Chapter I: An Estimate of Bernini (1)

During the last hundred years there has come a great change in the feeling of most people towards the art of the different epochs of the Renaissance. Whereas our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers held Carracci and Guido and others of the same time in high esteem, we are now taught that these later men are of little value or interest in comparison with the artists of the fifteenth century, and even the most halting and stuttering “Primitive” is held of more worth than the more able masters of the seventeenth century. This change is natural enough, but betokens a lack of true understanding of the purpose and powers of the fine arts.

The altered mental attitude in religious matters which renders most people incapable of feeling the appeal of the mystical fervour of the seventeenth century explains in a measure why the earlier work is preferred; and added to this is the effect of the development of archæological training which has given rise to an interest in the mere search for origins—a search that has done infinite harm in blinding the eyes of students to the fact that, for the world at large, it is far more important to see whither life is carrying us than from what slow, groping, and inexplicable protoplasm and haphazard chance it sprung. The teachers of our universities go on in their dull round, like Dervishes, repeating that the Parthenon was the most perfect expression of Greek art, and there are those who cannot see the beauty of the silver vases from Boscoreale because they choose to call them Roman. Without doubt there are many sound reasons for the purely archæological study of classic art, and recently a small but perceptive band of scholars has raised Roman art from the ignorant neglect into which it had fallen and given it the proper position due to any such able expression of great ideas; this justifies the hope that the worth of the later Italian schools will become once more manifest, not again to be forgotten.

The idea that the art of any civilized people rises by a steady and constantly more perfect progression to one glorious peak of perfection and then falls by rapid and recurring blunders to a waste of meaningless effort is, I believe, due to the too frequent mistake of considering the monuments of the arts as separate entities and as self-ordained rather than as indices of vital currents of thought and life. The English dictionary is not synonymous with English literature. Nor does the will-o’-the-wisp phrase “art for art’s sake” mean that each work of art is a unique and inexplicable phenomenon. Its true meaning is that the artist, be he poet or sculptor or musician—no matter what form his art takes—finds the only adequate expression of himself in the forms and under the governance of the laws of the art which he follows. By so far as he follows these laws is his work intelligible to other men; by so far as he finds new combinations for the forms and new adaptations of the laws to meet the new circumstances of ever changing life is he original and great. When Shakespeare or Keats wrote a sonnet the verses were not produced by them merely for the sake of using a certain complicated formula of fourteen lines to make certain statements, nor when Pheidias carved the Athena or Praxiteles the Hermes was it merely with the idea of reproducing the human form in stone.

Had such been the motive of these poets and sculptors their results would have had small value; but each one of them had something to say that he could best express in the form chosen, some feeling towards life he wished to share with others, and in this outgiving he steadily sought to perfect the form that held his idea. The care he lavished on the verse and marble so that the expression of this thought might be the completest possible and truest to his idea, the delight in making his chosen art conform to the laws of language or of gravity, while at the same time it held the thought as a nest holds an egg, _that_ was art for art’s sake, and a very different matter from mere technical dexterity.

All the arts are alike means of conveying ideas from brain to brain and from the past and forgotten generations to those not yet thought of. No one school ever told the whole truth, but only that part of it maybe which local circumstances enable it to see. Each of them, from the earliest which faded away before recorded time, to the latest which looks eagerly forward to to-morrow with the hope of new accomplishment and absorption in new truths discovered, is but as the searchlight casting its sharp-defined ray through the immeasurable dark. The flames of Priam’s pyre crimsoning the night which hung over the “topless towers” were not marked on the Argive hills, but the message was flashed hither and yon over the star-tracked sea, raising now hopes now fears, till at Mycenæ no answering flame was lit, but instead the young Phœnix was born.

And as no one school can answer all the questions, so no one single pundit can tell all the truth even of his own school. In each honest, unshamming workman there is something of truth, something others long ago thrilled to or that others yet to come may also feel, something that he knows with a clarity and conviction not to be equalled by any other. In a sense he does express his time, but neither the artist nor any man else is merely the product of his time, and the truly great ones go ahead of it, following the gleam of the divine spark which each man is born with to shelter in his heart as best he may. If it keep alight, by God’s grace, his life becomes in truth art for art’s sake, and he is one of the successful runners in the torch race across the great divide of life that separates the hopeless past from the hopeful future.

Of such there are many to spur on the weary and to guide the strayed back to the beacon path. In every man who has appealed to the masses, whose ears have rung and whose heart has swelled with the loud cries of “well done,” there is, be sure, something of the ultimate divine truth—some no mockery—some sincerity which heated in the fires of his soul and beaten with long pain and trouble on the anvil of his heart, shall be, if we can grasp it, a treasure undiminishing so long as we have breath to live.

