Legends of the monastic orders : as represented in the fine arts. Forming the second series of Sacred and legendary art

Contents

Preface - Introduction :

I. General Character and Influence of Monastic Art. Ugliness and Sameness of the Representations. Historical and Moral Importance of the Monastic Subjects, generally and individually. Contrast between the Benedictine Pictures and those of the Mendicant Orders II. Distinction between the Devotional and the Historical Subjects ______

III. Founders, Habits, and Attributes of the different Orders -

Preface

In presenting to the public this Second Series of Sacred and Legendary Art, I can but refer to the Preface and general Introduction prefixed to the First Series for an explanation of the purpose of the work as a whole, and the motives from which it was first undertaken.

I spoke of it there as, at best, only an attempt to do what has not hitherto been done — to interpret, as far as I could in a limited space, and with very imperfect knowledge, those works of Art which the chui ches and galleries of the Continent, and our own rich collections, have rendered familiar to us as objects of taste, while they have remained unappreciated as subjects of thought ; — to show that, while we have been satisfied to regard sacred pictures merely as decorations, valued more for the names appended to them than for their own sakes, we have not sufficiently considered them as books — as poems — as having a vitality of their own for good and for evil, and that thus we have shut out a vast source of delight and improvement, which lay in the way of many, even the most uninstructed in the technicalities of Art.

I his was the object I had in view — knowing that, doing my best, l could do no more nor better than make the first step in a new direction. No one can feel more strongly than myself the deficiencies of the liist Series of this work. That it has met with great and unhoped-for success, is no evidence of its merit ; but rather a proof that it did, opportunely, supply a want, which, as I had felt myself, I thought others might feel also.

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PREFACE.

For the gentle and generous tone of criticism towards that work — public and private — I am deeply grateful. But, in this Second Series, I shall require even more especially the candour and forbearance of the reader.

To speak of the religious pictures painted for the monastic communities, and to avoid altogether any allusion to disputed points of faith, of history, of character, has been impossible. It was said of the First Series, by an authority for which I have a high respect, that I had ‘ spoiled my book by not making it Roman Catholic.' But I am not a Roman Catholic ; how, therefore, could I honestly write in the tone of thought, feeling, conviction, natural and becoming in one of that faith ? I have had to tread what all will allow to be difficult and dangerous ground. Flow was this to be done safely, and without offence, easily given in these days? Not, surely, by swerving to the right or to the left; — not by the affectation of candour; — not by leaving wholly aside aspects of character and morals which this department of the Fine Arts, the representations of monastic life, necessarily place before us. There was only one way in which the task undertaken could be achieved in a right spirit — by going straight forward, according to the best lights I had, and saying what appeared to me the truth, as far as my subject required it ; and my subject — let me repeat it here — is artistic and aesthetic, not religious. This is too much of egotism, but it has become necessary to avoid ambiguity. I will only add that, as from the beginning to the end of this book there is not one word false to my own faith — my own feeling — so I truly hope there is not one word which can give offence to the earnest and devout reader of any persuasion : — if there be, I am sorry ; — what can I say more ? .

The arrangement is that which naturally offered itself; but, in classing the personages under the various Orders, I have not pedantically adhered to this system : it will be found that I have departed from it occasionally, where the subjects fell into groups, or were to be found in the same pictures. Much has been omitted, and omitted with regret, to keep the volume within those portable dimensions on

PREFACE.

xv which its utility ancl its veuchibility depended. If it be asked on what principle the selection has been made, it would be difficult to reply.

I have just followed out the course of my own thoughts my own

associations. If I have succeeded in carrying my readers with me, there needs no excuse : they can pursue the path into which I have led them, to far wider knowledge and higher results. But if so faith ey find it difficult or tedious to accompany me, what excuse would avail ?

