The renaissance of art in France

Front matter

DUVEEN BROTHERS LIBRARY

72© FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK

THE

Contents

OF

THE FIRST VOLUME.

CHAPTER PAGE

CHAPTER I. As tu basty, pour apres ruiner ?

O quelle perte ! — C. Marot.

The art of the French Renaissance depends for its charm on the nature of the purely personal motive by which it is animated. It is in a most special way the expression of the desires not of a nation but of a class, the result of individual needs, individual taste, individual caprice at a period when the life of the few had become exceedingly rich and complex. It cannot, therefore, appeal to a wide public, and requires perhaps more than the art of any other time a knowledge of the conditions under which it was produced in order to arrive at an appreciation of its excellence.

Art is the speech of the people only in its most abstract forms. When it presents, for example, a type of physical beauty unaffected by any moral agent, as in

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the Antinous — or when it renders a physical ideal in which is embodied a conception of moral beauty — as in the Niobe, or the Sistine Madonna, the grief of the mother bereaved, or the sacred joy of maternity — art is universally intelligible. It is a tongue which knows no accent. In the purity of these simple reductions local colouring is lost, as many tints become fused into one glory beneath the noon-day sun. The work of the French Renaissance scarcely, however, affords any instance of this sublimation of the aspirations, hopes, and fears of the human spirit ; but it is, on the other hand, rich in local colour, and contains in its stronglymarked character an abundant source of interest for those who read in it the signs of the time at which it was produced.

When the imprisoned instincts of fifteen centuries burst their bonds, the moment of revolt left its traces everywhere ; in art and literature, as in life ; and the necessary transition from old forms to new, which gradually took place in Italy, was in France peculiarly sudden and complete. The life of the nation had long languished under an enforced repression specially foreign to the French temperament, and a rule, long fallen into disrepute, was shaken to the foundations on coming into contact with hostile traditions embodied in forms apt to the national sympathies and instincts.

The warriors of France came back from Italy with the wonders of the South on their lips and her treasures

CHARLES VIII. ENTERS ITALY.

in their hands. They brought with them books and paintings, they brought with them armour inlaid with gold and silver, tapestries enriched with precious metals, embroidered clothing, and even household furniture. Distributed by many hands in many different places, each precious thing became a separate centre of initiative power. The chateaux of the country nobles boasted the treasures which had fallen to the share of their lords at Genoa or at N aples ; and the great women of the court were eager to divide the spoil. The contagion spread rapidly. Even in the most fantastic moment of Gothic inspiration, the French artist gave evidence that his right hand obeyed a national instinct for order, for balance, for completeness, and that his eye preferred, in obedience to a national predilection, the most refined harmonies of colour. Step by step he had been feeling his way ; now, the broken link of tradition was again made fast ; the workmen of Paris and the workmen of Athens joined hands, united by the genius of Italy.

It must not, however, be supposed that no intercourse had previously existed between France and Italy. The roads by Narbonneand Lyons were worn by many feet. The artists of Tours and Poitiers, the artists of Paris and Dijon, were alike familiar with the path to Rome. But an intercourse, hitherto restricted, was rendered by the wars of Charles VIII. all but universal. The brief campaign (1494), in which the

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king commanded in person, had left his followers dazzled, bewildered, eager to return to the fertile life of the land which had aroused their desires. Something also of a chivalrous passion prompted them to urge their leader to take up again his abandoned enterprise.

Preparations were made, and Charles was induced to set forth as far as Lyons. Then, in answer to the protestations of those about him, in fulfilment of the pledges given to those who awaited his help, six ships were despatched to Gaeta bearing men and provisions, but bearing also the news that Charles had deserted his own standards, in the pursuit of a vulgar amour. Two years later he died, with the curse of Savonarola on his head, and France could no longer be restrained.