Such an one was Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, whose life was almost coterminous with the seventeenth century (1598–1680). Honoured during life by three courts, and at that time court patronage was a very different thing to what it is now, he has of late been treated with a disregard which is unjustified, and has been blamed for faults which were not his. These false judgments can be traced back to the envy of some of his contemporaries, who on the one hand accused him of ignorance of the mechanics of his art and of stupidity of design, and on the other, oftentimes, did their best to copy him. But it gives us pause when we consider that notwithstanding the forces of jealousy backed by powerful influence that were brought to bear on him he remained in the eyes of artistic Italy during his sixty and more working years the “Michael Angelo of the seicento.” And this estimate of him, if we lay aside preconceived notions and formulas handed down to us by our parents, and look at his work with our own eyes and study it in the light of our own knowledge, will turn out to be the right one. Only the rash and heedless dare say of one who acquired such admiration in his own day that his work was poor and unworthy. And yet this is what is said. His style is said to be extravagant and artificial and his violent material effects are said to show that he was unable to express thought. Even the group of Apollo and Daphne is held to exhibit his ignorance of the proper domain of sculpture. It seems to me more likely that the judgment of the artists and critics of the seventeenth century is apt to be the correct one.

What would be artificial in an artist to-day was not so in Bernini, but was, if we could see it and free our hearts from the bonds of tradition, the most honest and simplest expression of a genius who had a new message for those who would take the trouble to understand. Frequently his work is criticised for not conforming to the “severe laws” of good sculpture and in this criticism lies the common fallacy of letting personal taste usurp the place of critical judgment. There are, of course, laws of gravity, and of stress or strain to which a sculptor must conform because they are in the nature of the material he uses, just as there are optical laws which the painter should know; but there are no laws to fix what the artist may or may not represent or the forms which he should give to his representations. Personal taste is very well in its place, but it is not criticism; and severe laws are good training for our powers, but dependence on them leads to stagnation and not to discovery. Because the stage-coach follows the old gray road is it artificial of the aeroplane to soar through the trackless ether? Probably most critics, when they speak of severe laws as fixed and irrevocable, have in mind those followed by the Greeks of the fifth century B.C.—surely of no later time, for what of the violent material effects of Pergamon? But suppose portraits of the present-day business kings were carved according to the one-time valid classic laws? Strangely unlike the subject would such portraits be!

There is nothing ultimately right in severity nor ultimately wrong in violence. The money-changers were not led from the temple by a ribbon round their necks. The pioneer and path breaker must be violent. This was Bernini’s work and purpose, and it is no more reasonable to blame him for the insincerity and stupidity of his followers than to blame Columbus for lynch law. As of many another, Bernini’s fame has been dimmed by the follies and shams of his would-be imitators. Many tried to imitate and surpass him, but it was not to be done. He had the quality of genius which is more than the power of taking infinite pains. That his pupils had, but they merely exaggerated the form of the outer husk of his work till it lost all semblance of truth and became nothing but untruth and error. In him was the divine spark, the light of which showed new worlds for sculpture to work in and the heat of which moulded his material into the eternal forms of beauty.

The study of Bernini is established on very strong foundations, and the misinterpretation of his aims is inexcusable; for we have sure records of every kind concerning him. From his surprising youth to his busy old age we can trace his progress and the development of his powers. Of all his numerous works scarcely one is lost, and such as have disappeared are of no importance whatever in comparison with what remains. The full account of his life was written by two contemporaries, one of them his son, and this is amplified by many letters and other papers—accounts of payments for his work, stories of his doings, plans for work sometimes never undertaken and other times finally accomplished by himself or his pupils, that have been turned up into the light after long sleep in Italian archives.[1] It is all before us, and each chapter of his life can be recalled from the Elysian fields. We grow eager with the same hopes, we feel despondent at the same broken faith and pledges, we grow interested in the same companionships, we rest after the same magnificent accomplishments, and to the end we are keen in search of new worlds to open up.

Even the look of him we know; what the appearance was as he moved among the Popes and Kings, the Cardinals and Princes of Europe. What it was for a man they saw we too can see. What it was of a heart he felt dragging him on with engine throbs we can guess when our amazed eyes rest on the Saint Theresa, the bust of Louis XIV, or the throne in St. Peter’s. A strongly built, dark man, his thick hair whitening in old age, but the quick eye never losing its brilliancy and piercing glance. Of simple fashion in dress, as the pictures and drawings by himself and others show him, for all his love of rich stuffs and floating draperies. A ready and pleasant wit made him the best of company, though at times withdrawn into himself by some mystical absorption. For just as the great religious leaders, so the great artists are at times lifted by some ecstasy away from actual surrounding fact and lost in worlds only visible to their inner eye, and though visible never to be told of. At other times his spirits broke forth in irrepressible gaiety which though it might form itself as satire was never malevolent. Generous to a fault, and always ready to lift up a friend, he was implacable towards his enemies, and rightly showed them no mercy. He had the strength to be a good hater,—not feebly excusing hypocrisy and meanness because the hypocrite was weak or knew no better, but hating, not the poor miserable individual, but his qualities, and, to the best of his own power, destroying them. Proud and self-confident, but willing to answer questions or to explain what might seem faults. A lonely man; one with many acquaintances but few friends. Too sincere not to be shocked by the heartless brutishness of the woman he loved, too honest a workman not to be hurt by the attacks of envy, but never losing heart, always following his ideal and seeking to eternize the beautiful visions of his bright soul.