Here, as in the former series, the difficulty of compression has been the greatest of all my difficulties ; it was hard sometimes, when in the full career of reflection or fancy, to pull up, turn short round, and retrace my steps, lest I should be carried beyond the limits absolutely fixed by the nature and object of the work. There was great temptation to load the text with notes of reference to authorities, or notes of comment where such authorities were disputed and contradictory ; but I found it would only encumber, not elucidate, the matter in hand. The authorities consulted are those enumerated in the Preface to the First Series, Avith the addition of separate and authentic biographies of the most remarkable persons. To Mr. Maitland’s Essays on the Dark Ages; to Sir James Stephen’s Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography ; and to Lord Lindsay’s beautiful work on Christian Ait, I have been largely indebted, and have great pleasure in thus acknoAvledging my obligations.

Of the illustrations — both woodcuts and etchings — I will say nothing, for they are to be considered merely as sketches — helps to the memory and the fancy. To illustrate the book as it ought to be illustrated, would have involved an expense which would have rendeied it inaccessible to the general reader, and thus defeated its purpose. It would not be difficult for those interested in the subject to collect a little portfolio of engravings after the pictures referred io, which, placed in the same order, would be, as a series, most interesting and suggestive in itself, as well as illustrative of the pages which folloAv.

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PREFACE.

A

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Ik preparing the Second Edition for the press, the authoress has availed herself of the opportunity to correct the work carefully throughout ; to insert much additional matter and several new legends, as well as many new illustrations, which will be found to increase materially any value or interest the book may possess as a volume of reference.

Sntrotourtum* i.

In the first series of this work, I reviewed the scriptural personages and the poetical and traditional saints of the early ages of the Church, as represented in Art.

I endeavoured to show that these have, and •ought to have, for us a deep, a lasting, a universal interest ; that even where the impersonation has been, through ignorance or incapacity, most imperfect and inadequate, it is still consecrated through its original purpose, and through its relation to what we hold to be most sacred, most venerable, most beautiful, and most gracious, on earth or in heaven. Therefore the Angels still hover before us with shining, wind-swift wings, as links between the terrestrial and the celestial ; therefore the Evangelists and Apostles are still enthroned as the depositaries of truth ; the Fathers and Confessors of the Church still stand robed in authority as dispensers of a diviner wisdom ; the Martyrs, palm -sceptred, show us what once was suffered, and could again be suffered, for truth and righteousness’ sake ; the glorified penitents still hold out a blessed hope to those who, in sinning, have loved much ; the Virgin Patronesses

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Introduction

xviii still represent to us the Christian ideal of womanhood in its purity and its power. The image might be defective, but to our forefathers it became gracious and sanctified through the suggestion, at least, of all they could conceive of holiest, brightest, and best ; the lesson conveyed, either by direct example or pictured parable, was always intelligible, and, in the hands of great and sincere artists, irresistibly impressive and attractive. To us, therefore, in these later times, such representations are worthy of reverent study for the sake of their own beauty, or for the sake of the spirit of love and faith in which they were created.

Can the same be said of the monastic personages, and the legends relating to them, as we find them portrayed in sculpture and painting ? I think not. It appears to me that, here, the pleasure and the interest are of a more mingled nature, good and ill together. At the very outset we are shocked by what seems a violation of the first principles of art. Monachism is not the consecration of the beautiful, even in idea ; it is the apotheosis of deformity and suffering. What can be more unpromising, as subjects for the artist, than the religious Orders of the Middle Ages, where the first thing demanded has been the absence of beauty and the absence of colour ? Ascetic faces, attenuated forms, dingy dark draperies, the mean, the squalid, the repulsive, the absolutely painful, — these seem most uncongenial materials, out of which to evolve the poetic, the graceful, arid the elevating ! True, this has been done, and done in some cases so effectually, that we meet constantly with those whose perceptioris have become confused, whose taste is in danger of being vitiated through the conventional associations awakened by the present passion for what is called Mediasval Art. But with all our just admiration and sympathy for greatness achieved through the inspiration of faith and feeling in spite of imperfect means and imperfect knowledge, let us not confound things which, in their very essence, are incompatible. Pain is pain ; ugliness is ugliness ; the quaint is not the graceful. Therefore, dear friends, be not deceived ! — eVery long-limbed, longeyed, long-draped saint is not ‘ a Giotto ; ’ nor every meagre simpering nun, or woe-begone monk, ‘a Beato Angelico.’

