There followed four or five years of eager experiment, much being planned and rather little carried to completion. Relieved from the pressure of a master, actual painting seems to have become irksome. He loves to sketch, to turn his designs over until they reach perfection, leaving them in the condition of the swiftest and most accurate notations. Lack of system and paralysis of will are already apparent. For about two years of this joyous and irresponsible creation he remained a primitive. Such he is in the idyllic little Annunciation of the Louvre,^[51] Figure 149, which should be for its fluent technic no earlier than 1476. He takes the motive which he had previously done under restrictions, reduces it to a symmetrical order, rejects distracting details, floods it with warm light breaking through ragged apertures of the trees, and invests it with a penetrating humility and grace. The little picture, which many critics set too early, is really Leonardo’s declaration of independence. It shows features which anticipate his mature style—a combination of a severe geometrical symmetry in figure composition with a romantically strange setting and lighting.

Of less import is the unpretentious little Madonna of the Flower, recently discovered, and in the Hermitage, at Petrograd. It is authenticated by numerous composition sketches. Its vivacity and youthful lightness of effect are entirely in Verrocchio’s manner, nothing is new but heavier shadows and more emphatic modelling.

On a sheet of drawings in the Uffizi, which characteristically combines with sketches of men’s heads studies of machinery, we read “This day I began the two Virgin Marys.” The day is effaced, but it is a month in 1478, ending in -bre—September, October or November. One of these Madonnas is, no doubt, the Madonna of the Flower.^[52] As to the other we have no certainty, but the sketches of this time show at least five madonnas in process of invention. A Madonna holding a mischievous Child who hugs a writhing cat, a Madonna with a Dish of Fruit, a Madonna kneeling before the Child, a theme later developed into the Madonna of the Rocks; a Madonna seated on the Ground, and a Madonna seated in the open with the Christchild and St. John. Dr. Jens Thys thinks the last composition may be the one actually begun as a picture, since such early Raphaels as the Belle Jardinière seem to imply such a picture as their model. We do well to turn from such speculations to the marvelous sketches for these Madonnas, Figure 150. Nothing firmer, lighter or more charming can be imagined. Of the line, thinned to a hair or widened to a blot, there is the completest control. These little figures, a couple of inches high at the most and often of thumb-nail minuteness, may be enlarged to life size without losing in structure or character. Nothing shows better the sheer fecund genius of Leonardo than these sheets, crowded with figures, scribbled with his right-to-left handwriting, and slantingly shaded from upper left downwards, after the fashion of a lefthanded draughtsman. They show how Leonardo worked in spurts of inspiration, creating a dozen lovely compositions and contented with none. They represent so many tensely joyous half-hours, with doubtless long intervals of other activities and withal of sheer brooding and unrecorded observation. They help one grasp the spasmodic and discontinuous quality of Leonardo’s genius—why the actual execution of pictures was ever a matter of pain and drudgery to him. Up to his twenty-ninth year he apparently made no prolonged effort of any sort, but spent himself furiously in separate investigations. Then he pulled himself together for a great picture, and though it too never got beyond the underpainting, it broke the new path to the Golden Age.

For several years Leonardo had turned over the theme of an Adoration of the Child in his sketch books. These desultory inventions were brought abruptly to a focus in March 1481, when he agreed to do an altar-piece for the monks of S. Donato at Scopeto. We have the best circumstantial evidence for identifying this piece with the unfinished Adoration of the Kings, now in the Uffizi. When we live ourselves into this dusky and mysterious sketch we step out of the early Renaissance into a new, ardent, rich and ordered region of invention such as the world had not witnessed since the glory of Greece faded. The composition went through at least three main stages. At first, as we see from a pen study in the Bonnat Museum, at Bayonne, an Adoration of the Shepherds was considered, the Madonna kneeling over the Christ between flanking groups of worshippers. The scheme was rejected as too thin and obvious. A picture of Lorenzi di Credi’s shows us its limited possibilities. Then the picture became an Adoration of the Kings, with the thatched shed, much action in the foreground group and a ruined amphitheatre in the background. This sketch in the Louvre, Figure 151, contains all the elements of the picture, but an extraordinary work of clarification and refinement remained to be done. The figures were studied and restudied till they reached both highest expressiveness and individuality,^[53] and an exact relation to the dense and intricate articulation of the foreground group. Often there are half a dozen separate studies for each motive. The central group was more closely massed till it became a rose of eager faces and flickering hands and kneeling forms pressing inward towards the Child. To increase this concentration, a mound is erected behind the group shutting it off from the wide background. To steady the group, the Madonna is no longer swung athwart the motion, but her nearly straight position becomes a sort of axis carried up by the trees above. In the richness, variety and animation of the compact group of adorers, Leonardo has met the Early Renaissance on its own ground and outdone it. In the wider setting he still observes the old precepts, but in a profounder and more significant sense. He has swept the traditional shed aside and opened up a world, a world furtive and active and combatant in its own wilfulness—playing, hiding, and fighting amid the crumbling ruins of old civilizations, and before distant towering crags which were there before civilization or man himself was; a world oblivious of the sublime mystery accomplishing itself in the kings who pay homage to a Babe. What an ironic substitute for the joyous pastoralism with which contemporary artists invested their pictures of the Epiphany!

