Chapter IV (2)

Think of the most powerful of the Popes, the head of Christendom, the excommunicator of the Kings of France and Spain, having to succumb to a fever; think of the great French writer, in whose brain the whole modern world mirrored itself, having to die of a gas from which even his dog recovered; think of the giant German philosopher, who had announced the starry infinitude of the moral law, degenerating into the imbecile who must tie and untie his necktie many times a minute. Surely it were worthier of man’s estate had Innocent III perished of an argument in favour of lay investiture, had Zola been snuffed out by an anti-Dreyfusard pamphlet or a romantic poem, had Kant succumbed to the scornful epigram of Herder, or even to the barkings of the priests’ dogs who had been given his name. And far worthier were it of a poet to die of a review than of a jaundice, of a criticism than a consumption. Infinitely more dignified was the death of Keats under the _Quarterly_ than the death of Byron himself under a fever, which some trace to a microbe, itself possibly injected by a mosquito. That were an unpardonable oversight of Dame Nature, who in her democratic enthusiasm forgets that mosquitos are not men’s equals, and that these admirable insects should be blooded more economically. Assuredly the author of “The Vision of Judgment” would have preferred to die of a stanza or a sting-tailed epigram.

Dame Nature had the last word; but was Byron, foreseeing her crushing repartee, so absolutely unjustified in his criticisms and questionings of a Power that held him as lightly as the parasite on the hind leg of any of the fifty thousand species of beetles? For if Fate treads with equal foot on a Byron and a beetle, the bard may be forgiven if he takes it less christianly than the coleopteron.

Byron is “cheap” to-day in England, and while Greece celebrates the centenary of his arrival and Crete calls on his name, while Italy is full of his glory, his hotels and his piazzas, while Genoa is proud that he lived in _Il Paradiso_ and the Armenian Monastery at Venice still cherishes the memory of his sojourn there to learn Armenian, and every spot he trod is similarly sacred, the Puritan critic reminds us that

“The gods approve
The depth and not the tumult of the soul.”

Yes, we know, but when a poet is disapproving of the gods their standards matter less. And we are men, not gods, that their standards should be ours. _Humani sumus_, and nothing of Byron’s passion and pain can be alien from us. This tumult of the soul, who has escaped it? Not Wordsworth, assuredly, who wrote those lines. Only the fool hath _not_ said in his heart, “There is no God.” Even Cardinal Manning said it on his death-bed. Not that death-bed conversions are worth anything. Matthew Arnold was apt to give us Wordsworth as the reposeful contrast to the bold, bad Byron. But the calmness of Wordsworth is only in his style, and if his questionings are cast in bronze, they were often forged in the same furnace as Byron’s, and fused through and through with the pain

“Of all this unintelligible world.”

Poets, even the austere, have to learn in suffering what they teach in song. Only the suffering is always so much clearer than what it teaches them. And then, as Heine says, comes Death, and with a clod of earth gags the mouth that sings and cries and questions.

“Aber ist Das eine Antwort?”

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Among these multitudinous _Madonnas_, and countless _Crucifixions_, and _Entombments_ innumerable, who shall dare award the palm for nobility of conception? But there is a minor theme of Renaissance Art as to which I do not hesitate. It is the _Pietà_ theme, but with angels replacing or supplementing the Madonna who cherishes the dead Christ, and it is significant that the finest treatment of it I have seen comes from the greatest craftsman who treated it—to wit, Giovanni Bellini. His _Cristo Sorretto da Angioli_ you will find painted on wood—a _tavola_—in the Palazzo Communale of Rimini. The Christ lies limp but tranquil, in the peace, not the rigidity, of death, and four little angels stand by, one of them half hidden by the dead figure. The exquisite appeal of this picture, the uniqueness of the conception, lies in the sweet sorrow of the little angels—a sorrow as of a dog or a child that cannot fathom the greatness of the tragedy, only knows dumbly that here is matter for sadness. The little angels regard the wounds with grave infantile concern. Sacred tragedy is here fused with idyllic poetry in a manner to which I know no parallel in any other painter. The sweet perfection of Giovanni Bellini, too suave for the grim central theme of Christianity, here finds triumphant and enchanting justification.

It is perhaps worth while tracing how every other painter’s handling of the theme that I have chanced on fails to reach this lyric pathos.

Bellini himself did not perhaps quite reach it again, though he reaches very noble heights in two pictures (one now in London and the other in Berlin), in which the reduction in the number of angels to two makes even for enhancement of the restful simplicity, while in the Berlin picture there is a touching intimacy of uncomprehending consolation in the pressing of the little angelic cheeks against the dead face. But the fact that in both pictures one angel seems to understand more or to be more exercised than the other contributes a disturbing complicacy. The serene unity is, indeed, preserved by Bellini in his _Pietà_ in the Museo Correr of Venice. But here the three young angels supporting the body are merely at peace—there is nothing of that sweet wistfulness.