There are many portraits of him, some done with pencil or pen or graver, others more elaborate oil paintings. They are the work of his friends, or done by himself, and show him at various periods of life from young manhood to old age. Naturally they vary in many ways, but the variance is for the most part in the details of the outer shell of the man. The thick dark locks of the youth give place to the thin gray hairs of the old man; the full cheeks grow sunken and wrinkles frame the piercing eyes; but in all the portraits certain characteristics remain constant. A pencil drawing in the Galleria Nazionale in Rome is the best of the youthful portraits.[2] It is by himself, done when he was some twenty years old. It shows a finely shaped head with thick, waving hair. The face is strongly modelled, and all the features noticeable; the nose large and slightly bent, the chin square and strong. Lips full and sensitive, but vigorous. Most noticeable of all are the eyes, large and dark, set rather deeply under heavy brows, looking straightly and sadly but imperturbably on the world. A face of power yet of sweetness. A man to ask after and to watch what he will do in this world. Rather older we see him in two drawings in the private collection of Prince Chigi in Rome.[3] Life was testing him severely we know, but the eyes are still steady, are still bright with the inner light that was leading him on, and the mouth is still sweet and undrawn.

Of about the same time, or a little later maybe, is the oil portrait supposed to be by himself (though for this there is little proof), in the Uffizi.[4] No change yet in the character except in a strengthening and making permanent the good qualities of his youth. The man has found himself. Many years go by before we again see him face to face.

In the Gallery of St. Luke[5] and in the possession of Count Andreozzi in Rome[6] are portraits of him in his last years, and a very fine pencil drawing by himself in the Brandegee Collection (Plate I). All his works were completed, his visits to the courts of Europe were over, he is the “Michael Angelo of the seicento,” and yet he is just as simple in his dress and pose as ever. Obviously a great man whose ideals were so much greater to him than what he had accomplished that no possible flattery could disturb the balance of his mental poise. One change there is in the face more to be remarked than the higher forehead and the fuller chin. The eyes are still bright and level, the mouth still as soft and strong, but the sadness of expression has gone. Had he realized, I wonder, that soon all the sorrows of life would be hidden and lost under the gray church floor? Though the glad light of the sun no longer shone upon his life his face is bright with a mystical light as of the ranging stars which for countless thousands of years have guided the feet of man.[7]

It may be thought that I have given a fanciful interpretation to the change that came in his face from youth to old age, but it can be shown that some such thoughts as I have suggested moved him. About 1650, at a time when his enemies had attacked his work in St. Peter’s and caused him great financial damage and still greater hurt to his natural and proper pride, the idea came to him to carve an allegory that should show the ages what his feeling towards his critics, towards art and towards life truly was. Allegories in painting or sculpture are usually, owing to the fixed limitations of these arts, unintelligible, but no artist ever lived who could have done as well as Bernini in making clear his idea with the material he used. Even if we did not have his own words about this group his thought would be seen, for his amazing command of technique and his knowledge of statics made it possible for him to combine figures with a freedom rarely equalled, and thereby to express himself with an ease and fulness beyond the powers of most sculptors of any time. Only one of the two figures which were to form the group was ever finished, but there is a sepia sketch showing the whole composition.

In it we see the winged figure of Time hovering above a beautiful woman from whose nude body he lifts a mantle. She is Truth; in her hand she holds an image of the Sun darting bright rays in all directions. This group meant much to him; was perhaps the most personal and truly expressive work he ever made, and till his death he kept it by him. In his will he says that not without reason has he kept this statue of Truth unveiled by Time which he wishes to remain for ever in the possession of his descendants who, as they look on it, may remember that the most lovely of the virtues is Truth and that if one works under her guidance Time in the end reveals her. Are the “severe laws” of the ancients any more severe than this rule Bernini held before himself and wished his descendants never to forget, and is it sensible because at first sight his work seems strange and unaccountable to damn it with such words as “fantastic” or “baroque”?

The group was never finished, but in a dirty courtyard off the Corso in Rome, neglected as only the Italians know how to neglect such things till some outsider stirs their jaded appreciation to new interest, is the Discovered Truth. Time on hasty wings flies by, but as Bernini knew, Truth stays always, heedless of neglect, the fixed pole for all those who set their aim beyond the bounds within which their earthly eyes would prison them. And knowing this, it came to pass that his old face was lit with a peaceful smile as he came to the evening of life.

