Chapter 12

ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES--TADDEO GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366--FRA FILIPPO, 1412-1469--BENOZZO GOZZOLI, 1424-1496--LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT 1524--BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515--PERUGINO, 1446-1522--CARPACCIO, DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--CRIVELLI--FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN 1460--ANTONELLA DA MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE, 1496--GAROPALO, 1481-1559--LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT 1530--PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528--PARDENONE, 1483-1538--LO SPAGNA, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533--GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546--PARIS BORDONE, 1500-1570--IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540--BAROCCIO, 1528-1612--CARAVAGGIO, 1569-1609--LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656--GUERCINO, 1592-1666--ALBANO, 1578-1660--SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1685--VASARI, 1513-1574--SOFONISBA ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1620--LAVINIA FONTANA, 1552-1614.

Taddeo Gaddi, the most important of Giotto's scholars, was born in 1300, and was held at the baptismal font by Giotto himself. Gaddi rather went back on earlier traditions and faults. His excellence lay in his purity and simplicity of feeling. His finest pictures are from the life of the Virgin, in S. Croce, Florence. He was, like his master, a great architect as well as painter. He furnished the plans for the Ponte Vecchio and Campanile, Florence, after Giotto's death. He was possessed of great activity and industry. He is supposed to have died in 1366, and rests in the scene of his labours, since he was buried in the cloisters of S. Croce.

Fra Filippo, 1412-1469, a Carmelite friar. The romantic, scandalous life, including his slavery in Barbary, attributed to him by Vasari, the great biographer of the early Italian painters, has received no corroboration from modern researches. It is rather refuted. He always signed his pictures 'Frater Filippus,' and his death is entered in the register of the Carmine convent as that of 'Frater Filippus.' In all probability he was from first to last a monk, and not a disreputable one. He describes himself as the poorest friar in Florence, with six marriageable nieces dependent on him, and he is said to have been involved in debt.

His colouring was 'golden and broad,' in anticipation of that of Titian; his draperies were fine. He was wanting in the ideal, but full of human feeling, which was apt to get rude and boisterous; his angels were 'like great high-spirited boys.' Withal, his style of composition was stately. Among the best examples of his work are scenes from the life of St John the Baptist in frescoes in the choir of the Duomo at Prato. His panel pictures are rather numerous. There are two lunette[49] pictures by Fra Filippo in the National Gallery.

Benozzo Gozzoli, 1424-1496, a scholar of Fra Angelico, but resembling him only in light and cheerful colouring. He is said to have been the first Italian painter smitten with the beauty of the natural world. He was the first to create rich landscape backgrounds, and he enlivened his landscapes with animals. He displayed a fine fancy for architectural effects, introducing into his pictures open porticoes, arcades, balconies, and galleries. He liked to have subsidiary groups and circles of spectators about his principal figures. In these groups he introduced portraits of his contemporaries, true to nature and full of expression and delicate feeling. His best work is in the Campo Santo, Pisa, scenes from the history of the Old Testament, ranging from Noah to the Queen of Sheba. The Pisans were so pleased with his work as to present him, in 1478, with a sarcophagus intended to contain his remains when they should be deposited in the Campo Santo. He survived the gift eighteen years, dying in 1496. His easel pictures are rare, and do not offer good representations of the master. There is one in the National Gallery--a Virgin and Child, with saints and angels.

Luca d'Egidio di Ventura, called also Luca 'da Cortona,' from his birth-place, and Luca Signorelli, 1441, supposed to have died about 1524. His is a great name in the Tuscan School. He played an important part in the painting of the Sistine Chapel, though he is only represented by one wall picture, the History of Moses. At his best he anticipated Michael Angelo in power and grandeur, but he was given to exaggeration. His fame rests principally on his frescoes at Orvieto, where, by a strange chance, he was appointed, after an interval of time, to continue and complete the work begun by Fra Angelico, the master most opposed to Signorelli in style. Luca added the great dramatic scenes which include the history of Antichrist, executed with a grandeur which 'only Lionardo among the painters sharing a realistic tendency could have surpassed.' These scenes, which contain The Resurrection, Hell, and Paradise, bear a strong resemblance to the work of Michael Angelo. In his fine drawing of the human figure Signorelli may be known by 'the squareness of his forms in joints and extremities.' A conspicuous detail in his pictures is frequently a bright-coloured Roman scarf. His work is rarely seen north of the Alps.