For a contrary reason the woodland flavour is equally absent from its neighbour, a picture by an unknown painter of the Paduan school. Here the peace is exchanged, not for poetry but tragedy. The Christ is erect in his tomb, and the two haloed baby angels who uphold his arms are the one weeping, the other horror-struck. The horror is accentuated and the poetry still further lessened in an anonymous painting in a chapel of S. Anastasia in Verona, where boy angels are positively roaring with grief. Nor is the poetry augmented in that other anonymous painting in the Palazzo Ducale of Venice, where one angel kisses the dead hand and the other the blood-stained linen at the foot. In Girolamo da Treviso’s picture in the Brera one child angel examines the bloody palm and the other lifts up the drooping left arm with its little frock. Great round tears run down their faces, which are swollen and ugly with grief. Still more tragic, even to grotesquerie, is an old fresco fragment in an underground church in Brescia, where the little angels are catching the sacred blood in cups—those cups invented by Perugino and borrowed even by Raphael. Francesco Bissolo, in the Academy of Venice, preserves the tranquillity of Bellini, but by making the angels older loses not only the seductive _naïveté_ but the whole naturalness, for these angels are old enough to know better, one feels. They have no right to such callousness. Raphael’s father in his picture in the cathedral of Urbino escapes this pitfall, for his adult angels bend solicitously over the Christ and support his arms from above. But Lorenzo Lotto, though he gives us innocent child-angels, tumbles into an analogous trap, for he forgets that by adding a Madonna and a Magdalen in bitter tears he transforms these untroubled little angels into little devils, who have not even the curiosity to wonder what in heaven’s name their mortal elders are weeping over. In Cariani’s so-called _Deposizione_ at Ravenna one little angel does weep in imitation of the mortals, leaning his wet cheek on the Christ’s dead hand—“tears such as angels weep”—but he only repeats the human tragedy, and might as well be a little boy. Two older angels howl and grimace in Marco Zoppo’s picture in the Palazzo Almerici of Pesaro, while the haloed, long-ringleted head of the Christ droops with slightly open mouth and a strange smile as provoking as Mona Lisa’s. Francia in the National Gallery gives us a red-eyed Madonna with one calm and one compassionate angel, and Zaganelli in the Brera vies with Bellini in the vague, tender wonderment of the child angels who lift up the arms, but the picture is second-rate and the angels are little girls with bare arms and puffed sleeves. Nor is it a happy innovation to show us the legs of the Christ sprawling across the tomb.

Marco Palmezzano, with inferior beauty, also trenches on Bellini’s ground; but not only is the Christ sitting up, not quite dead, but one of the two child angels is calling out as for aid, so that the restful finality of Bellini is vanished. Still nearer to the Bellini idea approaches a picture in the Academy of Venice attributed to Marco Basaiti and an unknown Lombardian. But if this avoids tragedy, the turn is too much in the direction of comedy. The child angels are made still more infantine, so that there is neither horror nor even perturbation, merely a shade of surprise at so passive a figure. One plays with the Christ’s hair, the other with his feet—the Blake-like tenderness is not absent, but the poetry of this utter unconsciousness is not so penetrating as the wistful yearning of the Bellini angels before some dim, unsounded ocean of tragedy. This precise note I did, indeed, once catch in a corner of Domenichino’s _Madonna del Rosario_, where a baby surveys the crown of thorns; but this is just a side-show in a joyous, thickly populated picture, and the Christ is not dead, but a live _bambino_, who showers down roses on the lower world of martyrdom and sorrow.

He is almost too dead in the fading fresco of the little low-vaulted, whitewashed, ancient church of S. Maria Infra Portas in Foligno. A great gash mutilates his side, his head, horribly fallen back, lies on the Madonna’s lap, his legs and arms droop. The mother’s long hair hangs down from her halo, she clasps her hands in agony, and a child angel on either side looks on commiseratingly. Strange to say, this conserves the poetry, despite the horror, though the horror removes it out of comparison with Bellini’s handling.

In Genoa I found three more variations on the theme, two in the cathedral, the first with four angels, all gravely concerned, and the second with quite a crowd of little boys and angels, nearly all weeping. One of the little angels has taken off the crown of thorns—a good touch in a bad picture. The third variant is by Luca Cambiaso, and in the Palazzo Rosso, with a single agitated boy angel. A _Pietà_ in Pistoja takes its main pathos from its lonely position on the staircase of the fusty town hall: a last rose of summer, all its companions are faded and gone, all save one pretty lady saint blooming in a vast ocean of plaster. Even its own Madonna and Apostles are half obliterated; but the boy angel remains in a curious posture: he has got his head betwixt the legs of the Christ, and with his arms helps to sustain the drooping figure. Still more original touches appear in Andrea Utili’s picture in Faenza. Here the Christ has his arms crossed, and his halo, tilted back over his crown of thorns, gleams weirdly in red and gold, and on his tomb rest pincers and a hammer. The two youthful angels are deeply moved; one holds a cross and the other three nails.

If any painter could vie in enchantment with Giovanni Bellini it is Crivelli, and, indeed, there are fascinating things in his _Pietà_ in the Brera, idyllic sweetness in the angels, original decorative touches in the book and burning taper, and masterly imagination in the ghastly lack of vitality with which each dead hand of the Christ droops on the tender living hand of an angel. Had only the angels been a little younger, this would have been as sweetly lyrical as Bellini. From Michelangelo we have only a sketch of the subject, with his wingless child angels, over whom stands the Mater Dolorosa with useless outspread arms, that should have been helping the poor little things to support their burden. In Guido Reni’s _Pietà_ at Bologna her hands droop in folded resignation, while one angel weeps and one adores and pities. I fear the presence of the Madonna and other mortals destroys the peculiar celestial poetry, though of course the conjunction of mortals and angels brings a poetry of its own.

Tura’s treatment of the theme in Vienna I have not seen. But Vivarini breaks out in a new direction. His two angels fly from right and left towards the tomb, under full canvas, so to speak. But it is a pattern _et præterea nihil_. More poetic in its originality is a picture of the Veronese school in the Brera, showing us two baby angels, half curious, half apprehensive, unfolding the Christ’s winding-sheet. But it is a dark, poorly painted picture. Another new invention is Garofalo’s in the same gallery. He gives us a crowd of commonplace weeping figures in a picturesque landscape, and his angel is a sweet little cherub aloft on a pillar over the heads of the mourning mob. But the angel might be a mere architectural decoration, for all his effect upon the picture.

