The Renaissance
He was not so successful with the Baptist; it was a dour subject alien to his earthly spirit; the two statues of John in the Bargello are lifeless and absurd. Far finer is a stone relief of a child’s head, named for no good reason San Giovannino— the youthful St. John. In the same Salone Donatelliano St. George unites all the idealism of a militant Christianity with the restrained lines of Greek art: a figure firmly and confidently poised, a body mature and strong, a head Gothically oval and yet prefiguring the classic Brutus of Buonarotti. For the cathedral façade at Florence he made two powerful figures—of Jeremiah and Habbakuk, the latter so bald that Donatello called him lo Zuccone, “the big pumpkin.” On the Loggia dei Lanzi Donatello’s bronze Judith, commissioned by Cosimo, still brandishes her sword over Holofernes; the wine-drugged general sleeps placidly before his decapitation; he is masterfully conceived and cast; but the young tyrannicide, overwhelmed with drapery, approaches her deed with inopportune calm.
On a brief trip to Rome (1432) Donatello designed a classic tabernacle in marble for the old St. Peter’s. Probably in Rome he studied the portrait busts that had survived from the days of the Empire; in any case it was he who developed the first significant portrait sculpture of the Renaissance. His chef-d’oeuvre in portraiture was his bust, in painted terra cotta, of the politician Niccolò da Uzzano; here he amused and expressed himself with a realism that offered no compliments but revealed a man. Donatello made his own discovery of the old truth that art need not always pursue beauty, but must seek to select and reveal significant form. Many dignitaries risked the veracity of his chisel, sometimes to their discomfiture. A Genoese merchant, dissatisfied with himself as Donatello saw him, haggled about the price; the matter was referred to Cosimo, who judged that Donatello had asked too little. The merchant complained that the artist had taken only a month for the work, so that the fee demanded came to half a florin ($12.50) per day—too much, he thought, for a mere artist. Donatello smashed the bust into a thousand pieces, saying that this was a man who could bargain intelligently only about beans.43
The cities of Italy appreciated him better, and competed for his services. Siena, Rome, and Venice lured him for a time, but Padua saw him fashion his masterpiece. In the church of St. Anthony he carved a marble screen for the altar that covered the bones of the great Franciscan; and over it he placed moving reliefs and a bronze Crucifixion most tenderly conceived. In the piazza before the church he set up (1453) the first important equestrian statue of modern times; inspired, doubtless, by the mounted Aurelius in Rome, but thoroughly Renaissance in face and mood; no idealized philosopher-king, but a man of visibly contemporary character, fearless, ruthless, powerful—Gattamelata, “the honeyed cat,” the Venetian general. It is true that the chafing, foaming horse is too big for his legs, and that the pigeons, innocent of Vasari, daily bespatter the bald head of the conquering condottiere; but the pose is proud and strong, as if all the virtu of Machiavelli’s longing had here passed with the fused bronze to harden in Donatello’s mold. Padua gazed in astonishment and glory at this hero rescued from mortality, gave the artist 1650 golden ducats ($41,250) for his six years of toil, and begged him to make their city his home. He whimsically demurred: his art could never improve at Padua, where all men praised him; he must, for art’s sake, return to Florence, where all men criticized all.
In truth he returned to Florence because Cosimo needed him, and he loved Cosimo. Cosimo was a man who understood art, and gave him intelligent and bountiful commissions; so close was the entente between them that Donatello “divined from the slightest indication all that Cosimo desired.”44 At Donatello’s suggestion Cosimo collected ancient statuary, sarcophagi, arches, columns, and capitals, and placed them in the Medici gardens for young artists to study. For Cosimo, with Michelozzo’s collaboration, Donatello set up in the Baptistery a tomb of the refugee Antipope John XXIII. For Cosimo’s favorite church, San Lorenzo, he carved two pulpits, and adorned them with bronze reliefs of the Passion; from those pulpits, among others, Savonarola would launch his bolts against later Medici. For the altar he molded a lovely terra-cotta bust of St. Lawrence; for the Old Sacristy he designed two pairs of bronze doors, and a simple but beautiful sarcophagus for Cosimo’s parents. Other works came from him as if they were child’s play: an exquisite stone relief of the Annunciation for the church of Santa Croce; for the cathedral a Cantoria of Singing Boys—plump putti violently chanting hymns (1433–8); a bronze bust of a Young Man, the incarnation of healthy youth (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art); a Santa Cecilia (possibly by Desiderio da Settignano), fair enough to be the Christian muse of song; a bronze relief of the Crucifixion (in the Bargello) overpowering in its realistic detail; and in Santa Croce another Crucifixion, a gaunt and solitary figure in wood, one of the most moving representations of this scene, despite Brunellesco’s criticism of it as “a crucified peasant.”