Bernini’s work is of unusual variety, but the best of it falls into four classes. There are the wonderful groups illustrating old world myths that he produced in the full joy of life in his youth; there are the amazing religious monuments in which he embodied with unrivalled skill the mystical intensity of the religion whose chief priests he served; there are the superbly joyous settings for fountains which though the waters might dry up and cease to flow will still, so long as the stone lasts, echo their murmuring music; and there are the long series of magnificent busts on which he was employed from his very earliest days to his latest. He was besides author, painter, illustrator, and architect. I have no intention of cataloguing the long series of work his never idle hand produced, but wish merely to point out some of the forgotten beauties that he brought into being. In a measure, it is possible to trace the source of his inspiration and in lesser degree to foresee its outcome.

His father, Pietro, a Florentine, was a sculptor of no mean power before him. His mother was of Naples, and in that southern, passionate city Gian Lorenzo was born in 1598 and there he passed his first years. Some day another Mendel may be able to establish what were the forces of Florentine and Neapolitan blood that lay dormant in his young brain, but for us is no such certainty, and we can only guess at the effect of the father’s artistic occupations and the mother’s quick blood. In 1604, when the boy was but six years old, his father moved to Rome, the city his son was destined to impress with his genius as no city but Athens has ever been impressed by a single artist. Working at first for his father, he was only fourteen years old when he drew to himself the attention of all the _connoscenti_ by two busts which, as Annibale Carracci said, any artist after years of work might have been proud to make. The admiration Bernini won for these works, to which I shall return, led, as was the good habit of those days, to the patronage of the Borghese pope, Paul V.

In the Borghese villa, the ruined grandeur of which is still the chief pride of Rome, the young Bernini was surrounded by beautiful antique marbles, some of which he was called upon to restore. This familiarity with ancient sculpture, and this subjection in the task of restoration of his own spirit to that of classic masters, had a very marked effect on him—an effect which in its deepest sense lasted throughout his long life, though its more obvious and visible manifestation soon waned and faded away. That is to say, while his work at all times showed a perfect comprehension of some of the fundamental laws of the material out of which sculpture is formed, laws that were first clearly expounded by the Greeks, it is only in a few of his earliest, and for a youth miraculous, works that he shows a tendency to imitate classic form.

Four wonderful works were produced for the Borghese family. The Æneas and Anchises (Plate III), the David (Plate IV), the Rape of Proserpina (Plate V), and the exquisite group of Apollo and Daphne (Plate VI). All these were finished when he was only twenty-seven. Realizing this, the comparison of him with Michael Angelo no longer seems exaggerated, but one sees further that no such comparison can perform the ordinary service of all such juxtapositions, which is to afford a scale of better or worse, for the two masters are supreme, each in his own individual and original way, and incomparable.

Opinion may easily differ in regard to the first three of the works just mentioned. To me the Æneas is the least pleasing and the David the least successful artistically. The faults of both may be in part due to the fact that in each case Bernini’s imagination was to a certain degree hampered by work of other men which he seems to have set himself to surpass, and even though it may be granted that he did surpass his models, he would have done better, as in the Proserpina and Daphne, to let his own genius lead him whither it would and ignore other suggestion. The models I refer to are, in the case of the Æneas, the Christ by Michael Angelo in Santa Maria sopra Minerva and for the David the Borghese Warrior now in the Louvre, both works of small merit.[8] The reason the Æneas seems to me unpleasing is because of the weakness and unheroic look of the faces and figures, but others may not feel this, and the skill of the group is undoubted. The lack of success in the David is due to a slight failure in understanding the Greek motive that Bernini was copying. Whether or not he had in mind the Borghese Warrior as he carved this figure is a matter of slight importance. He was in any case representing a single figure in a position of strongly marked action, a problem that Myron magnificently solved in the Discobolus. The Borghese Warrior is by no means so successful. The David would rival the Discobolus had Bernini not made one mistake. The figure is turned to the wrong side. As he stands, the right arm drawn back, the left hand holding the stone in the sling in front of the body, the sling must fall loose and dead, the body must again be flung forward and the right arm swung upwards before the youth can get the momentum to hurl the stone at his enemy. Had Bernini turned the figure the other way with the left hand behind and the right in front of the body, this sense of ineffectiveness in the pose would not have existed, and the whole body would have been tensely set at the moment of rest between the action of drawing back for the aim and the instantaneously following motion of the cast.[9]

