Italian Renaissance painting

“ What the genius of Italian sculpture had for generations been striving after, finds its perfect realisation here. It was precisely by thus crowning the endeavours of antecedent artists—by bringing the opening buds of painting and sculpture to full blossom, and exhausting the resources of a long sustained and common inspiration, that the great masters proved their supremacy and rendered an advance beyond their vantage ground impossible. ”

“ But be this as it may, it is one of the singular richnesses of the Italian Renaissance that it knew of both tendencies; that while in painting it gave the equivalent of that rigid idealism of the Greeks which can make no compromise with ugliness; in sculpture it possessed the equivalent of the realism of Velasquez, which can make beauty out of ugly things, even as the chemist can make sugar out of vitriol. ”

“ This being in general the task assigned to art in the Renaissance, we may next inquire what constituted the specific quality of modern as distinguished from antique feeling, and why painting could not fail to take the first place among modern arts. In other words, how was it that, while sculpture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, painting became the distinguishing fine art of the modern era? No true form of figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting. ”

“ In the masters of the sixteenth century—Lionardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and the Venetians—the force inherent in the Italian genius for painting reached full development. What remained was but an after-bloom rapidly tending to decadence. To surpass those men in their own line seemed impossible. What they had achieved was so transcendent that imitation satisfied their successors; and if they refused imitation, originality had to be sought by deviating into extravagances. ”

“ Before the commencement of the eighteenth century the decline of the Renaissance school in Italy had begun; in fact, the painting of the seventeenth century came to be mere mechanical realism. For this reason the portraits were the best pictures of the time, as in them it was requisite to be true to the object represented.
Late in the eighteenth century a new impulse was given to Italian painting, chiefly through the influence of foreign artists such as Raphael Mengs, and the French painter David. ”

“ Humanism, the taste for the literature and history of the ancients, awakened the interest of Italian artists in the monuments of their forgotten past, and led them to seek, in the surviving remains of Roman architecture and in the scanty examples of ancient sculpture and painting that chance had brought to light, the secret of beauty.
The attitude of the Early Renaissance toward the antique differed from that of the Late Renaissance. ”

“ In pursuing this plan I shall endeavour to show how the successive stages in the evolution of Italian painting corresponded to similar stages in the history of the Renaissance. Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and stimulated by the enthusiasm of the two great popular monastic orders, painting was at first devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediæval Christianity. In proportion as the painters fortified themselves by study of the natural world, their art became more secular. Mysticism gave way to realism. ”

“ And while the modern world will hardly return to the coherence, solidity, and grace of the great Gothic and Renaissance masters, I am confident that there can be no exit from our present confusion and incoherence until our painters learn at least to consult those great Italian predecessors who dwelt on the heights above which is the abode of the human spirit’s creative rest. ”

“ Our problems do not seem so easy to solve, our tasks are more difficult because our vision is wider, but the spirit which animates us was anticipated by the spirit of the Renaissance, and more than anticipated. That spirit seems like the small rough model after which ours is being fashioned.
Italian painting interests many of us more than the painting of any other school not because of its essential superiority, but because it expressed the Renaissance; and Venetian painting is interesting above all because it was at Venice alone that this expression attained perfection. ”

“ It lies beyond the scope of this work to embrace in one inquiry the different forms of art in Italy, or to analyse the connection of the æsthetic instinct with the manifold manifestations of the Renaissance. Even the narrower task to which I must confine myself, is too vast for the limits I am forced to impose upon its treatment. I intend to deal with Italian painting as the one complete product which remains from the achievements of this period, touching upon sculpture and architecture more superficially. ”

“ The interest in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century was mainly for the sake of its second-hand version of Greek art, and for the architecture and painting of the Renaissance. On the contrary, now the objects from Greece itself have far eclipsed the Italian copies, and the interest lies in the early Italian civilization and its purely Roman derivatives; while modern taste values the mediæval art of Italy far from the bastard products of the florid age which followed. ”

“ Willard, Modern Italian Art.
THE DECLINE: An art movement in history seems like a wave that rises to a height, then breaks, falls, and parts of it are caught up from beneath to help form the strength of a new advance. In Italy Christianity was the propelling force of the wave. In the Early Renaissance, the antique, and the study of nature came in as additions. At Venice in the High Renaissance the art-for-art's-sake motive made the crest of light and color. ”

“ Every Italian was, in a way, an art critic, because every church in Italy was an art school. The artists may have led the people, but the people spurred on the artists, and so the Italian mind went on developing and unfolding until at last it produced the great art of the Renaissance. ”

“ The following essay owes its origin to the author's belief that Venetian painting is the most complete expression in art of the Italian Renaissance. The Renaissance is even more important typically than historically. Historically it may be looked upon as an age of glory or of shame according to the different views entertained of European events during the past five centuries. But typically it stands for youth, and youth alone—for intellectual curiosity and energy grasping at the whole of life as material which it hopes to mould to any shape. ”

“ It was against Italian sensuousness that the finer spiritual perceptions of the Teutonic-515- races rose in revolt; and the Italians, who had transmitted their own religious forms to Europe, could not understand the point at issue. Feeble or insufficient as we may judge this realism in the regions of pure thought or pious feeling, it was supremely powerful in art. It enabled the Italians so to apprehend the mysteries of the faith, and so to assimilate the classic myths, as to find for both a form of beauty in sculpture and in painting. ”