Thus have we seen almost every possible variation tried—adult angels and young angels and baby angels, calm angels and callous angels, lachrymose angels and vociferous angels, helpless angels and hospital angels, boy angels and girl angels, and only one artist has seen the sole permutation which extracts the quintessential poetry of the theme—the high celestial tragedy unadulterated by human grief, and sweetened yet deepened by angels too young to understand and too old to be unperturbed, too troubled for play and too tranquil for tears.

And it is to that incarnation of evil, Sigismondo Malatesta, that we owe this masterpiece of lyric simplicity, for ’twas the Magnificent Monster himself that commissioned it—His rolling and reverberating Magnificence, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo—whose polyphonous, orotund name and the black and white elephants of whose crest pervade the splendid temple which he remodelled at Rimini for the glory of God. And lest the world should forget ’twas he to whom heaven owed the delicious Pagan reliefs by the pillars, or the now-faded ultramarine and starry gold of the chapels, each first pilaster bears in Greek the due inscription:

TO THE IMMORTAL GOD
SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA DI PANDOLFO

(Pray do not pause here—epigraphs, like telegrams, are not punctuated)

PRESERVED FROM MANY OF THE GREATEST PERILS OF THE ITALIAN WAR
ERECTED AND BEQUEATHED MAGNIFICENTLY LAVISH
AS HE HAD VOWED IN THE VERY MIDST OF THE STRUGGLE
AN ILLUSTRIOUS AND HOLY MEMORIAL

No less reflexive was his apotheosis of the frail Isotta, of whom he first made an honest woman and then a goddess. What wonder if his critics carped at the “Disottæ,” the “divine Isotta,” he wrote over her tomb, in lieu of the conventional “Dominæ Isottæ Bonæ Memoriæ”! But one must do the bold, bad condottiere the justice to say that while two angels bear this inscription over her in gold, his own tomb is comparatively modest. It is Isotta whose tomb is supported by shield-bearing elephants and culminates in flourishes as of elephants’ trunks, Isotta who stands over her altar in the guise of a gold-winged angel. Malatesta’s patronage of Giovanni Bellini was not his only contribution to the arts, for a cluster of poets found hospitality at his court and burial at his temple—with a careful inscription that it was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo who buried them—though these seem to have plied the trade of Laureate, if I may judge from the volume published at Paris, “L’Isotteo.” I cannot pretend to be read in Porcellio de’ Pandone or Tommaso Seneca or Basinio of Parma. But Bellini’s _tavola_ suffices to make me say with riddling Samson, “Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness.”

For this is perhaps the teleological purpose of the Magnificent Ones, to play the Mæcenas to some starveling artist or penurious poet. There is in the santuario of the Malatesta temple a fresco of this Sigismondo. He is seen in the flush of youth, gay in a brocaded mantle and red hose, but somewhat disconcertingly on his knees before a crowned figure—his patron saint according to some, the Emperor Sigismondo more probably. Let us call it that sovereign fate to which even megaphonious Magnificence must bow. Almost divine in his lifetime, within a few years the Magnificent One’s character commences to decay, as if that too could not resist the corruption of death. Happy the prince of whom some not malodorous shred of reputation remains a century after his death. The evil that men do lives after them, the good they have _not_ done is oft interred with their bones.

Yes, there is a pathos in the Magnificent Ones. When I consider how their autocosm ensnared them with a sense of their own perdurability, lured them into engaging painters and architects and statuaries to express their triumphant sense of timeless energising, and then ebbed away from them, leaving them putrid carbonates, phosphates, and silicates, while the work of Beauty lived on and lives, having used these momentarily swollen creatures as its channel and tool, then I find it in me to pity these frog-bulls of egotism, so cruelly bemocked and deluded.

Before parting with the _Pietà_ theme I would remark that in the Italian galleries the name _Pietà_ is often—with apparent inaccuracy—given to pictures of the dead Christ alone in his tomb. One of the most curious pictures of this sort I came upon in the gallery of Faenza, where Christ stands in his tomb, yet still nailed on the Cross, from either end of which depends a scourge. I found the same design in the centre of a little stone shield over a building marked as the “Mons Pietatis” of Faenza. And this set me speculating whether such an image as a symbol of the Monte di Pietà was due to the mere suggestiveness of the word _Pietà_, or whether there was a more mystical connection implied between the Crucifixion and the loan-offices instituted in Italy by Bernardino da Feltre to frustrate the usury of the Jews. It is the Monte di Pietà of Treviso that shelters the _Entombment_ ascribed to Giorgione. It seems a long way from Golgotha to the pawn-shop, yet we still talk of pledges being redeemed.

HIGH ART AND LOW

“Pictures
Of this Italian master and that Dutchman.”
JAMES SHIRLEY: _The Lady of Pleasure_.