Though such slight criticism may be passed on these two works, the other two, the Proserpina and Daphne are not open to any similar attack. They are magnificent, and compel admiration even from those whose training would tend to limit their preferences to work of another type. Never was the spirit of the two stories more fully understood or more adequately rendered. Never was marble managed in more masterful fashion and given such flux and flow of life. One’s breath catches as one looks, for it seems no longer a work of art before one’s eyes, but life itself. There is the dark, passionate rape of Proserpine, her splendid soft body shrinking and twisting in the grasp of the undeniable, compelling God of the underworld. There is the sweet, sad loss of Daphne, her exquisite springtime figure fading and changing into the rustling silver leaves in fright at the too hasty claim of her lover. Her face is still lovely, though the wide eyes and open mouth show her fear, but is there nothing in her fear of loss of her dear pursuer? And what of him? Not to be thought of as Olympian brother to the cruel, forceful Pluto. His face and action betoken the tenderness that would save the woman he loves from the heartless folly she would thoughtlessly commit. In the one group the storm and rush of passion; in the other the tender restraint of love. Both purely Greek and classic, and both carved with such consummate mastery that we forget the marble and see only the dark Tartarean glow and hear only the whispering of the sad leaves.

The perfection of technique displayed in the works of Bernini’s youthful years is obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of sculpture. His knowledge of anatomy must have been almost instinctive, while he used the chisel with an ease that few painters could rival with a brush. His understanding, too, of balance and composition and of the forms the marble could be given was a revelation, and infinitely enlarged the field of sculpture. As a mere group, the Daphne has never been surpassed, and Bernini himself recognised that, at least from the point of view of technique, none of his later works were any more marvellous. The spirit and character, however, of the later work are very different. It is worth noting that his method of production differs greatly from that of his predecessors. Hundreds of sepia drawings by him still exist which show the fertility of his invention and the labour he spent in getting the best design for his works. There are also many terra cotta models for his statues, and in all of these we see a directness in the way he approached his subject that differentiates him from the forerunners in the art. Among the Greeks, among the painters at least, it was not uncommon to think of the body and the drapery as separate and to draw or model the first entirely nude and then afterwards to put drapery over it. This habit was common enough during the Renaissance, and the studies of such men as Dürer and Leonardo show that it was not confined to the lesser men whose lack of skill and knowledge was helped by such double process.

But among all the hundreds of sketches on paper and models in terra-cotta that are left us of Bernini’s work there is scarcely a trace of this method of procedure. He visualized each work in endless different ways, making rapid but most skilful studies of them all, but he saw the figure each time completed. The figures and drapery and setting were one indivisible whole to him, and his uncommon knowledge of anatomy, and the rare clearness of his mental vision, made it possible for him when the final form of the work was fixed upon to work at it from the outside inwards, and not, as in something built of blocks, from the inside outwards. And while his sketches differ in this regard from those of most other artists, the variety of them, especially the very numerous ones for the same monument, show the pitch of excellence to which art had arrived, for these sketches are no longer the record of the artist’s search to learn _how_, but of his eager search _how best_. Not that Bernini was unique in this. The fertility of invention of such men as Domenico Tiepolo is as that of a tree putting forth leaves, but no other artist illustrates these qualities and methods more completely and masterfully than our Gian Lorenzo.

I have mentioned above the originality displayed by men such as Michael Angelo and Bernini. Many another name could be added to these two, but it is not of men I wish to speak, but of this quality of originality, this crucible from which the old is drawn forth new, this Spring season of the mind which clothes the old, dry stumps with fresh life. The word is so often misused about the artists of to-day that its real significance is lost and true originality is too often imitated by a cheaper, rottener stuff. Every one of us is original in some degree. No one, unless he be mentally dead, sees or feels or believes as his father or grandfathers did before him. It may be the old belief was more correct and the old eyes were sharper than the new. Only the purblind and myopic think that all the early stages were wrong and that the solitary Present is alone right. Were this so, how hopelessly wrong this same Present would soon be! What a hideous precipice of error would this life’s painful course appear! As in life, so it is in Art, and all artists are original who are genuine and honest, who are spurred on only by their ideals and their love for their work—who give up worshipping the xoana and idols of a past day. It may be suggested that there is little difference, or perhaps even none, between one’s own ideal and any other suggested to us by some wrought image, whether in stone or verse is no matter. But there is. There is the difference of life. The light of one is of the dying embers, but the light of the other is of the rising Sun which shows the path we follow till our feet grow slower and slower, till at the last they halt and stop fixed. While the idol remains but the symbol of the ideal it is right. When it becomes the God it is wrong, or when doubt has cut its roots and sapped its strength and we pay it service merely because to do so has become an easy habit. So it is we come to see that the originality of these artists was not mere novelty, but was truthfulness. It represents their beliefs, and what you believe you believe for yourself alone. It shows us what their real, sure-founded and enduring hopes and aims were. Mere novelty cannot be believed in because it is accidental. It has neither root nor promise of flower. It is the mirage of the salt desert, and it is this mere queerness, mere strain, mere novelty which is too often mistaken for originality. It is the paradox masquerading as the True Word. Just as this world whirls like a “fretful midge” through space, ever in the same track, a recurring course, but gradually unperceived moves elsewhither, so do the great artists revolve, and impelled not by their own wilfulness but by the power of the divine spark within them, slowly move forward. And among that splendid company is Bernini.

