CHAPTER XVI

OF THE GENTLE SOUL OF HIM WHO CREATED THE LAY FIGURE

WE have seen a well-nigh forgotten painter of Florence in Verrocchio's day, one Cosimo Rosselli, training a student to create superb art as Piero di Cosimo. This Cosimo Rosselli must have had a rich sense of colour, since not only did Piero di Cosimo bring into Florentine art a wondrous rich and glowing colour, markedly golden as against the silvery tradition of Florentine painting ; but there also came from Cosimo Rosselli's studio-or, as some hold, from his pupil Piero di Cosimo's studio-a boy of nine, son of a muleteer of Suffignano, settled in Florence, a gentle, timid, yielding boy, who was gravely industrious. He starts with grinding the colours, sweeping the shop, running errands-becomes the bosom friend of another lad, one Mariotto Albertinelli, who is far from industrious or timid or shy-but our industrious apprentice is destined to bring a Venetian warmth of colouring to the Florentine achievement of the fifteen-hundreds, his name Baccio della Porta, to become more famous as Fra Bartolommeo.

FRA BARTOLOMMEO
1475 - 1517

Some thirteen years younger than Piero di Cosimo, but dying before him, was FRA BARTOLOMMEO. There is a tendency in present-day criticism, which is concerning itself far too much with the superficialities of technique, and the [127] antique-dealer's attitude towards works of art, which indeed is taken to be the essential significance of art, rather than with the inner significance of art, to underrate the work of Fra Bartolommeo. He cannot be dismissed as a mere pompous painter of monumental altar-pieces. Bartolommeo was not a poet, say, like Piero di Cosimo ; his lack of grip on character hampered his achievement ; and the very source of his strength, a sense of dignified composition, largely trended to harden his grouping into a somewhat heavy formula. But he was a forerunner of no mean order. He brought to painting a sense of sculpture and a grip of modelling which are attune to the artistry of Michelangelo, who was born in the same year. But he revealed qualities that had far greater influence upon the Florentine art of the fifteen-hundreds. The art of painting amongst the great Florentines of the fourteen-hundreds-developing through Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi-had thrust its innate domain of colour forward to increase of emotional utterance by mellowing the crude qualities of the Byzantine illuminators into harmonies expressed in tones, so that, as with the more tragic exponents of Florentine art, the illusion of depth in the picture had been aimed at, giving the sense of the roundness of objects, as though they stood in atmosphere. The Florentines had reached towards this by keen study of the relations of light and shade-called by artists chiaroscuro-tentatively it is true, until Leonardo da Vinci came and compelled the painted surface to yield the mysteries of atmosphere by a power of representing by light and shade an almost living quality as though the breath stirred within the figures, bathed in their volume of atmosphere. But Leonardo compelled chiaroscuro to the supreme place in rendering the pictured thing ; he made colour subordinate to light and shade ; and aimed at melting [128] colour into this light and shade rather than stating colour in its values as colour. He did not realise the modern vision of the aerial perspective of colour as colour, what one may call the musical utterance of colour against colour that creates colour in distance of its depth.

The first of the Florentines to attempt the use of brilliant colour in the rich harmonies which are the very essence of Venetian painting, was Bartolommeo. He did not achieve to greatness therein ; but at least he essayed it. He struck the new note of the fifteen-hundreds in the Florentine accomplishment.

I have said that Bartolommeo had a marked instinct for the large and rhythmic composition, but it was an instinct heavily qualified and weighted by scientific theories of balance ; and science is ever a hampering burden on the back of instinct in art. It ran to pyramidalisms and the like pomposities. And it created that elaborate scheme of laws, and invented that style, which were afterwards to have so strong an influence on a youth called Raphael, as indeed also were his gaiety of colouring and his rich and golden harmonies.

Bartolommeo also invented the lay figure ; and it is exactly in a certain effect as of lay figures in his art, of a scientific spirit rather than an instinct and emotion dictating his arrangements and the actions of his figures in those arrangements, that Bartolommeo fell short of greatness. Of a nature pliant and sensitive, he was influenced by Leonardo da Vinci, then by Raphael, who was subject to him, then, at the end, making the final effort and failure in attempting to catch the majesty and force of Michelangelo which were wholly alien to the charm of his gracious art. To build sublimity on gentle grace were to break both.

Bartolommeo was a passionate disciple of Savonarola, [129] of whom he painted two well-known portraits. It was on hearing the Dominican thunders against worldliness and immorality that Bartolommeo gathered together his studies from the nude and burnt them upon the public " pyre of vanities." A monk he was to become, but, strangely enough, neither he nor that other pure and gentle follower of Savonarola, Lorenzo di Credi, had the fire in his art to utter the rage of Savonarola.

Bartolommeo was deeply humiliated by the failure of the monk and his public execution by burning and hanging. On the fall of Savonarola, Bartolommeo retired from the world, entering the Dominican Order, and withdrawing into the convent of S. Marco.

His masterpieces are the Raphaelesque Madonna, with Saints and Angels, in the cathedral of Lucca, and the Virgin appearing to St. Bernard in the Academy at Florence. Bartolommeo's art is a development far beyond the art of the fourteen-hundreds-he is the connecting link between it and the coming Golden Age.

MARIOTTO ALBERTINELLI (1474-1515), the friend and fellow-worker of Bartolommeo, has largely lost his individuality, swamped in the art of Bartolommeo, perhaps in that he it was who carried out the pictures left incomplete when the friar retired from the world. It is certain that many of Albertinelli's paintings are set down to Bartolommeo ; but that he was an artist of power is proved by his serene and masterly Visitation at the Uffizi, marked by rare nobility and dignity.

The friendship of these two opposite souls, in boyhood and manhood, is one of the charming pictures of the Renaissance, little given to fidelities. The sweet and gentle spirit of Bartolommeo shines serenely through it all. Bartolommeo early became a disciple of Savonarola, and a [130] piagnone ; Mariotto Albertinelli, wilful and noisy, was, for the Medici party, a loose liver, an uproarious partisan. He ended by leaving art and becoming an innkeeper. Yet the two ever remained firm friends. Contrast the gentle and timid soul of Bartolommeo, whose weapon drops from his hand at sound of the first onrush of the besiegers upon the convent of S. Marco, vowing to become a monk if heaven should spare him ! with the rollicking, swashbuckling tapster Albertinelli.