Vasari’S Lives
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THE SCOTT LIBRARY. VASARI’S LIVES. i Vasari’s Lives of Italian Painters, selected and Prefaced by Havelock Ellis. LONDON: WALTER SCOTT, LTD. PATERNOSTER SQUARE. / ' ' THE GETTY CENTER LIBRARY CONTENTS. PAGE CiMABUE (Born 1240—Died 1302) 1 Giotto (Born 1266—Died 1336) .... 4 Buonamico Buffalmacco (Living in 1351) . 11 Dello (Born 1404— Living in 1464) . .22 Luca Della Robbia (Born 1400—Died 1481) . 27 Paolo (Born 1397—Died . Uccello 1475) . 34 . Lorenzo Ghiberti (Born 1378—Died 1455) . 42 Masaccio (Born 1401 —Died 1428) . -5° Filippo Brunelleschi (Born 1377—Died 1445) . 52 Donatello (Born 1386— Died 1466) . .80 Frate Giovanni da Fiesole (Born 1387— Died 1455) 87 . Alesso Baldovinetti (Born 1422— Died 1499) . 91 Lippi (Born 1406 . Fra Filippo —Died 1469) . 94 Sandro Botticelli (Born 1447— Died 1510) . 102 Nanni Grosso . .108 Pietro Perugino (Born 1446—Died 1523) . 109 Luca Signorelli (Born 1441— Died 1523) . 115 Leonardo da Vinci (Born 1452—Died 1519) . .118 Piero di Cosimo (Born 1441— Died 1521) . 133 Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco (Born 1475—Died 1517) hi — 1 VI CONTENTS. PAGE Mariotto Albertinelli (Born 1474—Died 1515) 146 Torrigiano (Born 1472—Died 1528) 150 Raphael Sanzio (Born 1483—Died 1520) 154 Andrea del Monte Sansovino (Born 1460— Died 1529) 160 Baldassare Peruzzi (Born 1481— Died 1536) . 162 Andrea del Sarto (Born i486— Died 1531) . 167 Madonna Properzia de’ Rossi (Born 1490— Died 1530) 1S1 Rosso (Born 1496— Died 1541) 187 Amico Aspertini (Born 1475— Died 1552) 194 Francia Bigio (Born 1482—Died 1525) 197 Morto da Feltro . 201 Parmigiano (Born 1504—Died 1540) 203 Fra Sebastiano del Piombo (Born 1485— Died 1547) 21 Cristofano Gherardi, called Doceno (Born 1508— Died 1556) ...... 21 7 Jacopo da Pontormo (Born 1494— Died 1557) 221 Michele san Michele (Born 1484— Died 1559) 2 33 Giovan-Antonio Bazzi, called Sodoma (Born 1477 Died 1549) ...... 236 Jacone ....... 243 Giovan-Francesco Rustici (Born 1474— Died 1554) . 246 Michelagnolo Buonarroti (Born 1475— Died 1564) 254 Jacopo Sansovino (Born i486—Died 1570) 285 PREFACE. If we take a bird’s-eye view of European painting we find that it falls into two groups or masses. The earliest to appear is in the south, and corresponds, not perhaps its is accidentally, to ancient Etruria ; centre Florence. The other is in the north; it radiates chiefly from Flanders and Holland, extending to France, more especially to Scandinavian France in Normandy, and to Teutonic districts such as the more Scandinavian parts of Great Britain. Outside these two large masses there is, indeed, one other group, of the first magnitude because it includes Velasquez, which is apparently unconnected with either of the great main groups. But while the Spanish school apparently stands apart, influenced from the south, and having as well characteristics that are all its own, it is really closely allied in essential spirit and method to the great northern mass. Velasquez might have been brother to to Rembrandt ; he could scarcely have been akin Raphael. To look at the map in this way is, of course, to confine ourselves to modern painting; we know nothing of Greek classic painting save from its last delicious reflections, rescued from Pompeii to adorn the wonderful museum at Naples, and so impressive because of the wonderful art impulse behind them, which they seem to hint at, without fully Vlll PREFACE. revealing. That impulse has long been extinct; no great painting, no great art of design in any kind, has come from Grecian Italy, from Rome to Naples, since the irruption of Christianity. In modern Europe we see only these two great northern and southern centres of painting. The characteristics of these two groups are widely different. The southern men looked at life like children. Their aesthetic tastes, one might say, were fundamentally those of the Bower birds of Australia; they gathered together all the pretty things they could see and wove them into har- monious pictures. At the highest point they present to us a charming unreal phantasmagoria, a sort of Italian opera in fresco. Those persons who in music are chiefly attracted to Rossini or Donizetti or Bellini or Verdi, will in painting be chiefly attracted to Gozzoli or Botticelli or Raphael or Andrea del Sarto. In the historical development of each group there is a progressive toning down of the pretty miscellaneous details, as we reach Raphael, just as when we reach Verdi, but the general tone and temper throughout remain the same. There are exceptions; Leonardo, for instance, one of the very greatest artists of all time, possessed the most accomplished, the most searching intellect that has ever been directed to painting; and I need scarcely point out that I am not here concerned