A year had hardly passed before the French troops crossed the Alps, and now it was no longer possible to imagine that the expedition meant a mere triumphal tour through Italy in order to take possession of Naples. The experiences of the campaign of 1494 had made clear the situation. If Italy were again to be sacrificed and betrayed, it would be done by men sinning in full knowledge. Charles and his companions had been taken by surprise. When they entered Italy, mind and imagination were alike led captive by the magic attractions of the land and people. The Italians, on the other hand, felt, and exaggerated in feeling, the poetic side of the relations which they had brought themselves to believe in, as existing between

RESULT OF THE EXPEDITION.

their nation and the French. Italy was the Holy Land of Europe lying bound, and awaiting its deliverance at French hands. But the instinct which had carried the French so far could not furnish a trustworthy guide in dealing with the conflicting interests and complicated intrigues of Italian politics.

As soon as Charles and his followers were called upon to take decisive action, it became evident that they were so fettered by sentimental relations and personal pledges given on all sides that a statesmanlike view of the position and statesmanlike action was impossible. The campaign of 1494 resulted therefore in a confused series of fatal blunders. The interests of the people they had come to succour were forgotten, whilst the sympathies of the King and his nobles were absorbed by tales of personal wrongs, or well-devised advocacy of hereditary rights. The crusade which had been undertaken in the name of a nation was degraded to the miserable championship of the quarrels of this or that petty prince. Finally the French army recrossed the Alps, after having, as its most signal exploit, almost destroyed, at Milan, the most brilliant and lettered court of the day.

This was done in good faith. It remained for Louis XII. and his advisers to plan deliberate treachery. Cruelly as the Italians had suffered at the hands of Charles VIII. they still looked to France for help; they knew that though they had been injured they had

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not been betrayed. But the weak and generous impulses of Charles VIII. found no place in the councils of his successors. The rulers of France were three. Louis, Anne of Brittany, and Georges d’Amboise, Archbishop of Rouen. Louis, a poor political contriver with a royal preference for royal alliances, Amboise, a scheming churchman to whom a free city or a free state was necessarily odious, Anne, a woman whose masculine understanding had a feminine warp, and served her only to prosecute the aggrandisement of her family, and to keep her well with her priest. This triumvirate held the destinies of France, and sealed the fate of Italy.

An ominous visitor arrived at the French court. Caesar Borgia came, bearing the Papal Bull which the King required to establish his marriage. The Archbishop of Rouen at once began to spin the thread of an intrigue which should obtain for him a cardinal’s hat. To the King, the woman, and the priest, the friendship of the Pope was so indispensable that they, with one accord, gave the right hand of fellowship to his son, whose filthy reputation heralded him to the highest honours that France could bestow. The bastard Borgia, with a French princess to wife, became Cdsar de France.

The doom of Italy was pronounced. Substantially the compact was this. Aided by Borgia, the French were to destroy the free cities of the north, and

THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGNS OF LOUIS XII.

in return France was to aid Borgia in breaking the power of the independent nobles who yet resisted Papal aggression in the south.

In July 1499 the work began. At first the Italians failed to realise what had taken place. When the French army entered the Milanese territory the inhabitants fraternised with the troops, Milan, Genoa, Pavia opened their gates with joy. But in a few months the course of events, in the south, aroused a dread anxiety. There, Borgia, under the protection of the French king, and with the assistance of the French arms, was triumphantly glutting his brutal rage and lust, whilst Frenchmen were forced to look on helpless and indignant.

Milan, justly terrified, made an attempt to throw herself on the mercy of her old ruler. To no purpose. Louis went back over the Alps, leaving a strong hand and a strong garrison in Milan, and dragging with him the unfortunate Louis Sforza, a miserable proof of the final destruction of the most brilliant court of Upper Italy. Leonardo da Vinci had to look on the destruction of his model for the statue of Francesco Sforza, of his paintings in the palace of the Duke Louis, of his constructions for the palace of Galeazzo San Severino. ‘ The Duke/ he writes, c has lost his State, his fortune, and his liberty, and has finished nothing which he has begun.’ Leonardo returned to Florence, his patron died of insult, cold,

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damp, and privation, after ten years of prison and exile, in the Castle of Loches.

