16 SEPTEMBER 1854, Page 19

h ut ado.

THE RENAISSANCE AND ITALIAN COURTS OP THE CRYSTAL PALACE.

Art had been Gothic all over Europe for nearly two centuries, when Italy, one of the last to adopt the principle in its entirety, became the first to revolt from it. The predilection for antiquity, natural in a land of antiquities and never utterly worsted, began to assert itself more and more definitely ; and the Revival or Renaissance supervened. Revival of what ? of antique art modernized, or of modern art antiquated ?

The upholders of the Renaissance make it a point to note that a re- markable degree of naturalism distinguished the movement. The ques- tion is one whose rationale deserves to be examined.

A noble spirit of art includes two essentials—lofty conception, and the love of nature. Both principles may coexist with either an early or an advanced stage of executive power. In the former case, the lofty con- ception will be fully stamped upon the work ; the love of nature, unable to express itself in perfect form, will appear as simplicity and indivi- duality in the larger features, and in details will manifest some peculiar predilection in the artist. A minute point will be elaborated, not just because the artist has seen it and can render it perfectly, but because he takes especial delight in it, and would linger over it and communicate his pleasure to others. When the spirit of art is thoroughly noble, and the execution advanced, everything takes its place. Giotto may be cited as an exemplar of the first state, and Lionardo of the second. But if the execution is advanced without a noble spirit to work up to, the means supersede the end. Conventionalism moulds the conception, and the love of nature degenerates into mere mastery over matter-of-fact. The artist crowds points without reference to a whole. He prides himself upon executing well what were better not executed at all ; what is neither endowed with adequate value in itself nor consecrated by his own predilection, but simply that which he knows he can do so as to surprise others.

By the end of the fourteenth century, Italy knew so much about execution and so much about antiquity as to become dissatisfied with Gothic art—"above" it. Turning out better specimens of sustained workmanship than before, she imagined that she was producing more excellent works of art ; and into labours still essentially Gothic in senti- ment and character she thrust classic or bastard-classic details of archi- tecture, costume, and accessory. Few things are uglier than the jumble of such details, which became the ornamentation of her productions. But "there were giants in those days"—a Ghiberti, a Donatello, a Luca della Robbie, a Verrocchio ; men who would have been great at any time, and who, born into that time, and feeling themselves superior to systems, wrestled with the system of their day. For be it remembered, that it was then more conventional to be formally Gothic than to be Clasaie, as it is the reverse now ; and that, when we of the present are content to bring up the humble rear of the movement which they began, we are just, what they refused to be, the bondsuess. nrecedent. Nor be it forgotten that those men were the outcom Classicism but of

Gothicism ; divided, indeed, in their allegian , but nurtured by the latter into that independent mind which borrowed shape only and not essence from the former. If they, however, and such as they, stand great in individual dignity, the spirit which fostered the Renaissance movement in smaller men claims no honour from us. It was the spirit which whitens the sepulchre, full of dead men's bones within—which loves rapid-erase more than patient energy. The Renaissance men per- ceived that the ancients had known more in various respects than their awn immediate predecessors ; and, setting a higher value on this than on the thought and feeling of the Gothic period, they found it more con- genial, as well as easier, to reintroduce points of Classicism than to invent new things in Gothicism. They preferred facility to invention, and "naturalism" to nature. That there is great naturalism in the works of the earlier Renaissance, is true ; but it is a kind of Flemish naturalism : not that which makes its Virgin and its Infant Saviour the Blessed among women and the Word become flesh, but that which makes them a woman and a boy ; not that which makes its angel a pure creature bear- ing the message of God, but that:which makes him a man with manlier limbs and more birdlike wings. Reverence and faith went out, and artifice came in but artifice is not art. As the movement progressed, the gods and goddesses were revived more and more : in itself a misera- ble tailing-off from the themes on which the earlier art had delighted solemnly to dwell, and still more miserable from the spirit in which it was carried out. The antique mythology of the Renaissance is a my- thology of prurient men and women with names once venerable in Greece —skeletons to reclothe with flesh, but not with divinity—a mythology of Bacchantes and Satyrs. Barring their few greatest men, who wasted strength on a profitless sort of dilettantism, the Revivalists had no ghost to conjure up, but only a body to unearth. Christians became Pagans in art, only to show, by the lowering which Paganism underwent at their hands even from its own ideal, that it was dead past cure. Revi- valists ?—say. Resurrectionists.