Sandro Filipepi, called Botticelli, 1447-1515. He was an apprentice to a goldsmith, and then became a scholar of Filippo Lipi's. Botticelli was vehement and impetuous, full of passion and poetry, seeking to express movement. He was the most dramatic painter of his school. Occasionally he rises to a grandeur that allies him to Signorelli and Michael Angelo. His circular pictures of the Madonna and Child, with angels, are numerous. Like Fra Filippo, Botticelli's angels are noble youths, some of them belonging to the great families of the time. They are prone to be ecstatic with joy or frantic with grief. There is a grand Coronation of the Virgin, by Botticelli at Hamilton Palace, and a beautiful Nativity by the old master belongs to Mr Fuller Maitland. His Madonna and Child are grand and tragic figures always. Botticelli's noble frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are apt to be overlooked because of Michael Angelo's 'sublime work' on the ceiling. There has been a revival of Botticelli's renown within late years, partly due to the new interest in the earlier Italian painters which Mr Browning has done something to stimulate.

I quote some thoughtful remarks on Botticelli by W.C. Lefroy in _Macmillan's Magazine_: 'Mr Ruskin, we know, divides Italian art into the art of faith, beginning with Giotto, and lasting rather more than 200 years, and the art of unbelief, or at least of cold and inoperative faith, beginning in the middle of Raphael's life. But whatever division we adopt, we must remember that the revival of Paganism, as a matter of fact, affected men in different ways. Right across the schools this new spirit draws its line, but the line is not a hard and sharp one. Some men lie wholly on one side of it, with Giotto, Angelico, and Orcagna; some wholly upon the other, with Titian and Correggio, but there are some on whom it seems to fall as a rainbow falls upon a hill-side. Such, for instance, is Botticelli. Now he tries to paint as men painted in the old days of unpolluted faith, and then again he breaks away and paints like a very heathen.

'The interest which this artist has excited in the present generation has been exaggerated into something like a fashion, and recent criticism has delighted to find or imagine in him the idiosyncrasies of recent thought. To us it may be he does in truth say more than he or his contemporaries dreamed of, but while true criticism will sternly refuse to help us to see in his pictures that which is purely subjective, it will, I think, recognise the fact that a day like ours is capable of reading in the subtle suggestions of ancient art thoughts which have only now come to be frankly defined or exquisitely analysed. To us, moreover, Botticelli presents not only the poem of the apparition of the young and beautiful manhood of humanism before the brooding and entranced, yet half expectant, maidenhood of mediævalism, but also the poem of the painter's own peculiar relation to that crisis. For us there is the poetry of the thing itself, and also the poetry of Botticelli's attempt to express it. The work of Botticelli does not supply a universal utterance for mankind like Shakespeare's plays, but when we stand before the screen on which his "Nativity" is hung, or contemplate in the adjoining room his two perplexed conceptions of "Aphrodite," we are face to face with a genuine outcome of that memorable meeting, mediævalism, humanism, and Savonarola, which no generation can afford to ignore, and our own especially delights to contemplate. There has been much dispute about the date of Botticelli's "Nativity," and some defenders of Savonarola have hoped to read 1511 in the strange character of its inscription, so that this beautiful picture, standing forth as the work of one for many years under the influence of "the Frate," may refute the common calumny that that influence was unfriendly to art. Our catalogue, indeed, unhesitatingly asserts of Botticelli, that "he became a follower of Savonarola and no doubt suffered from it;" but though there seems to be really little doubt that the "Nativity" was painted in 1500, the inscription, with its mystic allusion to the Apocalypse, and the whole character of the picture, afford unmistakable evidence of the influence of Savonarola.'

Pietro Perugino, 1446, died of the plague at Frontignano in 1522. Perugino is another painter who has been indebted to the last Renaissance. His fame, in this country rested chiefly on the circumstance that he was Raphael's master, whom the generous prince of painters delighted to honour, till the tide of fashion in art rose suddenly and floated old Pietro once more to the front. At his best he had luminous colour, grace, softness, and enthusiastic earnestness, especially in his young heads. His defects were monotony, and formality, together with comparative ignorance of the principles of his art. His conception of his calling in its true dignity was not high. His attempts at expressing ardour degenerated into mannerism, and he acquired habits and tricks of arrangement and style, among which figured his favourite upturned heads, that in the end were ill drawn, and, like every other affectation, became wearisome. In the process of falling off as an artist, when mere manual dexterity took the place of earnest devotion and honest pains, Perugino had a large studio where many pupils executed his commissions, and where, working for gain instead of excellence in art, he had the satisfaction, doubtless, of amassing a large fortune. Among his finest works is the picture of an enthroned Madonna and Child in the gallery of the Uffizi. Another fine Madonna with Saints is at Cremona. His frescoes in the Sala del Campio at Perugia are among his best works. The subjects of these frescoes are partly scriptural; partly mythological. In the execution there is excellence alike in drawing, colouring, and the disposal of drapery. A _chef d'oeuvre_ by the master is the Madonna of the Certosa at Pavia, now in, the National Gallery. Yet it is said to have been painted at the very period when Michael Angelo ridiculed Perugino's work as 'absurd and antiquated.' Vittore Carpaccio, date and place of birth unknown, though he is said to have been a native of Istria. He was a historical painter of the early Venetian School and a follower of the Bellini. His romantic _genre_ pictures show the daily life of the Venice of his time, and are furnished with landscape and architectural backgrounds. His masterly and rich work is mostly in Venice. He introduces animals freely and well in his designs.

