THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.'
[SECOND NOTICE.] OUR last week's article must not be taken so much as an attack upon originality in Art-method, as an attempt to defend its pure and rare character. One of the constant thoughts of those who care for Nature, centres in the infinity of subject-matter that exists there, waiting to enter its immortality in Art. Therefore, the revival of approved languages of Art, systems of method founded upon the canons elaborated by the great of bygone times,
* The Ciriltsation of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy. By Jacob Burckhardt. Authorised Translation by Sir G. C. Atickilemore. 2 vols. London : C. Kegan Paul and Co.
is a thing to be encouraged and welcomed. Constancy of means and infinite permutations of ends seems to be a law alike
of Nature and of Art. If there be any inherent progression and design at all in the history of Art, we do not hesitate to draw the conclusion that the pioneers of it, those Titanic natures endowed with a physique and a humanity well-nigh matchless, made some of the perfect roads and settled certain boundaries that will require a similar power to reach again in a more advanced age, when the principles thus reached are to be applied to the setting- forth of necessarily wider thoughts and themes.
During the period of the Renaissance, its workers in painting and sculpture are to be mainly divided into two classes. The one was employed in recording the appearance of specific aspects of nature as perfectly as possible, to be employed upon themes whether of imagination or reality. The other strove by might of what must be called inspiration to realise dreams of those ideals whither they perceivedall nature to be tending. The first and earlier class has been called by a name that is very inaccurate, but that will probably always be employed now—Preraphaelite. The champions of Pre- raphaelitism have laid upon the shoulders of some of the second class, particularly Titian, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, the burden of hastening the decline of Art. And though they can well bear up against this charge, yet many a day will elapse before, by a marshalled mass of proof that will be clear and general, their own right place will be shown to be nearest of all to the heart of Nature, exhibiting with undeviating truth the types of her aims, and the first gleams of her perfect sight. The writer to whom we all owe the deepest debt in these matters is, nevertheless, the one who has brought the gravest charges against the painters of the above-named second class. Mr. Ruskin was of yore the great upholder of their claims, as against those of their pseudo-followers. Nevertheless, his recent attacks upon Titian and Michael Angelo have been of the severest kind, and believing, as we now do, that they are un- justifiable loads upon the memory of these men, we have no doubt that their perfect fidelity to truth will be vindicated. A news- paper article is obviously unfitted to reply to an elaborately- reasoned argument, but we will indicate an instance of the kind of injury that Mr. Ruskin believes to have been incidental to the influence of Titian and Michael Angelo. In the Notes to the Turner Drawings, that we have all been reading with so much benefit, and in relation to the fact that Turner never painted flowers, Mr. Ruskin says :—"This essential dislike of trees and flowers began precisely when art was culminating, and Titian, and Veronese, and Vandyck, and Velasquez care as little for flowers as Turner." To infer that Titian disliked flowers—even if he had never painted them as he has done perfectly in his "Bacchus and Ariadne," of our National Gallery—seems to be due to Mr. Ruskin's keen and much-needed championship of a school of painters (the above-named first class), to whom, how- ever, Titian was never opposed. To ask why Titian and Turner did not devote their skill to painting those " earth-stars "they must so passionately have loved, is to ask why Beethoven, who caught fragmentary chords of the music of the spheres, did not devote more of his power to songs and dance-music. To expect Titian, the painter of the drama of humanity, to show his power in all things in proportion to their simplicity of beauty, and not in proportion to their relative majesty, is indeed to forget that long before humanity was created, the earth was clothed in starry vesture, and to forget that for every human form that breathes, myriads of splendid flowers perish unseen. Happily, those conversant with the greater part of Mr. Ruskin's writings will know how fully he writes on all sides of his subject. Yet even this will not make amends for some of these last charges against Michael Angelo and Titian. They are the more to be regretted because Art will never prosper until its workers can have some unanimity of feeling. Mr. Ruskin would say that all this is throwing dust in the eyes of those who are willing to see clearly, if they can. He would give us up for lost. In thus putting the purpose of the great painters of the human drama above that of the exquisite delineators of natural loveliness, he would affirm that we have forgotten the relation between Solomon and the lilies of the field. On the contrary, we should affirm that with painters like William Hunt, Botticelli, Carpaccio, Luini, and Mr. Ruskin himself, the cause of the lilies will be perfectly safe, until a day like the present, when its knights affirm that Solomon, along with his paled glory, was blind to the beauty of the lilies of the field. That Titian, Michael Angelo, Veronese, Velasquez, Turner, one and all were passionately alive to the deep-dyed beauty of flowers, and felt deeply the exquisite forms of Nature's starry carpet of intricate design, is to us a certainty.
When Turner or Beethoven in a mountain-pass listened to the deep grating growing into sounding thunder, and viewed the vivid flowing purple lit with fretted gold, the dark, wet moun- tain-sides suddenly flooded in a stream of grandeur, now warm, then warmer into crimson, and lost in the quickly supervening mystery, did his poor, mortal brain possess the reserve of energy to make him stoop down and notice the drenched gentian and lift up the alpine rose ? Titian, Michael Angelo, and Turner, with dauntless pains, left us visions of beauty analogous to Nature's greatest harmonies ; and these worn and splendid workmen are not to be assailed for leaving to their quieter-minded brethren the office of recording Nature's schemes of ornamentation. Quite as unpardonable, however, is the notion that finds favour with some of the Classic school, that flowers and natural scenery are not worth painting. Titian and Turner did not paint flowers, because there was no time for them to do so, not because flowers are outside the realm of the severest art. Indeed, it would seem natural, except in such a writer as Mr. Ruskin, that the defenders of landscape and floral painting should be tempted to assail the positions of the standard painters of those classical schools which reject the claims of some of the finest results of all art,—some of the modern water-colour landscapes. We do not think it would be unjust to say that the Turnerian scheme of colouring, in which every fine point of colour tells, is the only really original system of art developed since the Renaissance. We do not forget the distinguished names of the English painters who have, in fact, faithfully achieved again the perfect manner of Greek, Venetian, and Florentine, in believing it to be of the very gravest significance for the future of art, that the painter who has learned the revelation of Turner's colouring applied to the hills and sky, Mr. A. W. Hunt, does not find his place in the National Academy.