By the campaign of 1507, the work, thus begun, was consummated. The ancient spirit of independence still lingered in Genoa, and Venice was not yet crushed. There were still fresh laurels to be won. In this Holy War the Pope and the Emperor willingly joined forces with France. Assured of the countenance of Austria and Rome, Louis started, at the head of his troops, carrying with him the court poet, Jean Marot, to chronicle the exploits of the ‘ Voyage de Genes.’ The deathblow was first given to Genoa. She was forced, Marot tells us, ‘ la corde au coul, la glaive sous la gorge, implorer la clemence de ce prince.’ Venice was next traitorously surprised and irreparably injured. Having thus brilliantly achieved the task of first destroying the lettered courts, and next the free cities of Italy, Louis died, bequeathing to Francois I. the shame of fighting out a hopeless struggle for supremacy against allies who, no longer needing help, had combined to drive the French from the field.

There was, indeed, one other duty to be performed. The shattered remains of Italian civilisation might be collected, and Paris might receive the men whom Italy could no longer employ. The French returned to France empty of honour, gorged with plunder, satiated with rape and rapine, boasting of cities sacked, and garrisons put to the sword. They had sucked the life-

CENTRALIS A TION OF POLITICAL POWER.

blood of Italy, but her death brought new life to France.

The impetus thus acquired by art and letters coincided with a change in political and social constitutions. The gradual process of centralisation which had begun with Louis XI. transformed the life of the whole nation. The teaching of the Middle Ages, both religious and civil, had inured the masses to passive obedience. To men writhing beneath the exactions of local tyranny, the formidable development of the monarchical power brought a sense of relief ; it brought the conception of the king as of one to whom all should be answerable. The same system which was to end by becoming an unendurable burden appeared at first as a means of escape from the cruelty of more immediate oppression. The ultimate seat of power being removed so much farther off, the field of individual action and effort became, at first, so much the wider. The very possibility of appeal was a source of new energy and confidence.

This political change, the shaping of the monarchy, and the centralisation of power, gave considerable impulse to the movement of the Renaissance in the province of Art. The royal court began to take proportions hitherto unknown. It gradually became a centre which gathered together the rich, the learned, and the skilled. Artists, who had previously been limited in training, isolated in life, and narrowed in

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activity by the rigid conservative action of the great guilds and corporations, were thus brought into immediate contact with the best culture of their day. For the Humanists did not form a class apart, and their example incited those with whom they lived to effort after attainments as varied as their own, whilst the Court made a rallying point for all, which gave a sense of countenance and protection even to those who might never hope to enter it.

Italian artists seem never to have been as completely at the mercy of the artisan element as their brethren of the north. Late into the twelfth century a sense of connection with classic tradition had lingered, but towards its close the guilds and corporations began to attain formidable power. In the north their action was to a great extent in harmony with the popular instincts. The craftsman triumphed over the artist. Each man found his place definitely allotted to him in an inexorable order of things, rebellion against which meant ruin. A great Gothic Cathedral oppresses the mind as heavily as the Pyramids with the sense of the subjection of the individual. It tells of the never-to-be-ended labour of centuries. The Pyramids bear enduring witness to the complete thought which ordained their birth, to the eternal life of will, but the crumbling masses of the Middle Ages testify to the finite power of human endeavour, to the limitation of energy, to the triumph of Time. When the sound of the chisel dies away in the

EMANCIPATION OF THE WORKMAN i echoing aisles, the work of decay has begun. Ever building, and ever to be built anew, the lives which have passed into them leave traces but as of letters on the sand effaced again and again by the wave of each succeeding generation.

It has been said, by those to whom the great northern school of architecture gives complete satisfaction, that the workman finds within its rules alone a career of independent creative energy. Classic work, and the Renaissance, are supposed to have made of him a slave, and a machine. But the more we study Greek work the more profoundly deepens the conviction that not even the most subordinate parts could have been produced by mere machines. The beauty of quite simple and apparently monotonous passages of ornament depends on variations of line and curve so subtly determined in relation to their position that they could only be apprehended and expressed by an actively interested mind. The simplest border pattern on a vase requires, for its successful laying on the convex surface, the most exquisite delicacy of calculation and practice, in which the secret activity of the intelligence finds its outward expression.

