It is interesting to note how a certain quaint trick of placing the legs in a sideways slant of somewhat charming awkwardness prevailed with him-it is seen in this allegory of Venus and Cupid that shocked Symonds ; it recurs in his fine St. John the Baptist at the Borghese Gallery in Rome, ; where again there is no spiritual atmosphere but considerable power ; it is seen at its worst in the Dead Christ at the Uffizi, though he realises an astounding sense of the limpness of the dead thereby ; and it is even employed with considerable grace in the Venus and Cupid at Buda-Pesth. Indeed, Venus and Cupid ever brought out the best qualities of his art-struck fire from the steel that his cold colouring was otherwise liable to suggest-as the picture at the Colonna Palace in Rome again proves. In all is a frank delight in lusty passion that runs to naughtiness. In The Holy Family at the Pitti in Florence is considerable charm, if little religious atmosphere ; but the religious picture as a rule brought out all Bronzino's worst defects ; and in The Virgin at the Uffizi he uses his favourite awkwardness of the leg to a degree that is vile bad drawing, and causes discomfort through the vision to the senses, as though a bully twisted one's arms.

But the moment Bronzino stands before a portrait, he braces himself to remarkable achievement. The Portrait of a Boy at the National Gallery in London is not his, though the most widely known of his accounted works, and by no means to be compared with his finest portraiture-indeed, we here have the critics attributing it now to Pontormo, now to Rosso Fiorentino (Salviati), and then to others-probably because it is richer in colour than Bronzino's usual painting. Bronzino left us an astoundingly fine gallery of the personages of the Florentine Court of his day, being [250] fortunately employed to that end by the Grand Duke Cosimo I. -most of these are to be seen in Florence. Not only are his portraits searching works of art, and marked by rare distinction ; not only do they display keen sense of character and insight into personality, though the painting be hard enough at times, and the colour somewhat chill ; but they had a wide-reaching effect in setting the style and manner of portrait-painting throughout almost every Court in Europe ; and it is impossible to avoid the conviction that Velasquez, directly or indirectly, owed a heavy debt to them. Velasquez was so original and virile a realist, that whatever convention he employed must have been a very overwhelming one in his day ; and to the influence of Bronzino much of that convention guides. Even Mr. Berenson, a most astute observer of the comparative relations of the artistry of painters, seems to have been struck by this ; and it is impossible to look upon the portraits by Bronzino of Eleanora da Toledo, of Prince Ferdinand, and of the girlish Princess Maria de' Medici at the Uffizi in Florence, without thinking of the great Spaniard.

Of Bronzino's famous renderings of Cosimo I., himself, in armour, his hand upon his helmet, and of the head of Cosimo I. alone, the Uffizi, the Pitti, the Royal Gallery in Berlin, hold superb examples ; besides the Duke Cosimo I. with the Sprig of Myrtle, Berlin possesses also a good Eleanor of Toledo, as does the Uffizi this same Eleanor of Toledo and her child, Don Garcia. The little Medici Garcia, Bronzino painted several times, from the fat, laughing little fellow holding the goldfinch, to bigger boyhood. The Uffizi contains also the superb portrait of little Mary de' Medici as a little girl, and another of the head of the same Mary de' Medici as a girl, as well as the Mary de' Medici head and bust with hand on breast. There also are the [251] Lucretia Panciatichi-the head and bust of A Young Lady, her hand holding a book-the Man in Armour ; whilst at the Borghese is the half-nude bust of Lucretia with dagger held upwards in her slender fingers, which Morelli vows to the art of Bronzino.

Dying in Florence on the 23rd of the November of 1572, on the edge of seventy, as the fifteen-hundreds reached their twilight, the last mighty spirit of the Florentine Renaissance, the great heart and vigorous body of Michelangelo eight years in the grave, Bronzino was the last master of significance in the art of Florence. With him the Renaissance wholly ends in Tuscany and the south. In Venice, across the mountains to the north, the Renaissance still brought forth splendour ; the Renaissance came to later birth in Venice, but was even now also well-nigh spent. Titian was near his ending, with but five years to live ; Paolo Veronese died sixteen years later ; Tintoretto was not to see the fifteen-hundreds out, dying twenty years after.