The Adoration of the Kings, Figure 152, is the richest, most complicated, most beautifully ordered picture of its century; even Leonardo was not to surpass it simply as a composition. Like all rich things it will bear many analyses. You may consider it as a triangle, with the reciprocal forms enriched, or, with Dr. Thys, as the combination of two radiating motives, one centred on the Madonna’s face, the other on the soft alert body of the Child. Such analyses are only important as temporary aids to understanding of the main fact that in the making of such a masterpiece a clear and subtile geometry is involved. Later Leonardo was to declare that there is no science which cannot undergo mathematical demonstration, and he probably would have added—no art. Of his own art at least the saying is true. It may have been not so much his native indolence that arrested a work which had claimed months of passionate preparation at the moment when creation was at its height, as the conviction that it would lose something if fully realized. One can see how he loved the summary touches of dark and light, the swift, sufficient evocation of body and soul which he had learned from Masaccio. He may have hated to cover up such work, and a critic today may well be in doubt whether the gain in finishing it would have atoned for the loss. Or Leonardo da Vinci may already have been called to Milan and a new artistic life. However that be, the monks of Secopto, after a long wait, turned to Filippino Lippi, who had already undertaken one lapsed commission for Leonardo, and he promptly achieved an Adoration of the Kings which only shows how inimitable Leonardo was, and how little mere richness counts in any picture.

For two years between 1481 and 1483, there is silence. It seems to me that in this time we may set the crowning of his early work in the Madonna of the Rocks at the Louvre and the Cartoon of St. Ann at London. The Madonna of the Rocks, Figure 153, is the logical outcome of a half dozen Adorations which we may trace through the drawings of 1478. A sheet of sketches in the Metropolitan Museum shows him turning the theme over, rejecting the established profile arrangement of Fra Filippo, and hitting on the formal pyramidal pattern which appears in the picture itself. There the pyramid is felt not merely in plane, but also in depth. The forms and faces are superbly tense without either rigidity or the fluency of Leonardo’s later work. The setting is primitive, with minutely studied textures of rock and crisp shapes of wall-flowers. Everything derives from Fra Filippo and Botticelli, but with new meaning. The romantic strangeness of the setting, the glimpses of sky and opening in the rock, the sifting in of light from the heart of the picture itself, the broad contrast of the formality of the figure arrangement with the picturesque wildness of the setting—all this is purest Leonardo and represents the culmination of many experiments. One can trace this idea of irregularly broken light and an informal screen as foil for a geometrical pattern, from the little Annunciation of the Louvre, through the unfinished St. Jerome of the Vatican. The Early Renaissance steps into the background, where it belongs. Leonardo never rejects it; he fulfils it with an exquisite sense of proportion.

If the first Madonna of the Rocks was painted before 1482, in Florence, so probably was the cartoon of the Madonna with St. Ann, Figure 127, perhaps the most precious single work that Leonardo has left us. The inwardness of the relation between the two women is in the mood of the Adoration of the Kings, single motives suggest the drawings for the Madonna of the Cat. Later Leonardo was to lend to the motive greater complication and formal elegance, somewhat at the cost of emotional insight. Pictures of intense and natural feeling Leonardo does not produce after his thirtieth year. Instead we have dramatic objectivity in one phase, and in another, exquisite subtilities, a calculated graciousness sweet to morbidity.