And again : the effigies of the monastic personages do not only fail, and necessarily fail, in beauty ; — they have a deeper fault. Generally speaking, the moral effect of such pictures upon the mass of the people was not, at any time, of a healthy kind. The subjects were

INTRODUCTION.

xix mot selected to convey a precept, or to touch the heart; the aim was mot to set forth the virtue of the good man as an example ; but to g>lorify the community to which he belonged, and to exalt the saints 0-*f the respective Orders as monks, not as men. Even where, as men, tlhey shine most attractively, the holy example conveyed in the representation is neutralised through a species of assumption in the pmrpose of the work, a vainglorious and exclusive spirit, which has ccertainly interfered with, and diminished, the religious impression. Sometimes, where the sentiment which the painter brought to his tsask was truly pious, we still feel that the glory of his community wvas the object at heart ; and that the exaltation of his own patriarch, whether that were St. Benedict, St. Francis, or St. Dominick, had become to him an act of devotion. I have observed that many who haave resided long in Catholic countries are apt to see, in the monastic poictures, only this selfish, palpable purpose ; and, associating such rcepresentations with the depravation of the priestly character, the tyyranny of rulers, and the ignorance of the people, regard them either aa,s mere objects of virtu, where the artist is rare and the workmanship boeautiful, or as objects of disgust and ridicule, where they have not tlhis fancied value in the eyes of the connoisseur.

The want of physical beauty, the alloy of what is earthly and selfseeeking in the moral effect, — these are surely important drawbacks im estimating the value of the monastic pictures considered as religious Akrt. If they can still charm us, still attract and rivet attention, still e^xcite to elevated feeling, it is owing to sources of interest which I vwill now endeavour to point out.

In the first place, then, Monachism in Art, taken in a large sense, iss historically interesting, as the expression of a most important era 0)f human culture. We are outliving the gross prejudices which once represented the life of the cloister as being from first to last a life of haziness and imposture ; we know that, but for the monks, the light ml liberty, and literature, and science, had been for ever extinguished ; aind that, for six centuries, there existed for the thoughtful, the g'entle, the inquiring, the devout spirit, no peace, no security, no luome but the cloister. There, Learning trimmed her lamp ; there Contemplation ‘ pruned her wings ; ’ there the traditions of Art, preserved from age to age by lonely, studious men, kept alive, in form amd colour, the idea of a beauty beyond that of earth, — of a might beyond that of the spear and the shield,— of a Divine sympathy with

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INTRODUCTION.

suffering humanity. To this wc may add another and a stronger claim on our respect and moral sympathies. The protection and the better education given to women in these early communities ; the venerable and distinguished rank assigned to them when, as governesses of their Order, they became in a manner dignitaries of the Church ; the introduction of their beautiful and saintly effigies, clothed with all the insignia of sanctity and authority, into the decoration of places of worship and books of devotion, — did more, perhaps, for the general cause of womanhood than all the boasted institutions of chivalry.

This period is represented to us in the Benedictine pictures or effigies. Those executed for the Cistercians, the Yallombrosians, the Camaldolesi (or by them, for these communities produced some of the most excelling of the early artists), are especially characterised by an air of settled peace, of abstract quietude — something fixed in the attitude and features, recalling the conventual life as described by St. Bernard.1 There is an example at hand in the assemblage of Saints by Taddeo Gaddi, now in our National Gallery. The old mosaics, and the most ancient Gothic sculpture, exhibit still more strongly this pervading sentiment of a calm, peaceful, passionless life ; sometimes even in the female figures, grave, even to sternness, but oftener elevated, even to grandeur.