Delightful labour went to the raising of the Parthenon, as to the building of the Cathedral of Bourges, but its organisation in the one case impeded the perfection of individual development, and in the other required it. The necessary condition of success was

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that those who planned should resume in their own persons all the knowledge of those whose labour they directed ; the ultimate goal of effort was thus placed farther off, but those who had the power were no longer debarred from reaching it.

Emancipation of the individual is the watchword of the sixteenth century ; to the artist it brought relief from the trammels of a caste thraldom, and the ceaseless efforts of the Humanists find an answer even in the new forms seen slowly breaking through the sheath of Gothic art.

The passion, which the French displayed, in the first moments of admiration, for the classic ornaments, the grotesques, the arabesques unearthed in Italy, has often been remarked. They seem, says M. Michelet, to take an infantile pleasure in loading their ancient architecture with these capricious flowers. At Gaillon, these foreign accessories are transferred to outlines which have in no degree been modified to receive them. It is thus that all great changes of style are inaugurated. The ornaments, the small details, the fittings of the interior first submit themselves to the new force, which, gradually breaking way, extends its dominion to the more highly organised provinces of Art.

Great changes of style are always necessitated by some previous change in the conditions of human society and life. Changes in these conditions necessarily affect first those objects which are not only

THE OUTBURST OF LIFE.

rendered by their size most readily amenable to treatment, but form most intimately a part of our daily life. The style of each great school is but the expressive garment which clothes underlying form ; change in the form necessitates change in the garment. Change in habits of life, means change in structural forms, change in structural forms means change of style. By slow degrees the varied possibilities latent in new conditions are aroused, worked out, and exhausted. At the close of the fifteenth century the possibility of fresh development in Gothic seemed at an end. The next step was no matter of choice.

A social revolution, a change in habits of life, set in, at the same time, in violent reaction. For fifteen hundred years the senses and their appetites had been debased, and degraded in the estimation of men. They had become as vile as they had been accounted. Utter foulness of manners and habits of indiscriminate excess were not the result of the Renaissance, but the outcome of the Middle Ages. The revolt against the repressive rule which had been gathering strength for fifteen centuries preceded the Humanistic movement. The effect of the Humanistic movement was to bridle the excesses of the reaction. The outburst of life came first, the attempt to maintain an aesthetic direction of life followed. The Renaissance, in proclaiming honour to every manifestation of human energy, gave each a claim to be considered worthy of culture. Even the

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senses should be served like princes, and all pleasures brought within the domain of Art.

The Middle Age theory of life has been touched by Heine,

The reaction followed, but it was swiftly overtaken. Compare Villon with Ronsard. There seems to be a century between them. Villon is a voice of the reaction. The cry which he utters is simply ‘ Let us live ! ’ Live ‘ pour gaudir et faire grant chere.’ Steal, if you cannot otherwise come by the means of enjoyment ; only by no means die without having tasted the pleasures of life. So he chronicles his meals, and his loves, by turns sinking into mere dull obscenity, or exulting in evanescent fits of drunken gaiety. With Villon, passion lives only in its purely physical form, with Ronsard it is always veiled by the grace of exquisite refinement, and even presents itself also under its moral aspect. For the Renaissance in this respect, as in all else, conceived an exalted ideal. Love in its rarest perfection combining the utmost sensitiveness to physical beauty with that moral passion which makes all sacrifice a sacred privilege, and gives a common stimulus to all noble living, is a conception not unknown to Renaissance literature, and which gives a distinctive

THE IDEAL OF THE HUMANISTS.

charm to several stories in the Heptameron of the Queen of Navarre.