The terra cotta studies in the Brandegee Collection[10] illustrate clearly Bernini’s originality and the power to which I have referred above, of seeing his visions in their completeness without having to painfully build them up. I do not mean to imply that each separate detail of his works was the same in his first vision of them as in their finished form. He worked at them assiduously, and perfected them with the greatest patience and care, but when they came into his mind they rose before him like ghosts from the tomb—vague but entire.

It is noteworthy that most of these models are of angels, and as such represent the religious work by which Bernini is best known, and on which he was most often employed after his youth was past. By the time he was twenty-five years old he had been employed by three Popes, and before his death five others sought his aid and depended largely on his genius in their endeavours to beautify Rome and to render their own fame imperishable. These undertakings were of very various character, but the greater number of them, such as statues of Saints, decoration of chapels, altars and tabernacles, grave monuments of Popes and prelates, were done with religious purpose and may be called his ecclesiastical work. It is superb in its mastery, magnificent in effect, and while utterly different from anything that had been done before, gives the impression of complete and perfect sincerity. Though unlike earlier work and though the religion that inspired and made it possible has changed so that never again will an artist be able to give similar expression to his ideals, still there is no ground for considering it merely curious and the expression of insincerity or passing error. Anything that affected so many thousands of men, which they found beautiful and satisfying to their souls, must be in a measure true, must have in it some portion of ultimate wisdom. Silence or contempt towards it, any feeling but of sympathy with it, shows not a better knowledge but a duller understanding.

During the sixteenth century a great change had come about in the way men looked at life. Discoveries were made of all sorts; on land for men’s feet to follow or in mathematics and philosophy for their souls to reach up to. Old dogmas became untenable and the roofs with which men had sheltered their heads became scaffolding on which they planted their feet. It was a time of revolution—the revolution of the wheel of life which advances as it turns. I have called attention to the fact that the artists in their search for the fullest possible expression of their thought often threw off dozens of designs for a single work before finding the one most adequate. Technique no longer hampered them in the slightest way, and they readily changed their mode in accordance with new views, no longer blindly following the old guides. The work of Titian is one of the most obvious illustrations of this. In his youth he followed, like the Indian, the steps of his leaders, but as he aged, he broke from them more and more, till at the end he arrived in a world his teachers could never have imagined. Bernini had a similar experience.

One of the commonest complaints brought against Bernini is that he introduced the habit of decorating the archivolts or domed roofs of the churches with figures of angels fluttering about like great white birds, and in this complaint no distinction is made between the idea that underlay this scheme of decoration and the inappropriate and exaggerated use of it made often by his imitators. From the earliest times of the Renaissance, this scheme had been used. Bernini did not invent it. The Gothic portals and towers of France are crowded with figures of saints and kings, of angels and demons. In orderly ranks they guard the gates or singly spring into mid air from the balconies. In Italy the shepherds of the people stood in pulpits which rested on the strong shoulders of Christ’s soldiers or on the steady wings of the heavenly host, while high o’erhead (as in the Portinari Chapel in S. Eustorgio, Milan), a ring of winged figures, hand holding hand, danced and sang, and down the long aisles and in the dark chapels every sleeper in his stony bed was guarded by the faithful spirits.

Why then find fault with Bernini and think he erred in doing what all the world found good? If Bernini is mistaken in putting marble figures above our heads, why excuse Correggio for the circling swarms with which he covered the church domes, or Michael Angelo for the cataract of figures with which he covered the Sistine Chapel? All such work must be considered for its suggestion, not from the point of view of its actual substance. Why, if the conventional and halting work of the nameless early artists is good, should the masterly work of Bernini be considered bad? Only because the modern world thinks it foolish to believe in anthropomorphic angels and having no belief, has lost the power of understanding symbols. And also the antagonism Bernini’s work arouses is due to the fad for the primitive and incomplete. The very lack of power that every early artist tried to rid himself of is now thought to be his chief value and grace, and as in the daily press a missing word puzzle attracts more attention than a sonnet so the halting early work finds more admirers than the later perfect art.

Perfect as they are, there is something more than anthropomorphism in Bernini’s angels. Earlier artists, even the best of the Florentines, when representing these heavenly messengers, almost always make them so solid and human that the wings are utterly inadequate, or else they suggest the body by a thin and shapeless swirl of drapery topped by a perfectly substantial head. In either case the result is unsatisfactory, for though the figures conform to the usual idea of angels as effeminate human forms with wings, the chief impression they make is of inconsistent and impossible anatomical combinations.