Carlo Crivelli was another master of the fifteenth century who deserves notice. He had strong individuality, yet was influenced by the Paduan and Venetian Schools. He displayed an old-fashioned preference for painting in tempera. Sometimes his drawing approaches that of Mantegna, while he has a gorgeousness of colouring all his own. His pictures occasionally show dignity of composition in combination with grace and daintiness; but he could be guilty of exaggerated vehemence of expression. He frequently introduced fruit, flowers, and birds in his work. He is fully represented in the National Gallery, his works there ranging from 'small tender pictures of the dead Christ with angels, to a sumptuous altar-piece in numerous compartments.'

Filippino Lipi was an adopted son and probably a relation of Fra Filippo's, though a scholar's use of his master's name was not uncommon. The date of his birth is earlier than 1460. Filippino was also a pupil of Botticelli's, while there was a higher sense of beauty and grace in the pupil than in the teacher. Among his last works is the Vision of St Bernard, an easel picture in the Badia at Florence. The apparition of the Madonna in this picture is said to be 'full of charm.' In his larger works he is one of the greatest historical painters of his country. Roman antiquities had the same keen interest for him which they held for the greatest of his contemporaries, and he made free use of them in the architecture of his pictures. He has fine work in the Carmelite Church, Florence, and in S. Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome. Much of some of his pictures is painted over. The National Gallery has a picture of Filippino's 'of grand execution,' though almost colourless--the Madonna and Child, with St Jerome and St Francis.

Antonella da Messina was the Neapolitan painter who brought the practice of painting in oils from the Netherlands into Italy, though it is now believed, from stubborn discrepancies in dates, that the story of his great friendship with Jan Van Eyck, as given by Vasari, is apochryphal. Very likely Hans Memling, called also 'John of Bruges,' was the real friend and leader of Antonella. His best work consisted of portraits. He is believed to have died at Venice in 1496.

Benvenuto Tisio, surnamed from the place of his birth Garofalo, was born in 1481, and died in 1559. He passed from the early school of Ferrara to that of Raphael. His conception was apt to be fantastic, while his colouring was vivid to abruptness, and he was deficient in charm of expression. He fell into the fault of monotonous ideality. At the same time his heads are beautiful, and his drapery is classic. His finest work is an 'Entombment' in the Borghese Palace, Rome. There is an altar-piece by Garofalo, a Madonna and Child with angels, in the National Gallery.

Bernardo Luini, who stands foremost among the scholars of Lionardo da Vinci, was born by the Lago Maggiore, the date unknown, came to Milan in 1500, was elderly in 1525, and is supposed to have died not long after 1530. His work is chiefly found in Milan. His great merit has been only lately acknowledged. He is not 'very powerful or original,' but for 'purity, grace, and spiritual expression,' he ranks very high. He unites the earnestness of the older masters with the prevailing feeling for beauty of the great masters of Italian Art. His pictures were long mistaken for those of his master, Lionardo, though it is said that when the difference between them is once pointed out, it is easily recognised; indeed, the resemblance is confined to a smiling beatific expression in the countenances, which abounds more in Luini's pictures. His heads of women, children, and angels present every degree of serenity, sweet cheerfulness and happiness, up to ecstatic rapture. 'Christ Disputing with the Doctors,' in the National Gallery, formerly called a Lionardo, is now known to be a Luini. He painted much, whether in tempera, fresco, or oil. His favourite subjects in oil were the Madonna and Child, with St John and the Lamb, and the Marriage of St Catherine. Probable he appears to greatest advantage in frescoes. He is said to have reached his highest perfection in the figure of St John in a Crucifixion in the Monasterio Maggiore, Milan.

