The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance. By Bernhard Berenson.
(G. P. Putnam's Sons.)—It is not often that a work about the Renaissance painters has in it so many now and original views. The book is especially interesting in the part which treats of Raphael. Raphael is the greatest " illustrator " that the world has seen ; and his type of beautiful woman, "as no other, has struck the happy mean between the instinctive demands of life, and the more conscious requirements of Art." Mr. Berenson uses the word "illustrator" in a special sense. He says an illustration "is all that which, in a work of art, is not Decorative ; " and adds : "Raphael's frescoes reproduce nothing which was ever seen in that precise form in the world about us, either by himself or by any one else. They convey no informa- tion." But though they do not add to our knowledge of facts they stock our mind with images. Beyond this, Raphael coloured with his own personality the whole of the images called up by the Old and New Testament. What an astonishing thing it is, if one thinks of this youth from Urbino who fixed the forma with which we clothe the story of the Bible. Mr. Berenson makes use of the phrase "space-composition" to describe that extension of ordinary composition beyond length and breadth into depth. Space-composition was the peculiar property of the Central Italian painters. Perugino was a master of it, but Raphael was supreme in this, as in all forms of composition. We have dealt here with Raphael only, but the reader will find valuable things in this book about Duccio, Signorelli, Pintoricchio, and Perugino. One third of the volume—which is not a large one—is taken up with lists of pictures by the artists of Central Italy, which are to be found in European galleries. The attributions are those of the author, and differ sometimes from the official ones. We are promised a volume on the North Italian painters, to which we look forward with great interest.
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