If the naturalism of the inferior men partakes more of academic sure- ness and of Flemish triviality than of any higher character, that even of the greatest is not always above contenting itself with ordinary matter- of-fact. The frieze of the Acts of Mercy ascribed to Giovanni, Girolamo, and the younger Luca della Robbia, above the Hotel-Bourgtheroulde arcade of the facade of the court, is distinctly of the Flemish order of naturalism, the truth of commonplace. Indeed, it may be stretching a point to cite this at all as the work of lofty men. We may remark here that the retention of the blue ground in the reproduction without the colour of the other parts spoils the scheme of the work, and gives an ap- pearance of bad drawing to the limbs where their high relief recedes into the ground. The small head of St. John Baptist by Donatello, from the Effizj at Florence, is, as the Handbook says, "evidently studied from nature " ; and admirably so, but the nature is that of a boy who will never turn out a St. John : and again, the full figure of the same saint by

the same noble sculptor is only too sufficiently described as "a beautiful transcript from nature." Let us protest by the way against the state-

ment in the Handbook that the equestrian statue of Gattamelata is the " masterpiece " of Donatello ; while yet the St. George rests upon his shield at the entrance to the court, ready, as his heroic face proelsirres to fight the world, the flesh, and the Devil. Another instance of natural- ism is the bas-relief representing the mourning over the dead Christ, from theft* chapterhouse of the Certosa at Pavia. As an exhibition of in- tense hideousness and mis-selection of form, in a manner which would strongly dispose us to refer it to a German rather than an Italian hand, nothing can surpass this : but the lamentable shape which its naturalism takes in this respect is redeemed by dramatic passion, and feeling, human if not divine, as intense as the hideousness.

Renaissance ornamentation is frittered and frivolous ; often wonder- fully executed, not seldom possessing details of refined grace, rarely dis- playing a beautiful, still more rarely a reasonable and consistent whole. It gives eruptions and showers of bright minutim, like a show of fire- works ; lavishes vain elegances, relieves them with cumbrous obtrusions, and means nothing. A good deal of the ornament in the Renaissance Court is pleasing, but profitless; in the Italian Court its later Raphael- esque stage is displayed,—less pleasing, as it appears to us, and as a whole equally unmeaning and incongruous.

However objectionable may be the spirit of Renaissance art and orna- ment in so far as it derives from the Renaissance merely, no court in the Crystal Palace boasts works of nobler excellence than this individually. The Singers of Luca della Robbia—not to refer to other examples—is one of the completest designs in existence ; exquisite in its grace, as full of impulsive and simple nature as of poetic feeling, and in a spirit ele- vated to exactly the right point for such a subject. As a model of style it is unsurpassed. The sculptures from the Certosa, representing inci- dents from the life of St. Ambrose and in the building of the Certosa itself; are eminently characteristic, and approach very closely to Gothic manner. Ghiberti's gate, which has exhausted the homage of Europe, it were idle to praise, insolent to criticize in a sentence. Verrocchio's mag- nificent equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleen ,e powerful as a Titan, severe as death, lionlike and stupendous, is what Ruskin terms it, one of the noblest works in the world.* For the sublimity of towering energy and fierce will nothing in the Crystal Palace competes with it. The Elizabethan Court forms an interval between the Renaissance Court and the Italian. In entire buildings of this style there is a ma- norial aspect dear to English eyes, which claim it as their country's own; but the details, such as those selected for the Crystal Palace are ugly and distorted. The effigies here are fine specimens of the period; but we need not linger over them, or within the precincts of the court.

The Italian Court carries us forward through the great day of Michael Angelo to the shameful day of Bernini. The wonderful Bacchus, a creation greater than any antique precedent, stands outside the court ; within are the mighty mystic Dawn and Twilight of the Lorenzo monu- ment, and the Light and Night of Giuliano's. The figure of Giuliano himself, unlike that of Lorenzo, does not rank among the nobler ema- nations of Buonarroti's genius ; neither does the Christ with the Cross. His genius, indeed, had little in it of the sacred, one of whose first re- quisites is what the Germans call selbstteidtung or self-annihilation : it was incarnate rather of enormous ambition irrepressible effort, which marched on conquering and to conquer. He scaled peak after peak of intellectual achievement, and held them in his own right, rather than as the vassal of a higher power. Besides the above-mentioned works, and various others, the collection includes the Pieta, the so-called Slave, and the Virgin and Child from the Medici Chapel,—too visibly marked with the master's peculiarities, but realizing in the most noble manner the conception of the "Mater venerabilis, Mater pia." We do not know anything else from Michael Angelo's hand so sacred as the head of the Blessed Mother.