What drew Leonardo from Florence to Milan we do not surely know. Probably he was called directly by the Duke Lodovico Sforza to undertake the colossal equestrian statue of his father Francesco. Moreover, Leonardo seems to have achieved notoriety at Florence without gaining much confidence or achieving much success. After all, he had rather little to show for his genius—just his sketch books and his good intentions in unfinished masterpieces. He seems, too, never to have mastered the practice which ever brought the best commissions, fresco painting. Thus he had every reason to seek new fortunes.

He heralded his coming to Milan with the most truthfully boastful of letters in which he arrogated to himself all ability as an inventor, civil and military engineer, painter, sculptor, and architect; and he entered the presence of Lodovico bearing a silver lute wrought in the form of a horse’s skull. This dramatic entrance was the forecast of arduous duties as an entertainer. He sang, told anecdotes and fables, arranged pageants and masques, conducted debates on his art—in short, accepted the thousand and one duties and distractions of a courtier.

He painted the portraits of the Duke’s mistresses, and it is possible that we have the girlish figure of Cecilia Gallierani in the lady with an Ermine^[54] at Cracow. The forms and feeling are entirely like Leonardo’s work in the early eighties. He agreed to do an altar-piece for the Church of San Francesco, and delivered it only after a delay of twenty-three years. This most postponed of pictures is the version of the Madonna of the Rocks now at London. Meanwhile Leonardo’s constant concern was “the horse,” as he calls it. For seven years he worked at a rearing horse with a fallen foe trodden beneath. It is shown in many drawings. It was too sensational a theme to please him in the long run. So in 1490, spurred by the risk of losing the job, he restudied the horse, using the walking motive, which had come down from classical antiquity. Eventually the clay model was set up before the Sforza castle, just in time for the invading French archers to make a target of it. The rider was never even definitely planned. The whole project remained a chagrin to Leonardo even after the horse itself had disappeared. One day in Florence he civilly accosted Michelangelo who turned on him with the taunt—“Thou who did’st model a horse and could’st not cast it in bronze.”

Amidst the distractions of the court, the irksomeness of the rashly undertaken Sforza monument, and the increasing passion for scientific research, Leonardo managed to carry through his single monumental work, the Last Supper, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

For three years Leonardo worked spasmodically on the Last Supper, and it was finished in 1498. The design had been most carefully elaborated. He started with the customary arrangement of the apostles in pairs, John in Jesus’ bosom—a refractory motive, and Judas in sinister isolation on the near side of the table. Almost by accident he fell upon the effective grouping of the apostles by threes. Then he set himself to giving in expression and gesture the maximum emotion that could be contained within a monumental design. He eliminated the old casual accessories and made all the lines of perspective converge on the face of Christ. He gave to all the figures a classical gravity, though admitting many varieties of age and character.

Thus even in its ruined estate The Last Supper, Figure 154, is perhaps the most impressive picture in the world. The moment is that when Christ says “One of you shall betray me.” The arrangement is in five great balancing waves. From the Christ there is an outgoing gesture of resignation and love, from the apostles converging, incoming waves of horror, amazement, curiosity and indignation. Each undulation is double. Extended arms or pointed hands check the motion where it is excessive or connect the separate groups. Only Judas is out of the converging rhythm. He swings back defiantly pondering his part. Highly agitated in details, the whole is held within a noble and pathetic decorum. It is the very ideal of a Renaissance composition—dense, rich, energetic, varied, yet unified by a severe and calculated pattern which subordinates to its purpose the most diverse components. Raphael can only imitate it in the lower part of the Disputa, and monumental design ever since has gone to school with it.

It was unhappily painted in tempera, not in oils as older accounts say,^[55] on the dry wall, and it soon began to deteriorate. What we see today is merely the wraith of it, yet a wraith that imposes itself and moves us as few better preserved masterpieces do.

In the year 1500 the French overran Lombardy, and, Leonardo, after wandering in Northern Italy and a martial episode as engineer for conquering Cæsar Borgia, returned, in 1503, to his native Florence. He is fifty and already in spirit an old man. His always limited will power has given out, he broods incessantly over mathematical and physical lore, wastes himself over fantastic inventions. His exhibit is only a cartoon, now lost, for a St. Ann. He makes portraits by proxy, but paints, himself, only under peculiar incentives. Such he found in the commission for a great battle-piece for the Priors’ Palace and in the personality of Mona Lisa.