The aesthetic direction of the movement rested in the hands of the nobles, aided by artists and men of letters. The bourgeois class, as a body, remained indifferent to the ideal held up by the Humanists. Rich men, men of leisure and cultivation, could alone be expected to feel the charm of an ideal, the realisation of which demanded the harmonious perfection, in every human being, of every human faculty ; an ideal which offered to the world once more the conception of the beautiful mind in the no less beautiful body. In the twenty-third chapter of ‘ Gargantua,’ Rabelais describes ‘ Comment Gargantua fut institue par Ponocrates en telle discipline, qu’il ne perdoit heure du jour.’ It is a fantastic picture of that complete life which the Humanists exhausted themselves in the effort to achieve. They strained the limit of human energy. Their keen perception of the value of life brought along with it the terror of death, and this terror goaded them into frantic struggles to get the utmost out of that present over which was cast already the shadow of the inevitable end.

The men of the fifteenth century said, ‘ Our existence is not life, let us break our bonds and live ; ’ the Renaissance came and said, ‘ Your life is that of beasts, not men. Do not rest until you have shaped every manifestation of human energy into its most i6

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perfect form. Not until you have done this, and in your own person combined all, can you say you have tasted perfect life.’ Not a moment should be lost. ‘ Le jour tant soit-il court vaut mieux que la nuitee.’ The sculptor stood already chiselling the terrible skeleton which should surmount the cold silence of the grave. The day is all we have, they said, ‘ apres la mort on ne voit rien qui plaise,’ and the passionate effort to get everything into this short day, to taste al! pleasure, to know all knowledge, to see all beauty, defeated itself.

The studies of Gargantua embrace, in one day, classic literature and language, mathematics, botany, and astronomy ; he also practises wrestling, swimming, riding, and all manly exercises which give strength as well as those which give grace to the body ; thought is taken for the pleasures of the table, and he also enjoys the company and converse of learned and travelled men, music is not forgotten, and time is found for elaborate dress, finished even to perfume. We laugh at the superhuman performance of Rabelais’ giant, but a large measure of sober earnest lurks beneath the extravagant fiction. It is but the difference between attempt and achievement.

The day of Gargantua represents the intention which animated the men of the Renaissance. Leo Battista Alberti is described as philosopher, scholar, poet, musician, architect, painter, sculptor, mathema-

ITS HIGH STANDARD OF ATTAINMENT .

tician, and jurist. The name of Leonardo da Vinci brings to mind equally well-attested and varied acquirements. But France can show numerous and remarkable illustrations. Etienne Jodelle, the author of ‘ La Rencontre,’ the earliest French example of modern light comedy, was not only a poet, and a man of pleasure, he was a scholar, an orator, a skilful fencer, and accomplished in the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. Jacques Grevin was a celebrated physician, a statesman, a poet ; his classical attainments were considerable, and he distinguished himself by translations both from Greek and Latin. The acquirements of Jean Cousin are in every way remarkable ; had he not achieved practical success in every branch of art, his written works on Perspective, and on ‘ The Measurements of the Human Body,’ would alone have rescued his name from oblivion.

Cousin lived to a good old age ; so did Alberti ; so did Leonardo ; but they are exceptions to the rule. For the most part the life of these men is but a sudden spark, as swiftly extinguished. Pico della Mirandula died at thirty-one; Joachim du Bellay, whose Latin verse is French poetry, died at thirty-five ; Jodelle at forty; Grevin at thirty. Urged by consuming passion both in work and pleasure, each had hasted through a brilliant but brief existence, and this intense concentration of vital effort which we see mirrored in individual lives distinguishes the entire epoch.