The fifteen-hundreds were the Golden Age of the Renaissance in Italy ; the first fifty years of the century saw the Renaissance in Tuscany at its full flowering-the last half saw it wholly wither and die. When 1600 struck, the Renaissance throughout Italy was at an end ; and a far vaster and mighter art was about to be born.

Italy, making one final and colossal effort through the sublime personality of Michelangelo, essayed to utter the full significance of the New Thought ; but Michelangelo, for all his almost superhuman powers, balked and flung back by the utter corruption throughout the land, baffled most of all by the utter corruption of Rome, as you shall read in the despair of his sonnets, like his own Italy, [252] unable wholly to rid himself and his soul from the shackles and dead weight of a great historic past, reeled back even as he created the mightiest artistic achievements of his age, cursing Beauty, which he found, for all its sublime splendour, to be but Dead Sea Apples in his mouth, whilst the deeper man in him craved for mightier adventures of the soul.

To the Italians of the After-Renaissance we will return again ; but before betaking us over the Apennines to our Venetian journey, let us estimate the endeavour of the genius of Tuscany and the peoples lying adjacent thereto, to utter the revelation of their age through their senses.

It will be seen that the Florentine genius broke into two streams, the one largely tributary to Siena, that concerned itself with a suave beauty rooted in mysticism- through Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Filippino Lippi, culminating in Raphael ; the other concerned with tragic power, deep rooted in realism and the human form-through Donatello, Masaccio, the Poliamoli, Verrocchio, and Leonardo da Vinci, culminating in Michelangelo. And he who puts aside the worn-out theories, rigid classifications, and labels of the professors and museum-masters, which have no relation whatever to art, and are but a rough and ready way of dealing with schools, and who instead gazes at the Florentine achievement throughout the Renaissance, allowing his whole senses to surrender themselves to the impression created upon him by the works of that achievement, will notice simply this : The early endeavour of the men of the Renaissance, wearied of mere illumination, was to paint on flat surfaces the visions aroused in their senses by the new life that was surging through their world-the first effort is always to draw in outline and to fill in this outline with [253] flat colours ; then the painter bends his will to try and " overcome mere flatness of height and width by so painting objects that they express depth, or, to put it perhaps more simply, to paint things as they would appear in a mirror. To this seeming simple problem the whole effort of the Renaissance craftsmanship bent its will-first by essaying to paint objects as they saw that low reliefs in sculpture uttered them, by winning to mastery of light and shade. And Michelangelo, for all his gigantic strength and vigorous will, was able to thrust the craft of painting no farther than this intention, which Leonardo da Vinci had already conquered. With their craftsmanship of painting developed to this advance, however, the vast genius of Florence employed it to astounding purpose, compelling it to express a mighty gamut of human emotion that reaches from the most exquisite and subtle shades of mystery to the stupendous and awful heights that create the sense of the sublime.

But with colour as colour-with the employment of colour to do what the Florentines compelled light and shade to do, the whole genius of Tuscany achieved but little. Florence employed colour with exquisite sense of its rhythm ; but of its vast values in uttering the orchestration of the musical thrill that colour arouses in the senses, of the relations of colour to colour bathed in the depth of the atmosphere that surrounds each object before the vision, they knew scarce aught at all. They were feeling dumbly for it, but could get no nearer than to state the light and shade of things with intense and exquisite in-quisitiveness, and to play colour thereabout.

One of the sadnesses of the fact of life is the shortness of its duration ; but an even more pathetic fact is the short [254] duration of the greatness of a people. The Italian peoples roused like a young giant to inhale the breath of the New Thought. With eager desire they leaped forward to grasp it. It took but three hundred years completely to exhaust them. The full significance they would not realise. And the New Ambitions of Man, the New Virility, folded its cloak and silently flitted over the northern fastnesses of the Alps, and departed to other peoples. Italy reeled back, a slave under the heels of servile polities ; her literary endeavour a mere feeble and academic scholarship ; her art grown into mere futile imitations of her former greatness.

THE END OF VOLUME I.

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press.