Chapter IV
SECONDARY ITALIAN PAINTERS OF THE CENTURY. FRA ANGELICO, PERUGINO, FRA BARTOLOMMEO, BOTTICELLI, BELLINI, TITIAN, CORREGGIO, TINTORETTO, VERONESE AND OTHERS
Perhaps nothing illustrates better the wealth of genius in what we have called Columbus' Century than the fact that after detailed accounts of the lives of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, many painters of the first rank still remain to be treated of in the second place, as it were, a number of them exhibiting some quality that has given them an almost unique distinction in the history of art. Some of these great painters are acknowledged to be among the most distinguished artists of all time. When it is realized that men like Fra Angelico, Perugino, Botticelli, Titian, Correggio, Tintoretto and Veronese have to be grouped together in a single chapter, the necessities of compression in our account of the century will begin to be appreciated. Each of them deserves, for any adequate presentation of his work, not a few paragraphs, but a large volume, and about each of them indeed not one but many volumes have been written even centuries after their deaths. It must not be forgotten that almost the same abbreviation of the story must be made for any other phase of the century's achievements.
When Columbus' Century opened, Fra Angelico had just been summoned to Rome to set about what has usually been considered the crowning labor of his life. This was the painting in fresco of the walls of the small oratory in the Vatican, since known as the chapel of Nicholas V, because the decoration of it was ordered by that great pontiff, a man of deep scholarship and an enlightened patron of the fine arts, whose aim to make Rome not only the centre of the religious life, but also of the best influences for art and science for all the world, {54} has come to be well recognized. Artists and art critics have been almost fulsome in their praise of these decorations of Fra Angelico. The walls were covered on three sides with two series of paintings, the upper portion illustrating the life of St. Stephen, the lower that of St. Lawrence. That two sets of subjects so similar should have been treated in close juxtaposition without any repetition in design or composition is in itself the best possible evidence of the artist's power and his constructive imagination. The designs show a freshness of conception very remarkable in a man of advanced years, yet withal there is absolutely no falling off in the power and sincerity of his art, and if anything a deepening of the religious feeling so characteristic of him. When he did this work he was probably past sixty-five years of age.
Fortunately in our day, when it is so easy to obtain cheap reproductions of the works of all the great painters, and when copies in color of Fra Angelico's paintings may readily be secured, anyone may know for himself something at least of the sweetness and power of this charming painter of the early Renaissance. His Madonnas have a most taking motherly expression and yet are full of the mystic saintliness that becomes the Mother of God. His angels are a constantly-repeated argument and impelling appeal for the existence of these invisible creatures, which have been well declared to look so real as to be convincing. His pictures of Christ as man and boy are replete with humanity, and yet have the Divinity shining through the veils of flesh. No one but a man who believed firmly, completely and entirely in what he was painting could ever have given us these marvellous representations. It is easy to understand, then, that when it comes to his pictures of the saints Fra Angelico has given us, absolutely true to life, representations of them in various actions as their activities appeal to him. Among them he has introduced some portraits of his friends, thus laying the foundation of that portrait painting which was to develop so finely in the next generation and which was fortunately to preserve for us the features of so many whom we would like to have known. In the meantime, in the background of his pictures he has given us the beginning of modern landscape painting in all the beauty and {55} charm of his own, simple, single-hearted way of looking at the beauties of nature.
One of the most important of the Italian painters of the first half of Columbus' Century, all the more interesting because he was young Raphael's master, was Pietro Vannucci, whom, from the name of his adopted town Perugia, the world of art knows as Perugino. He was born just before the century began in 1447. His parents were poor, though not of low condition, and as a boy Pietro worked as a shop drudge with a painter in Perugia. There has been much discussion as to who this painter was, and probably the best determination is Niccolo da Foligno, who is sometimes considered the originator of the school of Umbrian painters, in which Perugino thereafter took so important a place. Niccolo was himself a pupil of Benozzo Gozzoli, who owed his training to Fra Angelico. There were other artists at Perugia under whose influence young Perugino came, and their names, when taken in connection with those already mentioned, will show the wondrous art influences abroad in the period. Vasari mentions also Bonfigli, known also as Benedetto Buonfiglio, whose work can be seen at its best only in Perugia and is well deserving of study, and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, in whom the typical Umbrian landscapes, which are so important a feature in Perugino's pictures, first make their appearance. A still more important influence in Perugino's life was Piero della Francesca, who was perhaps at Perugia for a while, though Perugino may have met him elsewhere.
After his apprentice work in art at Perugia, Perugino travelled and was influenced by such men as Luca Signorelli, Lorenzo and the group of great painters then at Florence, including Ghirlandajo, Cosi, Moroselli and Botticelli, as well as the master Verrocchio, in whose studio, or rather workshop, Perugino probably came in contact with Leonardo da Vinci and also Lorenzo di Credi. There are two oft-quoted lines from Giovanni Santi, "two youths alike in age and love, Leonardo da Vinci and the Perugian Peter of Pieve." It was Perugino's merit to have reached distinction, even amongst these, and his religious pictures have a value all their own. After his years of training and journeying, Perugino had his {56} opportunity at Rome, especially in the Sistine Chapel. Of his work there, Berenson said in his "Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance," "It is the golden joyous color and the fine rhythm of the groups and above all the buoyant spaciousness of this fresco that win and hold us." He has spoken of "the golden dreamy summerings" of his pictures in the Louvre, and especially "the round containing the Madonna with the guardian saints and angels, all dipped in the color of Heaven, dreaming away in bliss the glowing summer afternoon." Perugino's power to paint man "not as a mite against infinity, but as man should be in Eden, dominant and towering high over the horizon," has given him a place all his own. "It is this exaltation of human being over the landscape that not only justifies but renders paintings great."
Grimm, in his "Life of Michelangelo," goes out of his way to say that "Perugino's work in the Sistine Chapel far surpasses the others, though they include such great men as Botticelli, Signorelli and Ghirlandajo. His simplicity, his symmetry, his thoughtful composition and finishing of individual figures, though in the others these are often in masses, scarcely to be distinguished, all these give a surpassing distinction to his painting."
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Perugino that has been paid by subsequent generations is the attribution to Raphael of some of the works that have since been determined to be Perugino's. "Apollo and Marsyas" of the Louvre, Paris, which has had its place in the Salon Carre for thirty years, is a typical example and is still called a Raphael in the Louvre catalogue, though now it has been almost definitely assigned to Perugino. Most of the important galleries of Europe have pictures that they value very highly that were done by Perugino, and mistakes with regard to his work have always been such as indicated the highest appreciation of Perugino, for they have been attributed to great masters.
One of the great painters of this time who, if he had done nothing else but influence Raphael deeply, would deserve a place in any account of the art of this century is Fra Bartolommeo. He was the intimate personal friend of Savonarola and painted the well-known portrait of the great preacher after {57} the unfortunate execution of the friar. At a time when the Order of St. Dominic was very unpopular, Bartolommeo entered it in 1500, and for a time gave up painting. [Footnote 5] He returned to his art, however, "for the profit of the Convent and the glory of God." Quite naturally he was very much influenced by the works of Fra Angelico, his brother, in religion, which were all round him in the monastery of San Marco, and also came under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, who worked at Florence during the first decade of the sixteenth century. Bartolommeo had charge of the studio San Marco, and it was here that Raphael came in contact with him to the mutual benefit of both the painters, though Raphael was much the younger man. In 1508 Bartolommeo visited Venice and came under the spell of the rich coloring of Bellini and Titian.
[Footnote 5: It is often said that it was fortunate that Savonarola's preaching did not continue to influence the Florentines deeply, for if it had it would surely have seriously disturbed art, and as it is, it is often declared that there must have been many beautiful works of art sacrificed in the bonfires built in the streets of Florence under Savonarola's inspiration. In the sketch of Fra Bartolommeo (M. E. James, London, 1902), the answer to this is contained in a single paragraph:
"The artists of Italy had no quarrel with the friar; some of the best of them were his devoted friends, while many entered his Order. Fra Filippo Lappacini in 1492, Fra Agostino di Paulo, Fra Ambrogio and Fra Luca della Robbia, Fra Benedetto (miniature painter), 1495, Fra Eustachio, 1496. Michael Angelo read the friar's sermons constantly; Cronaca, the great architect, 'could talk of nothing else.' Raphael painted him among the doctors of the Church. Baldini, Lorenzo di Credi and Botticelli loved him."]
Fra Bartolommeo's greatest works are probably the "Marriage of St. Catherine," "The Last Judgment," now in the Church of Santa Maria Nuova, Florence, the picture which is said to have attracted the attention of Raphael, and the well-known "Descent from the Cross," or as it is often called, "Lamentation over Christ," "in which the expression of suffering on the faces is charmingly differentiated for the various characters of St. John, the Magdalen and the Blessed Virgin, and so subdued that a heavenly peace illumines the group." It has been declared that Bartolommeo united the spirituality {58} of Fra Angelico to the perfect treatment in form and color of Raphael, combined with a gentle gravity that was all his own and a devotion that was part of his life. The "Descent from the Cross" is one of his last works and, far from showing any sign of failing power, is masterly and firm. In anatomy and composition and color it is unsurpassed; in delicacy of feeling and religious devotion it is considered one of the great pictures of the world. His portrait of "Savonarola," a work of love on the part of an ardent disciple, is deservedly his best-known work and is one of the great portraits of all time, worthy to be placed beside those of such masters of portraiture as Bellini, Titian, Raphael and even Leonardo.
Among the other secondary painters of Columbus' time one of the greatest, an artist who would have stood out above all his contemporaries in almost any other period of art, is Sandro Botticelli. He is the only contemporary whom Leonardo mentions in his "Treatise on Painting." A quarter of a century ago Walter Pater, in his Renaissance essays, said of him in regard to this distinction of being mentioned by Leonardo:
"This pre-eminence may be due to chance only, but to some it will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment, for people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work; and his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important. In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of classical stories; or if he painted religious incidents, painted them with an undercurrent of original sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject."
In his pictures of "Spring" and the "Birth of Venus," Botticelli has shown his power to paint great imaginative pictures, and the "Venus" particularly shows his faculty of expressing the intimate, elusive psychology of his subject. In {59} his little sketch of Botticelli, Streeter (Catholic Truth Society, London, 1900) says:
"Perhaps the most striking thing in this dainty discerned vision of antiquity is the conscious emphasis laid on the distance from which the vision is beheld. The sorrow Botticelli had learned to restrain in his recent 'Madonnas' breaks out afresh in the wistful plaintiveness of the goddess of pleasure, separated from her true home by 'the travail of the world through twenty centuries,' by a 'yawning sepulchre wherein the old faiths of the world lay buried and whence Christ had arisen.' It would seem, not as some critics have asserted, that Botticelli strove, and strove in vain, to achieve the true embodiment of a pagan ideal, but rather that he sought in this strange mingling of pagan and mediaeval sentiment to express his own profound instinct of the impossibility, to a later age, of ever reaching it."
Botticelli is famous above all for his round pictures. Somehow these tondi, as they are called, became fashionable in Florence about the middle of the latter half of the fifteenth century, and when he was about thirty Botticelli painted a series. One need only see the charming reproductions that are now so often used for decorative purposes to realize how beautiful they are. The "Madonna of the Magnificat," so-called because the Blessed Virgin is represented with pen in hand, as writing her song of praise, though also known as the "Coronation of the Blessed Virgin" because the angels are represented as placing the crown on her head, is the most perfect of these. The lines of the composition, which have been exquisitely arranged so as to fit into the round frame, have been very aptly compared with those of the corolla of an open rose. Botticelli was able not only to conquer the difficulties of this round form of painting, but actually to elaborate out of the difficulties involved in this form of composition new beauties, just as a poet may choose a particularly difficult metre, and actually add to the quality or at least the charm of his poetry by the exquisite form in which he puts it.
One of Botticelli's forms of artistic activity that has attracted the attention of artists and literati very much in the modern {60} time is his execution of a series of illustrations for Dante. With his profound sympathy with the mediaeval spirit it might well be anticipated that he would make as nearly adequate illustrations of Dante as may be possible. It requires a deep knowledge of Dante to appreciate these illustrations. They are not at all like modern attempts to illustrate Dante and are separated as far as Heaven from earth from Dore's illustrations. They are extremely naive and simple, and at first are likely to strike a modern as being caricatures rather than illustrations. The grotesque element in Dante is not minimized to the slightest extent. It requires much study to appreciate Ruskin's profound expression that a noble grotesque is one of the most sublime achievements of art. The illustrations have to be studied in connection with the text and with a thorough spirit of devotion to Dante before proper appreciation comes. Great authorities in art and in the older literature, however, have united in declaring these the most wonderfully illuminating illustrations of Dante that were ever made. It is an index of the genius of Botticelli that he should have achieved so marvellously in a mode of art unfamiliar to him personally and then quite new in the world. His illustrations were made as copies for the illustration of a printed book.
Until Botticelli has been studied faithfully and seriously, most people are likely to think of him as a painter of what he saw with a certain poetic charm and a naivete which makes him by contrast particularly interesting to the modern world. Few realize how much appreciative students of Botticelli, who are at the same time art critics, have learned to think of his high seriousness, his lofty purpose and his marvellous execution in his paintings. It is above all for his psychology that he has come to be admired in the modern time, and as our own interest in psychology has deepened, the appreciation for Botticelli has grown. He was gifted with a profound psychological insight into character, which he knew how to express with almost incredible simplicity and directness. Talking of his St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Eligius and St. John, a well-known German critic. Prof. Steinman, recently said:
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"It would seem that in these four strongly contrasting figures Botticelli aimed at portraying the four human temperaments in their separate and distinctive modes of response to the same spiritual appeal: the fiery enthusiasm of the impulsive St. John, looking upwards, rapt in wonder; the studious concentration with which St. Augustine, who here represents the phlegmatic temperament, unmoved, continues his writing; the nerve-strained longing of St. Jerome, worn and wasted with many fastings and watchings; and the benignity of the sanguine St. Eligius, who, gazing before him, raises his hand in blessing. With consummate skill, Botticelli has distinguished between the reality of these living figures and the ideal quality of the celestial vision. And a special artistic interest is given to this picture, making it a typical instance of the rare versatility of the painter's genius, by the fact that in the vigorous, massive, realistic portraiture of the saints, in the fantastic, poetical delicacy of the angelic choirs, in the stiff, severe traditionalism of the central figures of the mystery, it shows three separate modes of imaginative conception, three separate methods in the manipulation of line and colour, so distinct and individualized that it would seem almost that they must be the work of three separate artists."
A very great painter, who is not often appreciated as he should be outside of Italy, though in recent years he is much better known, is Giovanni Bellini, the distinguished Venetian painter. His portrait of the "Doge Loredano" is now recognized as one of the world's great portraits, and copies of it are to be seen everywhere. His masterpieces, however, are his altar pictures, which are noted for their beauty and devotional quality. His Madonnas particularly are famous. His well-known painting at Berlin of the "Angels Mourning over Christ" is probably one of the most humanly touching of mystical pictures. The "Presentation of the Infant Christ" in the Temple, in which Mary is shown presenting the child to the High Priest over a table, while the striking expression of worship on the faces of old Simeon and Joseph completes the meaning of the picture in wondrous fashion, is another typical example of Bellini's power to express the loftiest devotional sentiments.
Among those in second rank in this great period of art, one {63} of the greatest was surely Titian. In any other period he would quite easily have been the greatest painter of his time. His painting was done in Venice, and his early training was in glass work and mosaic work, to which apparently must be attributed his marvellous development of color in painting. At the age of about fifteen he entered the studio of Giovanni Bellini, at that time the greatest of Venetian painters and one of the important contributors to the art of this period. In this studio a group of young men, including Giorgione, with whom Titian came to be on terms of intimate friendship, Giovanni Palma, Lorenzo Lotto and Sebastiano Luciani, all destined to fame, were brought together. Especially Titian and Giorgione broke away from the older traditions of painting and became founders in modern art. All of his long productive life of nearly 100 years, except for very short visits elsewhere, Titian lived in Venice and did his marvellous painting there. There are masterpieces by him that are acknowledged by artists and critics to be among the greatest paintings we have. No one has been more faithfully studied by art students in all the generations since his time. Some of his Madonnas are among the most beautiful in the world and bear comparison even with all but the very finest of Raphael's. His "Entombment of Christ" in the Louvre is a surpassing representation of this scene which so often appealed to artists. The "Assumption" at the Academy in Venice is probably one of the most visited of pictures in Italy and shows all the best qualities, though some also of the defects, of the great Venetian.
Such pictures as the "Presentation of the Blessed Virgin," in the Vatican at Rome, show how Titian faithfully developed his best powers until he arrived at the very climax of artistic expression. No more thoroughly satisfying representations of religious themes were probably ever made. While he could make wonderful pictures on a large scale, and his compositions have always been the subject of loving study, some of his smaller pictures are almost more beautiful than any he has made, and his series of small Madonnas are only equalled and very few of them surpassed even by Raphael's treatment of the same theme.
As a portrait painter, however, Titian almost excelled his {64} work as a religious painter. His series of portraits of the Emperor Charles V are among the world's greatest portraits. His portrayals of Philip II are thought by some even to surpass those of his father. Titian's portraits of himself and his daughter are wonderful "counterfeit presentments" of the real individuals. Indeed, the portraits of his contemporaries left us by Titian have an eternal interest, and besides being great works of art they are marvellously illuminating of the human personalities depicted. They represent not merely a reproduction of the features of the individual, but preserve for posterity the character and the very soul. Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael have surpassed him when they set themselves the same task. Van Dyke is his equal in some respects, but much less satisfying. Rembrandt and Velasquez are his peers, but there are those who think that he combines the best qualities of both these great successors in the same field to a noteworthy degree.
Besides his religious pictures and portraits, however, Titian succeeded in painting some of the greatest representations of ancient mythological lore that have ever been done. His much-admired picture of the "Bacchanals" in Madrid and the still more famous "Bacchus and Ariadne," so often now seen in copies, show how well he could enter into the spirit of the old Olympian mythology. It was typical of the Renaissance time in which he lived that he should thus be inspired by Greek culture and religion. If we did not have from his hands so many beautiful Christian devotional pictures, which never could have been painted except by a man who was himself a believer in the religious scenes and mysteries that he portrays, it would have been almost impossible to believe, after a study of these pagan pictures, that he could have retained a devout Christian piety and faith with such a sympathetic appreciation and an intimate understanding of the psychology of the old pagan myths. It was this combination, however, that was perfectly possible to the great minds of the Renaissance period. The greater they were like Titian, Michelangelo and Raphael, the deeper was their faith, though the higher their power to portray phases of religious feeling that might be considered so foreign to their religious experience as to be quite out of {65} the range of their sympathetic expression. Smaller men, influenced by Greek mythology, became merely pagan, but the greater men retained their faith in its completeness. The smaller men are so much more numerous that we have the tradition of the Renaissance making men pagan, but this is not true with regard to the geniuses of the time.
