Sculpture and architecture tended to run in families—the della Robbias, the Sangalli, the Rossellini, the Pollaiuoli. Antonio Pollaiuolo, uncle of Simone, learned accuracy and delicacy of design as a goldsmith in the studio of his father Iacopo. The bronze, silver and gold products of Antonio made him the Cellini of his time, and a favorite of Lorenzo, the churches, the Signory, and the guilds. Noting how rarely such small objects retained the name of their maker, and sharing the Renaissance mirage of immortal fame, Antonio turned to sculpture, and cast in bronze two magnificent figures of Hercules, rivaling the strained power of Michelangelo’s Captives, and the tortured passion of the Laocoön. Passing to painting, he told the story of Hercules in three murals for the Medici palace, challenged Botticelli in Apollo and Daphne, and equaled the absurdity of a hundred artists in showing how calmly St. Sebastian could receive into his flawless body the arrows launched at him by leisurely bowmen. In his final years Antonio returned to sculpture and cast for the old church of St. Peter in Rome two superb sepulchral monuments—of Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII—with a vigor of chiseling and a precision of anatomy again presaging Michelangelo.
Mino da Fiesole was not so versatile nor so tempestuous; he was content to learn the sculptor’s art from Desiderio da Settignano, and when his master died, to carryon his tradition of smooth elegance. If we may believe Vasari, Mino was so affected by Desiderio’s early death that he found no happiness in Florence, and sought new scenes in Rome. There he made a name for himself with three masterpieces: tombs of Francesco Tornabuoni and Pope Paul II, and a marble tabernacle for Cardinal d’Estouteville. His confidence and solvency restored, he returned to Florence, and adorned with exquisite altars the churches of Sant’ Ambrogio and Santa Croce, and the Baptistery. In the cathedral of his native Fiesole he set up in classical style an ornate tomb for Bishop Salutati, and for the abbey of Fiesole he molded a similar monument, more restrained in ornament, to commemorate the Count Ugo who had founded that monastery. The cathedral of Prato boasts a pulpit by him, and a dozen museums display one or more of the busts by which his patrons were less flattered than embalmed: the face of Niccolò Strozzi, swollen as with the mumps, the weak features of Piero the Gouty, the fine head of Dietisalvi Neroni, a pretty relief of Marcus Aurelius as a youth, a splendid bust of St. John the Baptist in infancy, and several lovely reliefs of the Virgin and Child. Nearly all these works have the feminine grace that Mino had learned from Desiderio; they are pleasing, but not arresting or profound; they do not grip our interest as do the sculptures of Antonio Pollaiuolo or Antonio Rossellino. Mino loved Desiderio too much; he could not turn his back upon his master’s exemplars and seek in the merciless neutrality of Nature the significant realities of life.
Verrocchio—“True Eye”—was brave enough to do this, and produced two of the greatest sculptures of his time. Andrea di Michele Cione (for that was his real name) was a goldsmith, a sculptor, a bell-caster, a painter, a geometrician, a musician. As a painter his chief claim to fame lies in having taught and influenced Leonardo, Lorenzo di Credi, and Perugino; his own paintings are mostly stiff and dead. There are few Renaissance pictures more unpleasant than the famous Baptism of Christ; the Baptist is a dour Puritan, Christ, presumably thirty, looks like an old man, and the two angels at the left are effeminately insipid, including the one traditionally ascribed to Leonardo. But Tobias and the Three Angels is excellent; the central angel foreshadows the grace and mood of Botticelli, and the young Tobias is so fair that we must either attribute him to Leonardo, or confess that da Vinci received more of his pictorial style from Verrocchio than we supposed. A drawing of a woman’s head, in Christ Church, Oxford, again suggests the vague and pensive ethereality of Leonardo’s women; and Verrocchio’s dark landscapes already feature the gloomy rocks and mystic streams of Leonardo’s dreamy masterpieces.