They fail just as the archaic Greek centaurs with human feet fail. When one looks at Bernini’s angels, the two done in his youth for the altar of Sant’ Agostino, or the two for instance which he carved in later years for the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, but which were considered too beautiful to be exposed in the open air and are now sheltered in Sant’ Andrea delle Fratte (Plates VII, VIII), or at the one which kneels on the left hand of the _Ciborio_ in the _Cappella del Sacramento_ in Saint Peter’s, one has no sense of unreality. The bodies are human in form, but spiritual in their lightness and grace. The wings are strong and large, and yet so feathery as to seem almost transparent. The drapery falls and clings to and fits the body as a cloud might, and the face and action express a perfect and soul-filling adoration that finds expression in tireless worship and unending song of praise. These are the true “sexless souls, ideal quires.”

This same strong religious feeling is shown with equal certainty in other figures by Bernini which are better known than his angels. These are the figures of saints which he made in his middle and later years. The earliest of them, that of Santa Bibiana, done in 1626, when he was still a young man, shows in the arrangement and pose of the figure the influence of the antique. The technique exhibits the same magnificent ease and the same power of reproducing the various qualities of drapery and flesh and hair that we saw before in the Borghese groups, and there is in the face and gesture the expression of self-effacement in religious ecstasy that is the most noticeable quality of the later figures of this kind. As he grows older, these two characteristics of technical differentiation of surface and of ecstatic expression altered. While he lost no atom of technical power he tended to lay less stress on the appearance of the mere surface of his figures and to pay more attention to and show forth more clearly their mental condition. In doing this he brought into being figures as truly representative of the religion of his time as those of Michael Angelo or any other sculptor of any epoch.

Religious emotion must always call forth strong feeling, but the strength is sometimes shown in terms of apparent restraint, at others it shows itself in violent action. Athena Parthenos is as emotional as the Santa Theresa and Savonarola, and Luther is as violent as the Crusaders. The seventeenth century was a time when men thought it no shame to show their feelings. The Puritans showed them as clearly as the Italians, though in a less pleasant form. If to-day it is difficult to realize and sympathize with the sentiment shown in Bernini’s Sant’ Andrea, or Daniel, or Maria di Magdala, it is not because of our superiority, but rather because we have lost a very precious sense and power of spiritual levitation. Look at the Habakkuk. Is it not a splendid presentation of the prophet who was burdened with the grievance which he beheld, who saw for so long the righteous compassed about by a “bitter and hasty” race that he felt the Lord would never respond to his cry? But even as he complains the visible answer of the Lord appears, and the Angel with playful tenderness pulls at his hair so that his face is upturned to the light of Heaven, not any longer dark with earth’s despair, as he bids him write the vision of the Lord’s judgment that shall not tarry—write it so that he may run who readeth. And Habakkuk still points to the iniquity that blackens the world and the angel points to the inevitably approaching woe. It is superbly original. It is deeply felt.

The St. Jerome in the Duomo at Siena is another very striking figure; if it seems to most observers unpleasant, this is mainly because it does not conform to the conventional and uncharacteristic way they are accustomed to see Jerome represented. As a subject for artists he has been treated far more often by painters than by sculptors, and in the paintings the mere beauty of colour and of surroundings adds charms which are uncharacteristic of, and distract from, the real interest of the figure. When carved by Bernini, there is nothing but the figure to consider—whether it be suggestive of the real man as we know him by his writings or not. Probably most people if asked what image the name of the saint brought to their minds would recall the print by Dürer or some painting such as that by Catena in the National Gallery. But splendid as the print and the painting are, it is only by a pleasant fiction and by refusing to regard the truth that they can be thought to represent in any way the Saint as he was among men. They show a very gentle old man in the neatest and quietest of surroundings, peacefully writing his comments on the scriptures.

It can hardly be supposed that his contemporaries regarded Jerome primarily as a peaceful and abstracted scholar. Surely Bernini did not, but instead shows us the unhappy wanderer and ascetic monk. Scholarship was only one phase, and among the people with whom he lived scarcely the most important phase of St. Jerome’s life. To his contemporaries he showed himself chiefly as an acrid controversialist taking a leading part in the “strife of tongues.” Unhappy in his Pannonian home, he spent a restless youth wandering over Europe, but instead of peace found only momentary forgetfulness in pleasures, the remembrance of which brought deep sorrow in his later years. Then he turned to asceticism and sought by living as an anchorite in the desert to conform himself to the teachings of his Lord. But the degradation of such a life, the unnatural and disgusting view it took of the image of his Maker and the temple of his soul, the morbid introspection and sterility of selfish self-mortification, brought him trouble and pain, not calm, till, at last, an old man, he died in Bethlehem thoroughly disheartened with the iniquity of the world and the horrors resultant on the destruction of Rome by the barbarians.

