. Preaching of Baptist.
Cassel.
    484. Old Man Seated.
Dijon.
    Musée, Donation Jules Maciet. Resurrection.
Dresden.
    80. Legendary Subject. 1523.
Florence.
    PITTI, 102. The Magdalen.
    UFFIZI, 87. Descent from Cross.
    1296. _Predelle_: Life of St. Ascanius.
    1571. Tobias and Angel.
    CORSINI GALLERY, 164. Madonna, infant John, and sleeping Child.
    206. Portrait of Man. 1540.
    CONTE NICCOLINI (Via dei Servi). Madonna with St. Anne and infant
        John.
    CONTE SERRISTORI. Madonna with St. Anne and infant John.
Locko Park (near Derby).
    MR. DRURY LOWE, 44. Christ bearing Cross.
London.
    1218, 1219. Story of Joseph.
    1304. Marcus Curtius.
    MR. CHARLES BUTLER. Portrait of Young Man.
    MR. FREDERICK A. WHITE. Birth Plate.
Milan.
    COMM. BENIGNO CRESPI. Adoration of Magi; Madonna.
    DR. GUSTAVO FRIZZONI. Adam and Eve.
Munich.
    1077. Madonna and infant John.
Oxford.
    CHRIST CHURCH LIBRARY, 55. "Noli me Tangere."
    57. Resurrection of Lazarus.
Richmond (Surrey).
    SIR FREDERICK COOK. Holy Family; Last Supper; Crucifixion.
    Two _Grisailles_: Apollo and Cupid; Apollo and Daphne.
Rome.
    BORGHESE, 338. Madonna.
    425, 426, 440, 442, 463. Life of Joseph.
    MISS HERTZ. Bust of Magdalen.
Troyes.
    MUSÉE. Tobias and Angel.
Venice.
    SEMINARIO, 23. Madonna.
    PRINCE GIOVANELLI. Moses Striking Rock.
Wiesbaden.
    NASSAUISCHES KUNSTVEREIN, 114. Madonna and infant John.

ALESSO BALDOVINETTI.

1425-1499. Pupil of Domenico Veneziano; influenced by Paolo Uccello.

Bergamo.
    MORELLI, 23. Fresco: Portrait of Himself (fragment from S. Trinita,
        Florence).
Berlin.
    1614. Profile of Young Woman. (?)
Florence.
    ACADEMY, 159. Trinity. 1471.
    233. Marriage of Cana; Baptism; Transfiguration. 1448.
    UFFIZI, 56. Annunciation.
    60. Madonna and Saints.
    MR. B. BERENSON. Madonna. E.
    S. AMBROGIO. Baptist with SS. Catherine, Stephen, Ambrose, and
        Angels, 1470-1473.
    SS. ANNUNZIATA, ENTRANCE COURT. Fresco: Nativity. 1460-1462.
    DUOMO, SACRISTY. Intarsias (after his cartoons): Nativity, 1463.
        Circumcision.
    S. MARCO, COURTYARD. Crucifixion with S. Antonino.
    S. MINIATO, PORTUGUESE CHAPEL. Annunciation. 1466.