THE DAWN OF MODERN PAINTING

THE RENAISSANCE IN CENTRAL ITALY

CHAPTER I

OF THE CRADLE OF THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY

IN Italy, and in France on that side that lies hard by northern Italy, as well as in northern France, where she reaches to the flood of the Rhine, there began to dawn in the twelve hundreds a new meaning in life, a new revelation of the significance of life ; and with the dawn was to be created what is somewhat foolishly called a re-birth, a Renaissance, of the arts-for the arts evolve, as all life evolves, and dead things are re-born never. There was at any rate a new-found intimacy with nature ; men began to see life freshly; and there followed a marked outburst of artistry which sounded a new note.

In France the Gothic arts had developed a keen effort to express the reality of living things. The character of all Gothic art had been its direct inspiration from, and its affectionate intimacy with, nature. It had concerned itself with teaching ; and Gothic architecture is covered with ornament intensely interested in all that was known and felt of nature. The mediaeval church was the school of mediæval Europe.

As the mediæval years ran out, everywhere, on all sides, was a strange stirring in men's hearts-everywhere amongst the Gothic peoples was this sense of awakening-everywhere men were thinking and seeing and stating what they saw in a manner that the world had never before known. The Dark Ages were near spent. The nations were arising. The air was redolent of the coming of Spring.

[32] Now," as this Gothic interest in nature, in the joy of life, stole into Italy, and, like the Prince of Faery, stealthily making its way through the briery woods and thorn-entangled ways of scholasticism and Byzantinism, came to the sleeping Princess, and kissing Italy upon the mouth, awoke Italian realism from its long slumber, and set astir a new life in the land, it so chanced that there came to Italy soon thereafter, out of Greece, a sudden interest in the great dead past of antique Rome and ancient Hellas-a widespread searching into the Greek ideal of life that had insisted upon man as being the chiefest significance to man-a keen desire to learn, from the literature and history and arts of antique days, what had been the source of his glory and his greatness-that inquisitiveness into the ideals of the men of antique days which the philosophic folk call Humanism.

At once sprang up a taste for Greek and Roman literature and art ; and architecture took on forms that were a tribute to Athens-the Renaissance architecture was born. The men of the Renaissance no doubt thought they were bringing Athens to Italy ; but there was that in their blood which made an academic restoration impossible-they were working out a new growth of the soul of man, and were but disciplining Gothic art to Greek forms, creating the mixed and complex art of the Renaissance that had no real likeness to that of Athens, however much it aimed to imitate antique Greece.

Certain fine qualities the Italians caught from Greece- love of independence, a republican ideal of liberty. And just as Greece inspired these ideals, so also she put upon Italy that lack of nationality, the petty conception of the city's greatness above the unity of the race, which was to be the curse of Italy throughout the splendid years of her Renaissance ; which was to split the land into warring [33] elements and petty states ; which was at last to lose Italy her independence for hundreds of years. And, as with her life, so with her art-the Greek spirit was to set up a living ideal of humanism ; to set up also a false ideal, the ideal of Beauty as the aim of Art, which was to hamper her complete expression, and eventually to fall like a blight upon her artistic endeavour-and to balk the endeavour of all lands that came under her after-influence. For nothing has balked the full utterance of the arts in the succeeding ages, and hampered their achievement so wantonly, as this Greek falsity that Art is Beauty.

Italy, then, since the fall of Rome, had been building the Italy of the Middle Ages, mediæval Italy, using her ancient Roman buildings for quarries wherefrom to take the stone for that building-just as her life had filched parts from the life of ancient Rome. Then, towards 1300, came the Gothic love of nature stealing across the Alps out of France and from the Rhine. For he who looks upon the art of Renaissance Italy feels at once that here is something pouring into his sense of vision that no other age had aforetime brought forth.

To realise the significance of Italian art, it is well also to remember that, at the close of the Middle Ages, the life beyond the death of the body-otherworldliness-the Day of Judgment, or rather, as the Middle Ages grimly put it, the Day of Wrath, " Dies Irae," filled the vision of the Italian. Dante's whole genius was founded upon it-his art thunders it. The theatres made Hell the subject of their dramas. Tortures and the agonies of burning cauldrons drew crowds to the pageant and the play ! So you shall find the art of Florence, from beginning to end, steeped in the inquisitive survey of the emotions in the Day of Wrath; [34] Michelangelo putting the crown to his and Italy's achievement in a vast Day of Judgment. The several circles of hell roused the painters to continued illustration. And the very Christ loomed to them as the Judge to whom even the Madonna kneels at the dread bar of Final Justice.

It was the monkish habit that upheld the ascetic over the worldly life-as though to discipline men's passions with the fear of death ever before their eyes. Thus, side by side, even whilst Boccaccio's tales and Petrarch's sonnets sound the blithe note of the coming era, the Italian genius is weighed down by the desolate nightmare that was the gift of the Middle Ages-Death busy with his sickle amongst young men and maids, rich and poor, with the wrath of God beyond and inevitable. Surely Boccaccio in the garden, beguiling the youths and damsels amidst the roses, while the plague roams outside the gates, bears something of the symbol of the Renaissance in Italy ! It was a dramatic age-and the drama uttered itself in painting.

The grim and savage sternness of the Middle Ages burst through the gates of the dawn of the Renaissance, joined hands with Romance and antique Paganism, and ran riot through the Renaissance.