Probably there is mostly fable in Vasari’s tale that when Verrocchio saw the angel that Leonardo had painted in The Baptism of Christ he “resolved never to touch the brush again, because Leonardo, though so young, had so far surpassed him.”26 But though Verrocchio continued to paint after the Baptism, it is true that he gave most of his mature years to sculpture. He worked for a while with Donatello and Antonio Pollaiuolo, learned something from each of them, and then developed his own style of stern and angular realism. He took his career in his hands by molding in terra cotta an unflattering bust of Lorenzo—nose and bangs and worried brow. In any case II Magnifico was well pleased with two bronze reliefs—of Alexander and Darius—made for him by Verrocchio; he sent them to Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, and engaged the sculptor (1472) to design, in the church of San Lorenzo, a tomb for his father Piero and his uncle Giovanni. Verrocchio carved the sarcophagus in porphyry, and decorated it with bronze supports and wreaths in exquisite floral form. Four years later he cast a boyish David standing in calm pride over the severed head of Goliath; the Signory liked it so much that it placed the statue at the head of the main stairway in the Palazzo Vecchio. In the same year it accepted from him a bronze Boy Holding a Dolphin, and used it as a fountain spout in the courtyard of the palace. At the height of his powers Verrocchio designed, and cast in bronze for a niche on the exterior of Or San Michele, a group of Christ and Doubting Thomas (1483). The Christ is a figure of divine nobility, Thomas is portrayed with understanding sympathy, the hands are finished with a perfection seldom attained in statuary, the robes are a triumph of sculptural art; the whole group has a living and mobile reality.
So obvious was Verrocchio’s superiority in bronze that the Venetian Senate invited him (1479) to come to Venice and cast a statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni, the condottiere who had won so many victories for the island state. Andrea went, made a model for the horse, and was preparing to cast it in bronze when he learned that the Senate was considering the advisability of confining his commission to the horse and letting Vellano of Padua make the man. Andrea, according to Vasari, broke the head and legs of his model and returned to Florence in a rage. The Senate warned him that if he ever put foot on Venetian soil again he would lose his head in no figurative way; he replied that they should never expect him there, since senators were not as skillful as sculptors in replacing broken heads. The Senate thought better of the matter, restored the total commission to Verrocchio, and persuaded him to return at twice the original fee. He repaired the model of the horse, and cast it successfully; but in the process he became overheated, caught a chill, and died within a few days, at the age of fifty-six (1488). In his last hours a rude crucifix was placed before him; he begged the attendants to take it away and bring him one by Donatello, so that he might die, as he had lived, in the presence of beautiful things.
The Venetian sculptor Alessandro Leopardi completed the great statue in so vivid a style, with such mastery of motion and command, that the Colleoni suffered no loss by Verrocchio’s death. It was set up (1496) in the Campo di San Zanipolo—the Field of Sts. John and Paul; and it struts there to this day, the proudest and finest equestrian statue surviving from the Renaissance.
VI. PAINTING
1. Ghirlandaio
Verrocchio’s thriving studio was characteristic of Renaissance Florence—it united all the arts in one workshop, sometimes in one man; in the same bottega one artist might be designing a church or a palace, another might be carving or casting a statue, another sketching or painting a picture, another cutting or setting gems, another carving or inlaying ivory or wood, or fusing or beating metal, or fashioning floats and pennons for a festival procession; men like Verrocchio, Leonardo, or Michelangelo could do any of these. Florence had many such studios, and art students went wild in the streets,27 or lived Bohemianly in the tenements, or became rich men honored by popes and princes as inspired spirits beyond price and—like Cellini—above the law. More than any other city except Athens, Florence attached importance to art and artists, talked and fought about them, and told anecdotes about them,28 as we do now of actors and actresses. It was Renaissance Florence that formed the roman
tic concept of the genius—the man inspired by a divine spirit (the Latin genius) dwelling within him.