Then followed a period when the seclusion of the cloister-life ceased to be necessary, and ceased to do good. The strong line of demarcation between the active and the contemplative life, between life in the world and life out of the world, could no longer be safely drawn. The seventh century after the death of St. Benedict saw the breaking forth of a spirit which left the deepest, the most ineffaceable, impression on the arts and the culture of succeeding times ; and some

more rarely; rises more quickly; treads more cautiously; rests more securely; dies more happily; is absolved more easily; and rewarded more plenteously.’)

This sentence was usually inscribed on some conspicuous part of the Cistercian houses. Wordsworth, from whom I take the quotation, has thus paraphrased it: —

‘ Here man more purely lives ; less oft doth fall ;

More promptly rises ; walks with nicer tread;

More safely rests ; dies happier ; is freed Earlier from cleansing fires ; and gains withal A brighter crown.’

INTRODUCTION.

.\x i of the grandest productions of human genius, in painting, sculpture, and architecture, signalised the rise of the Mendicant Orders.

To understand fully the character of these productions, it is necessary to comprehend something of the causes and results of that state of spiritual excitement, that frenzy of devotion, which seized on Christian Europe during the period I allude to. It seems to me, that in this movement of the thirteeenth century there was something analogous to the times through which we of this present generation have lived. There had been nearly a hundred years of desolating wars. The Crusades had upheaved society from its depths, as a storm upheaves the ocean, and changed the condition of men and nations. Whole provinces were left with half their population ; w hole districts remained uncultivated; whole families, and those the highest in the land, were extinguished, and the homes of their retainers and vassals left desolate. Scarce a hearth in Christendom beside which there wept not some childless, husbandless, hopeless woman. A generation sprang up, physically predisposed to a sort of morbid exaltation, and powerfully acted on by the revelation of a hitherto unseen, unfelt world of woe. In the words of Scripture,

‘ men could not stop their ears from hearing of blood, nor shut their eyes from seeing of evil.’ There was a deep, almost universal, feeling of the pressure and the burden of sorrow ; an awakening of the conscience to "wrong ; a blind, anxious groping for the right ; a sense that what had hitherto sufficed to humanity would suffice no longer. But, in the uneasy ferment of men’s minds, religious fear took the place of religious hope, and the religious sympathies and aspirations assumed in their excess a disordered and exaggerated form. The world was divided between those who sought to comfort the afflictions, and those who aspired to expiate the sins, of humanity. To this period we refer the worship of Mary Magdalene, the passion for pilgrimages, for penances, for martyrdom ; for self-immolation to some object or for some cause lying beyond self. An infusion of Orientalism into Western Christianity added a most peculiar tinge to the religious enthusiasm of the time, a sentiment which survived in the palpable forms of Art long after the cause had passed away. Pilgrims returning from the Holy Land, warriors redeemed from captivity among the Arabs and Saracens, brought back wild wonders, new superstitions, a more dreamy dread of the ever-present invisible, — enlarging in the minds of men the horizon of the possible, without enlarging that of experience. With more abundant food for the

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INTRODUCTION.

fancy, with a larger sphere of action, they remained ignorant and wretched. As one, whose dungeon-walls have been thrown down by an earthquake in the dead of night, gropes and stumbles amid the ruins, and knows not, till the dawn comes, how to estimate his own freedom, how to use his recovered powers, — thus it was with the people. But what was dark misery and bewilderment in the weak and ignorant, assumed in the more highly endowed a higher form; and to St. Francis and his Order we owe what has been happily called the Mystic school in poetry and painting : that school which so strangely combined the spiritual with the sensual, and the beautiful with the terrible, and the tender with the inexorable ; which first found utterance in the works of Dante and of the ancient painters of Tuscany and Umbria. It has been disputed often, whether the suggestions of Dante influenced Giotto, or the creations of Giotto inspired Dante : but the true influence and inspiration were around both, and dominant over both, when the two greatest men of their age united to celebrate a religion of retribution and suffering ; to solemnise the espousals of sanctify with poverty — with the self-abnegation which despises all things, rather than with the love that pardons and the hope that rejoices ; and which, in closing ‘ the gates of pleasure,’ would have shut the gates of mercy on mankind.1 We still recognise in the Franciscan pictures, those at least which reflect the asceticism of the early itinerant preachers and their haggard enthusiasm, something strangely uncouth and dervish -like. Men scourging themselves, haunted by demons, prostrate in prayer, uplifted in ecstatic visions, replaced in devotional pictures the dry, formal, but dignified figures of an earlier time. For the calmly meditative life of the Benedictine pictures, we have the expression of a life which panted, trembled, and aspired ; a life of spiritual contest, of rapture, or of agony. This is the life which is reflected to us in the pictures painted for those religious brotherhoods which sprang up between 1200 and 1300, and drew together and concentrated, in a common feeling, or for a common purpose, the fervid energies of kindred minds.