Titian, as Delacroix said in the article in his "Dictionnaire des Beaux Arts," is one of those who came closest to the spirit of antiquity. The great modern artist and art connoisseur did not hesitate to declare that nowhere, unless perhaps in such great monuments of antiquity as the sculptures of the Pantheon, can antiquity be so well understood as in the pictures of Titian. Yet this is the painter whom the bishops and ecclesiastics, the monks and friars and the people of his time, desirous of expressing what was deepest in their sense of devotion and piety, sought after most eagerly, because of his wonderful ability to express all the charm of religious personages and all the power of religious feelings. He has all the many-sidedness of the Renaissance, yet without any loss of the mediaeval power to inspire profound Christian feeling.
A very great school of art of the Renaissance was that which took its rise in Southern Tuscany and the Romagna, of whom the three best-known representatives are Piero dei Franceschi, Luca Signorelli and Melozzo da Forli. Piero's influence on Perugino has already been spoken of. Berenson declares him "hardly inferior to Giotto and Masaccio in feeling for tactile values; in communicating values of force he is the rival of Donatello; he was perhaps the first to use effects of light for their direct tonic or subduing and soothing qualities; and, finally judged as an illustrator, it may be questioned whether another painter has ever presented a world more complete and convincing, has ever had an ideal more majestic, or ever endowed things with more heroic significance."
Piero's two pupils, Melozzo and Signorelli, each of them starting, as Berenson says, with the heritage Piero left him, yet following the promptings of his own temperament and the guidance of his own genius, touched excellence in his own splendid way. Melozzo was the grander temperament, {66} Signorelli the subtler and deeper mind. Visitors to Loretto, who see the music-making angels in a cupola there, are likely to be surprised into an appreciation of the power of the painter to express something of the witchery of music. Berenson says of them: [Footnote 6] "Almost they are French Gothic in their witchery, and they listen to their own playing as if to charm out the most secret spirit of their instruments. And you can see what a sense Signorelli had for refined beauty, if, when seated with Guido's 'Aurora,' you will rest your eyes on a Madonna by him in the same pavilion of the Rospigliosi Palace."
[Footnote 6: Op. cit, p. 81.]
One of the very great artists of the Renaissance, who has come into his own of appreciation in recent years again, is Antonio Allegri, generally known as Correggio, from the small town near Mantua in which he was born. He is one of the most surprising figures in the history of art. So far as we know, he had no teachers and no pupils. He seems never to have visited any of the cities in which in his time (1494-1524) so many great pictures might have been seen, nor did he seek to make the acquaintance of any of his great contemporaries. All that we know of him was that he had "an uncle who painted, but was no artist." He influenced the artists of the after-time in Italy almost more than any of his contemporaries. By some he is placed among the decadent or "sweet" school of Italian painting, and undoubtedly such painters as Guido Reni and Carlo Dolci, who were for many centuries more popular than the greater masters, were deeply influenced by him. While so negligent of others' achievements in life he was destined to form a school that attracted more attention from subsequent generations than almost any of his contemporaries. His pictures represent a climax of Italian religious art, and his painting of angels and celestial beings, together with that of Fra Angelico two generations before, serves to show how wonderfully the Italian painters of this time were able to visualize spiritual conceptions.
Grimm, in his "Life of Michelangelo," says of Correggio: "As Parma, where he (Correggio) painted, lies between Milan, Florence and Venice, so does Correggio's painting represent a middle term between the schools of these cities. Greater {67} than all who came after Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael there are many qualities of his art in which Correggio excels even these. Unlike the Venetians, he did not neglect drawing; he embraced the whole of his art and made a distinct advance."
Grimm goes as far as to say, "If we could think of streams flowing together out of the genius of Raphael, Leonardo, Titian and Michelangelo to form a new spirit, that spirit would be Correggio's. He has the dreamy smiling sweetness of Leonardo, and to add an external detail, his fate as to our absolute ignorance of his inner and outer life; he has the joyous, radiant, uncreated quality of Raphael with his brief life and its interruption in the very bloom of it; he has the boldness of Michelangelo, his liking for unprecedented attitudes and his power to reproduce them in marvellous foreshortening; he has Titian's soft coloring and the gift to picture the palpitating naked flesh as if the pulse was beating in it."
It is one of the world's greatest losses in art that he was cut off in his prime at the early age of thirty, yet what we have from him shows the supreme artist, and though we might have had further precious art treasures, we could scarcely have had a completer revelation of his genius.
Leigh Hunt, in his article on him in the "Catholic Encyclopaedia," emphasizes the far-reaching influence which Correggio's work had over artists after his time and how deeply the principles of his art prevailed in painting and sculpture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over all Italy and France.
"Correggio is the most skilful artist since the ancient Greeks in the art of foreshortening; and, indeed, he was master of every technical device in painting, being the first to introduce the rules of aerial perspective. Radiant light floods his pictures and is so delicately graded that it passes subtly into shade with that play of reflections among the shadows which gives transparency in every modulation. This is chiaroscuro. Even in Allegri's earliest works it was prominent, and later he became the acknowledged master of it. His refined feeling made Correggio paint the nude as though from a vision of ideal beauty; the sensuous in life he made pure and beautiful; earthly pleasures he spiritualized, and gave expression of mental beauty, the very culmination of true art. His angel pictures {68} are a cry of Sursum Corda. The age in which he lived and worked was partly responsible for this; but his modesty, his retiring disposition, his fondness for solitude, his ideal homelife, his piety and the fellowship of the Benedictine monks contributed far more to it."
A very great painter of Columbus' Century, though he is usually thought of as of a later period, was Jacopo Robusti, whom we know as Tintoretto. According to Ridolfi, himself born almost on the date of Tintoretto's death, the artist was born in 1512, though later dates up to 1520 have been assumed for him. Like many of the other great workers of the Renaissance, he too lived to be at least seventy-five and probably well beyond eighty. The same store of energy that enabled him to accomplish his work gave him length of days. He was the son of a dyer, and, as a boy, was fond of drawing, finding the colors used by his father valuable for practice in painting. While he lived at a time when many of the great painters of the Renaissance were at work, he was not deeply influenced by them, but fortunately for himself developed his own genius. He is famous for his drawing, his power over which he owed to dissection, drawing from life and from models draped and lighted in various ways, some of them suspended from the ceiling so as to get the correct prospective of flying figures. He invented an ingenious device, a rectangular framework with strings across it which, held before the eye, taught how to measure the proportions accurately. While Venetian painters generally are famous for their coloring, Tintoretto is the master of them all in drawing and one of the world's greatest artists in Italy.
Like every other great worker of the Renaissance, almost without exception, he had a passion for work and has left us an enormous amount of finished painting. Some of his paintings, as, for instance, the "Bacchus and Ariadne," are looked upon as the greatest of their kind. Some of his great paintings in the palace of the doges at Venice have been a favorite study of artists ever since his time. Ruskin considered him one of the greatest painters who ever lived and has made his name and work familiar to English-speaking peoples. Probably no one has ever dared to attempt the solution of so many {69} problems in painting as Tintoretto, and no one has solved them better. He deeply influenced his own generation and has influenced every generation since that has had true critical spirit and appreciation for art. It has been well said of him, and without exaggeration, that he mastered every detail of his art. Ridolfi tells us his two favorite subjects of study were the works of Titian and the reliefs of Michelangelo. He wrote on the wall of his studio these words, Il disegno di Michelangelo e il colorito di Titiano (the drawing and composition of Michelangelo and the coloring of Titian). These were his ambitions. He as nearly accomplished this transcendent purpose as perhaps it is possible to be done.
An eminent painter of the Venetian school at this time, who is usually thought of as belonging to a later period, is Paolo Cagliari, better known as Veronese. He was twenty-two years of age, however, before Columbus' Century closed, and as he began his work very early in life he had received some important commissions before he was twenty-five years of age. He owes all his training to the great period at least. His greatest picture, the "Marriage at Cana," was painted practically within the decade after the close of our period. He was very fond of huge compositions, and Tintoretto alone outdid him in the conception of large pictures and the filling of large canvases. Like most of the painters of the Renaissance, he was a man of tireless energy, as well as sharing the facility that so many of them possessed; his very large pictures did not serve to limit the number of his paintings to the extent that might otherwise be expected. He was a master of decoration and of the use of the sumptuous color that the Venetians had invented because of their familiarity with pigments and the making of glass, and no great decorative painter has equalled him in the effect produced by this wealth of color. Already the decadence is beginning and his great paintings lack feeling, and above all exhibit no trace of religious feeling, though many of them are on religious subjects, but they are splendid, unexcelled, cold triumphs of composition.
These great painters of the Renaissance, touched by the humanistic spirit abroad in the world of their time and with the old Greek ideas of the place of man as the very centre of {70} the universe, created a new way of looking at men in their relation to the world around them. They Hellenized their vision of men and stamped it upon the culture and civilization of their time. Berenson has suggested in his "The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance" that they thus influenced not only men's way of looking at men, but actually to some degree transformed men themselves by the mirror they held before them. He said: [Footnote 7]
[Footnote 7: Op. cit, p. 67.]
"The way of visualizing, affected by the artists, the humanists and the ruling classes, could not help becoming universal. Who had the power to break through this new standard of vision and, out of the chaos of things, to select shapes more definitely expressive of reality than those fixed by men of genius? No one had such power. People had perforce to see things in that way and in no other, to see only the shapes depicted, to love only the ideals presented. Nor was this all. Owing to this subtle and most irresistible of all forces, the unconscious habits of imitation, people soon ended either by actually resembling the new ideals or, at all events, earnestly endeavoring to be like them. The result has been that, after five centuries of constant imitation of a type first presented by Donatello and Masaccio, we have, as a race, come to be more like that type than we ever were before. For there is no more curious truth than the trite statement that nature imitates art. Art teaches us not only what to see, but what to be."
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V. PAINTING OUTSIDE OF ITALY
While it is the custom to think of our period, Columbus' Century, as the time of the Renaissance, owing its inspiration to the rebirth of Greek ideas into the modern world, it must not be forgotten that quite apart from this there was a "great wind of the spirit" of art blowing abroad at this epoch. The Renaissance is thought of as Italian, but the Teutonic countries exhibit in Columbus' Century a great artistic development at the beginning quite uninfluenced by the New Learning that came from the Greek rebirth. Painting, sculpture, architecture and the arts and crafts, all reached a climax of expression in the Teutonic countries, especially in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the evidence for which is to be seen in the monuments preserved for us particularly in the Low Countries and in Southern Germany.
Flemish art above all others reached a high level of perfection at this time that has scarcely ever or anywhere been surpassed. The work of the brothers Van Eyck, accomplished just before the opening of Columbus' Century, paved the way for a great new development of art and made their invention of painting in oil the favorite medium of pictorial expression. After such a work as "The Adoration of the Lamb," at Ghent, no one could doubt either of their genius as artists or the future of the new mode in painting. Their pupil, Roger Van der Weyden, did not excel his masters, but carried on worthily the tradition which they had established, and passed on the torch which they had lighted to successors whose fame was to be undying. Memling is indeed a great master in painting, almost never excelled, seldom equalled and representing a phase of art development quite independent of the humanistic side of the Renaissance.
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The wonderful decorations of the casket of St. Ursula in the Hospital of St. John at Bruges, done just about the time of the discovery of America, are not unworthy to be placed beside the greatest art of Europe from any period. The almost more beautiful "Adoration of the Magi" in the same place shows a minute finish in detail, a marvellous power of composition, a charm of expression and a wonderful application of colors which have not faded during all these four and a half centuries, which deservedly place it among the world's supreme artistic triumphs. What Giotto is at Padua in the Arena, and Fra Angelico in San Marco at Florence, Memling is in the Hospital of St. John at Bruges. The pictures must be seen in all the glory of their unfading colors to be properly appreciated or to enable those who are less familiar with the great work of the Netherlands painters to understand the encomiums of critics; but even uncolored reproductions give some idea of the charm of the originals.
Strange to say, because of the neglect of the biographical details of their painters' lives by the Teutonic nations, even Memling's name has not been quite certain until comparatively recent years. Bruges was one of the great merchant towns of this time, wealthy, populous, busy, enterprising, ambitious, the home of merchant princes who were as generous in their patronage of art as the ecclesiastics or nobility of Italy, or as our own millionaires, though they believed in the creation of new works of art especially adapted to their surroundings rather than the collection of those that had an established reputation. During the first half of the fifteenth century Brabant had produced the group of famous artists whom we have mentioned, most of whom worked at some time or other in Bruges. As Weale, himself an associate of the Royal Academy of Belgium, says in his "Hans Memlinc": [Footnote 8] "Of none of all the many celebrated men who made this town their home has Bruges more reason to be proud than of Hans Memlinc." While his works remained, however, the personal memory of him was lost, and hence it is only in our time that it has been quite sure that the initial letter of his name should be "M" and not "H," though the other form is often used by writers about art, and that the final letter should probably be "c" and not "g" though in English the latter terminal has been most frequent.
[Footnote 8: London: George Bell & Sons, 1907.]
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It was only in 1889 that Father Dussart, S.J., discovered in the Public Library of St. Omer in a manuscript by the historian, James De Meyere, an extract from a diary, in which the death of John Memmelinc, the painter, is placed on the 11th of August, 1494. He was probably born about 1435, or a little before, so that his accomplishment as a painter was all in the first half of Columbus' Century. Memling is the greatest of all these early painters of the Netherlands in his portraits, and yet there are many religious pictures which are full of the devotion of the best of the Italians and wonderful in their composition, in their solution of the technical problems of painting and their marvellous power of expression which show him to be one of the great painters of the world. His great picture, which has been called "Christ the Light of the World," is a triumph in every mode of the painter's expression. His shrine of St. Ursula, an oblong tabernacle of carved oak with gabled ends, for which Memling did a series of miniatures, is one of the most beautiful accomplishments of this kind in the world. In very contracted panels, Memling has placed hundreds of beautiful faces and details of architecture, shipping and water scenes that must be seen to be appreciated. "It has been said that Van Eyck, even when painting religious subjects, only awakes earthly ideas, whilst Memling, even when painting earthly scenes, kindles thoughts of heavenly things. It is easy to see by his paintings that he was indeed a man humble and pure of heart, who, when the arts were beginning to abdicate their position as handmaids of the Church in order to minister to the pleasures of men, preserved his love for Christian tradition, and in earnest simplicity painted what he believed and venerated as he conceived and saw it in his meditations. There is no affectation, no seeking after novelties, no mixture of pagan ideas in his works."
Memling's contemporary, Dirk Bouts, deserves scarcely less praise, and Quentin Matsys is another of the genius painters of the time. The story of his rise from blacksmith to painter is only a good illustration, whether legendary or not, of the {74} closeness of the mechanical arts, those of the goldsmith and the silversmith particularly, but of all the smiths, to the liberal arts of painting and sculpture. The divorce of these higher and lower arts from each other always leads to decadence, not alone in the mechanical, but also in the liberal arts. The goldsmith or silversmith in the Low Countries, in Italy, in Nuremberg, easily became a sculptor in the highest sense of the term, and not infrequently turned his attention successfully to other arts. It was an ideal condition, showing how deeply culture had penetrated, and whenever something of it at least does not exist the liberal arts are sure to be artificial and borrowed, not native and genuine.
Memling's successors in the Flemish tradition of painting maintained their master's distinction, and even when lacking in that genius which alone enables men to do great work did painting that is far above the mediocre, and that served to spread the spirit of culture among the people. Lucas van Leyden, in a short life of less than forty years, did some beautiful things that shall always keep his memory alive. Gerard David falls only short of the work of such great contemporaries as Memling himself. David's pupil, Moestart, nobly continues the tradition of his master. Michiel Coxcie and others do good work before the end of Columbus' Century, which, in a country less dowered with great artists than Flanders, would have secured them places of highest distinction in the history of national art.
The generation of Flemish painters after Memling who studied in Italy represent among them some great artists worthy to be mentioned even beside their Italian masters, though these are confessedly the great Renaissance artists. Justus of Ghent is the first of these, an actual contemporary of Memling and a man who not only learned from but also in turn deeply influenced the Italians with whom he was brought in contact. Jan van Mabuse-Gossaert, Bernard van Orley, Blondeel and Gerard David were touched by the spirit of the Italian Renaissance and its great painters, yet preserved the native fire of their genius and displayed national characteristics which have deservedly given them a place quite apart from the Italian schools. Some of their paintings are among those the world knows best and values most highly, and they have gained in prestige in later years as the knowledge and appreciation of Teutonic art has spread.
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Great as was the distinction and achievement of the Low Countries, at this time it was not so far superior to Southern Germany as to eclipse its brilliancy. What Bruges was to the Low Countries, and especially Flanders as an art capital at the beginning of Columbus' Century, Nuremberg was to Southern Germany. The city well deserves the name of Northern Florence, for all the arts flourished luxuriantly and the monuments attest, even better than any traditions, how much was accomplished here for art. Her greatest artist in this, very like so many of his Italian contemporaries, was not limited in his powers of expression to any one narrow mode, for Albert Duerer was painter, designer, engraver, but also like Leonardo a mathematician, and like Michelangelo a writer. Duerer's place as a painter is too well known to need special description here. He is now acknowledged to be one of the world's greatest artists, worthy to be mentioned in the same breath even with his supremely great contemporaries, Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Botticelli and Correggio. In recent years he has come to be more generally known. His pious pictures have a certain Teutonic literalness added to their mystical quality that gives them distinction.
He is one of the great group of cultured intellectual people who made Nuremberg so famous at this time. While his art has many essential German characteristics, it is much more than national, though it shows very well the high standard of excellence that the German painters of this time had attained. His visits to Italy and the Netherlands broadened his views, developed his artistic sense, refined his taste and did much for him, yet the essential German character of his painting and his absolute individuality as an artist remained. Some of his Madonnas are quite as charming in their way, though very different from the Italian, as those of the great Renaissance painters in the peninsula. His "Adoration of the Magi" will bear comparison with the masterpieces even of Italy and the Netherlands, and his Madonnas, though of German type, have a sweetness all their own. In his second period some of his {76} painting at Venice shows how deeply he was influenced by the Venetian colorists and yet was never merely an imitator.
Duerer did fine work of real artistic quality, not only in painting, but also in wood engraving, and afterwards in engraving on copper. Prints from his woodcuts or copperplates still command high prices, and indeed it is probable that only those of Rembrandt are valued more highly. He brought these two modes of art to great perfection. He was a fine craftsman, as well as an artist, and both etching and wood {77} engraving owe much to his inventive ability and handicraftsmanship.