Early in the year 1504 he began to work on the cartoon for the Battle of Anghiari. He chose the incident of a cavalry fight for the standard. He composed a whirl of horses and infuriated riders, hacking and slashing about a flag—a literal picture of bloodlust at its height. The ability he expended on this atrocious theme may be sensed in a dozen preparatory sketches, Figure 155. The portion which he actually painted on the wall is represented only by inferior copies. The original soon faded from deficient technical methods. The old copies tell us that this great piece, while the marvel of its day, was sensational and highly exhibitionistic. We need not too much mourn its loss. The admiration it evoked was that of an age eager for novelty and responsive to display.

While working on the battle-piece, Leonardo met the young Neapolitan wife of Francesco del Giocondo and began her portrait, Figure 156. She had lost children and was habitually sad. He employed musicians to charm the inscrutable fascinating smile to her face. He set her demure and watchful before a romantic expanse of river plain rimmed by blue alps. Against this wild charm of nature, he made Mona Lisa a symbol for all that is cultured, self-contained, sophisticated, civilized. Simple people instinctively dislike her, and are right. Subtle people adore her, and are also right. Such as wish poetic commentary on her mysterious beauty may find it for themselves in Walter Pater’s admirable essay. They will do well to temper his eloquence with Kenyon Cox’s^[56] just if prosaic observation that this portrait is simply the finest, most accurate, and subtle bit of modelling in the world. Its mystery is perhaps merely one of amazing vision and impeccable workmanship. The truth may well lie between two interpretations, each of which is valid in its own field. Had there not been some extraordinary spell in the woman herself, Leonardo, now well weary of painting, would hardly have studied either her soul or her modelling with such tenacity.

During his brief sojourn in Florence, Leonardo did cartoons for two designs of Leda and the Swan, his only mythological picture. One represents her standing, the other crouching. If we may trust the inferior imitations, in which alone we know these subjects, their calculated sensuousness was almost cloying. Their mood is that of his least agreeable imitator, Sodoma.

In May 1506 Florence lent Leonardo to Charles d’Amboise, the French viceroy at Milan, and there he spent the most of the next five years. The Franciscans had been biding their time, and under legal duress made him finish the Madonna which he had promised twenty-three years earlier. Thus the second Madonna of the Rocks, at London, was painted somewhat against the grain. It has more simplicity and breadth than the earlier version and shows improvements in the position of the angel. It also lacks the minute and painstaking delicacy of its original, reveals a tired hand and mind. Otherwise Leonardo achieved in painting only the third version of the Madonna and St. Ann, Figure 157, now in the Louvre. The interweaving of the figures is compact and masterly, the solution of the difficult problems of the two heads consummately clever. It has passages of the utmost loveliness, like the foot of the Madonna, but there is some suspicion of oversophistication, and Leonardo never summoned the energy to finish it. Painting little himself,—for he was busy with canals, architecture, and the never finished equestrian monument of Trivulzio,—Leonardo gave his stamp to the entire Milanese school. Such pupils as Boltraffio, Cesare da Sesto, Andrea Solario, his old partner, Ambrogio de Predis, and his intimate, Francesco Melzi, readily grasped his mannerisms, and filled Italy with Leonardesque pictures of inferior inspiration. More robust and independent spirits, like Bernardino Luini, adapted his manner intelligently to the needs of mural painting. Lombardy under his influence for a moment seemed to vie with Florence and Rome.

In 1513 Leonardo was called to Rome by the new Pope Leo X, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son, Giovanni. It was the moment for artistic ambition to flame in one who felt himself a great painter. Michelangelo had recently unveiled the Sistine ceiling, and Raphael had completed the Camera della Segnatura. Leonardo was sixty-one, when a painter should be at his best. Yet he plunged himself into scientific experiments, perpetrated strange practical jokes on his patrons, produced nothing but disorderly notes, and after two wasted years left the repute of one rather an amateur magician than an artist.

