A FAILURE OF NERVE

ITALIAN PAINTING 1520-1535

By

SIR KENNETH CLARK

H. R. Bickley Memorial Lecture

CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD !967

LIST OF PLATES

I. II.

Michelangelo. The Brazen Serpent. Sistine Chapel, Rome. Donatello. The Risen Christ. San Lorenzo, Florence. Mantegna. St. Sebastian. Ca'd'Oro, Venice. Botticelli. Miracles of St. Zenobius. (Detail). National Gallery, London. Leonardo da Vinci. Deluge (Cataclysm). Royal Library, Windsor. Michelangelo. Ancestors of Christ-Jacob. Sistine Chapel, Rome. Michelangelo. Ancestors ofChrist-AbinaJab. Sistine Chapd, Rome. Pontormo. Joseph in Egypt. National Gallery, London. Pontormo. Christ before Pilate. Certosa, Florence. Pontormo. Deposition. Certosa, Florence.

m.
IV. V.

VI. VII.

vm.
IX. X.

lV

LIST OF PLATES

XI. XII.

Pontormo. Descent from the Cross. Santa Felicita, Florence. Rosso. Madonna and Child with St. Anne and Young St. John. County Museum of Art, Los Angeles-Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Herbert T. Kalmus. Rosso. Descent from the Cross. Cathedral, Volterra.

XIII.

XIV. Rosso. The Daughters ofJethro. Uffizi, Florence. XV. Giulio Romano. Hall of Giants. Palazzo del Te, Mantua.

XVI. Beccafumi. Last Judgement. Carmine, Siena. XVII. Pordenone. Christ nailed to the Cross. Cathedral, Cremona.

A FAILURE OF NERVE

FEW events in the history of art have been the subject of more gratifying generalisations than the sudden end of the episode known as the High Renaissance. Older historians, with the moral bias of their time, spoke of the luxury and frivolity of the Papal Court, the rise of Luther, and the Sack of Rome. Recent historians have gone beyond social and economic explanations, and have invoked psychoanalysisl and the spirit of scientific enquiry. These generalised explanations are not entirely borne out by facts and dates. The great change that came over Florentine painting in the early sixteenth century took place several years before the Sack of Rome; and I am confident that the artists in whose work it appears had never heard ofLuther, still less of Copernicus. It took place at a time when society and the conditions of patronage had not changed, and the political scene was no more confused and menacing than it had been during the previous twenty years. I believe that the reasons for this change are to be found pardy within the art itself, in the purely professional problems ofFlorentine painting; and pardy in a feeling that the whole structure of the High Renaissance rested on foundations too narrow and insecure to bear its weight; together these produced a state of anxiety which I have ventured to call a failure of nerve. In the next hour I shall examine the ten or fifteen years during which this change took place; but before doing so I should remind you that this crisis,
1 Arnold Hauser, Mannerism, London 1965, Section VII: Alienation as the Key to Mannerism, and Section VIII: Narcissism as the Psychology of Alienation.

LECTURE

which seems so abrupt and radical to us, passed almost entirely un-noticed in its own time. It is true that the death of Raphael in 1520 was considered a misfortune, but his successors, Perino del Vaga, Polidoro, and the resourceful Giulio Romano seemed capable of carrying on where he had left off-had indeed been doing most of his painting for him during the last three years of his life. Vasari, in the proemio of his third section, places the turning point of Italian art at the beginning of the century, when, thanks largely to the discovery of certain famous antique statues, Florentine artists could fmally shake off the maniera secca cruda and could achieve a new perfection of grace, naturalism, and movement. From that time onwards he believed that art had followed a steady crescendo. Of course this is an ex parte statement and must be read in its historical context. Moreoever, as we shall see, Vasari did at one point recognize that something strange had happened, although he attributed it to the idiosyncrasies of a single artist. Nevertheless, when we read the volumes of modem critics, who dutifully repeat that the art of the sixteenth century involved a turning away from nature, a revolt against antiquity, and a rejection of renaissance ideals, it is prudent to turn back to the writings of an intelligent and well-informed contemporary to see how little he and his fellow artists thought that they were doing any of these things. Let me now imagine a group of young painters in the year 1520 discussing their predicament on hearing of Raphael's death. This flight of imagination, in spite of its Victorian flavour, is more historical than it sounds, because in fact we have an almost contemporary description of a similar discussion some hundred and fifty years earlier when, according to Sacchetti, a group of painters met to discuss the state of their art after the death of Giotto. Who, they asked, would be considered his equal? Several names were proposed, and finally Taddeo Gaddi said, 'Certainly there have been plenty of skilful painters ... but this art has grown and continues to grow worse

LECTURE

every day'.1 So might have spoken a group of English poets after the death of Chaucer; and I think the conclusions of the young Florentines of 1520 would have been very similar. There was, however, an important difference between the two meetings. Taddeo Gaddi and his friends were middle-aged men, who had grown up under the shadow of their master and spent their lives in diffusing his style. They were prepared to slog along in the accepted manner. The talented painters of 1520 were not. The two Florentines, Pontormo and Rosso, were twenty-six and twenty-five. The Romans, Giulio, Perino, Polidoro, were twenty and under. They had already been entrusted with great commissions, they had masteredthetechnical skills of their time, they were bursting with invention. But between them and the development of their gifts was the enormous, impregnable barrier of achievement which had been erected in the preceding fifteen years. Looking at the masterpieces of Leonardo, Michelangelo; and Raphael, they may well have felt that every possible line of advance had been blocked by an apparently final solution. The painting of the High Renaissance was based on two main traditions of design. The first used the draped human figure in order to create a kind of pictorial architecture in a rationally constructed space. By this means it gave to the great episodes of sacred history an air of timeless nobility. This tradition of solid form and gravitas, going back to Masaccio, had a deep effect on all three leaders of the High Renaissance. Leonardo had included Masacciesque figures in his early Adoration; and his Last Supper is basically a development of this monumental tradition, in which the forms are more intricately related and balanced on a single point. Michelangelo' s earliest drawings are copies from frescoes of Masaccio and
1 Taddeo Gaddi, che era nella brigata disse: per certo assai valenti dipin,tori sono stati, .. ma questa arte e venuta e viene mancando tutto di. Franco Sacchetti, Trecento Novelle Novella 136