To come in the Uffizi upon a Dutch collection, to see the boors of Jan Steen, the tavern peasants of Heemskerck, the pancake-seller of Gerard Dou, the mushrooms and butterflies of Marcellis Ottone, is to have, first a shock of discord and then a breath of fresh air and to grow suddenly conscious of the artificial atmosphere of all this Renaissance art. Where it does not reek of the mould of crypts or the incense of cathedrals or the pot-pourri of the cloister, it is redolent of marmoreal _salons_, it is the art of the Magnificent Ones. Moroni’s _Tailor_ marks almost the social nadir of its lay subjects, and our _sartor_ was no doubt a prosperous member of his guild. There are two courtesans in Carpaccio but indistinguishable from countesses, in a rich setting of pilasters and domestic pets. Guido Reni painted his foster-mother, but it is the exception which proves the rule. And the rule is that Demos shall appear in Art only as the accessory in a sacred picture, like the old woman with the basket of eggs in Titian’s _Presentation in the Temple_, or the servants in the many sacred suppers and banquetings beloved of Veronese. That the Holy Family itself was of lowly status is, of course, ignored except here or there by Tintoretto or Signorelli or Giovanni Bellini, and the wonderful gowns and jewels worn by the carpenter’s wife, according to Fra Angelico or Crivelli, would be remarkable even on a Beatrice d’Este or a Marie de’ Medici. Who would ever think that Raphael’s _Sposalizio of the Virgin_ was the marriage of a Bethlehem artisan to a peasant girl? Even the carpenter’s barefootedness—the one touch of naked truth—seems a mere piece of hymeneal ritual, in face of that royal company of princesses and their suites, that functioning High Priest. No; insistence on the humbleness of the Holy Family hardly tallied with the Christianity of the Renaissance, or even with the psychology of the poor believer, who loves to dress up his gods as Magnificent Ones and for whom to adore is to adorn. Aristocracy is the note of Italian painting—the Holy Family takes formal precedence, but the Colonnas and the Medicis rank their families no less select. The outflowering of Dutch art was like the change from the airless Latin of the scholars to the blowy idioms with which real European literature began. Italian art expressed dignity, beauty, religion; Dutch art went back to life, to find all these in life itself. It was the efflorescence of triumphant democracy, of the Dutch Republic surgent from the waves of Spain and Catholicism as indomitably as she had risen from the North Sea. Hence this sturdy satisfaction with reality. Rembrandt painted with equal hand ribs of beef and ribs of men. The Low Countries invented the fruit and flower piece and the fish and game piece. That Low Art hails from the nether lands is not a mere coincidence. Holland was less a country than a piece of the bed of the sea to which men stuck instead of limpets. Cowper says, “God made the country and man made the town,” but the Dutch proverb says, “God made the sea and we made the shore.” ’Twas no braggart boast. The Dutchman had made for himself a sort of anchored ship, and the damps and vapours drove him oft from the deck to the warm cabin, where, asquat on plump cushions with buxom _vrow_ and solid food and stout liquor, he met the mists with an answering cloud from his placid pipe. And the art he engendered reflected this love for cosy realities, and found a poetry in the very peeling of potatoes. No voice of croaking save from the frogs of his marshes. Let your Leopardis croak ’mid their sunny vineyards, let your Obermanns sulk on their stable mountains Mynheer is grateful to be here at all, to have outwitted the waters and dished the Dons. And so never has earthiness found more joyous expression than in his pictures. What gay content with the colours of clothes and the shafts of sunshine, and the ripe forms of women, and the hues of meats and fishes! O the joy of skating on the frozen canals! O the jolly revels in village taverns! Hail the ecstasy of the Kermesse! “How good is man’s life, the mere living.” “It is a pleasant thing to have beheld the sun.” These are the notes of Dutch art, which is like a perpetual grace to God for the beauty of common things. And if the painters are concerned so much with the problems of light, if Rembrandt was the poet of light, was it not because the Dutchman had always in his eye varying effects of light, shifting reflections and scintillations in the ubiquitous canals, kaleidoscopic struggles of sunlight with mist and fog? The Venetians too, those Hollanders of Italy, are notable for their colour, in contrast with the Florentines.

Even in the Dutch and Flemish images of doom I have thought to detect a note of earth-laughter, almost an irresponsible gaiety. Pierre Breughel paints the _Fall of the Angels_ as a descent to lower forms—the loyal angels beat the rebels down, and they change as they fall into birds, beasts, and fishes, into frogs and lizards, and even into vegetables. There are bipedal carrots, and winged artichokes and bird-tailed pomegranates. ’Tis as if the worthy painter was anxious to return to the kitchen, to his genre subjects. Or may we sniff a belated Buddhism or a premature Darwinism? Instead of a sacred picture we get a pantomimic transformation scene: metamorphosis caught grotesquely in the act. This _Fall of the Angels_ seems a favourite Flemish subject—one reads almost an allegory of Art hurled down from heaven to earth.

The same sportive fantasy frolics it over the Flemish hell. De Vos gives us a devil playing on the fluted nose of a metamorphosed sinner. In a triptych of Jerome Bosch, the _Last Judgment_ is the judgment of a Merry Andrew who turns the damned into bell-clappers, strings them across harp-strings, or claps their mouth to the faucets of barrels till they retch. So far goes the painter’s free fancy that he invents air-ships and submarines for the lost souls to cower in, unwitting of the day when these would hold no terrors for the _manes_ of erring aeronauts and torpedoists.

Italian art even in the childish grotesqueries of its Inferno never falls so low as this freakish farrago. One cannot help feeling that the Italians believed in hell and the Netherlanders made fun of it.

One of these extravaganzas of Bosch has drifted to Venice, though this _Temptation of St. Antony_ (of which there is a replica in Brussels) is also attributed to Van Bles. The nude ladies coming to the saint with gifts are most unprepossessing, and what temptation there is in the whirl of carnival grotesques I cannot understand. No doubt some allegory of sin lurks in these goblin faces, with their greedy mouths full of strange creatures, and in this great head with black-tailed things creeping in through eye and mouth, with frogs suspended from its earrings and a little town growing out of its head. Such uncouth ugliness has no parallel in Venice, unless it be a German Inferno with a belled devil. From such puerilities one turns with relief to the coldest and stateliest conventions of High Art.