Having lived a wanderer, it was appropriate that Leonardo should die an exile. Francis I, an enthusiastic patron of Italian art, called him to France and settled him honorably in the Château of Cloux, near Amboise. We hear of him as immensely learned and venerable, but palsied, and dependent on the affectionate care of his pupil Melzi. He died on the morrow of Mayday 1519 at peace with the church, leaving money to sixty poor persons who should follow his body with candles to the tomb. Doubtless you could have marked in that pitiful procession many of those gnarled, toothless and haggard faces which Leonardo formerly loved to sketch in the intervals of his endless quest of beauty. As we study the marvelous drawing of himself in old age, Figure 158, we may surmise that he was glad to go. It is hard to see in it the courtier who bore the fantastic silver lute to Lodovico, the artist who charmed a smile from the weary and cautious face of Mona Lisa. One sees a man immensely old, though at an age generally robust and cheery—one who has tried to crowd many lives into one and has paid the inevitable penalty.

Broken and intermittent as it had been, Leonardo’s painting had sufficed to show the way. He had substituted mystery of light and shade for allurement of frank color, study of the subtler and finer shades of emotion for obvious characterization, had founded modern portraiture. He had shown how to express power and passion with delicacy, had combined the richest animation and variety with monumental severity of design. After him the art of painting was never to be the same again. Its standards became ampler and more classic. Stolid men like Fra Bartolommeo immediately accepted his principles of composition and so did miraculously alert intelligences like Raphael’s. His mere passing contact and tradition inspired that admirable language of light and dark that became poetry in Giorgione and Correggio. The good and the harm he did is active today in thousands of academies and art schools. His is assuredly the finest intelligence that ever applied itself to the painter’s art, and if he failed in will and in fecundity, he has impressed himself upon posterity as no other Italian painter save Titian. His art had its limitations, but its capacity for influence, to which he added the thoughtful eloquence of his written word, seems limitless; and his glory is imperishable.

Nowhere does the superiority of Florence show more clearly than in the attitude of her artists to Leonardo. Where his Milanese followers aped his superficial mannerisms, his Florentine admirers studied and assimilated his construction in light and shade and his principles of geometrical composition. Unhappily the early years of the sixteenth century were a slack time in Florence. Such transitional painters as Piero di Cosimo, Granacci, Franciabigio, Il Bacchiacca, and Ridolfo Ghirlandaio were not men to carry forward Leonardo’s discoveries, but they and others, at least paid him an intelligent homage and sensibly clarified their practice under his influence. Greater intelligences like Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto not merely adopted Leonardo’s canons, but even at certain points criticized them. Both saw the drawback of Leonardo’s passionate concern with chiaroscuro—that it flooded the canvas with colorless shadow, tending to reduce the palette to black and white. Both men then therefore kept their rich shadows colorful. Both worked for a more compact and intricate composition as well as for graceful, abstract poses. In these latter endeavors they simplified and sharpened principles which Leonardo himself only rarely carried to their logical extreme.

Leonardo retained certain primitive qualities. He seldom reduced his compositions to dense arrangements of the figures, loving to allow elbow room and delighting to open up landscape backgrounds. And while in the “Treatise on Painting” he advocated elaborately balanced and counterpoised poses, in practice he usually sought an excuse for them in action. A consummate stylist, he achieved style on a basis of function. The pose, in his own words, must express “the emotions of the soul.” Right here his ablest followers took issue with him. Posture with them no longer expressed specific or individual emotion, but abstract beauties of grace, dignity or grandeur. The figures no longer do or feel anything, they are arranged as the general composition and mood of the picture require. Such gradual advance towards pure style heralds the advent of the High Renaissance.