At the time of the Renaissance, the critical faculty had not yet appeared in strength, and perhaps on that account to some extent, we find company after company of artists quietly and from their consciences doing the best work they could. But though, if Art is to take its due and important place with the other aims for human amelioration, this critical searching and comparing are of vital help for truth, yet by affording such varied choice and width of view to the artist, they retard the formation of definite methods, requiring assiduity, perseverance, and endless care. Then, in the meantime, the weeds of public prejudice spring up, ranker and more rank, and choke the tender germs of genuine taste. Thus it is that many earnest men, like Mr. Ruskin and Mr. William Morris, who really know in a profound sense what art is, and have its cause at heart, take a gloomy view, and seem to think that a total social dissolution and radical change of life will be necessary, before the teaching of man's creative soul will again be given in simplicity. While admitting the great weight of the opinion of men like these, we must own to a far different impression. The very slow and painful growth of truth in Art seems to be strictly analogous with the development of the world itself. It is to be seriously doubted whether the day for reaching ideals will ever dawn upon earth. In this terrific globe to-day, its continents are crowded with half-developed life, in every shade of misery and pain. Its greatest centres of human life are denominated but "modern Babylons." We cannot reconcile the growth of art during the Renaissance times, which were even more cruel and immoral than our own, with the ideal field that Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Morris believe to be necessary for its very existence. Instead of looking for a total revulsion of human effort, or expecting, alas ! a radical change of life on the part of those who have no perception of truth and beauty, the mind would rather trust to help in fostering the few blossoms that pierce their way to the light, and would diffuse their in- fluence. Even comfort may be taken from the thought that in this age of mechanism and vulgar unrefinement, there yet exists more prevalently than in the golden days of Italian art, standards of health and faithfulness that English- men are at least thinking about ; and that a certain truer sanctity of wife and homestead awaits at evening those who now spend the day-time of their lives in the darkness of a coal-mine. Dr. Burckhardt in writing of the Renaissance makes the following brief statement :—" What seems characteristic of Italy at this time is, that here marriage and its rights were more often and more deliberately trampled under foot than anywhere else." With respect to the received notion of simplicity and calmness of labour resulting from purity of life, we find in the cases of the painters Perugino and Filippo Lippi, who above the rest imbued their work with the deepest piety and serenity of method, that they were, as men, by no means up to the
mark, whether judged by the lax standard of the age, or any other standard. The better the life, the more ter- rible seem often to be its struggles. It is certainly possible that Michael Angelo, against whose unswerving uprightness and purity of life and devotion to what he believed to be truth, a breath has never been raised, might better have re- strained his passionate and most unjust condemnation of Perugino as a "dunce in Art," had he been ignorant what manner of man Perugino was. In much the same way as Michael Angelo, Mr. Ruskin has not hesitated to affirm that the appalling introduction of "bad workmanship" into the Arts must be laid on the head of Michael Angelo. He says, in his lecture on Michael Angelo and Tintoret :—" The changes brought about by Michael Angelo, and permitted or persisted in calamitously by Tintoret, are in the main points these,—first, bad workmanship. The greater part of all that those two ever did is hastily or incompletely done ; and all that they did on a large scale in colour is, in the best qualities of it, perished." But it becomes more and more evident that the greatest human work is tentative,—nay, the very globe itself is unfinished, and "shall dissolve." We fully admit that the study of the work of Michael Angelo may have had disastrous temporary effect upon succeeding ages. But the ages themselves often lengthen themselves out before a man like him is understood. It was the mindless adulation of his followers that forced upon mankind, as their standards of sublimity, violence of action, gigantic masses of heavy folds and bewildered floral wreathing, and coarse, largely-made architecture. To blame Michael Angelo for all this is wrong. As Mr. Ruskin has himself pointed out, Plato was for ages the founder of a false Platonism. The world itself being incomplete, it is but a sign of glorious hope that Leonardo left his, and Michael Angelo also his, work unfinished. To rank the purpose of those who, like Perugino and other great painters of the Preraphaelite age, were content with finite beautiful aims in a world of infinitude, above that of men who wrestled with the colossal problems that will enwrap us all, seems to be missing the real light.
It is unnecessary to say that even a short review of the meanings of the Renaissance includes themes not here touched upon, and that the following is but one view of those meanings, though, with Mr. Symonds, we believe it to be the essential one. The extract is taken from his book recently published :—
"Among the multitude of figures covering the wall above the altar in the Sistine Chapel, there is one that might well stand for a symbol of the Renaissance. It is a woman, of gigantic stature, in the act of toiling upwards from the tomb. Grave-clothes impede the motion of her body, they shroud her eyes, and gather round her chest. Part only of her face and throat is visible, where may be road a look of blank bewilderment and stupefaction, a struggle with death's slumber in obedience to some inner impulse. Yet she is rising slowly, half- awake, and scarcely conscious, to await a doom still undetermined. Thus Michael Angelo interpreted the meaning of his age."
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