If the three great divisions of the regular Ecclesiastics seem to have had each a distinct vocation, there was at least one vocation

1 For the espousals of St. Francis with Poverty, ‘ the Dame to whom none openeth pleasure’s gate,’ as represented by Giotto, see p. 255 ; and Dante, Par.

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INTRODUCTION.

xxiii common to all. The Benedictine monks instituted schools of learning: : the Augustines built noble cathedrals ; the Mendicant Orders founded hospitals ; all became patrons of the fine arts, on such a scale of munificence that the protection of the most renowned princes has been mean and insignificant in comparison. Yet, in their relation to Art, this splendid patronage was the least of their merits. The earliest artists of the Middle Ages were the monks of the Benedictine Orders. In their convents were preserved from age to age the traditional treatment of sacred subjects, and that pure unworldly sentiment which in later times was ill exchanged for the learning of schools and the competition of academies; and as they were the only depositaries of chemical and medical knowledge, and the only compounders of drugs, we owe to them also the discovery and preparation of some of the finest colours, and the invention or the improvement of the implements used in painting; — for the monks not only prepared their own colours, but when they employed secular painters in decorating their convents, the materials furnished from their own laboratories were consequently of the best and most durable kind.1 As architects, as glass painters, as mosaic workers, as carvers in wood and metal, they were the precursors of all that has since been achieved in Christian Art ; and if so few of these admirable and gifted men are known to us individually and by name, it is because they worked for the honour of God and their community, not for profit, nor for reputation.

Theophilus the Monk, whose most curious and important treatise on the fine arts and chemistry was written in the twelfth century and lately republished in France and in England, was a Benedictine. Friar Bacon was a Franciscan, and Friar Albert-le-Grand (Albertus Magnus) a Dominican. It is on record that the knowledge of physics attained by these two remarkable men exposed them to the charge of magic. Shakspeare, ‘ who saw the thing that hath been as the thing that is,’ introduces Friar .Laurence as issuing from his cell at dawn of day to gather simples and herbs, and moralising on their properties. The portrait is drawn throughout with such wonderful and instinctive truth, it is as if one of the old friars of the fourteenth century had sat for it.2

1 Materials for a History of Oil Painting, by Sir Charles Eastlake, p. 6.

2 ‘ The good friar of this play,’ says Mr. Knight, in his notes to Komeo and Juliet, ‘in his kindliness, his learning, and his inclination to mix with, and xxiv

INTRODUCTION.

In reference to the monastic artists, it is worth observing that the Benedictines are distinguished by the title Don or Dom ( Dominus ), peculiar, I believe, to the ecclesiastics of this Order : as Don Lorenzo Monaco, who painted the beautiful Annunciation in the Florence Gallery ; 1 Don Giulio Clovio, the famous miniature of the sixteenth century. The painters of the Mendicant Orders have the prefix of Fra or Frate, as Fra Giacopo da Turrita, a celebrated mosaic worker in the thirteenth century ; Fra Antonio da Negroponte, who painted that supremely beautiful and dignified Madonna in the Frari at Venice ; — both Franciscans : Fra Filippo Lippi, the Carmelite ; Fra Beato Angelico da Fiesole, and Fra Bartolomeo (styled, par excellence , II Frate, the Friar), — both Dominicans.