John of Bologna's Mercury and other works—the splendid triumphant Perseus of Cellini contrasted (and how contrasting !) with Canova's-- Raphael's Jonah, beautiful and admirable, but not inspired with pro- phecy—Torrigiano's emaciated St. Jerome, more hungry than ascetic, with the baser metal and stone of Jacopo Sansovino and Bernini—further serve to endow this Court with a rich representation of the Italian school of sculpture. And in the Court of Christian Art, a little further on, we again meet the stern soul of Michael Angelo breathed into the colossal Moses,—a statue, if we may be allowed the privilege of heresy, more grandiose than grand.

Three remarkable ceilings roof the galleries of the Renaissance and Italian Courts. The first is Perugino's from the Sala di Cambio at Perugia, excellently reproduced by Mr. Frederick Smallfield; with Apollo in the centre, Mars, Jupiter, &c. in lunettes, and a profusion of Renaissance ornament. Spite of the authority of Perugino's name and the reverence we bear to it, we cannot control the verdict of our eyes that this produc- tion is a, clumsy and ugly one,—a salutary warning of the ill influences of the Renaissance. The second ceiling is by Serb, from the Bib- lioteca Antica at Venice,—an example as favourable as the preceding one is the opposite; not truly a serious work, for its ornament, like that of the period generally, has no significaace' but grave in the effect of its in- digoes and blacks and iron greys relieved with gold. The third is Raphael's great ceiling from the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican. comprising some of his most perfect designs, and copied by Mr. Alfred Stevens with a sompleteness of effect, and a success generally, deserving of the highest praise.

Truly artistic also, and very interesting as a aeries, are the water- colour copies from famous pictures hanging upon the internal walls of the Italian vestibule and the adjoining screen, to the number of 132. Some- thing might be said in question of the discretion which has chosen the subjects ; nineteen Vandycks, for instance in this land of Vandycks, to a single Giotto, Angelico, or Tintoretto. But let that pass. The painter, Mr. West, has made a really remarkable display of vigorous handling and glowing depth of colour—remarkable under any conditions, and peculiarly so in water,-„colours. He has fallen, however, into a very serious mistake in starting, as it were, from Titian's key of colour, and applying it almost indiscriminately to whatever comes under his brush—Cimabue, Mantegna, Palma Vecchio, Teniers, it is all very nearly the same. The result, in the majority of cases, is a falsity as absolute as if one hue had been sub, stituted for another, and far more misleading than if ovary specimen had been painted in the proportionally lower tone usual in water-colours. Let us not leave this series without calling the visitor's attention to the transcendent grace, purity, and simple nature—simple, yet no jot un- worthy of its subject—of the Salutation by Giotto, from the Arena Chapel at Padua: the most perfect work of art without exception, to our think- ing, in the entire range of the pictures selected, from the thirteenth * Or words to the same effect. How does it come to pass that there is ab- solutely no individual notice of this glorious production in the official Hand- books to either the Renaissance or the Italian Court ; which can yet call Ger- main Pilon's reliefs "grand" and "deserving the highest praise," and Pieria° da Vinci's "very graceful" ? century to the eighteenth, and from the Sienese school to that of the Regency.

Phrenologists recognize a distinction between the qualities of self-es- teem and love of approbation—assigning the nobler function to the first, and the ignobler to the second. The temper of which these are two varying modes was an essential of the Renaissance movement. It may be called acute self-consciousness. With the great men, it took the form of strong individual quality, the effort at superiority with something of vain glory, a versatile exercise of faculty, and an impatience of fetters unless self-imposed. With the small men, it displayed itself in trick, bravura, imitation of approved models, not through a spirit of manly reverence, but of fashion and the appetence for repute ; or, on the other hand, in a mean rage for novelty. With both it tended to place the art before the object of art—the painter, architect, or sculptor, before nature; and, when the emancipation of executive power had culminated, it left conception sterile, and sank deeper and deeper into convention, vanity, and falsehood.