“ The spirit of imitation, conscious and unabashed, was of the very life blood of the movement, and it was in their devotion to that period in Italian painting which preceded the crowning glory of the Renaissance that the artists whose work constitutes the most important contribution to the painting of modern Europe were led to a stricter veracity in the rendering of the facts in nature which they sought to interpret. ”

“ The artistic genius of the Italian people has, in fact, always been essentially a genius for painting, and the painter's habits of mind are constantly manifested in the Italian architecture of all epochs. ”

“ Without undue insistence, all the apostles are interested in the rite which ordains their chief. Here is no casual pleasure ground in which you may delightfully look about, here is a definite vision of a momentous act which you must see swiftly, completely, and precisely as the artist intends 180you shall see. It is the only well-considered design among these frescoes. It points the simplest and surest way by which the exuberance of the Early Renaissance might be disciplined into a noble order, and within twenty years the lesson was to be reread for all Italy by young Raphael of Urbino. ”

“ We may regard them simply as appealing to our sense of beauty, and affording harmonious intellectual pleasure. Or we may regard them as expressing the thought and spirit of their age, and as utterances made by men whose hearts burned within them. Critics trained in the study of good Greek sculpture, or inclined by temperament to admire the earlier products of Italian painting, are apt to pursue the former path exclusively. They demand serenity and simplicity. ”

“ Venetian painting alone among Italian schools was ready to satisfy such a demand, and it thus became the first genuinely modern art: for the most vital difference that can be indicated between the arts in antiquity and modern times is this—that now the arts tend to address themselves more and more to the actual needs of men, while in olden times they were supposed to serve some more than human purpose. ”

“ Still there are certain broad facts about the distribution of artistic gifts in Italy which it is necessary to bear in mind. However much we may desire to treat of painting as a phase of national and not of merely local life, the fundamental difficulty of Italian history, its complexity and variety, owing to the subdivisions of the nation into divers states, must here as elsewhere be acknowledged. ”

“ Ideas came to them for centuries through form and color, until at last the Italian mind took on a plastic and pictorial character. It saw things in symbolic figures, and when the Renaissance came and art took the lead as one of its strongest expressions, painting was but the color-thought and form-language of the people.
FIG. 26.—FRA FILIPPO. MADONNA. UFFIZI. Please click here for a modern color image
And these people, by reason of their peculiar education, were an exacting people, knowing what was good and demanding it from the artists. ”

“ The whole first period of Italian painting was occupied with the endeavour to set forth in form and colour the popular conceptions of a faith at once unphilosophical and unspiritual, beautiful and fit for art by reason of the human elements it had assumed into its substance. It was natural, therefore, that the Church should show herself indulgent to the arts, which were effecting in their own sphere what she had previously accomplished, though purists and ascetics, holding fast by the original spirit of their creed, might remain irreconcilably antagonistic to their influence. ”

“ Florence is no longer a main current but an eddy, and what small flood-tide still runs courses in the more resolute academism of Bologna, which is to be capable of inspiring a Poussin; and in the raw naturalism of Naples, which is about to give lessons to a Velasquez.
Fig. 166. Pontormo. Frescoed Lunette.—Poggio a Cajano.
255 ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER V Poetry and Painting in the Renaissance Reversing the maxim ut pictura poesis, the Renaissance believed that painting should be poetical. Indeed the term poesia is commonly applied to all painting of a mythological or idyllic sort. ”

“ For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere well-paid craftsman, chasing brooches for the copes of Santa Maria Novella, or twisting metal screens for the tombs of the Medici, lay the ambitious desire of expanding the destiny of Italian art by a larger knowledge and insight into things, a purpose in art not unlike Leonardo's still unconscious purpose; and often, in the modelling of drapery, or of a lifted arm, or of hair cast back from the face, there came to him something of the freer manner and richer humanity of a later age. ”

“ But there has been no true restoration of Italian art. The painting of Italy in our time has been largely a commercial enterprise rather than an outcome from artistic genius or impulse, and the few works which are exceptions to this rule are not sufficient to encourage the hope that this nation can again attain to her former rank or regain the fame of her past in the history of modern art. ”

“ Italian painting suddenly declined for lack of taste. The followers of Raphael and Michelangelo possessed astonishing power and knowledge, but, save their own cleverness, no longer had anything to express. Thus painting became merely an art of self-exploitation and display, a matter of difficult foreshortenings, complicated groupings, and novel constructions in light and shade. Such at least was the case at Rome, and partly at Florence. At Venice, Milan, Cremona, Ferrara, and generally in the North the decline was gradual and benign. ”

“ But the perfect plastic art of Italy, the pure art of the Cinque Cento, the painting of Raphael, Da Vinci, Titian and Correggio, the sculpture of Donatello, Michelangelo and Sansovino, the architecture of Bramante, Omodeo and the Venetian Lombardi, however much imbued with the spirit of the classical revival, takes rank beside the poetry of Ariosto as a free intelligent product of the Renaissance. That is to say, it is not so much an outcome of studies in antiquity as an exhibition of emancipated modern genius fired and illuminated by the masterpieces of the past. ”

“ This decision virtually fixed the character of Christian art in Italy—it was 19to be warm and humanistic, but it was to revive much of that abstract nobility which old Rome had inherited from Greece. Thus Italian painting at the outset took a classic stamp which when true to itself it has never lost. In fundamental ideas of beauty, there is no real difference between Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo. ”