And yet Dutch art and Italian are not wholly discrepant the link, as I have said, comes through the minor figures of religious scenes, or even occasionally through the major. A Dutch homeliness lurks shyly in the background of Italian art, and at times appears boldly in the foreground. From one point of view nothing could be more Dutch than the innumerable Madonnas who suckle their _Bambini_. Nor do their haloes destroy their homeliness. The peasant girl of Tintoretto’s _Annunciation_ in S. Rocco wears a halo, but neither that nor the angel bursting through the crumbling brick of the door can prevent this scene from being a Dutch interior with a cane chair. Realism, smuggled in under the cloak of religion, is none the less realism, and when Moretto shows us the _Bambino_ about to be bathed by mother and nurse, and paints us a basket of belly-bands, he has given us a genre picture none the less because rapt saints and monks look on in defiance of chronology, and, perched on a bank of cloud over a romantic landscape, angels sing on high. Even as early as Giotto the nurse who presides at _The Birth of the Virgin_ is washing the baby’s eyes. Very curious and realistic is the pastoral study which Luca Cambiaso styled _Adoration of the Shepherds_. And in Veronese, for all his magnificence, and in Carpaccio, for all his fairy-tale atmosphere, and above all in Bassano, for all his golden glow, we get well-established half-way houses between High Art and Low. Under the pretext of _The Supper in Emmaus_ Bassano anticipates all Dutch art. Here be cats, dogs, plucked geese, meat in the pan, shining copper utensils scattered around, the pot over the glow of the fire, the rows of plates in the kitchen behind. What loving study of the colour of the wine in the glasses of the guests, and of their robes and their furs! These things it is that, with the busy figures behind the bar or stooping on the floor, fill up the picture, while the Christ on a raised platform in the corner bulks less than the serving-maid, and the centre of the stage is occupied by a casual eater, his napkin across his knees. If this sixteenth-century picture is Venetian in its glowing colour and its comparative indifference to form, it is Dutch in its minuteness and homeliness.

The same love of pots and pans and animals glows in _The Departure of Jacob_, with his horse and his ass and his sheep and his goats and his basket of hens, and even beguiles Bassano into attempting a faint peering camel. But not even the presence of God in a full white beard can render this a sacred picture. It is, however, in his favourite theme of _The Animals going into the Ark_ that Bassano brings the line between the sacred and secular almost to vanishing point. Although Savonarola preached on the Ark with such unction, as became the prophet of a new deluge, the just Noah himself seems the least religious figure in the Old Testament, perhaps because—after so much water—he took too much wine. There is even a tradition recorded by Ibn Yachya that after the Flood he emigrated to Italy and studied science. At any rate Bassano always treated him as a mere travelling showman, packing his animals and properties for the next stage. In a picture at Padua Noah’s sons and daughters are doing up their luggage—one almost sees the labels—and Noah, with his few thin white hairs, remonstrates agitatedly with Shem—or it may be Ham or Japhet—who is apparently muddling the boxes. A lion and lioness are treading the plank to the Ark, into which a Miss Noah is just pushing the leisurely rump of a pig, which even the lions at its tail fail to accelerate. Countless other pairs of every description, including poultry, jostle one another amid a confusion of pots, wash-tubs, sacks, and bundles, the birds alone finding comfortable perching-room on the trees. Mrs. Noah wears her hair done up in a knot with pearls just like the Venetian ladies, and a billy-cock hat lies on one of the bundles. In his _Sheep-shearing_ (in the Pinacoteca Estense of Modena) Bassano throws over all pious pretences and becomes unblushingly Dutch—nay, double-Dutch, for he drags in agricultural operations and cooking as well as sheep-shearing.

But it is in Turin that Bassano’s Batavianism runs riot. For his market-place is a revel of fowls, onions, prezels, eggs, carcases, sheep, rams, mules, dogs gnawing bones, market-women, chafferers, with a delicious little boy whose shirt hangs out behind his vivid red trousers. And his _Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan_ is an extravaganza in copper pots and pans; and yet another market masterpiece is an inventory of all he loved—butcher’s meat and rabbits and geese and doves, and lungs and livers, and gherkins and melons, and cocks and hens, and copper pans and pewter spoons, and a cow and a horse and an owl and lambs, all jostling amid booths and stalls on a pleasant rustic background as in a Tintoretto Paradise of luscious paintabilities.

Gaudenzio Ferrari has the same love of sheep, and these, with horses and dogs, force their way into his pictures. The Bible is an encyclopædia of themes, and even had any subject been wanting, apocrypha and sacred legend would have provided it. For his pet lambs Ferrari goes to the copious broidery on the Gospel, and his _Angels predicting the Birth of Maria_ is really a study in sheep on the background of a domed and towered Italian city. Giotto too had attempted sheep, though they are more like pigs, and dogs, though they are elongated and skinny; his camel with grotesque ears and a sun-bonnet one can forgive.

The lives of the saints supplied other opportunities for “Dutch” pictures in the shape of miracles at home. Titian himself stooped to record the miracle of putting on again the foot which the man who had kicked his mother cut off in remorse. And in the same Scuola of the Confraternity of St. Antony at Padua you may see the neglectful nurse carrying safely to its parents at table the babe she had allowed to boil.