Thus much for the historical and artistic interest of the monastic representations taken generally. Considered separately, some of these pictures have even a deeper interest.

The founders of the various religious communities were all remarkable men, and some of them were more, — they were wonderful men ; men of genius, of deep insight into human nature, of determined will, of large sympathies, of high aspirations, — poets who did not write poems but acted them ; all differing from each other in character, as their various communities differed from each other in aim and purpose. As a matter of course, in all works of art dedicated by those communities, the effigies of their patriarchs and founders claim a distinguished place. Thus we have in the monastic pictures a series of biographies of the most interesting and instructive kind. It will be said that this is biography idealised. Idealised certainly, but not falsified ; — not, I think, nearly so falsified as in books. After having studied the written lives of St. Benedict, St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Clara, St. Dominick, and others, to enable me to understand the pictures which relate to them, I found it was the pictures which enabled me better to understand their lives and characters. I speak, of course, of good pictures, painted by earnest and conscientious artists, where traditional or characteristic resemblance has been attended- to. The monkish pictures of the later schools are in general as ignorantly false in character as they are degraded in taste and style.

perhaps control, the affairs of the world, is no unapt representation of one of the distinguished Order of St. Francis in its best days.’

1 Vide Sacred and Legendary Art, vol. i. p. 86.

INTRODUCTION.

XXV

I have spoken of the want of beauty in the early pictures of monastic subjects ; but though the figures of the ascetic saints are not in themselves beautiful, the pictures in which they occur are sometimes of the highest conceivable beauty, either through the effect of suggestive and harmonious combination, or the most striking and significant contrasts. For instance, a group which meets us at every turn is the combination of the dark-robed, sad-visaged, self-denying monk, with the lovely benign Madonna and the godlike innocence of her Child. Sometimes the votary kneels, adoring in effigy the divine Maternity, the glorification of those soft affections which, though removed far from him in his seclusion, are brought near to him, and at once revealed and consecrated through the power of Art. Sometimes the sainted recluse stands with an air of dignity by the throne of the Virgin-mother ; sometimes the introduction of angels scattering flowers, or hymning music, for the solace of the haggard hermit, forms most striking and poetical contrasts.

And, again, the grouping in some of the monastic pictures is not merely beautiful, it is often in the highest degree significant. It has struck me that such pictures are not sufficiently considered like books, as having a sort of vitality of meaning; only, like books, before we can read them we must understand the language in which they are written. I have given a number of instances in the course of

this volume. I will add another which has just occurred to me.

In the Pitti Palace there is an ‘ Annunciation of the Virgin,’ in which St. Philip Benozzi, who lived in the fourteenth century, stands by in his ample black robes, listening to the angelic salutation. We are struck, not by the anachronism — where the subject is not treated as an event, but as a mystery, there can be no anachronism, as I have elsewhere shown, — but we are embarrassed by what appears a manifest incongruity ; and such it is on the walls of a palace : in its original place the whole composition was full of propriety, and through its associations, became harmonised into poetry. It was painted for the Order of the Servi, in honour of their chief saint, Filippo Benozzi ; it was suspended in their church at Florence, dedicated to the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin (the famous Annunziata). The Order was founded in especial honour of the Virgin, and, by a rule of the original institute, all their devotions began with the words of the angel Gabriel, ‘ Ave Maria ! ’ Thus we have the explanation at once ; and the dark-robed, listening monk

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INTRODUCTION.

in the background becomes an object of intelligent interest to those who understand the import and the original purpose of this fine picture.

I will give another example : we often meet with pictures of St. Dominick holding the keys of St. Peter, or receiving them from the apostle. The allusion is to a custom of the papal court, which has prevailed since the days of Iwnocent III. The important and confidential office of Master of the Sacred Palace was given to St. Dominick in 1218, and has ever since been held by a member of the Dominican Order. The pictured allegory is thus the record of an historical fact, and commemorates one of the chief honours of the community.