It is worthy of note that Verrocchio’s studio left no great sculptor (except one side of Leonardo) to carry on the master’s excellence, but taught two painters of high degree—Leonardo and Perugino—and one of lesser but notable talent, Lorenzo di Credi. Painting was gradually ousting sculpture as the favorite art. Probably it was an advantage that the painters were uninstructed and uninhibited by the lost murals of antiquity. They knew that there had been such men as Apelles and Protogenes, but few of them saw even the Alexandrian or Pompeian remnants of ancient painting. In this art there was no revival of antiquity, and the continuity of the Middle Ages with the Renaissance was most visible: the line was devious but clear from the Byzantines to Duccio to Giotto to Fra Angelico to Leonardo to Raphael to Titian. So the painters, unlike the sculptors, had to forge through trial and error their own technology and style; originality and experiment were forced upon them. They labored over the details of human, animal, and plant anatomy; they tried circular, triangular, or other schemes of composition; they explored the tricks of perspective and the illusions of chiaroscuro to give depth to their backgrounds and body to their figures; they scoured the streets for Apostles and Virgins, and drew from models clothed or nude; they passed from fresco to tempera and back again, and appropriated the new techniques of oil painting introduced into northern Italy by Rogier van der Weyden and Antonio da Messina. As their skill and courage grew, and their lay patrons multiplied, they added to the old religious subjects the stories of classic mythology and the pagan glories of the flesh. They took Nature into the studio, or betook themselves to Nature; nothing human or natural seemed in their view alien to art, no face so ugly but art could reveal its illuminating significance. They recorded the world; and when war and politics had made Italy a prison and a ruin, the painters left behind them the line and color, the life and passion, of the Renaissance.
Formed by such studies, inheriting an ever richer tradition of methods, materials, and ideas, men of talent painted better now than men of genius had painted a century before. Benozzo Gozzoli, says Vasari in an ungracious moment, “was not of great excellence… yet he distanced all the others of his age in his perseverance; for among the multitude of his works some could hardly help but be good.”29 He began as a pupil of Fra Angelico, and followed him to Rome and Orvieto as assistant. Piero the Gouty recalled him to Florence and invited him to portray, on the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace, the journey of the Magi from the East to Bethlehem. These frescoes are Benozzo’s chef-d’oeuvre: a stately and yet lively procession of kings and knights in gorgeous robes, of squires, pages, angels, hunters, scholars, slaves, horses, leopards, dogs, and half a dozen Medici—and Benozzo himself slyly introduced into the parade—and all against backgrounds and landscapes marvelous and picturesque. Flushed with triumph, Benozzo went to San Gimignano, and decorated the choir of Sant’ Agostino with seventeen scenes from the life of its patron saint. In the Campo Santo at Pisa he labored for sixteen years, covering vast walls with twenty-one Old Testament scenes from Adam to the Queen of Sheba; some, like The Tower of Babel, were among the major frescoes of the Renaissance. Benozzo diluted his excellence through eager haste; he drew carelessly, made many of his figures depressingly uniform, and crowded his pictures with a confusing multitude of persons and details; but he had in him the blood and joy of life, he loved its lusty panorama and the glory of the great; and the imperfections of his line are half forgotten in the splendor of his color and the enthusiasm of his fertility.
The benign influence of Fra Angelico passed down to Alesso Baldovinetti and Cosimo Roselli, and through Alesso to one of the major painters of the Renaissance—Domenico Ghirlandaio. Domenico’s father was a goldsmith who had received the nickname of Ghirlandaio from the gold and silver garlands that he had fashioned for the pretty heads of Florence. Under this father and Baldovinetti Domenico studied with zest and zeal; spent many hours before the frescoes of Masaccio in the Carmine; learned by indefatigable practice the arts of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and composition; “he would draw everyone who passed the shop,” says Vasari, “making extraordinary likenesses” after a fleeting view. He was barely twenty-one when he was charged to paint the story of Santa Fina in her chapel in the cathedral at San Gimignano. At thirty-one (1480) he earned the title of master by four frescoes in the church and refectory of the Ognissanti in Florence—a St. Jerome, a Descent From the Cross, a Madonna della Misericordia (which included a portrait of the donor, Amerigo Vespucci), and a Last Supper that gave some hints to Leonardo.