with the sculptors. Again, the Venetians stand apart; spiritually as well as historically, Venetian art is a glorious ex- pansion of Flemish art; the fine flower of Venice sprang from roots at Bruges. But, on the whole, Florentine art—taking the word in the vaguest and widest sense—was unconscious of any heroic problems in art, not even urgent to gain self- expression, but well pleased with the conventionalism of facile realisms and equally facile idealisms. With glad heart and inexhaustible play of fancy the Florentine artist pro- PREFACE. IX duced his delicious extravaganzas, made up of soaring madonnas, pretty flowers, aureoled saints, luscious fruits, elaborate upholstery and raiment. All very childlike, per- haps, but these children were children of genius, and the time will never come when their work ceases to be delightful. The northern group began to develop earlier, but it developed more slowly, and is still alive to-day. It differs fundamentally from the other school, at the outset and all through, by being naturalistic. The Italians reached naturalism with Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, but it was for the most part a flaccid easy-going naturalism that sank at once and for ever into the flattest of painted twaddle. It seems as if these Etruscan Italians found it impossible to take the natural world seriously unless they mixed it up with the supernatural world, so that when their supernatural world had gone they lost everything that made art worthy of high aim. The northern men were natural from the first and serious from the first. Even their earliest work scarcely impresses us as infantine. And the masterpiece of the Van Eycks —the Adoration of the Lamb at Ghent and Brussels -—shows a searching directness and realism which only belongs to an art that is mature and, in the eternal sense, modern. Undoubtedly this result is not solely due to difference of racial temperament ; the northern men had no temptation to cover vast sunny expanses of wall; they were forced to concentrate themselves. But the fact remains that they took life seriously and realistically, not caring for visions, or for the collection of pretty things just because they were pretty or because they were there. They strove to express ever more perfectly the shape and colour and texture of things, and the mystery of light and the gloom of shadow, and the ever-varying life of the earth that at no X PREFACE. two moments is the same. No artists have got closer to the very fibre of nature, its microscopic texture, or its subtle in atmosphere ; and their research for truth they made the marvellous discovery that the object may be brought nearer by being thrown back, that by letting go the details it was possible to catch more perfectly at the whole. Time has justified the fundamental rightness of that art-instinct which began to grow so far back in the Rhine valley. The Florentine school died out long ago in sugary insipidities, but the northern school is still alive at Paris and wherever the influence of Paris extends, and we may count on the fingers of one hand the great artists of to-day who are out- side its influence. To appreciate one sort of beauty we need not revile another sort. I do not wish to belittle the art of Florence. So far as deep-rooted personal instincts go, I am frankly on the side of the Dutchmen and the Spaniards. I would rather live in a tavern with Hals and Steen, or in a spinning-shop with Velasquez, than go to heaven with Angelico or to hell with Michelangelo. One may waver, entering San Marco at Florence, as one falls beneath the influence of the sweet dreams that seem to float on the walls of its cells ; or as one cranes up his neck to divine, amid the harsh faded blues and greens, the stupendous visions flung on to the roof of the Cappella Sistina. But one regains one’s balance afterwards. It was a fine instance of the sanity of Goethe’s art-instincts that notwithstanding his own enthusiasm for Italy, and the enthusiasm for Italian art which existed in his day, he declared distinctly in mature age his preference for the art of the Dutchmen. To feel this is to be true to the instincts of one’s race. A racial preference of this kind does not make one blind to the facile delights of Italian painting, to the caprice and variety of its manifestations, to the extreme PREFACE. xi interest of the circumstances which enabled the Etruscan spirit to develop harmoniously down to the dregs. One may feel more at home at Bruges and Venice and Amsterdam and Madrid and Paris, but the delicious exotic art of Florence must still exert its charm on us. We do it it is no injustice by subordinating ; the marvel that so small a tract of country should ever have blossomed so luxuriantly into art which for a long period held its own against the world.