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The most vigorous and highly endowed of human creatures are rarely equal to the sustained direction and control of their own energies. Though these energies may, in the main, acquire a tendency to run in the course in which they are usually directed, their overflow at times is carried off in other than the accustomed channels. Through the new issue they will pass with the same force which characterised them in other action. Fullest energy means fullest possibilities of pleasure. The better animal has the keener senses, and acquires the greater impetus in every mode of life. Those who can put most passion into their work can, if they turn that way, put most passion into their pleasure. The men of the Renaissance wooed the secrets of the past, or kissed out their lives on the lips of their earthly loves with the same burning zeal. ‘ Heureux,’ cries Ronsard, ‘sera le jour que je mourray d’amour/

One of the most significant signs of the time was the delight in the nude which instantly manifested itself. The eye no longer dwelt with morbid satisfaction on the shrouded and emaciated shapes which haunted the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, or yielded to the unwholesome fascinations of the monstrous devils who, peering from capital or cornice, enhanced with their terror the denunciations of the priest Men turned from the saintly virgins, whose meagre forms had been blanched and attenuated by the shade of cloistered

DELIGHT IN PHYSICAL BEAUTY .

discipline, to watch Diana and her nymphs with limbs moulded by action, and finished by the free air.

Whenever the senses quicken, and the instinct for the beautiful is awake, then this passion for the nude shows itself. It is a passion which has, like all others, its coarser side, and sometimes deserts the ideal mistress, to burn on other altars an impurer flame. In the memoirs of the time we often come on traces of work done merely to serve the end of some scandalous whim. The author of the Ldgende du Cardinal de Guise recounts how the Cardinal contrived to have smuggled into his chamber, as a Madonna, a painting of this class, in which he himself figured, together with his niece, Mary, Queen of Scots, and two other women of his house. La Ldgende , it is true, was an anonymous attack on the Guises, written by a Huguenot ; and fanatics are not usually scrupulous as to the weapons they employ ; but other instances of a similar nature abound.

One noble boasts the possession of an 4 Aretin en figures ’ ; another gives his mistress a volume of paintings in which the loves and persons of the great ladies of the court are shamefully exposed ; a third gives a banquet to a mixed company of guests, and passes round a ‘couppe d’argent dore grave au burin avec plusieurs figures de^ l’Aretin de l’homme et de la femme.’ The celebrated book lost by Charles

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VIII. at Fornova, and which contained portraits of the most beautiful women of Italy, seems to have been one of a large class of like work, to which, also, would seem to have belonged the mysterious ‘ ouvraiges et pourtraictures’ commissioned by Francois I. of Francois Clouet immediately after his return from Madrid — ‘ouvraiges et pourtraictures ’ for which Clouet was to be well paid, but which ‘ le diet Seigneur ne veult estre aultrement declarees.’

These works, however, even if we had them, would furnish no fair test of French art of the day. Perfect beauty, like perfect love, involves the presence of the moral ideal. If we wish to realise the true quality of the best work of the time, we must turn to that which was done to set before all men in the eye of the sun — to the daylight directness and simplicity of Goujons nymphs — to the frank naivetd of Palissy’s ‘ Femme couchee ’ — to the dignity and indifference of the women of Cousin. For in Cousins ‘ Eva prima Pandora ’ we find that the French artists of the Renaissance stand the severest test to which the artists of any epoch can be put. They were capable of seeking beauty for her own sake, and, so seeking, found her.

The poets also contain manifold illustrations of the same passion. Ronsard constantly dwells on the subtle lines and delicate charm of finished womanly beauty. ‘ Belle gorge d’albatre, et vous chaste poicrine,’ he begins, and passes on to accentuate, with

EAGER PURSUIT OF ALL OBJECTS OF DESIRE. 21 sedulous care, every lovely trait, whilst through each

line is heard the sound of warning.

Pour qui gardes-tu tes yeux Et ton sein delicieux,

Ta joue et ta bouche belle ?

En veux-tu baiser Pluton La-bas apres que Charon T’aura mise en sa nacelle ?

Then, just as the sculptor, of this epoch, placed, on the mausoleum of a princess, side by side with the woman in her magnificence, 4 it,’ the worn-out body of the death-bed, so Ronsard goes on to draw the companion picture : —

Apres ton dernier trespas Gresle tu n’auras la-bas Qu’une bouchette blesmie,

Et quand mort je te verrois Aux ombres je n’avou’rois Que jadis tu fus m’amie.

Ton test n’aura plus de peau,

Ny ton visaige tant beau N’aura veines ny arteres,