As might be expected of this intimate friend of Wilibald Pirkheimer, he was a scholar as well as an artist, and we have from him three books, one on the proportions of the human figure, which shows how carefully he studied the essentials of his art; one on geometry and one on the art of fortification. Like Leonardo he felt his ability as an engineer, and like Raphael and Michelangelo was widely interested not only in every mode of art, but all the intellectual interests of his time. No more than the Italians he was not a narrow specialist in any sense of the word, and nothing shows so clearly as his career and achievements how much the spirit of genius was abroad at this time in Europe everywhere, lifting men up to heights of accomplishment that had scarcely been possible before.
Besides Duerer, the great painters of South Germany were the Holbeins, father and son. Hans Holbein the elder first came into prominence at Augsburg as a partner to his brother Sigmund, a painter, none of whose works have come down to us. His early works are nearly all on the Passion and show the influence of his studies of the Passion Plays, so frequently given all over South Germany at this time. Early in the sixteenth century he came under Italian influence and painted some pictures that, while naive and primitive, exhibit evidence of high artistic ability. His fame was eclipsed entirely by his son, Hans Holbein, known as the younger, though there is no doubt at all of the influence exerted by Holbein the father on the art of his period, and his sketchbooks are precious material for the biography and customs of his contemporaries.
His son left Augsburg about 1515 to become an illustrator of books at Basel. The first patron of the younger Holbein is said to have been Erasmus, for whom, shortly after his arrival, he illustrated an edition of the "Encomium Moriae" by pen-and-ink sketches, which are now in the Museum at Basel. After some five years of work as an illustrator, Hans began to attract attention by his portrait drawings. Some of these, as J. A. Crowe in his article on Holbein in the ninth edition of {78} the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" says, are "finished with German delicacy and with a power and subtlety of hand seldom rivalled in any school." That he could paint with almost equal distinction his portrait of Boniface Amerbach, painted in 1519, furnishes ample evidence, for it is "acknowledged to be one of the most complete examples of smooth and transparent handling that Holbein ever executed" (Crowe).
Art was gradually being pushed out in the German countries, however, and above all there was no opportunity for religious painting, which used to form the chief source of income and of inspiration, as well as the principal resource of painters before this, as it continued to be in the Latin countries. Besides, the religious revolution had come to occupy men's minds with disputes about religious subjects, and interest in art further declined. How well Holbein could have painted religious pictures is very well illustrated by the famous altar-piece of the Burgomaster Meyer, with his wives and children, in prayer before the Blessed Virgin. Few Madonnas are more impressive than this, but now the beautiful Mother of God was no longer an object of reverence. Holbein could get no further commissions of this kind, and was pitifully reduced, it is said, even to the painting of escutcheons for a living. Erasmus, whose portrait he had so often made in many different positions, compassionated his poverty and lack of occupation and sent him with a note of introduction to Sir Thomas More. More appreciated him at once, had him paint his own portrait and those of his family and engaged the interest of the nobility in him.
Holbein executed portraits of many of the prominent nobility of England, and after two happy years returned to Basel, taking to Erasmus the sketch of More's family, which is still to be seen in the gallery of that city, being indeed one of the precious treasures of it. With the money made in London, Holbein purchased a house and made the charming portraits of his wife and children for it, but the next year witnessed the fury of the Iconoclasts, who, in their so-called reforming zeal, destroyed in one day almost all the religious pictures at Basel. It is not surprising to find him two years later back in England, where the merchants of the Steel Yard gave him a series {79} of commissions to paint portraits and he was employed also by the Court to provide the famous series of portraits of prospective Queens for Henry VIII. Some of these make it very dear that he could do portraits absolutely without flattery. {80} The series of drawings by him at Windsor form one of the most precious treasures of the English Crown. He was busy painting a picture of Henry VIII, "Confirming the Privileges of the Barber Surgeons," still to be seen in their building in London, when he sickened of the plague and died in 1543. Crowe says, "Had he lived his last years in Germany he would not have changed the current which decided the fate of painting in that country; he would but have shared the fate of Duerer and others, who merely prolonged the agony of art amidst the troubles of the Reformation."
Everywhere a great spirit entered into art and produced a series of artists with an originality and a power of expression that has given them a place in the history of art. The first important development of the modern period in France came among the illuminators of books and is well illustrated by the work of Jean Fouquet of Tours, the Court Painter of Louis XI. I have mentioned some of the books illuminated by him in the chapter on Books and Prints, and a copy of one of his illuminations from the famous Livy manuscript will be found there. He did a series of larger works which entitles him to the name of painter, and his portraits are worthy of the time. Bourdischon and Perreal, the first a painter of historical subjects and portraits in the reign of Louis XI, and the second, attached to the army of Charles VIII in his Italian expedition, painted many battle scenes. These first French artists were little influenced by Italian art, and then come a group, Jean Cousin and the Clouets, especially Francois, who is often called Janet, who, though under Italian influence to some extent, yet showed, especially taken in connection with the sculptors Colombe and Jean Goujon, that France possessed artists capable of forming a native school. Clouet's portrait of Elizabeth of Austria, wife of Charles IX, is worthy of the great portrait painters of this time.
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In Spain, as in France, there was a development of art in Columbus' Century that owes nothing to external influence and shows the originality of the time. As early as 1454 one Sanchez de Castro, "the Morning Star" of Andalusia, painted a retablo in the Cathedral of Seville and a fresco of St. Julian in the Church of the same city. He was still painting in 1516, so {82} that he must have enjoyed as long a life as many of the great Italian artists of the time. Juan de Borgona was working at Toledo in 1495 at a series of paintings which recall Perugino, yet have an originality of their own. It is not surprising, then, to find Luis de Morales, born about the beginning of the sixteenth century, called "the Divine" and hailed as the first Spaniard whose genius and good fortune have obtained him a place among the great painters of Europe. One of the master painters of this time is Juan Fernandez Navarrete, most of whose pictures were painted after the close of our century, but who had passed some twenty-five years of his life in it and been subjected to its influence and received his education from it. He is extremely interesting, because his nickname el Mudo, the Dumb, recalls the fact that he was one of the unfortunate deaf who, for lack of hearing, cannot speak, and yet succeeded in developing a great mode of expression for himself. Such opportunities for the defective are supposed to be quite modern, but as a matter of fact, in spite of difficulties and obstacles, genius usually finds a mode of expression. Like Italy, Spain has its schools of painting, and the school of Andalusia came into prominence under Luis de Vargas, "the best painter of the Sevillan line from Sanchez de Castro to Velasquez" (Sterling, "The Artists of Spain"). His earliest known work was completed just about the end of Columbus' Century. It is the altar-piece of the Chapel of the Nativity in the Cathedral at Seville, so often admired. Vargas is famous for his portraits, "for the grandeur and simplicity of his design, his correct drawing and fresh coloring and the great purity and grace in his female heads." [Footnote 9] Pablo de Cespedes, born toward the end of our period, doing his work afterwards, is very well known.
[Footnote 9: Painting, Spanish and French, Gerard W. Smith, among the Art Handbooks.]
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In the School of Valentia, Juan de Juanes is famous for his religious pictures. His vigor and variety of invention are wonderful and his coloring is splendid. His numerous faces of Christ were unrivalled, the best perhaps being that with the Sacred Cup. His pencil was wholly dedicated to religion, and, {84} according to the tradition, he habitually communicated and confessed before taking a sacred picture. He had two daughters, Dorothea and Marguerita, who are famous in the history of Spanish art, typical, illustrious women of the Spanish Renaissance.
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VI. SCULPTURE IN ITALY
Columbus' Century was destined to see the creation of some of the finest sculpture since the time of the Greeks. Probably in no department of art does this period stand out as so surely surpassing any other period of modern times, or indeed any time except the Periclean, as in its power to furnish great examples of plastic art. Triumphs of sculpture were accomplished in every medium--stone, bronze, terra-cotta, wood and the precious metals. The eve of the century saw the making of some very great sculptures, which portended the wonderful development that was to come. It was in 1447 that Ghiberti completed the second pair of doors for the Baptistery at Florence, which have been the admiration of the world ever since. After this it was easy to understand that there was no development of artistic expression in plastic work that might not be expected. All the expectations possible were realized in the succeeding hundred years.
Columbus' Century was ushered in with as great a triumph in sculpture and by the work of a master as great in his maturity, which came just then, as Fra Angelico was in painting. Fra Angelico, however, had been but little touched by the Renaissance spirit of classicism, while Donatello, the familiar name for Donato di Niccolo di Betti Pardi, whom the classic impulse was to carry ahead of all contemporary artists and indeed to make a model and a subject of study for all succeeding students of sculpture, was born even before the close of the fourteenth century, but like so many of the distinguished artists of the Renaissance period, lived a long life of persistent work and great achievement, and the most important part of that work came after 1450.
His greatest triumph, the monument to Gatamelata, was set up in Padua in 1453. There are two equestrian statues {86} that are conceded by all the world to be supreme works of art, and copies of which are to be found in many museums throughout our civilization. One of these is Donatello's "Gatamelata" and the other the "Colleoni," by Verrocchio, who was a disciple of Donatello. The earlier sculptor had seen some of the equestrian monuments of the Roman times and had wondered whether he could not imitate them, or at least accomplish the same purpose. Undaunted by the difficulties as men seem ever to have been at this time, he faced not only the problem of making the model that would express his ideas, but of putting it into the bronze form that would make it imperishable. He had to master all the problems of equine anatomy, but above all he had to make himself familiar with the details of the technique of the founders' art so as to master the process of casting so large a work absolutely in the round. Practically he had to discover a great many of these technical points for himself, and he had to invent methods of accomplishing his purpose. To most men at any time this would have seemed an almost impossible achievement. They would have been discouraged from attempting it. There were many simpler forms of his art that he might practise, and not take on his shoulders all the technics of the bronze foundry, but Donatello undisturbedly went on his way and accomplished his purpose.
There is nothing more interesting and at the same time nothing more characteristic of this period of discovery and a achievement--indeed, it is a worthy prelude to Columbus' Century--than the fact that the very first equestrian statue, made in the modern times when all the difficulties, material as well as artistic, were heaped up before the sculptor, is one of the greatest monuments of that kind in the world's history. Only the "Colleoni," made a half a century later, surpasses, if indeed that is to be conceded, yet this was the very first attempt. This is not so surprising, however, if one realizes the significance of other work of this time. Within a half a century of the invention of oil painting some of the greatest masterpieces of that mode came into existence; within less than half a century of the invention of printing, some of the most beautiful books that have ever been made were printed. There has been a {87} tendency in our time, as a result of much discussion of evolution, to think that such triumphs of achievement come only after long evolution and as the climax of a prolonged process of development. On the contrary genius at any time in the world's history takes hold of a mode of expression for the first time and secures a triumph in it that will be the envy and admiration of all succeeding generations.
While Donatello's success in this huge equestrian work might be expected to stamp his genius as much more fitted for monumental sculpture than any other mode of his favorite art, there is scarcely any phase of sculpture which he has not illustrated beautifully. The very spirit of youth is caught and fixed in imperishable bronze in his "St. George." There is probably no more successful attempt at the artistic rendering of the "little poor man of God" than Donatello's sculptured expression of him in his statue of "St. Francis" in the Church of St. Antony of Padua.
It was Donatello who, according to M. Muntz, the German authority on the history of sculpture, recovered the child from antiquity and gave it back to art. Some of his baby faces are among the most beautiful ever made, and yet without any of the sickly sentimentality that would make them pall. Their bodies are alive, their draperies cling or float as they touch their wearers, or are caught up by the air. Only his great contemporary, Luca della Robbia, has rivalled him in this regard, and it is doubtful whether even he has excelled him, though the world as a rule knows della Robbia for his baby faces and thinks of Donatello as having accomplished more monumental work. Donatello's "Bambino Gesu," infinitely human, and his boyish "St. John the Baptist," precociously serious, in the Church of the Vanchetoni, Florence, where they are seldom seen unless particularly looked for, are charming examples of Donatello's power of expression in child faces.
In Donatello, as in so many of these artists of Columbus' Century, the man is almost more interesting than his work. While at Padua doing the "Gatamelata," Vasari tells us that his works were held to be miracles, and they were praised so much that finally the master resolved characteristically to return to Florence. He naively remarked one day, "If I stayed {88} here any longer I should forget all I have ever known through being so much praised. I shall willingly return home, where I get censured continually; for such censure gives occasion for study and brings as a consequence greater glory." His end was very sad. He, whose hands had accomplished so much, was stricken with paralysis and yet lived on for years. His pupils, with whom the great master was a favorite, took care of him, and even to the end took his suggestions, worked out his ideas and brought their work to him for criticism. Galileo, a century later unable to see after having seen farther into the heavens than any other; Beethoven, unable to hear after having written some of the most divinely beautiful music ever conceived, may be compared to Donatello, with his useless skilful hands.
Even this sad fate did not sour him, however, but only made him tenderer to those who needed help. He had no near relatives, and some distant connections, hearing that his end was near, and as Hope Rea tells in his "Donatello" (London: George Bell & Sons), to which I am indebted for most of the details of this sketch, reminded him of their existence and begged him to leave them a small property which he possessed near Prato. "I cannot consent to that, relations mine," he answered them, "because I wish, as indeed seems to me to be reasonable, to leave it to the peasant who has labored so long upon it, and not to you who have never done anything in connection with it and indeed wish for it as some recompense for your visit to me. Go, I give you my blessing." The epigram, with which old Giorgio Vasari ends his all too short appreciation of the great master, seems the most fitting close that could be made to any notice of his life, "O lo spirito di Donato opera nel Buonarroto, o quello del Buonarroto anticipo di operare in Donato" ("Either the spirit of Donatello wrought again in Buonarotti, or the genius of Buonarotti had pre-existence in Donatello.")
Among the great artists, in the highest sense of that word, and one of the great sculptors of this period must be reckoned Luca della Robbia, with whose name there are naturally associated the names of others of this family, and particularly Andrea. Luca was chosen as one of the sculptors to execute {89} portions of the decorative work of the Duomo at Florence. He did one of the famous cantorias, the two sculptured marble singing galleries which are unfortunately no longer in the Duomo itself, but in the museum at the Eastern end of the great church. This was finished in 1438, when Luca, whose years run coincident with the century, was thirty-eight years of age. Among the artists from whom the Florentine officials might have chosen for the execution of these singing galleries was also Donatello, who actually modelled the other of the pair, and Ghiberti, since famous for the great doors of the Baptistery. It is sufficient to say that when Luca della Robbia's singing gallery was finished, the Florentines realized very well that no mistake had been made in giving him the execution of it, even though he had such great rivals.
This is almost the only great work in marble that we have from Luca della Robbia. He was a scientist, as well as an artist, and he was very much interested in artistic glazed work. He devoted himself to making this as perfect as possible and succeeded in adding this as a wonderful new medium to sculpture. Like so many other of the artists, painters and sculptors of this time, he was originally a goldsmith, but became ambitious of doing higher things than those usually committed to the craftsmen. Vasari tells us that he carved all day and drew all night, keeping his feet warm through the long winter evenings by covering them up in a basketful of carpenter shavings. He worked at the glazing of terra-cotta with the idea at first apparently of preserving his clay models by baking them.
Working in this new medium he brought to the execution of the models for it all his genius as a sculptor and succeeded in accomplishing some of the most beautiful results. He developed the medium so as to secure charming color, creamy white figures that stand out from a cloudy blue background, with a glaze that is perfect and joints that are almost invisible. It is only in comparatively recent years that a due meed of appreciation has been accorded to della Robbia's work once more, though his contemporaries valued him at his true worth, but in compensation for the neglect his pieces are now among the most costly works of art whenever they turn up at public {90} sales. While devoting himself to the new artistic modes, he accepted commissions in both bronze and marble for the embellishment of Florence, and the bronze doors of the sacristy of the Duomo are his, as well as certain reliefs in marble on the Campanile.
"In fact," as Hope Rea says in his "Tuscan and Venetian Artists," [Footnote 10] "the total amount of work produced by him in the middle twenty years of his life shows him to have been one of those strenuous laborers in art, the like of whom have hardly been seen before or since the years of the Renaissance." Luca never married, but he gave every opportunity to his nephew, Andrea della Robbia, who was an apt pupil, but who confined himself practically entirely to the new style invented by his uncle. In spite of what might be expected, the young man, with the advantage of his uncle's training and the possession of his uncle's secrets, did not do better work, though the amount of it that he turned out made the della Robbia terra-cotta an important part of Florentine art. In his hands, and those of his son Giovanni, what had been as pure an art as any form of sculpture came to be merely a decorative craft. Andrea's many beautiful pieces, however, and especially the well-known "Bambine," the swaddled infant medallions of the Hospital of the Innocents, have been very popular at all times and have entered into renewed popularity in our day. The great series of incidents of St. Francis' life, executed by Andrea for the Franciscan monastery of La Verna, represents the climax of his art work. He was thoroughly sympathetic with the early Franciscan traditions and he expressed the details of them beautifully.
[Footnote 10: "The Tuscan and Venetian Artists: Their Thought and Work," by Hope Rea. London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1904.]
One of the greatest of the sculptors of the Renaissance, who must indeed be reckoned among the greatest artists of all times, is Leonardo da Vinci's teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio. He was one of the wonderful Florentine artists whose genius was recognized by Lorenzo the Magnificent and was given the opportunity to express his artistic conceptions worthily by this liberal patron of the arts and literature. Three of his great {91} works, the tomb of Piero and Giovanni de Medici in the Church of San Lorenzo; his "David," which is in the National Museum, the Bargello in Florence and the "Child Holding a Dolphin," now in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, were all three executed for Lorenzo. These are all in bronze, but with the versatility of the men of his time, Verrocchio could express himself in other media just as charmingly. Michel has said of the terra-cotta "Madonna" made for the Hospital of Santa Maria Novella that in it "supreme distinction of thought is combined with the most scrupulous observation of nature." The famous marble bust of a "Flower Girl" is in the Bargello. A silver basso-rilievo, the "Beheading of John the Baptist," is now in the Cathedral Museum at Florence.
His two masterpieces are "The Incredulity of St. Thomas" and the statue of Colleoni, the celebrated condottiere who had commanded the Venetian troops. Both of these are in bronze. Little as the deep feeling of the scene between Christ and the doubting Thomas might seem apt to lend itself to expression in sculpture, Verrocchio has succeeded in making an extremely beautiful and touching work of art. The Divine Humanity, urging Thomas the doubter to put his hand into His pierced side, is a wonderful realization of one of the most pathetic of incidents. The triumph of Verrocchio's genius, however, is the "Colleoni." It is probably the greatest equestrian statue ever made. His contemporaries declared that Leonardo da Vinci's figure of the Duke of Milan on horseback surpassed it. Sometimes doubt is expressed as to whether Donatello's "Gatamelata" does not rival it. That question must be left for great artists and sculptors to decide, and in the meantime there is no doubt at all that Verrocchio was one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived. Burckhardt declared that "we have a right to call this equestrian statue the finest in the world."