Patron and artist grew old together, and Cosimo took such care of the sculptor that Donatello rarely thought about money. He kept his funds, says Vasari, in a basket suspended from the ceiling of his studio, and bade his aides and friends take from it according to their needs, without consulting him. When Cosimo was dying (1464) he recommended Donatello to the care of his son Piero; Piero gave the old artist a house in the country, but Donatello soon returned to Florence, preferring his accustomed studio to the sunshine and insects of the countryside. He lived in simplicity and content till the age of eighty. All the artists—nearly all the people—of Florence joined in the funeral that laid him to rest, as he had asked, in the crypt of San Lorenzo, beside Cosimo’s own tomb (1466).
He had immeasurably advanced the sculptural art. Now and then he poured too much force into his poses and designs; often he fell short of the finished form that exalts Ghiberti’s doors. But his faults were due to his resolve to express not beauty so much as life, not merely a strong and healthy body but a complex character or mental state. He developed sculptural portraiture by extending it from the religious to the secular field, and by giving his subjects an unprecedented variety, individuality, and power. Overcoming a hundred technical difficulties, he created the first great equestrian statue left to us by the Renaissance. Only one sculptor would reach greater heights, and then by inheriting what Donatello had learned, achieved, and taught. Bertoldo was Donatello’s pupil, and the teacher of Michelangelo.
3. Luca della Robbia
The picture that takes form in our minds, as we read Vasari’s biographies of Ghiberti and Donatello, shows the studio of a Renaissance sculptor as the co-operative enterprise of many hands, directed by one mind, but transmitting the art, day by day, from master to apprentice, generation after generation. From such studios came minor sculptors who left to history a less imperious fame, but in their degree contributed to give to passing beauty a lasting form. Nanni di Banco inherited a fortune, and had the means to be worthless; but he fell in love with sculpture and Donatello, and served a faithful apprenticeship under him until he could set up his own studio. He carved a St. Philip for the niche of the shoemakers’ guild in Or San Michele, and for the cathedral a St. Luke seated with the Gospel in his hand, and looking out with all the confidence of fresh faith upon a Renaissance Italy just beginning to doubt.
In another studio the brothers Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino combined their skills in architecture and sculpture. Bernardo designed a classic tomb in Santa Croce for Leonardo Bruni; then, on the accession of Nicholas V he went to Rome, and consumed himself in the great Pope’s architectural revolution. Antonio reached his zenith at thirty-four (1461) with his marble tomb in San Miniato, at Florence, for Don Jayme, Cardinal of Portugal; here is the victory of the classic style in all but the angel’s wings, the Cardinal’s vestments, and his crown of virginity—for James had startled his time by his chastity. America has two lovely examples of Antonio’s work—the marble bust of The Christ Child in the Morgan Library, and The Young St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery. And is there anywhere a nobler example of realistic port
raiture than the powerful head—corrugated with veins and furrowed with thought—of the physician Giovanni di San Miniato, in the Victoria and Albert Museum?
Desiderio da Settignano came to Florence from the nearby village that gave him his cognomen. He joined Donatello’s staff, saw that the master’s work lacked only patient finish, and distinguished his own productions with elegance, simplicity, and grace. His tomb for Marsuppini did not quite equal Rossellino’s for Bruni, but the tabernacle that he designed for the church of San Lorenzo (1464) pleased all who saw it; and his incidental portraits* and reliefs augmented his fame. He died at thirty-six; what might he have done if given, like his master, eighty years?