And yet despite all these manifold opportunities, no Italian seems quite to get the veracious atmosphere of the Dutch and to achieve the dignity of Art without departing from the homeliness of Nature. No Italian has brought Christ into the street so boldly as Erasmus Quellinus in that picture in the Museo Vicenza in which a girl with a basket of live hens on her head stops to watch the fat Dutch baby sleeping in its mother’s arms. Despite the unreal presence of adoring saints in the crowd, there is here a true immanence of divinity in everyday reality. The sixteenth-century Italian Baroccio did indeed depict a Dutch peasant-feast in his _Last Supper_ in the cathedral of Urbino, with its bare-legged boy cook stooping for platters from a basket and its dog drinking at a bronze dish, but its homeliness is marred by the hovering of angels. Realism unadorned is essayed by Fogolino in his _Holy Family_ in Vicenza, with the carpenter’s shop, the rope of yarn, the hammer; with a boy Christ in a black tunic saying grace before a meal of boiled eggs, pomegranate, and grapes, washed down by a beaker of red wine; with the Madonna bending solicitously over him, her wooden spoon poised over her bowl; but, alas! the whole effect is of a cheap oleograph.

But then Fogolino was not a great painter, and it would have been interesting to see a superb craftsman like Paul Veronese try his hand at homely nature, unadorned by great space-harmonies and decorative magnificences. As it was, he had the delight of a Dutchman in dogs and cats, copper pots and jugs, and earthen pans and groaning tables and glittering glasses, and these it is which fascinate him, far more than the spiritual aspect of the _Supper in the House of the Pharisee_, so that even when he wishes to paint the soul of the pink-gowned Venetian Magdalen, he paints it through a little bowl which she overturns in her emotion at kissing the feet of Christ. This is why meals are the prime concern of Veronese, obsess him more than even his noble pillared rhythms and arched perspectives. How eagerly he grasps at _The Marriage of Cana_ and _The Disciples at Emmaus_ and _The Meal in the House of Levi_, with which that hold-all of the Bible supplied him! Spaces and staircases, arches and balconies and lordly buildings, all the palatial poetry of Verona, with its fair women and rich-robed men—these are his true adoration, and he paints, not Jesus, but the loaves and fishes. Nay, it may almost be said that unless there be food in the picture Veronese grows feeble, and must have pillars at least to prop him up. See, for example, his _Susannah and the Elders_, with no trace of food and only a wall to sustain him. When the Biblical cornucopia was wholly depleted of its food-stuffs, he had to forage for manna, especially when the need of decorating a monastic refectory was added to his own passion for provender. One of his discoveries was _The Banquet of Gregory the Great_, which is in the Monastery of the Madonna del Monte outside Vicenza, and which is based on the legend that Gregory invited twelve poor men to eat with him and Christ turned up as one of them. But Christ, who is removing the cover from a fowl, is less striking than Paul Veronese himself—who stands on the inevitable balcony with his own little boy—and at best a mere item in the rhythm of pillars and staircases and sky-effects. Nothing brings out the defect of Veronese as a religious painter so clearly as a comparison of his _Disciples at Emmaus_ with Titian’s. Titian too gives us fine shades of bread and fruit and wine, and even a little “Dutch” dog under the table; Titian too plays with pillars and a romantic background. But how his picture is suffused with the spirit! These things know their place, are absorbed in the luminous whole. A certain blurred softness in the modelling, a certain subdued glow in the colouring—as of St. Mark’s—give mystery and atmosphere. The food is, so to speak, transubstantiated.

Even Moretto’s _Supper at Emmaus_ (in Brescia) is superior to Veronese’s, though his Christ in pilgrim’s cockle-hat and cloak has to the modern eye the look of an officer with a cocked hat and a gold epaulette.

But Veronese is not the only Italian who would have been happier as a lay painter. I am convinced that some of the romanticists of the Renaissance were born with the souls of Dutchmen, and these, as it happens, the very men who have not worn well; a proof that they were out of their element and gave up to romance and religion what was meant for realism. Take Guido Reni, the very synonym of a fallen star, the _Aurora_ in Rome, perhaps his one enduring success—though even here Aurora’s skirt is of too crude a blue, and there is insufficient feeling of mountain and sea below her. His portrait by Simone Cantarini da Pesaro shows him with a short grey beard, a black doublet, a lawn collar, and a rather pained look—there is nothing of the _Aurora_ in this sedate and serious figure. And better than either his violent Caravaggio martyrology or his later mythologic poesy I find his portraits of his mother and his foster-mother; the mother in black with a black turn-down collar, a muslin coif, and grey hair thinning at the temples, and the foster-mother a peasant woman with bare and brawny arms. The _St. Peter Reading_ in the Brera is also a strong study of an old man’s head. Moroni had the good sense or the good fortune to shake himself almost free of religious subjects and to produce a _Tailor_ who is worth tons of _Madonnas_, but even he did not utterly escape the church-market, and when one examines such a picture as his _Madonna and Son, St. Catherine, St. Francis, and the Donor_ in the Brera, one rejoices even more that an overwhelming percentage of his product is pure portraiture. For the holy women in this picture are quite bad; St. Francis is rather better, but the real Moroni appears only in the smug donor who prays, his clasped hands showing his valuable ring. Here, of course, the painter had simply to reproduce his sitter. As much can be said of Garofalo and many another religious painter, whose “Donors” often constitute the sole success of their pious compositions.

Lorenzo Lotto, too, should perhaps have confined himself to portraiture, if of a fashionable _clientèle_. His pretty _Adoration of the Infant_ might be any mother adoring any infant. Near it—in the Palazzo Martinengo in Brescia—Girolamo Romanino has a frightful fresco in the grand manner, and quite a good portrait of an old gentleman; which suggests that Romanino too should have avoided the classic. There is an altar-piece of his in Padua which, although by no means devoid of beauty, confirms this suggestion, for the Madonna and Child lack character and originality, and are infinitely inferior to the Dutch painting of the robes. The whole composition, indeed, glows and has depth only in its lower and more terrestrial part, including in that term the little girl angel who plays a tambourine below the throne.