Unfortunately Verrocchio was seized with a chill while casting it and died at the early age of forty-three, or we might have had some still more wonderful work from him. He is a typical many-sided genius of the Renaissance, though in sculpture particularly only two, perhaps three, of his greatest contemporaries ever equalled him; it is even doubtful if they {92} have excelled his "Colleoni," yet everything that he ever did was an advance on his previous accomplishment. His disciple, Leopardi, who finished the casting of the "Colleoni," is another great sculptor of the time who, in any other period, would be looked upon as a supreme artist. He has shone with reflected glory, besides, for his part in the "Colleoni," though it is very doubtful whether any but very small credit is due to him for the completion of this work which Verrocchio had left in such a state that but little was required to make it what it had been ever since, one of the world's greatest monuments of sculpture.
A great sculptor of the Renaissance, whose career presents many other features of interest, however, which have made him famous, is Benvenuto Cellini. He was born in 1500 and, like many of the artists and most of the sculptors of the time, began his life work as an apprentice to a goldsmith. After a troubled early manhood in Rome and other Italian cities, during which he executed some medals that are among the best of their kind ever made, and various ornamental pieces in the precious metals, he was for a time at the court of Francis I. Afterwards he worked in Florence, lending his genius to the fortification of the city during the war with Siena. While his career is entirely exceptional among the great artists of the time it is often taken for a type of the restless, rather unmoral than immoral, character that was supposed to be produced by the paganizing influence of the New Learning. The true types of Columbus' Century among the artists, however, are such men as Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo, deeply intent on their work, anxious only for the opportunity to accomplish high artistic purpose and without any of that restless unmorality that is at least supposed to have characterized Cellini. It would be much nearer the truth to point to the lives of such men as Fra Angelico or Fra Bartolommeo, happy in their monastery homes, or Correggio, who spent his time so peacefully with the religious of the little town in which he lived, than to appeal to Benvenuto's chequered stormy career as typical of the Renaissance.
Cellini's autobiography, as great a work of imaginative art, very probably, as any that he ever executed in plastic materials, has attracted as much attention in literature as his great {93} sculptures have in art. His name, then, has become familiar to many who know nothing about the intimate personal careers of the great artists of the time and who will in all good faith continue to draw their conclusions as to the character of the men of the Renaissance from Cellini's rather boastful proclamation of his successful vices, though this exactly represents the exception which proves the rule to be the opposite. In spite of his forbidding picture of himself he had moments of intense religious feeling and highest inspiration. Anyone who has seen his famous "Christ" in marble in the Escurial will not be likely to think that he was entirely lacking in deep religious feeling. His famous bronze group of "Perseus holding the Head of Medusa," to which deservedly the Florentines have given a distinguished place in front of the old ducal palace at Florence, is one of the masterpieces of modern sculpture. W. M. Rossetti spoke of it in his article in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" as "a work full of the fire of genius and the grandeur of a terrible beauty. One of the most typical and unforgettable monuments of the Italian Renaissance." His story of the casting of this great monument shows the difficulties under which the sculptors of the time labored, and yet how triumphantly they overcame technical obstacles and made great works of art.
While so great as a sculptor in monumental work, Cellini never thought art objects of small size beneath his attention, and like Raphael, willing to make the cartoons for the tapestries of the Sistine Chapel and composing great pictorial scenes as their subjects, so Cellini, with a true Renaissance artistic spirit, modelled beautifully any and every form of work in metal. He modelled flagons, bells and even rings and jewels, designed coins and medals for the Papal mint and for the Medici at Florence. It has been said that everything minted under his direction attained the highest excellence. His work in alto-rilievo was as fine as that in basso-rilievo. All over Europe there are well-authenticated specimens of smaller pieces from his hands, a bell in the Rothschild collection, a gold salt-cellar in Vienna, a shield elaborately wrought in Windsor Castle and even beautifully chased armor, such as he made for Charles IX of Sweden, which may be seen at Stockholm.
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Of course, for any proper estimation of the Italian sculpture of this period, the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo must bulk very large. They have been treated in separate chapters, and there is room here only to say that, while unfortunately we have almost none of Leonardo's sculpture, we have from his own great artistically critical generation traditions of magnificent accomplishment. As for Michelangelo, his own generation admired him only too much, and the almost inevitable imitation of his genius brought on decadence in plastic art much sooner than it would otherwise have come. His faults were imitated without any of the genius in power of expression that condones them in the great originals. If Michelangelo's sculpture had been the only contribution of this period to plastic art, that would have been sufficient to place it high among the periods of greatest productivity in this department of art. As it is, there were men who preceded Michelangelo whose genius is unquestioned and whose achievements have been recognized by the world ever since.
The roll of sculptors of the century worthily closes with the name of John of Bologna, who was born at Douai in Flanders, but passed all his life in Italy, and it is hard to know whether to group him with the Italian or extra-Italian sculptors. Most of his great work was done after the end of our century, but as he was probably more than twenty-five years of age when the century closed, and received all his training and inspiration from the men of our time, he deserves a place here. John, who owes his name of Bologna to the fact that one of his greatest works, the bronze "Neptune," was prepared for the fountain of Bologna, was often called by his contemporaries Il Fiammingo, in reference to the place of his birth. Probably no sculptor of his time has been more popular all down the centuries than he, and there are very few with any claim to education and culture who do not know his wonderful figure of "Mercury," with winged feet borne aloft upon the breezes blowing out of the mouth of Aeolus, the god of the winds. There has probably never been a more masterly expression of light, easy, graceful movements in statuary than this. It is for his power to express movement {95} within the limitations of plastic art that John is famous. His "Rape of the Sabines" in the Bargello in Florence is declared "to have come nearer to expressing swift-flashing motion and airy lightness than has ever been accomplished before or since." He lacked the faults of exaggeration of the later Renaissance and had many of its best qualities.
The sculptured work on and in the Certosa at Pavia belongs mainly to Columbus' period. It remains one of the great architectural and sculptural monuments of the world. It has its defects, which are mainly due to over-luxuriousness of decoration and failure to make the decoration and the structure itself harmonize, but it remains a beautiful example of the art of the time. It has continued to be ever since a place of pilgrimage for art lovers, and it will doubtless continue to be so for as long as this present phase of our civilization lasts. It contains some most effective work, and while not all of its sculpture is conceived in the true spirit of what belongs to plastic art, there is much of it that has never been surpassed except by supremely great sculptors, the men who are looked upon as the world's geniuses in this department. When the Certosa is compared with some of the churches which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were thought to be the highest expressions of artistic excellence, the taste and the ability of the sculptors and architects of the Renaissance become manifest.
Perhaps nothing brings out in greater relief the accomplishment of the sculptors of this period than the deep decadence of the art in the succeeding century. The only name that stands out with any prominence during the seventeenth century is that of Bernini, a man of undoubted talent, who, in a better period of art, might have been a sculptor of the first rank. Much of his monumental work, however, is thoroughly inartistic and has been declared "a series of perfect models of what is worst in plastic art." It is still more illuminating to learn that this work was looked upon in his time with the loftiest admiration. No sculptor in any period had quite so much fulsome praise. The eighteenth century sank, if possible, still lower in all that pertained to true sculpture, and sculptors often of great technical skill occupied themselves in making such {96} trivialities as statues covered with filmy veils, through which forms and features could be seen, and other tricks of art. It was not until Canova came at the end of the eighteenth century that there was any gleam of hope for sculpture, and even this was eclipsed to some extent by the classic formalism which came in with it.
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VII. SCULPTURE AND MINOR ARTS AND CRAFTS OUTSIDE OF ITALY
While Italy excelled in sculpture at this time, as indeed in every department of art, the other countries of Europe practically all enjoyed a magnificent period of development in plastic art, not a little of it thoroughly national in character and some of the most precious of it quite apart from Italian influence. Besides, there was a marvellous accomplishment in the subsidiary arts and artistic crafts well deserving of mention which confirms the place of this period among the greatest of productive eras. A very noteworthy development of sculpture took place in the Netherlands, where in the midst of the rising democracies and the commercial prosperity there was a great outburst of artistic genius. Wealthy patrons had the good taste to recognize artistic genius and encourage it. There has never been a period or country when tradesmen proved more discriminatingly beneficent. It would be indeed surprising if the country that produced the Van Eycks and the first great evolution of oil painting with the work of Van der Weyden, Memling, Quentin Matsys, Gerard David and so many others on canvas, should not have given us sculpture worthy of this fine artistic development.
We do not, as a rule, know the names of the individual sculptors in the Netherlands, because apparently they looked upon themselves as artist artisans, whose duty it was to do their work faithfully and thoroughly, looking for no reward of fame and no special recognition beyond their own consciousness of having done good work. Their sculptures are to be seen in many places, in the cathedrals, the town halls and the other beautiful buildings erected at this time. Louvain, Brussels and many of the other towns of what is now Belgium {98} particularly must have had many artistic workers in stone who well deserved the name of sculptors. They executed not only beautifully decorative work, but also full-length statues, busts, medallions in high and low relief, and plastic ornaments of all kinds. The high quality of their accomplishment can scarcely be disputed, and yet the lack of their names has often left the impression that there were no great sculptors at this time; the fine sculpture that has come down to us is, however, an emphatic contradiction of any such notion.
Some of the work done in the humble medium of wood is particularly interesting. The charmingly artistic wood-carving of the consecration of St. Eloi in the Church of Notre Dame at Bruges is a striking example. The choir seats of the Church at Louvain are quite as worthy of high praise, and the wood-carvings in the choir at Harlem so often admired come from this same period. Perhaps one of the best examples of the wood-carving of the time is the pulpit of the Cathedral at Leyden, which was made in this century.
The tombs of Mary of Burgundy and of Charles the Bold in the Church of Notre Dame, Bruges, still further emphasize the sculptural capacity of these generations, though, from the rarity of large masterpieces, there were apparently but few opportunities to display it on a monumental scale. These monuments, especially the older one, are supremely great works of art. A comparison of them is very illuminating for the history of sculpture in our period. Though constructed scarcely half a century apart, they are executed under the influence of the two typical but very different art impulses of this century. The tomb of Mary, made by Peter Beckere of Brussels in 1502, is mediaeval and Gothic in spirit. That of Charles, made by order of Philip II just before 1560, is a distinctly Renaissance work. The later is much more modern and obvious in the meaning of all its symbolism, but one need not be an artist to see how much more genuinely artistic is the earlier tomb. At first glance one seems almost a replica of the other, except, of course, for the figure of the deceased and the subjects of the decorations of the sarcophaguses, but it takes but little study to discover what a descent there is in the art quality of the Renaissance work. Nowhere can one see the {99} value of the old and the new nor compare Gothic and Renaissance so easily as here.
Sculpture developed very wonderfully in Germany during the first half of Columbus' Century. The commercial prosperity of the time, the development of industries and the increase of trade caused an inflow of wealth into many of the cities of Southern Germany particularly, and not a little of this wealth found its way through the generosity of donors into the decoration of their churches. The people's faith was deep and full. Reform had not yet come to disturb it. Germany devoted itself especially to sculptured decoration in wood. An immense number of carved altars, pulpits, choir screens, stalls, tabernacles and other church fittings of very great elaborateness and usually fine artistic quality were produced. One of the first of the great German wood-carvers was Joerg Syrlin, who executed the famous choir stalls of Ulm cathedral, so richly decorated and ornamented with statuettes and canopies. His son of the same name did the great pulpit in the same cathedral and was given the commission for the elaborate stalls in Blaubeuren church. These were finished within a year of the discovery of America. At Nuremberg wood-carving also reached a high degree of excellence, and Veit Stoss of Nuremberg, though notorious for his escapades, was looked upon as the most skilful of artists for church woodwork. He was invited to Cracow to do the high altar, the tabernacle and the stalls of the Frauenkirchen. His masterpiece is the great wooden panel nearly six feet square, carved toward the end of the fifteenth century, with an immense number of scenes from Bible history, which is now among the treasures of the Nuremberg town hall.
Albrecht Duerer himself with Renaissance versatility took up sculpture and did not despise even the humble medium of wood. He was a clever wood-carver and executed a tabernacle with an exquisitely carved relief of Christ on the Cross between His mother and St. John, which still may be seen in the chapel of the monastery at Landau. The British Museum possesses a number of miniature reliefs in boxwood which were also made by Duerer, though he early abandoned wood-carving for art work in materials that might be expected {100} to be more enduring. The influence of the wood-carving of this period can be noted in the work of the sculptors of the time, even after they abandoned it for stone and bronze. {101} Adam Kraft's great Schreyer monument in St. Sebald's Church at Nuremberg, for instance, shows very clearly the influence of wood-carving. There is no doubt, however, about his high place among the sculptors, even of this glorious period, in the art.
The Vischer family for three generations executed a series of very great monuments in bronze, especially during the second half of Columbus' Century. The genius of the family was Peter Vischer of the second generation, who was admitted as a master sculptor into the sculptors' guild of Nuremberg in 1489. Perhaps the most interesting thing about his work is his absolute mastery of the technique of his art. Few men have ever succeeded in casting in bronze to such good effect. After having finished the magnificent tomb of Archbishop Ernest in Magdeburg Cathedral, in which some traces of Gothic influence still linger, Vischer obtained the opportunity for his masterpiece in the beautiful canopy for the shrine of St. Sebald at Nuremberg, a veritable triumph of plastic art. Modern, critical appreciation of it has very well corroborated contemporary admiration. Its details are a never-ending source of interest and study. Some of the statuettes of saints attached to the slender columns of the canopy are among the most charming examples of their kind that we have. They have grace and dignity, as well as great expressiveness. Near the base there is a small, evidently portrait, figure of a rather stout, bearded man wearing a large leathern apron and holding some of the sculptor's tools with which he usually worked that is considered to be a figure of Peter himself. It is a marvel of clever realism.
The story of the execution of this monumental masterpiece is of itself a lesson in the art work of the time. Peter was assisted by his sons, and they worked at it almost continuously for more than ten years, between 1508 and 1519. It was often extremely difficult for them to secure money enough for their work from the authorities who had agreed to pay, though stingily enough, yet they devoted themselves to it as whole-heartedly as if it was a munificently rewarded work. The smaller figures are executed with marvellous attention to detail, and every feature of the work, the graceful scroll {102} foliage so abundantly used, the dragons and even the grotesques, all the details which crowd every possible part of the canopy, were executed evidently without the slightest regard for the time and labor which were required for them and with the good workman's delight in his work.
It has sometimes been said that these Teutonic sculptors of Nuremberg were mere workers in bronze who reproduced in that material the ideas and drawings of others. As pointed out by Cecil Headlam in his little book on "The Bronze Founders of Nuremberg," [Footnote 11] "The evidence of our eyes, which enable us to trace the development of their style, would be enough to refute that opinion even if we were without the documentary evidence which shows that father and sons alike were patient and painstaking draughtsmen as well as craftsmen all their lives." There is no doubt at all that they adopted and adapted many ideas from the great Italian sculptors of their own and the preceding time. They were deeply influenced by Sansovino, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, but they were not mere imitators and they were not plagiarists in any sense of the word. To quote Mr. Headlam again (page 131):
[Footnote 11: "The Bronze Founders of Nuremberg: Peter Vischer and His Family," by Cecil Headlam, B. A., formerly Demi of Magdalen College, Oxford. London: George Bell & Sons, 1906.]
"They could apply the lessons they had learnt from their careful study of the Italian Masters, and apply them with successful originality. It is in the energy which lives in the King Arthur, the simple yet vigorous composition and execution of bas-reliefs, such as the Healing of the Blind Man of St. Sebald's tomb, or the Tucher Memorial, with their wholly admirable treatment of lines and planes; it is in the tender and spiritual feeling infused into the greatest of their bronze portraits that the unanswerable vindication lies of an imitation proved not too slavish and of a study that has not deadened but inspired."
Other cities in Southern Germany, as Augsburg and Innsbrueck, and at least one city in Northern Germany, Luebeck, are in possession of bronze sculptures which show how thoroughly alive was the spirit of plastic art all over Germany at this time.
Innsbrueck possesses a series of bronze statues, all of them {103} executed in the first half of the sixteenth century, which has always attracted the attention of the world artists ever since. There are twenty-eight colossal bronze figures around the tomb of the Emperor Maximilian which stands in the centre of the nave of the Cathedral. They are designed to represent the heroes of the olden time and one of them, usually looked upon as the finest, is an ideal statue of King Arthur of the Briton legends, famous for the nobility of the face and pose. He is represented in the plate armor of the early fifteenth century. The statue of Theodoric is also considered to be not only a very fine example of the work of the period, but also one of the world's great bronze statues. The difficulties encountered {104} in the accomplishment of the casting of the bronze for these were so great that the Emperor invited Peter Vischer from Nuremberg to superintend at least this portion of the work and it is probable that his influence was felt also on the modeling. The designs are usually attributed to local artists at Innsbruck, however, of whose names we are not sure. In nothing are these older periods so different from ours as in the utter neglect of artists to make any effort to secure their personal fame.
In France even before the time of the Renaissance, or at least before the effect of Greek ideas was felt, there was a magnificent development of sculpture, an inheritance from the older period of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries which had left such magnificent monuments as the tombs in St. Denis, Le Beau Dieu at Amiens and the statues in the porch of the cathedral at Chartres. The first of these French Gothic sculptors of Columbus' Century is Colombe, trained in Flanders, who founded a school of sculpture at Tours. He {105} executed the tomb of Margaret of Austria and her husband Duke Philibert of Savoy in the Marble Church of Brou. Tours became a great centre of art in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Its name, the town of spires, indicates that there had always been aspirations after effect in their ecclesiastical architecture and this reached a culmination in statuary at this time. With Colombe his nephews worked while Jean Juste and his son collaborated in the poetic tomb built in honor of the son and daughter of Charles VIII in the Cathedral of Tours. Here also they erected the famous tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Bretagne, which has since been carried to St. Denis. The Justes had a power of putting touching human qualities into marble that has always given a special interest to their work. Jean Fouchet probably made at this time the lovely tomb of Agnes Sorel at Loches which has been so famous and has helped to make Loches a favorite pilgrimage place ever since.
French sculpture touched by the Renaissance reached a further triumph of artistic development in the first half of the sixteenth century. Two names particularly stand out, those of Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon. Though the first signs of that affectation and mannerism which developed as the Renaissance progressed are to be already noted in their styles, they combined great technical skill with refinement in modelling. Undoubtedly the greatest of the French sculptors of the time was Jean Goujon, whose most pleasing work is the marble group of Diana reclining beside a stag, which exhibits a power beyond that of any except the greatest Italian sculptors. He executed a series of sculptures for the older part of the Louvre which beautifully harmonizes with the architecture. His reliefs for the Fountain of the Innocents are one of the best known of his works and have a charm all their own.