Of the somewhat stolid and occasionally sentimental sublimity of Fra Bartolommeo^[57] nothing much need be said except that it was a formative influence on young Raphael. The Dominican monk is an impressive and amiable figure personally. Working solely for the glory of God and the profit of the Convent of San Marco, perturbed by the tragic fate of his cloister mate, Savonarola, he strove incessantly for a fuller color and a greater dignity. In his numerous Holy Families he is stately in a conventional way, nowhere more so than in the unfinished design for a Madonna with St. Ann, in the Uffizi. Occasionally, in such pictures as the Deposition of the Uffizi, and the Madonna of Pity at Lucca he achieves poignant, one is tempted to say operatic effects, forecasting the mood of the Baroque. Lucca also affords in the great picture God Adored by Two Saints, Figure 159, a fine example of this painter’s simple and massive compositions. In the fresco of The Last Judgment, which, being ruined, is better represented by Copies, Figure 160, we find an elaboration, in Leonardo’s sense, of the simple symmetries of Perugino. It is the precedent for Raphael’s monumental frescoes at Rome. His short career, from about 1495 to 1517, fell on evil times for Florence. In happier days he might have harmonized more perfectly the stylist and the lyrical dramatist that, as it was, never quite came to terms in his grave and noble personality. Yet to have mediated between Leonardo and Raphael would seem glory enough for any painter, and it was also no slight service to borrow for Florentine painting, rapidly becoming starved of color, something of the colorful richness of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione.

“The Perfect Painter” was what the Florentines called Andrea del Sarto,^[58] and he merited the title. He produced no masterpiece of the first order, but his Work is singularly uniform on a high level. Its chief qualities are dignity and grace with a great richness of color. The deep shadows are warm and full of dusky light, the stylistic poses of the figures always easy, and the weaving of the complicated groupings ever tasteful and harmonious. To the refractory art of fresco painting Andrea brought a richness, depth and variety of color that others hardly attained in oil painting. Only Luini in the north came near him in this regard. In short he is a consummate technician, carrying his art as far as skill and taste unillumined by sheer genius will reach.

Little of his excellence can be laid to his early training. Before 1500 he was working with Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea’s youthful frescoes of the miracles of S. Filippo Benizzi, in the fore-court of the Annunziata, show the loose and animated arrangements and the exaggeration of picturesque landscape features characteristic of his master. But Andrea learned rather of the time-spirit than of any other master. By 1514 his art is complete and one may see its flowering in the frescoes of the Birth of the Virgin, Figure 161, and the Madonna of the Sack, Figure 162, respectively in the fore-court and in the cloister of the Annunziata. It is a sumptuous and grave kind of design redeemed from heaviness by its exquisite balance of color masses, and from conventionality by the hint of portraiture in the artfully disposed figures.

Scores of times Andrea repeats these perfections in the great altar-backs required for the new Renaissance chapels. The Four Saints in the Pitti, the Madonna of the Harpies in the Uffizi, Figure 162a, the Enthroned Madonna at Berlin may serve among many to illustrate his accomplishment in this new vein. Somewhat reminiscent of the heavier monumentality of Fra Bartolommeo, these great pictures add a personal and disquieting note from the presence of the moody, handsome wife, Lucrezia whose caprices and infidelities are the tragic element in an otherwise even life.

Andrea in his later years won new glories but added no new note to his art. The monochrome frescoes in the Cloister of the Scalzo representing the Life of St. John Baptist merely show the old gravity somewhat exaggerated. The series which extended over many years (1515–1526) is uneven, and many of these perhaps overestimated compositions are plainly of student execution. Without his color, Andrea seems somewhat coldly academic. It was precisely this quality of stylistic grandeur, however, that appealed paradoxically to the romantic monarch, Francis I. He called Andrea to France in 1518 and kept him there in honor for a year. Had Andrea possessed any of the capacities of a teacher and theorist, he might have inaugurated the Renaissance in France. As it was he remained merely a harbinger of such inferior but more influential spirits as Il Rosso and Primaticcio who a few years later were to found the School of Fontainebleau.

Often the portfolios of a great technician are more thrilling than his major works. This is the case with Andrea del Sarto. His numerous sketches in red chalk, have an athletic charm which his painting lacks. Others have drawn differently in this medium, but no one has drawn better.

When Andrea died in 1531, “full of glory and domestic trials,” as Vasari recounts, the normal development of Florentine painting ended, and Florence had already seen her artistic star dimmed by the rising splendors of Venice and Rome. Artistically she became a city of wit and ingenuity, chronicling and criticizing art rather than producing it. Moreover the obsession of Michelangelo’s sublimity worked havoc with his dilettante imitators. Some of these have the grace of lucidity, like Agnolo Bronzino, who (1502–1572)^[59] practiced a reactionary sort of portraiture based on the old tradition of tempera painting. In sheer beauty of surface, enamel one is tempted to call it, he is little inferior to his great German contemporary, Hans Holbein, and his sense of character is only less keen because less individual. In the haughty patricians surrounding the person of Cosimo, the first grandduke, he found congenial sitters, Figure 163. In the narrow field of portraiture he is nearly in the first rank, while in his rare mythologies and religious pictures his limitations appear painfully. He was a vicious person, a cold æsthete, with few of the generous virtues that nourish the soul. Yet in his flinty way he was quite perfect, and as one of the first professionally unmoral artists he cannot be neglected by the psychological critic.