Bronzino was another victim to his pious epoch, though he emancipated himself almost as largely as Moroni. His _Madonna_ in the Brera is remarkable for the secular modernity of the Virgin’s companions. On her right is an ultra-realistic old woman; on her left Bernard Shaw looks down with his sarcastic, sceptical gaze.

Even the Netherlanders who had had the fortune to be born free would, after their wander-years in Italy, come back as Italians and paint in the grand manner. Hence the religious and historic Van Dycks which compare so poorly with the portraits, hence Rembrandt’s fat _vrow_ as Madonna, hence the Lenten attempts of Rubens to bant.

AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE: WITH A GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN
FALLACIES

Touching is that quaint theological tree in the cell of sainted Antoninus in San Marco, upon whose red oval leaves grow the biographies of the brethren. They lived, they prayed, they died—that is all. One little leaf suffices to tell the tale. This brother conversed with the greatest humility, and that excelled in silence. A third was found after his death covered with a rough hair shirt (_aspro cilicio_). In the holy shade of this goodly tree sits St. Dominic, separating—as though symbolically—the monks on his right from the nuns on his left.

_Naïveté_ can no further go. And, indeed, if one were to regard the _naïveté_ and forget the sweet simplicity, there is much in the mediæval world that one would relegate to the merely absurd. The masterpieces of Art have been sufficiently described. What a book remains to be written upon its grotesques!

The word is said to derive from the arabesques found in grottoes or excavated Roman tombs; those fantastic combinations of the vegetable and animal worlds by which the art of Islam avoided the representation of the real. But by the art of Christendom the grotesque was achieved with no such conscientious search after the unreal. Nor have I in mind its first fumblings, its crudities of the catacombs, its simplicities of the missal and the music-book, its Byzantine paintings with their wooden figures and gold embroidery. I am not even thinking of those early Masters whose defects of draughtsmanship were balanced by a delicious primitive poetry, which makes a Sienese Madonna preferable to a Raphael, and the early mosaics of St. Mark’s more desirable than the sixteenth-century work that has replaced them. The grotesque lies deeper than unscientific drawing; it mingles even with the work of the most scholarly Masters, and springs from the absence of a sense of history or a sense of humour. That the Gospel incidents should be depicted in Italian landscape and with Italian costumes was perhaps not unnatural, since, as I have already pointed out, every nation remakes the Christ in its own image—psychologically when not physically. Even the Old Testament was de-Orientalised by Raphael and his fellow-illustrators. Bonifacio Veronese, for example, put Italian hills and music-books into _The Finding of Moses_, and his Egypt is less Eastern than the Venice he lived in. But that the fancy-dress Bible should include also Doges and Cardinals and Magnificent Families, and that a Tintoretto in everyday clothes should look on at his own _Miracle of St. Mark_ or a Moretto come to his own _Supper at Emmaus_, this it is that lifts the eyebrows of a modern. One can permit Dominican friars to witness _The Incredulity of St. Thomas_, or Franciscans to assist—as in Marco Basaiti’s picture—at _The Agony in the Garden_. These holy brethren are at least in the apostolic chain; and in the latter picture, which is becomingly devotional, the scene is suggested as a mystic vision to justify the presence of these anachronistic spectators. But how is it possible to tolerate proud Venetian senators at _The Ascension of Christ_, or to stomach the Medici at the building of the Tower of Babel? It is true sacred subjects had become a mere background for lay portraits, but what absence of perspective!

It would be an interesting excursion to trace the steps by which the objective conception of a picture—true to its own time and place—was reached, or the evolution by which singleness of subject was substituted for exuberance of episodes and ideas, till at last Art could flower in a lovely simplicity like that of Simone Martini’s _Annunciation_. You shall see St. Barbara throned at the centre of her anecdotal biography, or the Madonna della Misericordia sheltering virtues under her robe, while her history circles around her. Even when the picture itself is simple and single, the predella is often a congested commentary upon the text, if, indeed, it has any relevant relation to the text at all. What can be more charming than the little angels round the throne of the Madonna in Benaglio Francesco’s picture in Verona—angels with golden vases of red and white roses, angels playing spinets and harps and pipes and lutes and little drums and strange stringed instruments that have passed away! But what can be more grotesque than the predella of this delightful picture, the Entombment and the saints with the insignia of their martyrdom (hammer and tongs and fiery braziers), and the cock that crew, and the kiss of Judas!

In a picture by Lorenzo Monaco at Florence the Virgin and St. John raise Christ out of his tomb, and above are not only a cross and the instruments of martyrdom, but a bust and floating hands, while spice vessels figure below.

To a modern the mere treatment of God the Father suffices to create a category of the grotesque, even though His head has usually the venerable appearance of the aged Ruskin and He is kept a discreet kit-kat or a half-length. But Fra Bartolommeo in Lucca paints Him at full length with His toes on a little angel and a placard in His hand bearing the letters alpha and omega. And Lorenzo Veneziano parts His hair neatly in the middle.