Jacopo Palma, called Il Palma Vecchio, was born about 1480 near Bergamo, and died in 1528. He is believed to have studied under Giovanni Bellini, while he is also the chief follower of Giorgione. His characteristics are ample forms and gorgeous breadth of drapery. His female saints, with their large rounded figures, have a soft yet commanding expression. He had an enchanting feeling for landscape, which seems to have been the birthright of the Venetian painters. To Palma is owing what are called 'Santa Conversazione,' where there are numerous groups round the Virgin and Child, as if they are holding a court in a retired and beautiful country nook. Palma rivalled Giorgione and Titian as a painter of women's portraits. Among these is that of his daughter Violante, believed to have been loved by Titian. 'Palma's three Daughters,' in the Dresden Gallery, is a masterpiece of 'fair, full-blown beauty.' The hair of the women is of the curiously bleached yellow tint affected then by the Venetian ladies. Palma painted many pictures, leaving at his death forty-our unfinished.

Giovanni Antonio da Pardenone, born 1483, died 1538. He had many names, 'Pardenone' from his birth-place, 'Corticellis' from that of his father, and he is believed to have assumed the name 'Regillo' after he received knighthood from the King of Hungary. He was Venetian in his artistic qualities. Many of his works are in his native Pardetowns near. All have suffered and some are now hidden by whitewash. His chief strength lay in fresco. His scenes from the Passion in the cathedral, Cremona, are greatly damaged and wretchedly restored, but they still reveal the painter as a great master. They have 'fine drawing, action, excellent colouring, grand management of light and shade, with freedom of hand and dignity of conception.' In the prophets and sibyls around the cupola of the Madonna di Campagna, Piacenza, Pardenone's power is fully proven. His immense works in fresco account for the rarity of his oil pictures and their comparative inferiority. There is only one picture, and that a portrait, indisputably assigned to Pardenone in England, in the Baring Collection.

Giovanni di Pietro, known as Lo Spagna (the Spaniard), was a contemporary of Raphael's, a fellow-pupil of his under Perugino. There is no record of the time and place of Lo Spagna's birth. He died in 1533. He was a careful, conscientious follower of Perugino and Raphael, doing finished and delicate work; an 'Assumption' in a church at Trevi is a fine example of his qualities. His best picture was painted in 1516, and is at Assisi. It represents the Madonna enthroned with three saints on each side. In his later works he betrayed feebleness. Pictures by Lo Spagna are often attributed to Raphael.

Giulio Pippi, surnamed Romano, born in 1492, died in 1546, was a very different painter, while he was the most celebrated of Raphael's scholars. He had a vigorous, daring spirit, with a free hand and a bold fancy. So long as he painted under Raphael, Giulio followed his master closely, especially in his study of the antique, but he lacked the purity and grace of his teacher, on whose death, the pupil leaving Rome, pursued his own coarser, more vehement impulses. The frescoes in the Villa Modama, Rome, are good examples of his style, so is the altar-piece of the Martyrdom of St Stephen in S. Stefano, Genoa. Giulio Romano was the architect who designed the rebuilding of half Mantua. His best easel picture in England is the 'Education of Jupiter by Nymphs and Corybantes,' in the National Gallery. In Raphael's lifetime his principal scholar was accustomed to work on the master's pictures, and on his death Giulio, together with another pupil, Gianfrancesco Penni, were left executors of Raphael's will and heirs of his designs.

Paris Bordone was born at Treviso in 1500 and died in 1570. He was educated in the Venetian School, and remained remarkable for delicate rosy colour in his flesh tints and for purple, crimson, and shot hues in his draperies, which were usually small and in crumpled folds. His _chef d'oeuvre_ is in the Venetian Academy. It is a fisherman presenting a ring to the Doge, and is a large and fine picture with many figures. He dealt frequently in mythological or poetic subjects. There is an example of the first in the National Gallery. He was great in single female subjects and women's portraits. There is a portrait by Bordone of a lovely woman of nineteen belonging to the Brignole family, in the National Gallery. He had often fine landscape and grand architecture in his pictures.

Il Parmigianino, born 1503, died 1540, was a follower of Correggio's. In Parmigianino's case the danger of the master's peculiarities became apparent by the lapse into affectation and frivolity. 'His Madonnas are empty and condescending, his female saints like ladies in waiting.' Still there were certain indestructible beauties of the master which yet clung to the scholar. He had clear warm colouring, decision, and good conception of human life. He was highly successful in portraits. There is a splendid portrait by Parmigianino, said to be Columbus, in Naples. Among his celebrated pictures is 'The Madonna with the Long Neck,' in the Pitti Palace. An altar-piece in the National Gallery, which represents a Madonna in the clouds with St John the Baptist appearing to St Jerome, is a good example of Parmigianino. It is said that he was engrossed with this picture during the siege of Rome in 1527. The soldiers entered the studio intent on pillage, but surprising the master at his work, respected his enthusiasm and protected him.