The other great sculptor, Germain Pilon, trained under the influence of the Renaissance, did his best work just after the close of Columbus' Century. His group of the Three Graces bearing on their heads an urn containing the heart of Henry II, executed for Catherine de Medici, has been deservedly very much praised. Other men, Maitre Ponce and Barthelemy Prieur, did work that has attracted much attention about this same time. A fine portrait effigy of a recumbent figure in full {106} armor of the duke of Montmorency, which has always attracted the attention of those of critical artistic taste and is one of the treasures of the Louvre, is the work of Prieur.
The story of subsequent decadence is as striking in France as in other countries. No sculpture of any significance appeared during the seventeenth century, though some of the artists of the time exhibited great technical skill. Indeed it was not until the coming of Hudon, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, that there is any relief from the story of mediocrity or worse, and {107} in his time the plastic arts had reached a very low ebb. Modern French sculpture is the result of the movement begun by Hudon, but it is separated from the Renaissance by nearly two centuries of debasement.
A very interesting and valuable development of the arts and crafts that came in the Netherlands at this time was in the execution of art tapestries. This is the period when weaving of all kinds came to its highest perfection all over the world. The fifteenth and sixteenth century Oriental rugs command the highest prices and are among the most beautiful examples of carpet weaving that we have. In the Netherlands and in France tapestry reached its highest perfection and the examples executed at this time are now the precious treasures of governmental museums and similar public institutions almost without exception and probably will not change hands again because they are looked upon as too valuable for educational purposes and the uplifting of popular taste for public authorities ever to part with them. In the Netherlands particularly, tapestry-making reached a climax of perfection. After Michelangelo had been asked to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Raphael was requested to do a series of cartoons for the tapestries to be hung around the walls of it, which were to be executed in Flanders. After their completion they were the admiration of Rome, and we have many expressions of praise for them from the great men of the time whose critical ability in all matters relating to art cannot be doubted.
Vasari has an enthusiastic tribute, which even discounting his well-known tendency to praise overmuch under certain circumstances, still serves to show how thoroughly satisfied this period of great art was with these masterpieces. He said:
"One is astonished at the sight of this series. The execution is marvellous. One can hardly imagine how it was possible, with simple threads, to procure such delicacy in the hair and beards and to express the suppleness of flesh. It is a work more Godlike than human; the waters, the animals and the habitations are so perfectly represented that they appear painted with the brush, not woven."
The tapestries were first shown the day after Christmas, {108} 1519, in the Sistine Chapel for which they had been designed. Some of the greatest of the Renaissance scholars and artists and literary men were present on the occasion. It was the custom at that time to send as Ambassadors to Rome from foreign countries, distinguished scholars and amateurs. Many of these were present. All were enthusiastic in their admiration. Rumor said that they were quite unable to express all that they felt for these new works of art. Everyone present, one of the guests said in a letter to his sovereign, was speechless at the sight of these hangings and it is the unanimous opinion that nothing more beautiful exists in the universe. Another of those present wrote:
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"After the Christmas celebrations were over, the Pope exposed in his chapel seven tapestries (the eighth not being finished) executed in the West (in Flanders). They were considered by every one the most beautiful specimens of the weaver's art ever executed. And this in spite of the celebrity attained by other tapestries--those in the antechamber of Pope Julius II, those made for the Marchese of Mantua after the cartoons of Mantegna, and those made for the King of Naples. They were designed by Raphael of Urbino, an excellent painter, who received from the Pope 100 ducats for each cartoon. They contain much gold, silver and silk, and the weaving cost 1,500 ducats apiece--a total of 16,000 ducats ($160,000) for the set--as the Pope himself says, though rumor would put the cost at 20,000 golden ducats."
Even this account gives evidence that it was not because of their rarity, but on account of their unique quality that the Sistine tapestries were so much admired. As a matter of fact, most of the ruling court families of Italy ordered tapestries for themselves that have since become famous and most of these were made in France and in the Netherlands.
There is absolutely no doubt left now that this is the period when the best tapestries ever made were woven. George Leland Hunter in his "Tapestries, Their Origin, History and Renaissance" [Footnote 12] says that the Golden Age of tapestries was the Gothic Renaissance Transition--the last half of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century--the hundred years during which Renaissance tapestries began and Gothic tapestries ceased to be woven, while many of the greatest tapestries were of mixed style like the story of the Virgin at Rheims. There are sets woven at various times during this period which are among the greatest tapestry treasures of the world. The largest of all these sets is the story of St. Remi in the church of the same name at Rheims--sixteen feet high with a combined width of 165 feet. When exhibited at the Paris Exhibition in 1900, one of them, wrong side out in order to display the richness and solidity of the ancient unfaded colors, attracted the attention of amateurs from all over the world. The story of St. Etienne in nine pieces at the Cluny Museum {110} at Paris was presented to the Cathedral of Auxerre in 1502.
[Footnote 12: John Lane Co., New York, 1912. pp. 33.]
As a matter of fact there was scarcely a cathedral or monastery in France at this time that did not come into the possession of beautiful tapestries that are now very precious treasures. During recent years the value of such tapestries have increased very much and our millionaires have been willing to spend almost fabulous sums in order to get possession of them. We have had the opportunity here in America through the munificence of the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan to see some of them in the Metropolitan Museum and have learned to realize that the praise of them is well deserved. Mr. Hunter says that "the most famous tapestries in the world are the Renaissance tapestries, though the only distinction in most cases between the Gothic tapestries of the end of the fifteenth and the Renaissance tapestries at the beginning of the sixteenth, is that in one, whatever architecture or ornamentation or decoration is used has Gothic motives, while the models for these same details in the later tapestries is drawn from the Renaissance." The Brussels tapestries of the early sixteenth century are particularly beautiful and are the despair of the modern tapestry makers. Other Flemish cities, however, Arras, Tournai, Bruges, Lille, Antwerp became famous for their tapestries and Delft, in Holland, was a worthy rival. The art seems to require too much patience for our modern artisans to compete with their brethren of the old time, but doubtless with the rise and appreciation of artistic handicraftsmanship and the demand for charming decoration of homes and public buildings regardless of cost, we may look confidently for a development even in this line.
The other phases of the arts and crafts also developed very wonderfully outside of Italy as well as in the peninsula. Beautiful vessels for altar use, chalices, candlesticks, crucifixes and the like were made, and indeed this is the supreme period of their manufacture. Some of the chalices of this time were made by distinguished sculptors who felt that they could not devote themselves to more suitable art work than this for Church purposes. Under the inspiration of deep religious feeling some even of the smaller pieces are among the world's {111} great works of art. Benvenuto Cellino made morses, chalices and crucifixes that are famous. Many of these were executed for patrons outside of Italy. His well-known crucifix in the Escurial near Madrid, made for Philip II, is a typical example. Processional crosses lent themselves to decorative effect very well, and some of them from this time are indeed very beautiful works of art. The same application of artistic craftsmanship was to be noted with regard to nearly everything meant for the service of the Church or for use in municipal building for the decoration of municipal property. The well-known iron well railing executed, it is said, by Quentin Matsys (or Massys), when the artist was but a blacksmith and had not yet taken up painting, is a typical sample of the combination of the beautiful and useful which characterizes so much of the work of this time and carries away every point of admiration.
There was scarcely any form of decorative work that did not receive high artistic development at this time nearly everywhere throughout Europe. In recent years enamels have attracted much attention, and the recent presentation of the Barwell collection to the British Museum brought the Limoges work into prominence again. The London Illustrated News reproduced a series of Limoges enamels in the Barwell collection that are marvellous in color and artistic excellence. {112} The Courtois, the younger of whom, Jean, died in 1586, are probably the greatest artistic craftsmen in this mode. Pierre Courtois (or Courteys) made just about the end of our century the largest enamels which ever came out of Limoges with life-size figures of the Virtues. Pierre Reymond (Raymond or Rexmont), who was the Mayor of Limoges in 1567, did some work that attracted attention as early as 1532. The stream of artistic influence at this time can be studied very well in his work, for he was influenced by the Germans in his early maturity, later came under the influence of the Italian school, though he had been a pupil of Nardon Penicaud, who himself came of a famous French family of fifteenth and sixteenth century artists, whose work always possesses distinction. Some of the plaques and salvers of this time in enamel are among the most precious treasures of national collections throughout the world.
Some of the locks and keys and latches and hinges for doors made during this period are among the most beautiful examples of iron work in the world. The Cluny Museum in Paris possesses a number of these as well as other iron work of Columbus' Century which show that the men of this time had the true artistic spirit in their work. The armorers of the period made probably the most beautiful armor that has ever been made, and the finest pieces in collections, especially {113} in national armories, are nearly all from this time. Scent boxes and jewel boxes of various kinds in the precious or semi-precious metals were always executed with fine artistic taste, or at least some of the best examples of these in the world come from this time. Clocks were made with a perfection of mechanism and at the same time an ornateness that give them a place in the art world instead of merely in the industrial domain. The furniture of the time is noted for its artistic quality, and some of the smaller pieces made by well-known sculptors or under their direction were works of art that now are thought of as world treasures for all time.
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VIII. THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CENTURY
Just as the introduction of Greek ideas gave a new impetus to literature and art and sculpture and painting, so it did also, and perhaps to an even greater degree, to architecture. The effect of classic thought had begun to be felt before 1450. It was noted first in ecclesiastical architecture and its influence can be traced throughout Europe. Brunelleschi, who built the great dome of the Cathedral in Florence, died in 1444, but not until he had shown the world of his time how beautiful such a conception was and how it could be accomplished. He had gone to Rome and studied the Pantheon, as well as all the other great buildings which the Romans had left in that city, and during his studies, becoming enamored of the subject, he mastered every detail of their style and became familiar with every form of Roman art. He first completed the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence and then was entrusted with a larger work, the completion of the Santo Spirito, which Arnolfo and Giotto had left unfinished and apparently, according to the practice of the Middle Ages, without even a drawing to show how they intended to complete it. They would have given it a Gothic roof. Brunelleschi conceived the dome and then, in the course of his studies and designing, definitely initiated the development of Renaissance architecture.
The first important influence in the architecture of our century is Leon Battista Alberti, who was led to the study of architecture because of his interest in classical literature and his desire to restore a classical style in building as well as in letters. In order to accomplish this, he wrote a text-book of architecture, "De re aedificatoria." Besides the theory of classic architecture, he also devoted himself to its practical exemplification, and there are some models of his work that are well {115} known. The charming little classic Church of San Francesco at Rimini and the much more important Church of San Andrea at Mantua were erected under his direction. The latter Church is noted, according to Fergusson in his "History of Modern Architecture," [Footnote 13] for "the beauty of its proportions, the extreme elegance of every part and the appropriateness of the modes in which classical details are used without the least violence or straining." All the details of the classical architecture as applied to Churches are to be found in this in their simplest and most sincere form. They were to become so familiar afterwards as to represent a standard of Church architecture.
[Footnote 13: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899.]
The great development of this new style came under {116} Bramante of Urbino, who was born the year that Brunelleschi died. His most remarkable monument in ecclesiastical architecture is the Church at Lodi. Alberti's work had been mainly {117} the restoration of the Basilican form. Bramante emphasized the domical or Byzantine type. After these two the change from the mediaeval to the modern style of architecture may be said to have been completed and under the most favorable auspices. The dome of Santa Maria delle Grazie, which Fergusson pronounces "both externally and internally one of the most pleasing specimens of its class found anywhere," is another monument to Bramante's genius. Bramante is most famous, however, for his bold design and magnificent foundations for St Peter's at Rome. He did not live to complete this, but had his original plan been carried out, the finished building would have been in many ways more satisfactory than it is and would have exhibited many less serious architectural faults.
An excellent type of the ornate architecture of the Renaissance period is the facade of the famous Certosa near Pavia. The designs for it were prepared by Borgognone, a distinguished Milanese artist of that time, one of whose pictures will be found reproduced in the chapter on Secondary Italian Painters. He was much more essentially a painter than an architect, and this the Certosa demonstrates. Many an architect, with no ambition outside of his own department, would be eminently well pleased, however, to have succeeded in producing so beautiful and harmonious a design as may be seen in the facade of the great Church of the Italian Carthusians.
The architectural monument of the century is St. Peter's at Rome, designed originally by Bramante, whose design was developed and harmonized very beautifully by Sangallo, but only after Raphael had carried on Bramante's work for some six years and Baldassare Peruzzi had succeeded him for an equal term, though without accomplishing much. The defects so often noted come from this succession of architects. Sangallo's design has been preserved for us and shows what a magnificent conception he had. Michelangelo's dome might well have taken its place in this design without any of the overpowering effect that it has on the structure as completed. In spite of all the criticism that may be made of St. Peter's, because, as the editor of the recent edition of Fergusson's "History of Architecture" (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899) says, "the {118} big pulls away from the beautiful and there must be a compromise," it is one of the most wonderful of churches and one of the most marvellous structures that ever came from the hand of man. Fergusson himself is severe in criticism, and yet he says, "in spite of all its faults of detail, the interior of St. Peter's approaches more nearly to the sublime in architectural effect than any other which the hand of man has executed."
In England Renaissance architecture, that is the influence of the classical, had very little, indeed almost no effect during Columbus' Century. The genius, as well as the taste of the builders and architects of the time, however, is well illustrated by the development of Gothic architecture which took place in this period. The Italians of the Renaissance decided that the interior of buildings should be decorated by paintings. The English builders were yet in the period in which they considered that the interior decoration, just as the exterior decoration, should flow naturally from the construction of the building. These two styles are very well illustrated in two famous structures which were built within the same generation, though separated by half the width of the European continent, and which are triumphs of the respective styles of architecture. These are the Sistine Chapel at Rome and King's College Chapel of Cambridge, the plans of which, because of the inevitable contrast they suggest and the supreme effectiveness of both of them, deserve study. Each has a beauty of its own that advocates of either style cannot help but admire, and both give magnificent testimony to the power of the men of this time to express themselves nobly and beautifully in structural work under the influence of religious ideas.
In Spain the architecture of the time is noteworthy, though it is mainly of ecclesiastical character. All of the buildings erected by Ferdinand and Isabella are in the Gothic style, and the famous Church of St. John of the Kings at Toledo is as Gothic as the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster. The Cathedral at Salamanca commenced in 1513 and that of Segovia in 1525 are both thoroughly Gothic. These buildings are so well known that the accomplishment of this period in architecture need scarcely be emphasized. The first distinctively Renaissance work in Spain is the Cathedral at {119} Granada, which, though Gothic in certain ways, contains Renaissance suggestions and modifications of form that have been adopted for many modern Churches.
The secular architecture of this period made as great progress as the ecclesiastical architecture, and it is of even greater interest because nearly all the ideas in common use among architects for monumental public buildings or ambitious private structures in our time are adopted and adapted from the architecture of Columbus' Century. As in ecclesiastical {120} architecture, the Renaissance begins in Florence. The erection of two of the magnificent palaces of the city, still well known and admired, the Riccardi, formerly called the Medicean, and the Pitti, were the initial steps. The Riccardi was designed by Michelozzi and has a splendid facade 500 feet in length and 90 feet in height. The Pitti is 490 feet in length, three stories high in the centre, each story 40 feet in height, with immense windows 24 feet apart from centre to centre. They show very well what the architects of this time could accomplish on this grand scale. Both were completed just about the beginning of Columbus' Century. After this, the Florentine buildings became more ornate, and yet with the ornament properly adapted to the structure and producing an effect of beauty that has deservedly won modern admiration and study. Probably the two most famous buildings of the first half of Columbus' Century are the Rucellai and the Guadagni palaces of Florence, the facades of which have been much admired. The Rucellai Palace was designed by Alberti, the Guadagni by Bramante. As their ideas dominated ecclesiastical architecture, so now they were to dominate secular architecture.
After Florence comes Venice, and here the wealth of the city, its Oriental affiliations and the light and air of its surroundings gave rise to a series of marvellously beautiful ornate Renaissance buildings, famous throughout the world and especially known to English-speaking people through Ruskin's "Stones of Venice." The most famous of these is the Palazzo Vendramini, which may be permitted to speak for itself. One of the most beautiful buildings in Venice is the Library of St. Mark, situated exactly opposite the Doge's Palace and built by Sansovino. Scarcely less beautiful is San Micheli's masterpiece, the Palace of the Grimani, which is now the post-office. These buildings are familiar to all. To know them is to admire them, and the architects of every progressive structural period since have devoted much study to them.
A very interesting development of Renaissance architecture took place in the little city of Vicenza, the birthplace of Palladio and the scene of some of his best work. Palladio was not so perfect in his achievements, as some of his admirers have suggested, but he applied most of the Renaissance ideas to {121} architecture very successfully, and his influence upon the after-time, as some of the illustrations which we have selected from his work will show, has been felt at all times and nearly everywhere. The Thiene Palace, which has been very much praised {122} and is generally quoted as one of his most successful designs, has been criticized rather severely by Fergusson, and yet its effectiveness cannot be gainsaid.
The Chiericate Palace, another one of Palladio's designs reckoned among his best, has the objection that it is open and weak at the angles and solid in the centre and the centre is full above and weak below, and yet, after mentioning these faults, Fergusson says that there is "an exquisite proportion of parts which redeems this facade and an undefinable elegance of detail which disarms the critic of Palladio's work so that in spite of the worst possible arrangements they still leave a pleasing impression on the mind of the spectator." This is, perhaps, damning by faint praise, but it is praise indeed from Fergusson. Many others have been most enthusiastic about this and other of Palladio's works, and one has only to look around at our modern ambitious structures to realize how much of influence Palladio still has.
In Genoa there are some very beautiful buildings of this time, though as their material, despite the name "the city of palaces," was mainly rubble masonry covered with stucco, the windows without dressings, the intention being to paint the architectural mouldings on the stucco and also to paint frescoes between them, the unsatisfactoriness of much of the architecture for modern study can be realized. In spite of these limitations, Galeazzo Alessi (1500 to 1572) succeeded in making some very beautiful buildings. Probably the most admired example is the building now known as the Municipalata in the Strada Nuova, formerly known as the Tursi-Doria Palace.
Vignola (1507 to 1573) occupies the place in Rome that Palladio holds in Vicenza towards the end of Columbus' Century. A charming example of his construction is the Villa of Pope Julius near Rome, the facade of which is certainly his and which, without being ambitious, represents his power to express simplicity and dignity even in a summer house.
His great work is the Palace of Caprarola, built some thirty miles outside of Rome for the Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. The building is all the more interesting because it has furnished ideas for some of the larger public buildings of our time and contains more than a suggestion for some recent architectural plans of somewhat startling character for New York City.