Our catalogue of grotesques is swollen by the explanatory scrolls and inscriptions of the early pictures; by the crude religious allegories, in which devils gnash teeth when Virtue routs Temptation; by the political cartoons at Siena—of Good and Bad Government (though these are more primitive than comic); by the literal genealogic trees—like that of Jesse in St. Mark’s, or on the stone door-posts of the Baptistery of Parma; by the Tree of the Cross in Florence, which shoots out branches with round leaves containing scenes from the life of the central crucified figure, and supports a pyramid of saints and celestials; by the devices of symbolism for representing abstract ideas or identifying saints. All haloes are proleptic even from childhood, and a martyr and his passion can never be parted. Those poor martyrs, what they suffered at the hands of painters without a gleam of humour!

’Twas not till I had found out for myself that the overwhelming preponderance in Art of the _Crucifixion_, the _Descent from the Cross_, the _Entombment_, and the _Pietà_ were due in no small measure to the opportunities they afforded of painting the nude figure, that I discovered why St. Sebastian was the most popular of all the saints, exploited in every other sacred picture, and—naked and unashamed—the almost inseparable attendant of the Madonna when she sits in saintly society. The superiority of his martyrdom at the hands of a troop of archers to other paintable forms of death leaps to the eye, for the arrows must be seen quivering in the target of his naked figure, though I have seen this pictorially precious nudity marred by such a plethora of arrows—as in the Opera del Duomo at Florence—that the saint is become a porcupine. The grim humour of the situation lies in the fact that St. Sebastian recovered from his arrows to be subsequently clubbed to death, but this deutero-martyrdom is hushed up by the Italian painters. To add to St. Sebastian’s sufferings at their hands, he has been made a plague-saint and his invaluable nudity haled into plague-pictures and plague-churches, as by Bartolommeo Montagna, who turned his arrows into the metaphoric shafts of the Pest. Not that I can blame the Italian painters. If I had ever been inclined to underrate the artistic significance of the nude, I should have been converted by the full-dressed angelets of Borgognone’s _Gesù Moriente_ in the Pavian Certosa. These delicious little creatures were once without a fig-leaf, but at the Father Superior’s protest they were clad in belted tunics and skirts, thus becoming squat little figures whose wings burst comically through their clothes. What might have been a masterpiece is thus a grotesque.

But if St. Sebastian must go sempiternally branded with arrows, like a British convict, it is St. Lawrence who has the clumsiest symbol to drag about. He and his gridiron are as inseparable as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Often it stands on end and seems the iron framework of a bed. Like his halo, it is with him long before his martyrdom, as it accompanies him to heaven. Only once in all Florence do I remember seeing it in its proper place—under the grilling saint—and then he is turning his other side to the flame in true culinary Christianity (“Jam versa: assatus est”). The artist has spared us nothing except the towels with which the angels wiped his face, and these may be seen at Rome in S. Giovanni in Laterano. St. Stephen is also heavily burdened with the stones that still keep falling on his head. In Bernardo Daddi’s frescoes in S. Croce they stick to him like burrs. St. John, transformed to an angel, contemplates his own (haloed) head on a platter, as if thinking two heads are better than one. Lucy keeps her eyes in a dish. St. Bartholomew holds his skin. St. Nicholas—the patron of commerce and the pawnbroker—is known by his three golden balls. Even families had their symbols, and the Colonnas, the complacent Colonnas, had themselves painted as soaring heavenwards at the last trump, each with a small column rising from his shoulder—literal pillars of Church and State.

These symbols, and many others less grotesque, disappear either with the gradual obscuration of the legends or the development of purer artistic ideas. There is another kind of symbolism, which may be called the shorthand of primitive art, and which may be studied in the archaic mosaics of St. Mark’s. Egypt dwindles to a gate (as though it and not Turkey were the Porte). Alexandria is expressed by its Pharos. Trees stand for the Mount of Olives. There is much of the rebus in these primitive representations. The Byzantine symbolism of St. Mark’s reaches its most curious climax in the representation of the four rivers that watered the Biblical Garden of Eden by classical river gods. The palm branch as the shorthand for martyrdom is a more congruous convention. In the mosaics of S. Vitale in Ravenna, Jerusalem and Bethlehem are expressed by towers, in Sant’ Appolinare Nuovo a few Roman buildings stand for Classe. In a Venetian painting ascribed to Carpaccio, Bethlehem is spelt by palm-trees and a queer beast tied to one of them, probably meant for a camel.

A more pretentious form of symbolism lies in the allegory proper, but even when the painting avoids the grotesque, the meaning is often hopelessly obscure. Such popular pictures as Botticelli’s _Spring_, Titian’s _Sacred and Profane Love_, and Paris Bordone’s _Lovers_ are still unsolved puzzles, and perhaps only the more satisfactory for that. But allegories that are enigmatic without being beautiful are merely bores. Such are the two pictures of the school of Lazzaro Sebastiani in Venice, in which a company of figures holding scrolls is perched in the boughs of a tree, looking at a distance like a full orchestra. Both of these pictures come from monasteries, and are therefore to be presumed sacred. And in one of them Adam and Eve are unmistakable under the tree, with mice and lizards gambolling around them, so that the tree must be the Tree of Life or of Knowledge; but who is the youth who stands beneath the other tree in a strange city of spires and towers and plays on a golden ’cello, while a maiden offers him an apple? Such intellectually faded pictures illustrate clearly the limitations of painting as a medium for intellectual propositions. But the most lucid of allegories or symbolisms has its own peculiar pitfalls. Luca Mombella introduces into a _Coronation of the Virgin_ a figure of “Humilitas” who is magnificently attired and wears pearls in her hair, while Montagna’s _Nestor Victorious over the Vices_ (in the Louvre) proves that most of the Vices are at least devoted mothers, for they burden their flight by snatching up their satyr-like brood.