Luca della Robbia was granted eighty-two, and used them well; he raised terra-cotta work almost to the level of a major art, and his fame out-journeyed Donatello’s; there is hardly a museum in Europe that does not display the tenderness of his Madonnas, the cheerful blue and white of his painted clay. Beginning as a goldsmith like so many artists of the Renaissance, and learning in that minuscule field all the delicacies of design, he passed on to sculptural relief, and carved five marble plaques for Giotto’s Campanile. Perhaps the wardens of the cathedral did not tell Luca that these reliefs excelled Giotto’s, but they soon commissioned him to adorn the organ loft with a relief picturing choir boys and girls in the ecstasy of song. Two years later (1433) Donatello carved a similar Cantoria. The rival reliefs now face each other in the Opera di duomo or Works of the Cathedral; both of them powerfully convey the exuberant vitality of childhood; here the Renaissance rediscovered children for art. In 1446 the wardens engaged him to make reliefs for the bronze doors of a cathedral sacristy. These could not rival Ghiberti’s but they saved Lorenzo de’ Medici’s life in the Pazzi conspiracy. All Florence now acclaimed Luca as a master.
So far he had followed the traditional methods of the sculptor’s art. Meanwhile, however, he had been experimenting with clay, seeking to find a way in which this tractable material could be made as beautiful in texture as marble. He molded the clay into the form designed, covered it with a glaze of divers chemicals, and baked it in a specially constructed kiln. The wardens admired the result, and commissioned him to place terra-cotta representations of the Resurrection and the Ascension over the doors of the cathedral sacristies (1443, 1446). These tympanums, though in monochrome white, made a stir by the novelty of their material and the refinement of their finish and design. Cosimo and his son Piero ordered similar terra cottas for the Medici palace and for Piero’s chapel in San Miniato; in these Luca added blue to the dominant white. Orders came to him now in an abundance that tempted him to rapid facility. He brightened with a terra-cotta Coronation of the Virgin the portal of the church of the Ognissanti, and the portal of the Badia with a tenderly graceful Madonna and Child, between such angels as might reconcile us to an eternity of heaven. For the church of San Giovanni in Pistoia he attempted a large terra-cotta Visitation; it was a fresh departure in the aged features of Elizabeth and the youthful innocence and diffidence of Mary. So Luca created a new realm of art, and founded a della Robbia dynasty that would flourish till the end of the century.
VII. PAINTING
1. Masaccio
In fourteenth-century Italy painting dominated sculpture; in the fifteenth century sculpture dominated painting; in the sixteenth painting again took the lead. Perhaps the genius of Giotto in the trecento, of Donatello in the quattrocento, of Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian in the cinquecento played some part in this alteration; and yet genius is more a function than a cause of the spirit of an age. Perhaps in Giotto’s time the recovery and revelation of classic sculpture had not yet provided such stimulus and direction as they were to give to Ghiberti and Donatello. But that stimulus reached its height in the sixteenth century; why did it not lift the Sansovinos and Cellinis, as well as Michelangelo, above the painters of that time? —and why was Michelangelo, primarily a sculptor, forced more and more into painting?
Was it because Renaissance art had tasks and needs too wide and deep for sculpture? Art, liberated by intelligent and opulent patronage, wished to cover the whole field of representation and ornament. To do this with statuary would have taken time, toil, and money prohibitively; painting could more readily express the double gamut of Christian and pagan ideas in a hurried and exuberant age. What sculptor could have portrayed the life of St. Francis as rapidly as Giotto and with Giotto’s excellence? Moreover, Renaissance Italy included a majority of persons whose feelings and ideas were still medieval, and even the emancipated minority harbored echoes and memories of the old theology, of its hopes and fears and mystic visions, its devotion and tenderness and pervasive spiritual overtones; all these, as well as the beauties and ideals expressed in Greek and Roman sculpture, had to find vent and form in Italian art; and painting offered to do it at least more conveniently, if not also with greater fidelity and subtlety, than sculpture. Sculpture had studied the body so long and lovingly that it was not at home in representing the soul, though Gothic carvers had now and then made spiritual stone. Renaissance art had to portray both body and soul, face and feeling; it had to be sensitive to, take the impress of, all the range and moods of piety, affection, passion, suffering, skepticism, sensualism, pride, and power. Only laborious genius could accomplish this with marble, bronze, or clay; when Ghiberti and Donatello attempted it they had to carry into sculpture the methods, perspectives, and nuances of painting, and sacrificed to vivid expression the ideal form and placid repose required of Greek statuary in the Golden Age. Finally, the painter spoke a language more easily understood by the people, in colors that seized the eye, in scenes or narratives that told beloved tales; the Church found that painting moved the people more quickly, touched their hearts more intimately, than any carving of cold marble or casting of somber bronze. As the Renaissance progressed, and art broadened its scope and aim, sculpture receded into the background, painting advanced; and as sculpture had been the highest art expression of the Greeks, so now painting, widening its field, varying its forms, improving its skills, became the supreme and characteristic art, the very face and soul, of the Renaissance.