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The plan of the Palace of Caprarola is a pentagon enclosing a circular court, each of the five sides measures 130 feet and the court is 65 feet in diameter, while the three stories are each about 30 feet in height. It is usually considered one of the finest palaces in Italy. In spite of the difficulty of the task and the singularly unfavorable nature of pentagonal form for architectural effect externally and commodious arrangements internally, the architect succeeded admirably. As the picture of it shows very well, the approach was managed beautifully and the effect of castellation very well secured.
The story of architecture, secular as well as religious, outside of Italy is quite as interesting as that in Italy itself at this time. Everywhere throughout Europe beautiful buildings were erected in charming taste and with fine effectiveness. This is particularly true as regards the municipal buildings of various kinds, the town halls, the hospitals, the asylums for foundling children, and all the other structures due to civic munificence at this time. Just as in regard to painting and sculpture, the Netherlands was the seat of some extremely beautiful artistic work of great originality and perfection of detail during this period. There is scarcely an important town of Belgium, and even a number of those that have become quite unimportant in our time, which does not present some architectural monument of cardinal importance in the history of architecture. While Italy is much better known, Belgium deserves, and in recent years has very properly received, devoted attention from students and amateurs in all the arts, and not least has its architecture come into its due meed of praise and appreciation.
One of the most beautiful architectural monuments of the later fifteenth century is the town hall of Louvain. Indeed, it is one of the most beautiful architectural monuments of its kind in the world. Schayes, in his "History of Architecture," says, "Not only is the Hotel de Ville of Louvain the most remarkable municipal edifice in Belgium, but one may seek in vain its equal in Europe." Its architect, whose name was unknown until well on in the nineteenth century, was only a master mason of this capital of Brabant when he was entrusted {125} with the task of making for the burghers of one of the most important towns of the time a town hall such as they would consider worthy of them, but above all surpassing those erected by any of the neighboring towns. He succeeded eminently in fulfilling the commission, and fortunately the town hall remains almost in its original condition as a monument to the wonderful artistic workmanship of the time.
George Wharton James, in his book on "Some Old Flemish Towns," says, "The exquisite Hotel de Ville reminds one of the caskets or reliquaries which Kings and Queens used to give to be placed upon the high altars of Cathedrals. There is the same simplicity of design, the same beauty of line, the {126} rectangle with gables, emphasized by a graceful tower at each pinnacle, and another at each angle, the whole finished with a crown spire tipped with a golden fleche." The decorations are most delicate, reminding one of the lace work of the country, but it seems almost incredible that this effect should have been produced so marvellously in stone.
In spite of the multitude of decorations, the structure does not strike one, as do so many of the buildings of the seventeenth century, as over-decorated, but somehow all the charming sculptured ornament seems as {127} suitably in place here as it is in the exquisite patterns of the lace of the town.
The beautiful Hotel de Ville of Brussels is almost as interesting as that at Louvain and represents the early part of the Columbus' Century. At the opposite side of the Grande Place is what is now known as the Maison du Roi, formerly known as the Broodhuis or House of Bread, which is scarcely less interesting, though very much restored, than the Hotel de Ville. The one is a monument of the Gothic of the middle of the fifteenth century, the other shows the influence of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century. The whole of the Grand Place gives an excellent idea of the devotion of these municipalities to civic beauty and monumental construction and represents an anticipation of ideas that are usually considered modern but that were very thoroughly developed and applied in making the "City Beautiful" in Columbus' Century. Were there space, much might be said here about the magnificent town halls of Bruges, Ghent and other cities of the Netherlands.
The architecture of Spain, practically always connected with the names of ecclesiastics and usually built for ecclesiastical or educational or charitable purposes, shows very well the profound intellectual genius of the people for whom Columbus' discovery was made and who were beginning to reap the material benefits of his extension of the Spanish realms in the Western continent. One of the most important of the buildings of the time is that of the University of Alcala, under the direction of the celebrated Cardinal Ximenes, or Cisneros. The rebuilding commenced about 1510 and continued nearly to the end of Columbus' Century. It is an extremely beautiful building. The Archiepiscopal Palace is quite equal to it, and its court has been very highly praised. Fergusson has spoken highly of the bracket capitals in the upper story of this court, of which we give a sketch, and he thinks this invention of the Spanish architect a distinctly new and valuable idea in architecture which unfortunately has not been commonly adopted.
Some of the internal arrangements have been very much admired, and the Paranimfo, a state apartment in the University, deserves attention not only for its intrinsic beauty, but {128} from its being so essentially Spanish in style. The roof is of richly-carved woodwork in panels in a style borrowed from the Moors. Fergusson says that there is another and more beautiful specimen of this sort of work in the chapel of the University above the Cenotaph of the great Cardinal.
Elsewhere in Spain some of these beautiful courts and interiors were ornamented very highly as became a Southern {129} people, and yet with an effectiveness and taste that have caused them to be very much admired in after-times. In the Monastery of Lupiana there is a cloistered court similar in design to that at Alcala, but even grander, four stories in height, each gallery being lighter than the one below it and so arranged as to give the appearance of sufficient strength, combined with the lightness and elegance peculiarly appropriate to domestic architecture, especially when employed internally as it is here. Fergusson, from whom the opinion just expressed is quoted, thinks that the Spanish architects were far more happy than their Italian brethren in this regard and mainly because they borrowed ideas from their own Spanish art rather than kept too insistently to classic ideas.
Two royal buildings in Spain, the Palace of Charles V at Granada and the Alcazar of Toledo, deserve to be mentioned. The Alcazar was begun before the end of Columbus' Century, but not finished until later. The sketch of it here presented gives an excellent idea of how simple and yet properly ornate for monumental purposes the Spanish architects were making their buildings at this time. The truly Spanish features of solidity below, with the increasing richness and openness above, is very effective and is all the more interesting because historians of architecture declare that this effect was little understood outside of the Spanish peninsula.
The upper portion of the famous tower of the Giralda at Seville, which has always attracted so much attention for its beauty, was being built just at the close of the century. We in modern America have given it the tribute of sincerest flattery by imitating it in the tower of Madison Square Garden. It is interesting to realize that the Spaniards put a figure of Faith at the summit of the beautiful tower, pointing strikingly heavenward. Is it significant that we in our time have found nothing better to put there than the outworn symbol of a statue to Diana?
French secular architecture at this time made some fine achievements which are very well known and have been very much admired. The Louvre in Paris is a succession of monuments to the architectural spirit of the French for centuries. I think that there is very general agreement that the portion {130} of this building erected in Columbus' Century is not only the most interesting, but the most beautiful. The Pavilion de I'Horloge is quite charming in its effectiveness. The ornamental portions are said to have been sculptured from designs furnished by Jean Goujon. This is enough of itself to make us sure that they would be beautiful, but they were besides very artistically designed to heighten the effect of the architecture.
The best-known contributions to architecture by the French in this time are their famous chateaux. The typical example of these is the Chateau of Chambord, commenced by Francis I immediately after his return from his Spanish captivity. While the design is classical in detail, it is eminently French in character, and it has been a favorite study of architects ever since. Its repute shows how well architects at this time {131} accomplished their purpose of making an impressively beautiful building. At this same time the Chateau of Madrid, situated in the Bois de Boulogne at Paris and which was unfortunately destroyed during the Revolution, was built, and the sketches that are left to us show us its beauty and effectiveness secured through comparative simplicity. All the famous chateaux of France were either built or received their most famous additions under the influence of the new spirit that came into architecture under the influence of Francis I. Those of Bury and Blois and Amboise and Chenonceaux were products of this period. The staircase and the wing in the centre of which it stands at Blois are among the most admired, or at least the most frequently drawn, of the works of this age.
All the other departments of architecture, besides the ecclesiastical and municipal, were affected by the enterprising spirit which entered into architecture at this time. Leonardo da Vinci offered to build fortifications under any and all circumstances, the more difficult the better, and succeeded in doing some excellent work. According to tradition he laid firm foundations, even under water, for certain French fortifications, and these still remain. In bridge building particularly this period did some excellent work. In the chapter on Social Work and Workers will be found an illustration of the bridge built across the Avon at Stratford by Sir Hugh Clopton about the time of the discovery of America, which shows that they could build beautifully as well as enduringly at this time. There are many private houses in the towns of Europe erected at this time, some of them even by families without any pretension to wealth or nobility, which illustrate very well how sincere and thorough was their domestic architecture, how beautiful because of its honest straightforwardness and how eminently enduring. Fra Giocondo, who edited the Aldine edition of Vitruvius in 1511 and who edited Caesar in 1513, introduced illustrations into these works, and particularly a plan of Caesar's bridge across the Rhine. He used his classical knowledge to good purpose, however, for in the service of the king of France he probably built two of the noble bridges that still span the Seine. These were finished early in the {132} sixteenth century. It would not be difficult to note other examples of this same kind in many parts of Europe at this time.
Fergusson summed up the place of this century in architecture very well in his advice to Italy as to what must be done in order to restore to that country the precedence that she won in architecture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He said (p. 169): "Italy has only to go back to the inspirations which characterize the end of the fifteenth and the dawn of the sixteenth century, to base upon them a style which will be as beautiful as it would be appropriate to her wants and her climate. If she will only attempt to revive the traditions of the great age which is hallowed by the memories of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, of Bramante, Sangallo, and even of Michelangelo, she cannot go wrong. These men erred occasionally from inexperience, and because the system under which the art was conducted in their days was such as to render success impossible; but their aspirations were right, and there was an impress of nobleness on their works which has not since been surpassed.
"Since their time the history of Italian art may be summed up in a few words. During the fifteenth century it was original, appropriate and grand; during the sixteenth it became correct and elegant, though too often also tinctured with pedantry; and in the seventeenth it broke out into caprice and affectation, till it became as bizarre as it was tasteless. During the eighteenth it sank down to a uniform level of timid mediocrity, as devoid of life as it is of art."
It is as true for all the countries of Europe as for Italy that what is needed for the redemption of architecture from the unfortunate sordid influences which have crept over it is a return to the ideas of Columbus' Century. Fortunately, since Fergusson wrote his paragraph of advice for Italy, a great change has come over the attitude of men generally toward architecture, and beautiful buildings are being erected nearly everywhere, most of them with Renaissance ideas prominent in them, but above all with the lessons drawn from this fruitful period of beautiful construction guiding the minds and hands of architects and builders. All around us handsome Renaissance buildings are rising. Inasmuch as they are mere {133} imitations, they are unfortunate evidence of our lack of originality. If, somehow, using the same high standards of taste and the inspiration of the classic authors as did the men of Columbus' Century, we can succeed in evolving an architecture suited to our conditions and our environment and appropriate for the uses of our day, then we shall accomplish the solution of the problem which they solved so well. What they did above all was to accomplish in building Horace's dictum that "he who mingles the useful and the beautiful takes every point." The merely useful is hideous. The merely beautiful is monstrous. Success lies in that combination of use and beauty, of which Columbus' contemporaries so ingeniously found the key.
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IX. MUSIC
Everyone concedes the supreme accomplishment of Italy in the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and even in the lesser arts and crafts during the Renaissance period, which we have called Columbus' Century. It is not always realized, however, that her place in music is almost equally important and that her accomplishment in this art came also during this same period. While musical development into modern forms came as a rule after the close of our century, the great foundations of modern music were laid at this time. These are not so deep beneath the surface of developed music, however, as to be hidden from us entirely at the present time. On the contrary, there are many composers and musical measures of this period which still have an interest quite apart from their antiquity and which music-lovers know very well in spite of the time that has elapsed since their composition.
We know nothing of ancient music, and indeed are scarcely able to conceive just how Grecian music was composed or written and expressed. It might be thought, then, that the Renaissance, representing the influence upon the modern world of the rebirth of Greek ideas, would be lacking in any important development of music. In every other department, even in that of science, indeed it might well be said, especially in that of science, the influence of contact with ancient Greek ideas can be readily seen. They formed the stimulus for study and often supplied the fundamental information on which modern, that is Renaissance, developments were built up. Without this aid from the ancients, then, it might reasonably be expected that music would be neglected or would certainly be in abeyance, but this is not the case. There is a great period of musical history, not perhaps so significant as the progress in other departments of aesthetics, but containing within itself {135} a magnificent achievement and the germ of all our modern music.
Perhaps there is nothing that demonstrates so well the fact that the Renaissance was not, as it is so often considered, a rebirth out of nothingness after some 1500 years of darkness and lack of accomplishment than the history of music. Only that there had been a great period of advance in Europe before the Renaissance, the stimulus of Greek would have had very little effect. The old philosophers said that things are received according to the capacity of the receiver, and in the modern time a favorite maxim of teachers is that students take away from a lecture what is of value to them just in proportion to what they brought to it. It was the height of the culture of the preceding period that enabled the generations of the Renaissance to take such good advantage of the New Learning. In music, there being no New Learning, they had to depend on their own efforts, and the magnificent fruits of their musical progress show how the genius of the time was capable of accomplishment for itself.
As a result of the lack of any stimulus from Greek sources for music, the first development of it at this time is noted not in Italy, as is true for other modes of aesthetic evolution because of contiguity to Greece, but, on the contrary, in the distant West of Europe and especially in the Netherlands. Henderson, in his "The Story of Music," declares that "all the countries at this time took Netherlandish masters," and one finds the names of distinguished teachers of music, who were from the Low Countries, in centres so far apart as Naples, Venice, Munich and Madrid.
The first of these, who was an extremely important factor in the music of the time, was Ockeghem, or Ockenheim, of Hainault, who, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, came to be looked upon as probably the greatest teacher of the time. He is surpassed in fame by his pupil, Josse Despres, usually known by the name, familiarly used among his friends, Josquin, who is also a native of Hainault. Henderson declares that "in technical skill no master has ever surpassed Ockeghem; and all that he knew he taught Josquin, who made it the outlet for his real musical genius." Luther said of him, "They sing {136} only Josquin in Italy; Josquin alone in France; only Josquin in Germany; in Flanders, in Hungary, in Bohemia, in Spain, it is always only Josquin." From this testimony, and the otherwise well-known popularity of this composer's music, it is probable that there has never been a great European musician who, in his own time, has gained more universal acclaim among music-lovers than Josquin.
There is no doubt at all of the merit of his work. Arcadelt, who was Palestrina's teacher at Rome and himself a distinguished musician of this time, said of him: "Other composers make their music where their notes take them, but Josquin takes his music where he wills." Arcadelt's musical ability is recognized; an Ave Maria by him is still often sung.
Other countries were not without an important development in music at this time. England had been the leader in musical composition and evolution before Flanders had her turn. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries England had developed part singing and also laid the foundations of counterpoint. In the fifteenth century musical composition and erudition came to be considered of so much importance that academic honors were conferred on musicians. John Hamboys, the author of some treatises on the art of music, is said to be the first on whom the degree of Doctor of Music was ever conferred. In 1463, according to the records, the University of Cambridge conferred the degree of Doctor of Music on Thomas Seynt Just and the degree of Bachelor of Music on Henry Habyngton. During the following century it was required that candidates for the degree of Musical Doctor should present an original musical composition. America has followed England in the granting of academic degrees for music, though I believe no other country has done so except Ireland.
In the latter half of Columbus' Century there was a vigorous native school of music in Germany which devoted itself, however, almost entirely to the composition of songs for the people. The best known of the composers of this time is the famous Hans Sachs of Nuremberg, who, in the first half of the sixteenth century, wrote so many ballads for the people and set them to his own music. He was by trade a shoemaker, and all the musical composers in this particular mode {137} seem to have been craftsmen who took to musical composition and the writing of ballads for their music as a recreation after their daily labor. They organized themselves into guilds, which, in imitation of the old knightly songsters of the days of chivalry, they called Meistersingers. In its vigorous originality this movement produced at the beginning some striking folk music with a wonderful influence on the life of the people. After a time, however, the spirit of exclusiveness asserted itself and seriously hurt their work. They enacted rigid and pedantic laws, refused to admit to mastership in the guild those who did not follow these laws, and the letter killed the spirit, and true music disappeared, while men who prided themselves on their musical ability and taste were trying to uplift it, but were really regulating it out of existence. The decline in music is, however, only commensurate with the decline in the other arts and due to many of the same causes. The latter half of Columbus' Century saw the rise of the great Roman school of music which, at the end of this period, was to bring about a culmination of musical achievements that places this among the greatest musical epochs of the world. As was true everywhere in Italy, Rome owed its musical incentive and teaching to a Fleming. The great master was Claude Goudimel, who is said to have been born at Avignon, but who was educated in Flanders and is known as a Fleming. Among his pupils at Rome, where he opened a school, are the most famous musicians of the sixteenth century and some of the most famous of all time. Among others, probably, were Palestrina, the supreme master of modern church music, though the old tradition of Goudimel's great influence over him is now denied; the brothers Animuccia, one of whom was the penitent and intimate friend of St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratory, after which the Oratorio is named, and the brothers Nanini, who contributed so much to Italian music before the end of the sixteenth century. Another of his pupils was Orlando di Lasso, known as Lassus or Latres of Mons, who was one of the greatest and most popular of the musicians of this time. He was known in many countries and popular in all of them. To him we owe the definite attempt to make words and music run along in such harmony as would {138} emphasize and thoroughly co-ordinate the meaning of both. An abuse had been growing for a considerable period by which prolix florid passages of music were written for single syllables. Even Josquin had indulged much in this vicious mode. After Orlando di Lasso's reformation, the practice was to come back again in the fiorituri of the opera composers, especially the Italians of the early nineteenth century, and had to be combated by Wagner. There is little in the revolution effected in music by the modern German composer in this regard at least that was not anticipated by his great predecessor, Orlando, full three centuries before. Orlando di Lasso was known, moreover, for the sweetness, beauty, as well as the great number and variety of his works. One of his songs, "Matona! Lovely Maiden!" has been pronounced one of the most charming part songs in existence.
Lassus (di Lasso) tried every form of music at this time, but devoted himself chiefly to musical compositions for church purposes. We have from him psalms, hymns, litanies, magnificats, motets, as well as more lengthy musical settings for religious services. Bonavia Hunt, the Warden of Trinity College, London, and lecturer on musical history, in his "History of Music" declares that Lassus' settings of the Seven Penitential Psalms for five voices are among his best works. They contain elements that have made them a favorite study for students of music even in our time. Lassus introduced such musical terms as Allegro and Adagio into music and brought chromatic elements into musical composition. He was very greatly appreciated in his own day and was called Princeps Musicae, the prince of music. He received as much honor from statesmen as Palestrina did from churchmen, and the story of the honor paid to both of them by their own generation is the best possible tribute to the musical taste of the time. Lassus was made a Knight of the Order of the Golden Spur.