Such is the man Bernini sets before us. The battered, wayworn feet; the strong, coarse body; the ragged, unkempt hair show the life he led. The face bending with closed eyes dreamily over the figure of the crucified Christ betrays his holy, misdirected zeal. What he was, and what he stood for, could not be shown more clearly than our sculptor has shown it here.

Equally fine, and in certain ways more beautiful, is the statue of Daniel in the lions’ den, which Bernini made in 1656 for Cardinal Chigi, who placed it with the Habakkuk in Santa Maria del Popolo. The youthful and splendidly built figure rests on one knee, his hands upraised in attitude of prayer, his head bent back with eyes wide open gazing upwards. From one shoulder, beside his body and over his legs, falls in wind-blown folds a single heavy mantle. A great lion crouches behind him, licking his foot. In its perfect physical beauty, in its not over-emphasised anatomy and in its entirely successful composition, by which great movement is given the appearance of completeness and stability, the figure is more closely allied to Bernini’s earlier works than to the mystical passionate figures such as the Jerome or Mary of Magdala or others of this period. It is unnecessary to dwell on the beauty of the figure and the technical skill it displays, for these can be seen by anyone whose eye and hand have been trained at all.

There is one less obvious point, however, to which I wish to draw attention, for it is as good an example as could be of what I have mentioned above. I refer to the way the legs show through the heavy drapery that covers them. The mantle does actually clothe the leg. It is not a mere addition. It takes its shape and movement from the leg beneath it. The one cannot be thought of without the other. Were the statue destroyed, and did only the right hip or left knee remain, one would instantly recognise what parts of the figure these were. But classic though the figure is in general appearance—it might almost be one of the Niobids—the feeling of absolute ecstatic faith is very clearly given in the upturned face and the reaching arms.[11] Now there have been times—great and noble times—when men did believe that God would send angels to shut the mouths of lions, and when men felt no fear, but only a carefree trust in His help if true innocency could be found in them.

Such work is not baroque, nor decadent, nor over-emotional, as it is commonly and thoughtlessly said to be, but it is a very adequate and convincing representation of a powerful and uplifting spiritual condition. It is just as fine as the graver and more sombre figures of Greece, or as the sad and ponderous figures of Michael Angelo.

Of all the figures of this period in Bernini’s development the most famous is the Saint Theresa (Plate IX). It is hopeless to express in words the great beauty of this figure. This can no more be done than the full perfection of any great poem can be rendered in a translation. The work is perfect in itself, and what of this kind can be shown in sculpture is here expressed with complete and ultimate adequacy. That most people are startled and shocked when they first see the figure is due to the fact that they do not think of what the scene really means, and they are not accustomed to seeing scenes of divine significance treated with perfect simplicity and pure faith.

Not that such scenes ought not to be so treated, but few are the artists who feel deeply enough or whose technique is finished enough to enable them to represent a scene of this sort so clearly and beautifully. As a result, the artist falls back on forms which have been repeated so often that they have become conventional and no longer can give the beholder the full impression of their meaning. No one is offended on seeing the Son of God bleeding on the cross around which surges a host of idle spectators, or at seeing Him in the manger before which all the nobles of Florence kneel in various theatric attitudes. But Saint Theresa is a figure new to them, and to have her shown in the crisis of her ecstasy with other figures looking on from the walls of the chapel, offends their “sense of propriety” and seems “paradoxical,” “perfervid” and “inconsequent.”[12]

Were this a fair criticism, a large number of the most beautiful works of Christian art would fall under the same condemnation. Far more paradoxical than Bernini’s figure are the representations of the Marriage of Saint Catharine, and they are quite as unpleasing if thought of in their literal sense. As for the figures looking at the Saint from the “opera boxes” at the sides of the chapel, it must be remembered that at this time most of the drama in Italy was founded on religious subjects, and such dramatic representation made a very deep appeal to men’s minds. The critics who find the Saint Theresa in bad taste do not hesitate to form part of the audience when Christ’s Passion is played among the hills of Oberammergau, and they will no longer be afraid to render Bernini the homage that is his due when they cease lazily to measure his work by conservative standards. The glory of a comet is not measured by the Eddystone Light nor a miracle by the conventions of ordinary society.

One other point concerning this statue remains to be considered. A recent critic[13] says that “there are many ecstasies, and Bernini has chosen something that borders closely on the most displeasing.” In this he expresses a common opinion, based, I believe, on a misconception, and on ugly, puritanical prudishness. Possibly there are many ecstasies, but religious ecstasy, the ecstasy of the Saint in joining herself to the spiritual existence of Christ, and the pure and natural ecstasy of love when self is lost in the future of the race, are as nearly as possible identical. The Venus de Medici is far more displeasing than the Saint Theresa.