In this period it was still groping and immature. Paolo Uccello studied perspective until nothing else interested him. Fra Angelico was the perfection, in life and art, of the medieval ideal. Only Masaccio felt the new spirit that would soon triumph in Botticelli, Leonardo, and Raphael.
Certain minor talents had transmitted the techniques and traditions of the art. Giotto taught Gaddo Gaddi, who taught Taddeo Gaddi, who taught Agnolo Gaddi, who, as late as 1380, adorned Santa Croce with frescoes still in Giottesque style. Agnolo’s pupil, Cennino Cennini, gathered into a Libro dell’ arte (1437) the accumulated knowledge of his time in drawing, composition, mosaic, pigments, oils, varnishes, and other phases of the painter’s work. “Here,” says page one, “begins the Book of the Art, made and composed in the reverence of God and the Virgin Mary… and all the saints… and in the reverence of Giotto, of Taddeo, and of Agnolo”;45 art was becoming a religion. Agnolo’s greatest pupil was a Camaldulese monk, Lorenzo Monaco. In the magnificent altarpiece—The Coronation of the Virgin—that Lawrence the Monk painted (1413) for his monastery “of the Angels,” a fresh vigor of conception and execution appeared; the faces were individualized, the colors were brilliant and strong. But in that triptych there was no perspective; the figures in the rear rose taller than those in the foreground, like heads in an audience seen from the stage. Who would teach Italian painters the science of perspective?
Brunellesco, Ghiberti, Donatello had made approaches to it. Paolo Uccello almost gave his life to the problem; night after night he pored over it, to the fury of his wife. “How charming a thing is this perspective!” he told her; “ah, if I could only get you to understand its delights!”46 Nothing seemed to Paolo more beautiful than the steady approximation and distant merging of parallel lines in the furrows of a pictured field. Aided by a Florentine mathematician, Antonio Manetti, he set himself to f
ormulate the laws of perspective; he studied how to represent accurately the receding arches of a vault, the ungainly enlargement of objects as they advanced into the foreground, the peculiar distortion of columns arranged in a curve. At last he felt that he had reduced these mysteries to rules; through these rules one dimension could convey the illusion of three; painting could represent space and depth; this, to Paolo, seemed a revolution as great as any in the history of art. He illustrated his principles in his painting, and colored the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella with frescoes that startled his contemporaries but have yielded to the erosion of time. Still surviving is his vivid portrait of Sir John Hawkwood on a wall of the cathedral (1436); the proud condottiere, having turned his arms from attacking to defending Florence, now joined, in the duomo, the company of scholars and saints.
Meanwhile another line of, development had reached from the same origin to the same end. Antonio Veneziano was a follower of Giotto; Gherardo Stamina was a pupil of Veneziano; from Stamina stemmed Masolino da Panicale, who taught Masaccio. Masolino and Masaccio made their own studies of perspective; Masolino was one of the first Italians to paint nudes; Masaccio was the first to apply the new principles of perspective with a success that opened the eyes of his generation, and began a new era in pictorial art.
His real name was Tommaso Guidi di San Giovanni; Masaccio was a nickname meaning Big Thomas, as Masolino meant Little Thomas; Italy was fond of giving such identifying marks to her children. Taking to the brush at an early age, he so lost himself in devotion to painting that he neglected everything else—his clothes, his person, his income, his debts. He worked a while with Ghiberti, and may have learned in that bottega-academy the anatomical precision that was to be one mark of his drawing. He studied the frescoes that Masolino was painting in the Brancacci Chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine, and noted with special delight their experiments in perspective and foreshortening. On a pillar in the abbey church known as the Badia he represented St. Ivo of Brittany with feet foreshortened as seen from below; the spectators refused to believe that a saint could have such mighty feet. In Santa Maria Novella, as part of a fresco of the Trinity, he pictured a barrel vault in such perfect diminishing perspective that the eye seemed to see the painted ceiling as sunk into the church wall.