Summoned to Rome by Sixtus IV, he painted in the Sistine Chapel Christ Calling Peter and Andrew from Their Nets— especially beautiful in its background of mountains, sea, and sky. During this stay in Rome he studied and drew the arches, baths, columns, aqueducts, and amphitheaters of the ancient city, and with so practiced an eye that he was able to seize at once, without rule or compass, the just proportions of each part. A Florentine merchant in Rome, Francesco Tornabuoni, mourning his dead wife, employed Ghirlandaio to paint frescoes for her memorial in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and Domenico succeeded so well that Tornabuoni sent him back to Florence armed with florins and a letter attesting his excellence. The Signory soon entrusted to him the decoration of the Sala del Orologio in their palace. In the next four years (1481–5) he painted scenes from the life of St. Francis in the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinità. All the progress of the painter’s art, except the use of oil, was embodied in these frescoes: harmonious composition, accurate line, gradations of light, perspective fidelity, realistic portraiture (of Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, Palla Strozzi, Francesco Sassetti), and at the same time the Angelesque tradition of ideality and piety. From the near-perfection of the altarpiece—the Adoration of the Shepherds—there would be but a step of deeper imagination and subtler grace to Leonardo and Raphael.
In 1485 Giovanni Tornabuoni, chief of the Medici bank in Rome, offered Ghirlandaio twelve hundred ducats ($30,000) to paint a chapel in Santa Maria Novella, and promised him two hundred more if the work should prove fully satisfactory. Aided by several pupils, including Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio gave most of the following five years to this high moment of his career. On the ceiling he painted the four Evangelists; on the walls St. Francis, Peter Martyr, John the Baptist, and scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ, from an Annunciation to a magnificent Coronation of the Virgin. Here again he delighted in contemporary portraits: the stately Lodovica Tornabuoni, fit to be a queen, the saucy beauty of Ginevra de’ Benci, the scholars Ficino, Politian, and Landino, the painters Baldovinetti, Mainardi, and Ghirlandaio himself. When, in 1490, the chapel was opened to the public, all the dignitaries and literati of Florence flocked to examine the paintings; the realistic portraits were the talk of the town; and Tornabuoni expressed himself as completely satisfied. Financially pressed at the time, he begged Domenico to forgive him the extra two hundred ducats; the artist replied that the satisfaction of his patron was more precious to him than any gold.
He was a lovable character, so adored by his brothers that one of them, David, almost slew an abbot with an aged loaf of bread for bringing to Domenico and his aides food that David held unworthy of his brother’s genius. Ghirlandaio opened his studio to all who cared to work or study there, making it a veritable school of art. He accepted all commissions, great or small, saying that none should be denied; he left the care of his household and finances to David, saying that he would not be content till he had painted the whole circuit of Florence’s wall. He produced many mediocre paintings, and yet some incidental pieces of great charm, like the Louvre’s delightful Grandfather with the bulbous nose, and the lovely Portrait of a Woman in the Morgan Collection in New York—pictures full of the character that year by year records itself upon the human face. Great critics of unquestionable learning and repute yield him only a minor rank;30 and it is true that he excelled rather in line than in color, that he p
ainted too rapidly, and crowded his pictures with irrelevant detail, and took a step backward, perhaps, in preferring tempera after Baldovinetti’s experiments with oil. Even so, he brought the accumulated technology of his art to the highest point that it would reach in his country and his century; and he bequeathed to Florence and the world such treasures that criticism hangs its head in gratitude.
2. Botticelli
Only one Florentine surpassed him in his generation. Sandro Botticelli was as different from Ghirlandaio as ethereal fancy from physical fact. Alessandro’s father, Mariano Filipepi, unable to persuade the boy that life would be impossible without reading, writing, and arithmetic, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticelli, whose name, through the affection of the pupil or the whim of history, became permanently attached to Sandro’s own. From this bottega the lad passed at sixteen to that of Fra Filippo Lippi, who came to love the restless and impetuous youth. Filippo’s Filippino later painted Sandro as a sullen fellow with deep-set eyes, salient nose, sensual fleshy mouth, flowing locks, purple cap, red mantle, and green hose;31 who would have guessed such a man from the delicate fantasies that Botticelli has left to the museums? Perhaps every artist must be a sensualist before he can paint ideally; he must know and love the body as the ultimate source and standard of the esthetic sense. Vasari describes Sandro as “a merry fellow,” who played pranks upon fellow artists and obtuse citizens. Doubtless, like all of us, he was many men, turned on one or another of his selves as occasion required, and kept his real self a frightened secret from the world.