A more appealing figure is his master, Jacopo Carrucci, called from his birthplace Il Pontormo.^[60] His was a tender and deeply religious spirit with the poet’s capacity for elation and melancholy. In his altar-pieces, such as the Deposition, Figure 164, at San Felice he seeks and achieves a positive pathos. Influenced by Michelangelo’s sublimity, he converts it to more specific and psychological ends. Often he is restless and over-emphatic as in the frescoes of the Passion in the cloister of the Florentine Certosa, or in the strangely complicated and contorted little picture of the Martyrdom of St. Mauritius and his Legionaries, in the Uffizi. In such work he moves towards the absolute expressionism of an El Greco, preluding also the more conventional emotionalism of the Baroque. As a portraitist he had no equal at Florence except his pupil Bronzino. Often the sensitiveness and moodiness of his characterizations recall his Venetic contemporary, Lorenzo Lotto. Even when he is robust he is sensitively psychological, as in the superb portrait of a Halberdier, Figure 165. Above all he was a powerful and subtle draughtsman whether with pen or chalk. His line writhes in a fashion at times sinister, at times singularly blithe, and his figure sketches have something of the imaginative thrill of the figure studies of Blake. For the grandducal palace of Poggio a Cajano, Figure 166, he did in a huge lunette pierced by a great round window a most original decoration for the odd triangles at the base. The unconventional fields are filled each by a rather small figure energetically posed and surrounded by greenery. The thing is at once monumental and pastoral and its freedom and tonality almost as modern as a Besnard. I would willingly dwell longer on so sympathetic an artist, but can only refer the interested reader to Dr. F. M. Clapp’s two authoritative volumes.

For a century and more after Pontormo’s death in 1556 there are still occasional artists of talent at Florence, but there is no longer a Florentine school. The masterpieces of Michelangelo were at Rome, those of Raphael widely scattered. Conscious of her decline, Florence begins to import artists—the Flemish portraitist, Sustermans; the Venetian decorator, Luca Giordano. One of her own abler painters, Francesco Salviati, attaches himself to the Venetian manner. Being an academic city, Florence eschews the rugged naturalism of Caravaggio, but has no longer vitality enough to find a substitute of her own. In the late sixteenth century her fresco painting sinks to the pompous emptiness represented by Giorgio Vasari, or by the hardly better mythologies of the brothers Federigo and Taddeo Zuccaro. In the seventeenth century she still can produce an idyllist of great romantic and sensuous charm in a Francesco Furini and a genial illustrator in a Giovanni di San Giovanni. But such names only suggest the incoherence of the times. Florence is no longer a main current but an eddy, and what small flood-tide still runs courses in the more resolute academism of Bologna, which is to be capable of inspiring a Poussin; and in the raw naturalism of Naples, which is about to give lessons to a Velasquez.

Poetry and Painting in the Renaissance

Reversing the maxim ut pictura poesis, the Renaissance believed that painting should be poetical. Indeed the term poesia is commonly applied to all painting of a mythological or idyllic sort. Angelo Poliziano’s unfinished but very popular poem on the joust of 1468 is lavish in descriptions, of which the painters made use. Botticelli surely got more than a hint for the Birth of Venus from stanzas xcix-ci of La Giostra, though the mood of the picture is wholly Sandro’s own and unlike the pagan joyousness of Poliziano.

Botticelli’s charming and even slyly humorous picture of Venus with sleeping Mars, at London, follows afar and discreetly La Giostra, I. stanzas cxxii-iii, but Botticelli has taken the motive out of doors and otherwise considerably subtilized it. Venus is

Poliziano also supplied to Raphael the theme of the Galatea, in the Farnesina, Giostra, I. cxviii (Fig. 192a)