The greatest musician of this time, however, probably indeed the greatest of all times, is Palestrina, who in 1551 was appointed the musical director of the Julian Chapel in the Vatican with the definite hope that he would reform the evils that had crept into music and were making the art in its most recent {139} development so unsuitable for religious purposes. The Council of Trent, whose sessions were being held with interruptions at this time, had to legislate so as to secure suitable music for the mass. Ornamental passages of all kinds, or at least what were supposed to be such, had been introduced into church music, until finally it was quite impossible to follow the words of the service. As Cardinal Borromeo said, "These singers counted for their principal glory that when one says Sanctus another says Sabaoth and a third gloria tua and the whole effect of the music is little more than a confused whirling and snarling, more resembling the performance of cats in January than the beautiful flowers of May." He was one of the committee who insisted at various sessions of the Council of Trent on musical reform, and while their work has sometimes been falsely represented as derogatory of music itself, all that the Council wished to accomplish was to secure intelligibility of the words, and as a matter of fact their insistence on the simplification of music led to a magnificent new development in the art.
It has sometimes been said that Palestrina's work represented a revolution in the music of his time. This is not true, however, for his great mass music was only an evolution in the hands of the great master of the musical movement that had preceded his time. The story of his having been asked to write music very different from that which had immediately preceded, in order that church music might be preserved and figured music be thus still used in ecclesiastical services, has been discredited by recent historical research. At the end of Columbus' Century a climax in musical expression had been reached which Palestrina represents and which marked an epoch in the history of music. The abuses that had crept in were quite apart from the genuine evolution of music. Henderson, in his "How Music Developed" (New York: Stokes, 1898, page 73), has told the story:
"The mass of Marcellus was not written to order, and there was nothing new in its style. The mass is simply a model of all that was best in Palestrina's day. It embodied all that was noblest in the polyphonic style developed by the Netherlands school. Its melody is pure, sweet and fluent, and its {140} expressive capacity perfectly adapted to the devotional spirit of the text. Palestrina's contemporaries, such as Lasso and some of his predecessors, wrote in the same style. Lasso's 'Penitential Psalms' are much simpler in style than this mass. Its apparent simplicity lies in the fact that its profound mastery of technical resources conceals its superb art. The polyphonic writing is matchless in its evenness; every part is as good as every other part. The harmonies are beautiful, yet there is apparently no direct attempt to produce them. They seem just to happen. But above all other qualities stands the innate power of expression in this music. It is, as Ambrose has hinted, as if the composer had brought the angelic host to earth."
Mees, in his "Choirs and Choral Music," has outlined what the place of Palestrina's music in church services is, and made it very clear how helpful it is for devotion instead of suggesting distractions, as modern music is so sure to do. Dickenson, in his "Study of the History of Music," says that in "Comparing a mass by Palestrina with one of Schubert or Gounod he (the hearer) will perceive not only a difference of style and form, but also one of purpose and ideal. The modern work strives to depict the moods suggested by the words according to the general methods that prevail in modern lyric and dramatic music; while the aim of the older music is to render a universal sentiment of devotion that is impersonal and general. Music here conforms to the idea of prayer. There is no thought of definite portrayal; the music strives merely to deepen the mystical impression of the ceremony as a whole."
Mees had said in his work, p. 61:
"Palestrina's conception of what the music of the Roman church should be was in perfect accord with the principle held by the early church: that music should form an integral part of the liturgy and add to its impressiveness. ... No sensuous melodies, no dissonant tension-creating harmonies, no abrupt rhythms distract the thoughts and excite the sensibilities. Chains of consonant chords growing out of the combination of smoothly-flowing, closely-interwoven parts, the contours of which are all but lost in the maze of tones, lull the mind into that state of submission to indefinite impressions which makes it susceptible to the mystic influence of the ceremonial and turns it away from worldly things."
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Perhaps the best proof of the enduring value of Palestrina's work is to be found in the fact that some of his compositions are still to be heard in the Sistine Chapel, and that even in our own time [Footnote 14] a definite movement to restore his music to its proper high place in the service of the Church has been initiated. Whenever, since his death, music has been really on a high plane, Palestrina has been thoroughly appreciated. Whenever musical taste has been debased and men have gone seeking after novelty and bizarre effects and over-decoration, Palestrina has been neglected. For music, he is what Dante is to literature and art, the touchstone by which it is easiest to estimate properly the value of a generation's critical faculty and spirit of appreciation. Henderson, in his "How Music Developed," already quoted from, has summed up Palestrina's accomplishment in a few words:
[Footnote 14: The decree of Pope Pius X, requiring the restoration of the Gregorian Chant to the place of honor in the Liturgic Services and making Palestrina's music the standard to which choir music should properly conform, seemed to many music-lovers distinctly reactionary and perhaps old-fogyish. As a matter of fact, it was a well-judged restoration of such criteria in church music as would preclude the possibility of modern unsuitable developments of music finding their way further into church services. It was open to the same objections on the part of those who knew no better as the decree of Pope Leo XIII that St. Thomas Aquinas' Philosophy should be the standard in Catholic schools of Philosophy and Theology. The two decrees will be set beside each other in history as examples of the ability of great Popes so to direct church policy as to preserve the faithful from human degeneracies of taste and thought. Palestrina's music is as firm a standard of church music as Aquinas' thought is a safe criterion in philosophy.]
"Before leaving the subject of Palestrina, let me endeavor to make clear to the reader wherein his style is so fine. Composers before him had begun to aim at the simplification of church music. They sought to accomplish their purpose by breaking the shackles of canonic law. The canon had demanded the most exact imitation in the different voice parts. The new style allowed the greatest freedom. The result was that free polyphony took the place of rigid canon. {142} Consequently composers were able to devote more attention to the development of fluent, beautiful and expressive melody. The merit of Palestrina's work was that it carried this style to perfection. His compositions became the models for succeeding composers, and indeed they remain to this day unequalled as examples of pure church music."
Palestrina's career furnishes another striking example of the opportunities for genius to express itself provided by this period. According to a contemporary manuscript authority, so that the story is probably much more authentic than such stories usually are, young Pierluigi of Palestrina, the ancient Praeneste, while peddling in the streets of Rome the products of his father's farm, used to sing songs, one of which was heard by the choirmaster of Santa Maria Maggiore. He found that the boy had not only a beautiful voice, but a taste for music, so he gave him the opportunity for a musical education. Palestrina lived to be over eighty years of age, with manifold opportunities afforded him for the display of his genius. The latter half of his life was spent as one of the most honored men of his generation. His most brilliant period began when he was nearly seventy and when he was apparently thinking his career at an end. His complete works in thirty-three volumes have just been published, the last volume of the completed edition being presented to Pius X in 1908, who was most interested in this great modern monument to the Catholic genius of music. The great composer is worthy to stand beside St. Teresa, St. Philip Neri and St. Ignatius Loyola as one of the protagonists of the counter reformation. He did for music and the Church what others did for education, mysticism and social reform.
One of the most interesting chapters in the history of music began just about the end of Columbus' Century. St. Philip Neri, of whom we have spoken in the chapter on Social Work and Workers of the period, was himself devoted to music and recognized how much it might mean for occupation of mind with higher things that would be a source at once of pleasure and social relaxation. He appreciated also how much of value music might lend to the proper expression of religious feeling, and even how much it might add to genuine religious {143} sentiment. The Miracle Plays of the latter half of the fifteenth century had always been accompanied by certain songs and glees with words relating to the sacred subjects often set to popular music. St. Philip recognized that these performances might be raised to a higher plane by introducing more music and using the best possible music for their illustration. Accordingly, in the course of services held in his oratory, he introduced historical scenes and sacred allegories with a musical setting, calling as a rule on his musical friends in Rome, and especially Animuccia, to supply him with compositions. Hence the term oratorio, the Italian word for oratory, for this class of music. It was not to reach its highest form of expression, the dramatic, until the end of the sixteenth century, but it is an invention of Columbus' period.
An extremely important invention of this time was the introduction of the chord of the dominant seventh. The discovery is usually said to have been due to Claudio Monteverde of the seventeenth century, but the earliest extant musical works, in which examples of the phenomenal chord of the dominant seventh with the full freedom of present-day practice are found, are those of Jean Mouton of Holling in Lorraine, who died about 1522. For nearly a century after this time this great discovery, like so many others in every department of science, struggled for a place. It was finally acknowledged. This discovery brought music into close relation with science, and demonstrated its foundation in the natural laws of acoustics. In his article on the History of Music in "The Encyclopaedia Britannica," Sir George A. MacFarren, Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, declared "that the discovery of the dominant seventh lays open the principle for which pagan philosophers and Christians had been vainly groping through centuries while a veil of mathematical calculation hung between them and the truth." The curious feature of the history of its introduction lies in the fact that it failed of appreciation from orthodox musicians for a considerable period and actually met with organized opposition.
Even this brief sketch will suffice to show how greatly music developed during Columbus' Century. There is probably no corresponding period in the world's history that can show as {144} much real advance that is lasting progress. Perhaps in no department of aesthetics does supposed progress come and go from generation to generation more easily than in music. What certain generations of musical critics have very highly praised is often judged by their successors quite worthless. The musical achievements of this period have, on the contrary, been beacon lights for succeeding generations. Whenever the principles that came to be accepted at this time have been much departed from, musical taste has proved false and musical accomplishment trivial. It is this sort of achievement, absolutely enduring in its quality, which above all counts for humanity, and it is nowhere so well illustrated in every department of intellectual effort as during this century of Columbus.
The organ, as we have it at the present time, practically came into its modern shape during Columbus' Century. In the latter part of the fifteenth century the pedals and their {145} application were developed by the organ-builders of the time, and in the first half of the sixteenth century pipes in large numbers came to be used, and the stops were arranged as in the modern organ. There are records of organ-building, particularly in France about the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, which show that the instrument had reached a very modern phase and that it was only a question of the adaptation of such mechanical aids as would enable the organist to control a greater number of pipes that was now needed to bring about the further development of this instrument. A good idea of the perfection of the organ at this time may be obtained from the description of one built at St. Maurice, Angers, France, in 1511, of which we have a detailed account in a legal process some years later. This contained two towers of thirty-five-foot pipe, forty-eight stops and a separate pedal. The independent pedal came into general use at this time. About this same time the violin began to develop and came very nearly into its modern form by the end of Columbus' Century, so that it was ready for the perfecting process which was to take place in the following hundred years.
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X. BOOKS AND PRINTS: WOOD AND METAL ENGRAVING
The scholarship of this century is well known to all the world, and the Renaissance is looked upon as the time when the deep knowledge of the classics, the New Learning or Humanism as it was called, awoke the modern spirit. The men of the time learned much from books. It is interesting to note, then, how much they did for books. The generations amply repaid the debt they owed to the past by what they accomplished for the preservation of the ancient writings, and above all by putting them in a worthy dress for the use and the admiration of future generations. The Renaissance must probably be considered to have appreciated books more than any other period in the world's history and to have done more to give dignity, beauty and permanence to the objects of their devotion.
It was no mere accident that just at the beginning of this period, about 1450, the invention of printing was perfected. Books had been rising in value and in price, though the demand had been constantly increasing, until it was only to be expected that some method of making them available for a much larger number of people must come. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the need for a thing sets men's minds at work until they have obtained it. Caxton's experience, detailed further on in this chapter, is illuminating in this regard. Great, however, as is the invention, the credit for which apparently must be shared by the Germans Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer, the use that was made of that invention during the century that followed is deserving of still higher appreciation. It had indeed come to a worthy time, but not by accident, for any time receives its deserts and wins the rewards of its own interests and efforts.
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If ordinary impressions were to be accepted, it might well be expected that printing having been invented about the middle of the fifteenth century, the first century would see industrious, but rather crude applications of the invention, until men became accustomed to its employment, and then gradually, by that progress which is so often assumed to be inevitable in mankind, printing would rise to be an art more and more beautiful as time went on, until in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we would have the most beautiful examples of book-making. As a matter of fact, however, during the first half century, immediately after the preliminary tentative application of the art, printing rose to a perfection that has never been excelled since and only equalled in few periods.
Between 1475 and 1525 some of the most beautiful printed books ever made were completed and {148} worthily bound. Columbus' Century can boast the production of the most beautiful books in the world. Succeeding centuries saw a decadence in the arts of book-making which was progressive until the latter half of the nineteenth century. At that time some of the worst books ever made, with poorly designed, cheap type, still cheaper but fortunately perishable paper, sadly inartistic illustrations and ugly bindings, were made (perpetrated is the expression one book-lover has used). It must not be forgotten that this same decadence affected everything else, and that painting and sculpture and architecture reached their lowest ebb also in the nineteenth century, though the book continued to be in the depths for longer than any of the other products of the arts.
Fortunately, William Morris came to call attention to the utter ugliness of commercialized book-making and to arouse his generation to a noble effort for the recovery of the lost art. He demonstrated how artistically books might be made by taking as models the printed books of Columbus' time. He imitated as far as possible their beautiful hand-made paper without reflecting surface, of a tint that made the ink stand out on printed pages with wide margins and judicious spacing, with type faces eminently suited for easy reading, and made with an eye to real artistic quality and with ink that has not faded all these 400 years. All these were book qualities well worthy of emulation. The work has been taken up in many places since, and now beautiful books are not so rare as they were, though it is doubtful whether, even with all our mechanical appliances, our ability to sell reasonably large editions, the prosperity of the time and the interest of publishers and bibliophiles, we have succeeded in making any books that we would dare to set in comparison with a number of the volumes that were printed in Columbus' Century.
The perfection which book-making by hand had reached at the time when printing was invented and began to come into general use made it comparatively easy for excellent printed books to be made--excellent in the sense both of good printing and fine illustration. The "Books of Hours" of the later fifteenth century are among the most beautiful volumes that were ever made. They were finely written in a dear hand, {149} beautifully decorated, handsomely illuminated and very suitably bound. Even the best painters did not hesitate to devote themselves to the making of illuminated illustrations for favorite volumes. The French were, as Dante suggests in Canto XI of the "Purgatorio," the best illuminators in his time, and they continued to maintain this superiority during the fifteenth century. Gerard W. Smith in his "Painting, Spanish and French" (Illustrated Handbooks of Art History), says that "the French school of miniature, though surpassed in seriousness and originality by those of Flanders and Italy, was yet skilful in appropriating many of the excellences of both. They surpassed the former in the general composition of their subjects and the latter in their perspective." The best known of their artist illustrators of this time was Jean Fouquet, the Court painter of Louis XI, whose work as painter is discussed in the chapter, Painting Outside of Italy. The pictures by him in the illuminated Josephus in the Paris Library are especially well known and often praised for their freedom of invention, their variety and the perfection of detail in their accessories. The compositions made for the illustration of Titus Livius, Livy the Latin historian, have been pronounced admirable for their naturalness and life. Fouquet is particularly happy in the landscapes which he introduces into his pictures and the architectural details which he adds. The miniature, which we have copied from the Livy manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale, illustrates all of these qualities very well and makes it clear that no element of artistic beauty or picturesque values was lacking in the books that were being made by hand when printing came to revolutionize the arts of book-making.
Some of the extra-illuminated books of this period are among the most beautiful printed books ever issued in their ornateness. Not long since Tregaskis advertised a little Book of Hours, printed by Simon duBois pour maistre geofroy tori de bourges 1527, at sixty guineas. He describes it as extremely rare and the first in which occurs the Arabesque border so frequently used by Tory and his successors in subsequent editions. Dibden, reproducing some of the borders in his "Bibliographical Decameron," said that he had seen {150} nothing more beautiful of this kind. Each page is printed within a varying woodcut border of birds, fish, flowers and insects, with the initials of the Queen Mother and of the King and Queen crowned, in combination with the arms of France and Savoy.
This is, of course, the period when these books were most beautifully done. There are a number of examples of them that have appeared in the sales in recent years and have {151} commanded high prices not alone because of their antiquity, but because of the exquisite charm of their decorations.
It was in competition with such exquisite books that the early printers found themselves. No wonder, then, that they were stimulated to do beautiful work and that their best efforts were aroused. The fine, broad enterprise of the printers of the time can be very well appreciated from the rapid development of their art and craft by the making of fonts of letters for all the different alphabets. Greek type was made as early as 1465. The first book wholly printed in Greek minuscules was Lascaris' Grammar at Milan in 1476. The first Hebrew types appeared as early as 1475. Aldus' famous Italic type, said to be an imitation of the handwriting of Petrarch, was introduced by Aldus Manutius of Venice for his projected small edition of the classics. The cutting of it was probably done by the painter Francia (Raibolini). It was first used in the Virgil of 1500. Arabic types were first used for the printing of a book in 1514 at Fano in Italy. Syriac was used for printing as early as 1538, and just after the end of Columbus' Century excellent types of this language were in use. A Psalter was printed in Russian at Cracow as early as 1491, and the Russian types were used at Prague in 1517. Anglo-Saxon and Irish types were used shortly after the end of Columbus' Century.
Music printing began early, the earliest specimen of music type occurring in Higden's "Polychronicon," printed by Wynken de Worde at Westminster in 1495. Notes had been printed from wooden blocks twenty-five years earlier, though some books had spaces left to be filled in by hand. About 1500 a musical press was established at Venice. Toward the end of the century special types and presses of many kinds for music were invented.
The great English printer of this time, William Caxton, is a characteristic type of the scholarly printers of the period. We know almost nothing about his life. He records his thanks to his parents for having given him an education that fitted him to earn a living, though he does not say where or how he was educated. Just about the beginning of Columbus' Century he settled at Bruges, going into business on his own {152} account, and soon became prosperous. He had been an apprentice to Robert Large, a wealthy London mercer of the time, who was one of the influential men of the period. In 1453 Caxton returned to England for his formal admittance as a member of the Mercers' Company. His story after this is not unlike that of Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy in our own time. He retired from business apparently with a competency, entered the service of Margaret Duchess of Burgundy, probably in order to have more time for his literary work, and the next year he finished his translation from the French of the "Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye," which was dedicated to Margaret. His book was very much sought after and circulated in manuscript. The task of copying it was too great and entirely too slow for the demand. With true business instinct, Caxton then "practysed & lerned at grete charge and dispense to ordeyne this said book in prynte." His book was printed at Bruges in 1474. The next year his second book, the "Game & Pleye of Chess," which he had also translated from the French, was printed.
The following year, 1476, Caxton returned to England and set up his own printing press at Westminster. The first issue from his press was the "Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers," which bears the date 1477. Though he died fourteen years later, in 1491, he is said to have issued ninety-six books from the Westminster Press in the intervening brief period. His publications include the works of Chaucer and Gower, Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" and a number of translations from French, Latin and Dutch, most of them probably made by himself and all of them under his editorial direction. He issued a number of smaller pious books which show his deep religious interest. Though brought up to a trade which he pursued successfully until he had made money, he was a scholarly man who wrote excellent vigorous English and had an ardent enthusiasm for literature. He is one of the greatest forces in English prose before the sixteenth century, and with Sir Thomas More helped to fix it in the form in which it was to pass to the Elizabethans and be given our modern shape. His life is the best possible evidence of the opportunities for education that abounded at the beginning of Columbus' {153} Century, and which even those quite outside of what would ordinarily be thought the possible chances for the higher education might readily secure.
