Fra Bartolommeo | Page 4

the mind of God.
It was a saying of Buffalmacco, who was not one of the most devout
painters of the fourteenth century, "Do not let us think of anything but
to cover our walls with saints, and out of disrespect to the demons to
make men more devout." And Savonarola, though he has been accused
of being one of the causes of the decline, thus upheld the sacred
influences of art; when he exclaimed in one of his fervent bursts of
eloquence, "You see that Saint there in the Church and say, 'I will live a
good life and be like him.'" If these were the feelings of the least devout
and the religious fanatic, how hallowed must the influences of
Christian painting have been to the intermediate ranks. Mr. Symonds
beautifully expresses the tendency of that time: "The eyes of the
worshipper should no longer have a mere stock or stone to contemplate;
his imagination should be helped by the dogmatic presentation of the
scenes of sacred history, and his devotion quickened by lively images
of the passion of our Lord.... The body and soul moreover should be
reconciled, and God's likeness should be once more acknowledged in
the features and limbs of men." [Footnote: Symonds' _Renaissance of
the Fine Arts_, chap. i. p. 11.]
The school of Giotto was the first to feel this need of the soul. He,
taking his ideas from nature, clothed the soul in a thin veil; the Italians
call his school that of poetic art; it reached sentiment and poetry, but

did not pass them. Yet the thirteenth century was sublime for the
expression of the idea; one only has to study the intense meaning in the
works of Giotto, and Orcagna, Duccio, and the Lorenzetti of Siena to
perceive this. The fourteenth century, on the contrary, rendered itself
glorious for manifestation of form. "Artists thought the veil of ideality a
poor thing, and wished to give the solidity of the body to the soul; they
stole every secret from nature; the senses were content, but not
sentiment." [Footnote: _Purismo nell' Arte_, da Cesare Guasti.]
The artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of whom we have to
speak, blended the two schools, and became perfection as far as they
went. Michelangelo drew more from the vigorous thirteenth-century
masters, and Raphael from the more sensuous followers of Masaccio
and Lippi. The former tried to put the Christian soul into his works, but
its infinite depth was unattainable. As his many unfinished works prove,
he always felt some great overwhelming meaning in his inmost soul,
which all his passionate artistic yearnings were inadequate to express.
Raphael tried to bring realism into religion through painting, and to
give us the scenes of our Lord's and the Apostles' lives in such a
humanized aspect, that we should feel ourselves of his nature. But the
incarnation of religion in art defeated its own ends; sensuousness was
introduced in place of the calm, unearthly spirituality of the earlier
masters. Compare the cartoon of S. Paul preaching at Athens, in which
he has all the majesty of a Cæsar in the Forum, with the lowly spirit of
the Apostle's life! In truth, Raphael failed to approach nearer to
sublimity than Fra Angelico, with all his faulty drawing but pure spirit.
After him, artists loved form and colour for themselves rather than for
the spiritual meaning. Miss Owen [Footnote: _Art Schools of Medieval
Christendom_, edited by Ruskin.] accuses Raphael of having rendered
Art pagan, but this seems blaming him for the weakness of his
followers, who took for their type his works rather than his ideal. The
causes of the decline were many, and are not centred in one man. As
long as Religion slumbered in monasticism and dogma, Art seizing on
the human parts, such as the maternity of the Madonna, the
personifications of saints who had lived in the world, was its adequate
exponent. The religion awakened by the aesthetic S. Francis, who loved
all kinds of beauty, was of the kind to be fed by pictures. But when
Savonarola had aroused the fervour of the nation to its highest point,

when beauty was nothing, the world nothing, in comparison to the
infinity of God;--then art, finding itself powerless to express this
overwhelming infinity, fell back on more earthly founts of inspiration,
the classics and the poets.
Lorenzo de' Medici and Pope Nicholas V. had fully as much to do with
the decline as Savonarola. The Pope in Rome, and Lorenzo in Florence,
led art to the verge of paganism; Savonarola would have kept it on the
confines of purism; it was divided and fell, passing through the various
steps of decadence, the mannerists and the eclectics, to rise again in this
nineteenth century with what is after all