Federigo Baroccio, of Urbino, born in 1528, died in 1612, was also a follower of Correggio's, and made a stand against the decline of art in his day. He was tender and idyllic, though apt in his turn to be affected and sentimental. When painting in the Vatican, Rome, his rivals sought to take his life by poison. The attempt caused Baroccio to return to Urbino, where he established himself and executed his commissions.

Amirighi da Caravaggio was born at Caravaggio in 1569, and died at Porto Ercole in 1609. He was chief of the naturalistic school, the members of which painted common nature and violent passions in bitter opposition to the eclectics, especially the Caracci. The feud was sometimes carried on appositely enough on the side of the naturalistic painters by poison and dagger. Caravaggio was distinguished by his wild temper and stormy life, in keeping with his pictures. He resided principally in Rome, but dwelt also in Naples. He is vulgar but striking, even pathetic in some of his pictures. The 'Beheading of John the Baptist,' in the Cathedral, Malta, is one of his masterpieces. His Holy Families now and then resemble gipsy _ménages_.

Guiseppe Ribiera, a Spaniard, and so called Lo Spagnoletto, was born 1593 and died 1656. He followed Caravaggio, while he retained reminiscences of the Spanish School and of the Venetian masters. Some of his best pictures, such as 'the Pieta with the Marys and the Disciples,' and his 'Last Supper,' are in Naples. He had a wild fancy with a preference for horrible subjects--executions, tortures--in this respect resembling Domenichino. Lo Spagnoletto is said to be particularly unpleasant in his mythological scenes. Many of his pictures have blackened with time. His 'Mary of Egypt standing by her open Grave' is a remarkable picture in the Dresden Gallery.

Giovanni Francesco Barbiera, surnamed Guercino da Cinto, approached the school of the Caracci. In his art he resembled Guido Reni, with the same sweetness, greater liveliness, and fine chiaroscuro. 'Dido's Last Moments' and 'St Peter raising Tabitha' in Rome and in the Pitti Palace are fine examples of Guercino's work. His later pictures, like Guido's, are fascinating in softness, delicate colouring and tender sentiment, degenerating, however, into mannerism and insipidity, while his colouring becomes at last pale and washy.

Albano, born 1578, died 1660. He had elegance and cheerfulness which hardly rose to grace. He painted mostly scenes from ancient mythology, such as 'Venus and her Companions.' Religious subjects were comparatively rare with him; one, however, often repeated was the 'Infant Christ sleeping on the Cross.'

Giovanni Battista Salvi, surnamed from his birth-place Sassoferrato, was born in 1605 and died in 1685. He followed the scholars of the Caracci, but with some independence, returning to older and greater masters. His art was distinguished by a peculiar but slightly affected gentleness of conception, pleasing and sweet--with the sweetness verging on weakness. He finished with minute care. He gave constant representations of the Madonna and Child and Holy Families in a domestic character. In one of his pictures in Naples the Madonna is engaged in sewing. His most celebrated, 'Madonna del Rosario,' is in S. Sabina, Rome. The Madonna bending in ecstatic worship over an infant Christ lying on a cushion is in the Dresden Gallery.

Giorgio Vasari was born at Arezzo in 1512 and died at Florence in 1574. He was an architect, or jeweller, and a historical painter of heavy crowded pictures. His lives of the early Italian painters and sculptors up to his own time, the sixteenth century, though full of traditional gossip, are invaluable as graphic chronicles of much interesting information which would otherwise have been lost.

Sofonisba Anguisciola, born 1535, died about 1620, was a pupil of Bernardino Campi about the close of the sixteenth century at Cremona. She is justly praised by Vasari. Though her works are rare there are a few in England and Scotland. Three of her pictures which are mentioned with high commendation by Dr. Waagen are, 'a nun in the white robes of her order, nobly conceived and delicately coloured,' in Lord Yarborough's collection; in Mr Harcourt's collection, 'her own portrait, still very youthful, delicate, charming, and clear;' and in the collection of the late Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, 'another portrait of herself at an easel painting the Virgin and Child on wood, delicately conceived, clear in colour, and very careful.'

Lavinia Fontana, born in 1552, died 1614, was a daughter of Prospero Fontana, who belonged to the fast degenerating Bolognese artists at the close of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. She was a better artist than her fellow painters, worked cleverly and boldly, and showed truth to nature. She has left excellent portraits. In the late Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's collection there is a picture by her, 'Two girls in a boat with a youth rowing,' on wood, 'of very graceful motive and careful treatment.'