The story of the great printers of the Renaissance might well be summed up in the work of the Venetian, Aldus Manutius, who was a distinguished scholar as well as publisher. Born 1450, he was a pupil of Guarino of Verona, and having studied Greek very faithfully, resolved to print all the Greek classics. He adopted the handwriting of Musurus as the model on which his Greek type was cast and then proceeded to make arrangements for worthy publication. The ink was made in the publishing house and only the best materials employed. He had special paper from the mills of Fabriano, and the bookbinding was done in a separate department of his own establishment. [Footnote 15] The result was the magnificent set of Editiones Principes issued by his house. The first of these was Musaeus, printed in 1493. Altogether twenty-eight editiones principes of the {154} Greek and Latin classics were issued in some twenty-two years. His trade symbol, the Dolphin and the Anchor, signifies speed and tenacity. In reference to it, Aldus himself once said, "I have achieved much by patience (the word he used was cunctando, literally by taking my time) and I work without pause." As we have said, Aldus invented the form of type called Italic, for which he received a patent from Pope Leo X. In 1500 Aldus printed the first leaf of a proposed Bible in Hebrew, Greek and Latin--a Polyglot Bible which was never completed. His work was carried on after his death in 1515 by the Asolani, his brothers-in-law, and later by Paolo Manuzio, his son, and afterwards by another Aldus, his grandson. In 1518 the Aeschylus was printed, and there was then no extant Greek classic of the first rank unprinted.
[Footnote 15: The lofty motives that impelled men to take up the art of printing can be very well appreciated from some expressions of Aldus in this matter. As a boy he had been shy, awkward and retiring, and although receiving his education in the best schools of Ferrara and Rome, he had not shown any marked ability. For a time he seems to have studied for the priesthood, but instead became a tutor for princely houses. This gave him sufficient for his modest tastes and a quiet, scholarly life. At the age of forty he gave up this career, and with little money began to edit and prepare for printing the works of almost forgotten Greek authors. This was about the time that Columbus launched his vessels to sail to America. Early as this date might seem to be in the history of the art, printing had already been overdone. When Aldus reached Venice there were or had been 160 printers or publishers in that city. Most of them were poor, some of them were bankrupt and none of them were making any money that might be expected to tempt a man of forty without experience to take up a business career. The state of the trade at Rome was scarcely better. Italy was disturbed by rumors of impending war. It was under these conditions that Aldus declared in the preface of one of his early books:
"I have made a vow to devote my life to the public good. God is my witness that this is my most earnest desire. ... I leave a peaceable life, preferring this which is laborious and exacting. ... Man was not born for pleasure unworthy of an elevated spirit, but for duties which dignify him. Let us leave to the vile the lower life of animals."]
Aldus devoted himself to the printing of the classics and quite neglected the theological works which were so popular, at least among the printers of the time. After seven years of the hardest kind of work he said, "In this seventh year of my self-imposed task I can truly say--yes, under oath--that I have not during these long years had one hour of peaceful rest." In 1498, perhaps from overwork, but more likely from neglect of the ordinary care of nature in regular eating and sleeping, he came down with a severe illness. During his illness his thoughts went back to his student days and he vowed that he would become a priest if he recovered. After his recovery, however, he asked and obtained a release from this obligation. The next year he married the daughter of an eminent brother printer, Torresano of Asola, and though there was great difference in their ages, Aldus being fifty and his wife scarcely twenty, it seems to have proved a happy marriage. Aldus health was better cared for after this, and then his thrifty father-in-law, who was a successful publisher, probably helped him with many suggestions, as a consequence of which Aldus made his books cheaper and more widely salable, and henceforth we have less querulousness over the neglect of the public to buy.
Aldus was one of the busiest of men. His motto was festina lente (make haste slowly). He says in one of his books, "You do not know how busy I am; the care I have to give to {155} my publications does not allow me proper time to eat or sleep." In self-defence against bores, and it is easy to understand how many there might be in this period of reawakened interest in scholarship who would think that they could occupy a few hours pleasantly and profitably for themselves in Aldus' establishment, he put this warning on his door:
"Whoever you are, Aldus entreats you to be brief. When you have spoken, leave him, unless you come like Hercules to help Atlas, weary of his burden. Know that there is work here for everyone who enters the door." Practically every important printer and publicist ever since has had to try to protect himself and his time in some similar way. Human nature, or at least the human nature of bores, has not changed any in these five centuries.
In spite of all that he did for his generation, he met with little of gratitude and almost less of personal appreciation. There were many distinguished scholars who were dear personal friends, there were many high ecclesiastics who admired and helped him, there were many noble patrons and clients of his house who must have brought him much consolation. But he had his critics as well: Erasmus could not refrain from some biting witticisms with regard to the frugality of his table, being himself somewhat of a glutton. Scaliger indeed said of him that he drank like three, but did only half the work of one man, while Aldus was very abstemious. Besides, Aldus complained that his books were fraudulently reprinted, that his workmen were tempted away from him after he had trained them, and that he even had to defend himself against the treachery of his own employees at times. Already at that time they were beginning to complain of the injustice done the author by lack of copyright. Erasmus complained: "Our lawmakers do not concern themselves about the matter. He who sells English cloth for Venetian cloth is punished, but he who sells corrupt texts in place of good ones goes free. Innumerable are the books that are corrupted, especially in Germany. There are restraints on bad bakers, but none on bad printers, and there is no corner of the earth where bad books do not go."
A writer in the old Scribner's Magazine for October, 1881, summed up what Aldus had accomplished for his profession {156} in a paragraph that evidently comes from a man who knows his subject well and probably in the modern time has faced some of the problems that Aldus had to meet, though with the advantage of the experience of over four centuries since to help him in solving them.
"Considering the difficulties he had to encounter, not the least of them the difficulty of getting compositors who could read Greek MSS. and compose Greek types, it is a wonder that they are as correct as they are. Some of them are above reproach. When he offered to the reader of his edition of Plato, as he did in the preface of that book, a gold crown for every discovered error, he must have had a confidence in its accuracy which comes only from the consciousness of thorough editorial work. Aldus' taste as editor went beyond the text. Not content with an accurate version, he had that version presented in pleasing types. Everybody admits the value of his invention of Italic, even if his use of it as a text-letter be not approved. But few persons consider that we are indebted to Aldus for the present forms that he introduced. How great this obligation is will be readily acknowledged after an examination of the uncouth characters and the discordant styles of Greek copyists before the sixteenth century. Aldus' invention of small capitals has already been noticed. Here, then, are three distinct styles of book-printing types which he introduced, and which have been adopted everywhere almost without dissent. Other printers have done work of high merit; other type-founders have made pleasing ornamental or fancy types; but no printer or founder since Aldus has invented even one original style of printing types which has been adopted and kept in use as a text-letter for books." [Footnote 16]
[Footnote 16: It was after Grolier's visit to Aldus in Italy that he took up the making of that collection of beautifully bound and printed books which have since made him famous; he evidently owed the inspiration not a little to the great Italian printer.]
The other most distinguished printer of Columbus' Century whose career deserves to be sketched at some length was the Frenchman, Geoffrey Tory or Trinus, who is not so well known as Aldus, coming a little later in history, but whose work was of the highest artistic character.
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Like Aldus, he was of poor parents, but attended the best schools in the Province of Berry toward the end of the fifteenth century and then travelled in Italy. He afterwards became instructor in Paris in the College de Plessis, edited an edition of Pomponius Mela, which was published by Jean Petit, and prepared "AEneas Sylvius" and other works for Estienne the Elder. Fond of art, Tory began to practise wood-engraving and gave up his teaching to study wood-engraving in Italy. He supported himself while studying by painting miniatures for the adornment of manuscripts and printed books and became a great master of his chosen art. He engraved initials, characters and borders for Simon de Collines in Paris, and his work shows the fullest acquaintance with all the resources of his art. His plates marked with the Cross of {158} Lorraine are now considered worthy of a very high place in every choice collection.
His principal contribution to book-making was his remarkable original work called "Champ Fleury." This book was divided into three parts for the instruction of printers. The first of these parts contained a treatise upon the proper use of letters. The second treated of the origin of the capital letter and its proper place. The third contained accurate drawings of letters and a large number of alphabets of various kinds, so that proper selection of type might be made for various kinds of books and varying sizes according to space and page. This work had a far-reaching influence. One result was an immediate and complete revolution in French typography and orthography--the abandonment of the Gothic and the adoption of the new cutting of antique type. After having been used for several centuries, the faces of the type thus produced were abandoned for a time and are now being revived. In this book also Tory laid down the rules for the proper use in French of the accents, apostrophe and marks of punctuation. He did more than anyone else to settle these vexed problems of usage for the world. The publication of the book won from Francis I, himself a scholar and patron of learning and an author to whom so much is owed in the French Renaissance, the title of King's Printer. Some of Tory's borders are illustrated on these pages. They have been fruitful models full of suggestion for such work ever since.
With the development of printing, the need of methods of multiplying illustrations for printed books soon made itself felt and was finely responded to by the genius of the century. Wood-engraving in the service of book-illustration came in very early in the history of printing and was, after all, only a development of the wooden blocks, out of which the first idea of movable types had originally sprung. It was very crude at the beginning, and yet often with an artistic expression that gives it great interest. Its possibilities for printing in company with movable types soon began to be realized, and as printed books became more beautiful and type faces more artistic, the necessity for supplying artistic illustrations was felt, and then it was not long before the need was supplied. Probably the {159} first wood-engraving designed for book-illustration which exhibits a marked artistic quality was "The Dream of Poliphilo," in which, as Woodberry says in his "History of Wood-Engraving," "Italian wood-engraving, quickened by the spirit of the Renaissance, displayed its most beautiful creation." It was written by a Venetian monk, Francesco Colombo, in 1467, and was first printed by Aldus in 1499. The subject was a worthy one, for though the book is a strange mingling of Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic traditions and poetic symbolism, it typifies the spirit of the Renaissance. It represents the search of youth for the loveliness of universal nature and the perfection of ancient art under the title of Polia, the charming maiden who combines all the qualities. Altogether there are 192 designs. They have been attributed to many illustrious masters, even John Bellini and Raphael, among others, but were probably due to Benedetto Montagna.
How soon illustration came to aid in the understanding of the text in books is very well illustrated by Fra Giocondo's work. When, in 1508, he published the letters of the younger Pliny in the Aldine edition, he not only described but illustrated the villas of the ancients. In 1511 he edited the Aldine edition of Vitruvius, with its rude woodcuts that are yet much more thoroughly illustrative than many a more ambitious modern book and which include the first modern plan of a Roman house. When he issued his Aldine edition of Caesar in 1513 this was illustrated with the earliest of all modern drawings of Caesar's bridge across the Rhine. Fra Giocondo is in fact the true father of the illustrated classic, as Sandys suggested in his Harvard Lectures on the "Revival of Learning" (Cambridge University Press, 1905). It may be well to add that the good friar was no mere student for erudition's sake, since, as is noted in the chapter on architecture, he entered the royal service in France, and in 1497 designed one at least, if not two, of the noble bridges that still span the Seine.
The great improvement which came in book-illustration and the making of prints we owe to Albrecht Duerer, who not only was the first to discover the capacities of wood-engraving as a mode of artistic expression, but who saw immediately that it could not equal the rival art of copperplate-engraving in that delicacy of line and depth of tone on which the metal-engraving depends for its excellence, but appreciating the limitations, Duerer prescribed the materials and processes of wood-engraving.
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He increased the size of the cuts, gave breadth and boldness to the lines and obtained new and pleasing effects from strong contrasts of black and white. As Woodberry in his "History of Wood-Engraving" (Harper's, New York, 1883) says: "He thus showed the true method of wood-engraving; but the art owes to him much more than this: he brought to the practice of it the hand and brain of a great master, lifted it, a mechanic's trade, into the service of high imagination and vigorous interest and placed it among the fine arts--a deed of far more importance than any improvements in processes or methods." In so doing, may we add that he only accomplished what so many of his contemporaries did in other arts. The goldsmiths became sculptors and painters, the decorators became true artists and the scholars learned from their classical books to execute what they had studied in the ancients.
It would be hard to say enough of Duerer's wood-engravings. His prints must be allowed to talk for themselves. Unfortunately, owing to limit of space, we are only able to give one of them, but that will furnish an excellent example of the marvellous qualities Duerer succeeded in expressing, in what might have seemed before this time a hopelessly coarse medium. The first of the four famous series of designs by which his skill in wood-engraving is first shown was published in 1498, but it was probably finished before that time. It consisted of fifteen large woodcuts in illustration of the Apocalypse of St. John, to which a vignette of wonderful nobility and simplicity was prefixed.
Other men did wonderful work in this new medium, after Duerer had shown them the way, though none of them surpassed or perhaps even equalled their master. Portions of the triumphal procession of Maximilian by Hans Burgkmaier show that his disciples were thoroughly capable of following in his footsteps. Such men as Hans Schaeuffelin and Hans Springinklee, as well as Hans Baldung, far surpassed most of their successors in the artistic quality of their wood-engraving. Lucas van Leyden and the Cranachs show how artists took to {162} this new mode of expression, and a series of men working in this century prove the wonderful power of the time to stimulate men's genius.
Besides Duerer and the group who were largely influenced by him, one man, Hans Holbein, deserves special mention because he illustrates especially the connection of the new art with book-making. Holbein commenced to practise wood-engraving as soon as he settled in Basel at about the age of twenty. He began by designing the title page, initial letters and woodcuts for the publishers of that period. He illustrated the books of the humanists, especially the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More, then a new and popular work, and afterwards designed the woodcuts for the Biblical translation of Luther, and he did some excellent caricature work. He is a realist and has illustrated particularly humble life, incidents of the daily doings of peasants and children, and these scenes are sometimes introduced as the background of initial letters, some twenty alphabets of which are ascribed to him. Geoffrey Tory in France introduced a classical spirit into wood-engraving, and the sculptors, Jean Cousin and Bernard Salomon and especially Jean Goujon, who made some excellent cuts for Vitruvius (1547), and a group of other illustrators in France, serve to show how the art spread and was used all over the world.
Another interesting development both in prints and in book-illustration came in the gradual evolution of metal-engraving, which, like wood-engraving, reached some of its highest perfection in Germany. Martin Schongauer, who died in 1488, is the first important name, though he was preceded by an unknown German engraver usually spoken of as "The Master of 1466." Schongauer used curved shading and greatly developed the technique. After him came Duerer, who lifted metal-engraving, especially copperplate-engraving, into the realm of art. Probably nothing illustrates so well his power of minute observation as some of his copperplates. His animals are reproduced with fidelity and charm, and in the early days of landscape painting he studied every leaf and branch and tree trunk and knew how to picture just what he saw. The climax of artistic quality was reached by Marcantonio in Italy, who worked under the direction of Raphael. After the work of these masters there was very little left to be added by subsequent engravers.
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How much the illustration of books was helped by this new development of art can be very readily appreciated by those who know some of the old books. Even technical books, such as text-books of anatomy, were beautifully illustrated from copperplates that are not merely conventional pictures, but often real works of art. The plates for Vesalius' anatomy were probably prepared under the direction of Titian by one of his best students, Kalkar, and Eustachius' anatomical plates probably also had the counsel of a great artist. [Footnote 17]
[Footnote 17: How much the book-making and bookbinding of this period is appreciated in our time will perhaps be best and most easily realized from the following item: "At the sale of Lady Brooke's Library at Sotheby's, Mr. Quaritch bought for $1,500 the well-preserved copy of Livy, dated 1543, in a fine contemporary morocco binding, and paid $1,475 for a copy, dated 1533. of Petrus Martyr's 'De Rebus Oceanicis, et Orbe Novo'" (New York Herald, Nov. 26, 1913).]
While the inside of the book was cared for so thoroughly and thoughtfully the outside of it was not neglected. This is the period when the most beautiful bindings in the world were made. The name of the Grolier Club in New York is testimony to this, for when our American bibliophiles wanted to name their association worthily they took their title from the great book-lover of Columbus' Century, Jean Grolier, the Treasurer of France, who did so much to encourage the beautiful book-making of the time. The collection of books made by Grolier is probably the most famous ever brought together. They were beautifully printed on the best of paper as a rule and most fittingly and artistically bound. The life history of practically every one of them has been traced, and many a book-lover has purchased immortality at a comparatively cheap price by having at some time or other been in possession of one of Grolier's books, for the name of every possessor is chronicled as a rule. Many a book-owner of our time has his only chance for being known in the time to come from the fact that he has one of Grolier's books in his library.
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The beautiful bindings need to be seen to be appreciated, but every phase of artistic adornment in books was exhausted. While leather was the favorite material for binding, silk and tapestry and plush were used, and ornamentation of all kinds, metal, tortoise shell and precious stones, was employed. There probably was never more taste displayed than at this time, and though subsequent workmen learned to finish much better, the best bindings of the modern time scarcely compare with those of Columbus' period in artistic quality.
Brander Matthews in his "Bookbindings, Old and New," said: "We must confess that there are very few finishers (of books) of our time who have originality of invention, freshness of composition or individuality of taste." He proceeds to say that in our time we have a more certain handicraft, but less artistic quality. The handicraft has improved, the art has declined. The hand has gained skill, but the head has lost its force.
In our time we are again coming to appreciate properly the value of beautiful books. There have been periods between ours and Columbus' Century when only the most sordid ideas obtained in the book world, or when bad taste ruled and book-binding, like printing and the other arts, had a period of decadence after the sixteenth century, that is hard to explain, though it is easy to find reasons for it, and which continued to sink books into ever greater and greater lack of artistic qualities until almost the twentieth century. Out of that pit dug by neglect of interest in the beautiful as well as the useful we are now climbing, but unfortunately many of our time are inclined to think that this is the first time there has been that emergence, though we are only beginning, as yet distantly, to imitate the beauties of book-making in the mediaeval and Renaissance periods.
Even more interesting for the modern time is the attitude of these great collectors of books of Columbus' time toward their precious treasures. They did not consider that they belonged to themselves alone, but to all those capable of using them. The distinguished Italian collector who preceded Grolier, Maioli, had the motto printed on his books, Tho. Maioli et amicorum--that is, "the property of Thomas Maioli and his friends." A number of other book-collectors, including Grolier, imitated this. Maioli is said to have had the true amateur spirit and to have taken up the making of beautiful bindings for himself. Geoffrey Tory also devoted himself to {167} bookbinding as well as to wood-engraving and his work for the printers. In a word it was a time when men were intent on making the book just as beautiful as possible, while all the time bearing in mind that its utility must be its principal characteristic.
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