LECTURE

Giotto. And fmally Raphael, after the tension and experiment of the Heliodorus, returned to the Florentine tradition in the tapestry Cartoons, which are a conscious effort to develop the formal constructions of Masaccio by adding the graceful postures of antiquity. Parallel with this establishment of rational order was the attempt to render movement, going back to the discovery, in the early quattrocento, of the battle sarcophagi in the Campo Santo and Cortona; and here too the heroes of 1505 seemed to have said the last word. The two cartoons in the Palazzo Vecchio, Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina and Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari, even if they were not, as Vasari said, the school of all the world, were unquestionably the school of Pontormo, Rosso, Bronzino, and Salviati. The student of Michelangelo' s bathing soldiers may well have felt that the subject of a naked figure in action had reached a point which allowed only of imitation or total deviation. Similarly, in Leonardo's group the motives of the battle sarcophagi had been worked out with daunting intelligence. The complete unity of his interlocked horsemen could not be surpassed. Even more discouraging was the situation in Rome where both Michelangelo and Raphael had pushed their stylistic explorations to incredible lengths. Just as in some formative decades of world history evolution seems to leap forward a thousand years, so these men of unsurpassed genius covered in five or six years the kind of development which should have taken a century. The first lgnudo on the Sistine ceiling is still related to the quattrocento; the lunette of the Brazen Serpent [Plate I] shows a dissolution and reintegration of the old classical form-world more radical, in every sense of the word, than anything which followed it in the next hundred years of conscious revolution. With Raphael the development is even more surprising because his early pictures were, by Florentine standards, almost archaic; but the Transfiguration makes a

LECTURE

more sophisticated use of pictorial devices than almost any work of the seicento. This was the stylistic or professional impasse confronting the young men of 1520. But beyond it was an obstacle less easy to define, and in its way equally frustrating: the massive confidence on which the early Renaissance had been based. Leon Battista Alberti, friend and theorist to the founding fathers of renaissance art, loved to repeat the maxim that 'a man can do all things if he will' Posse homines de se omnia ut velint.l Masaccio's figures in the Carmine embody this belief; they show a balance of intellectual and physical life, a self-contained vitality and a steadiness of nerve equalled only in Old Kingdom Egypt and Greece of the early sth century. These are the human qualities to which Raphael gave a smoother surface in the Stanza della Segnatura and the Cartoons. But it is precisely at this point that we begin to notice cracks in the splendid facade of the Renaissance. I need not remind an Oxford audience that the old nineteenth-century concept of a golden age of humanism has long ago been abandoned. In my opinion the reaction has gone too far. Michelet's 'discoveries'-the discovery of man and the discovery of antiquity-did take place and the fact that they were confined to a small circle does not destroy their ultimate value. But throughout the period there is plenty of evidence for what has been called the tragic insufficiency of humanism, and this is true of the field where the classical values of humanism were once thought to have shown themselves most confidently. Almost all the great artists of the fifteenth century turned away at some point from the belief in human perfection, ideal proportion or rational space. Let me give two examples. In the bronze David, Donatello made the first great assertion of confidence in bodily human beauty. Even the head was based on one of the most exclusively physical statues of antiquity, the
1 e.g. in his autobiography; cf. Opere Volgari di Leon Battista Alberti; ed. Bonucci, Vol. I, p. cxiv.

LECTURE

Antinous. Twenty-five years later what are the characteristic works of Donatello? The two St. John Baptists in Venice and Siena, and the St. Mary Magdalene in the Florentine Baptistry. Donatello's rejection of sensuous beauty has led him to dwell upon the ravages of age, disease, or asceticism with a relendess truth which was seldom repeated till the time of Goya, and equalled only in Rodin' s Belle Heaulmiere. He rejects one of the most deeply rooted of all humanist ideas-that spiritual beauty may be conveyed by physical perfection. He even renounces the beauty of divinity. In the pulpit of S. Lorenzo, one of his latest works, the risen Christ is no longer a god-like conqueror of death, but an exhausted man struggling out of the tomb, like a ship-wrecked sailor [Plate II]. Mantegna provides another example. No fifteenth-century painter had a firmer grasp of reality. His frescoes at Mantua of the Gonzaga court, the first life-size portrait group ever executed, 1 show a grasp of human character as firm and realistic as that of Roman portrait busts. Allied to this interest in real men and individuals was his love of Roman magnificence. The Hampton Court wall paintings, although ruined as works of art by repeated restorations, still make visible what the humanist poets and scholars have put into words about the all-conquering power of Rome. They are triumphs of unfaltering will. But the later works of Mantegna reveal a contrary state of mind. The St. Sebastian in theCa' d'Oro [Plate III] for example is a revivalist picture designed to play on our emotions by a skilful combination of subject and form, our imaginative experience of pain being enhanced by the conflicting angles of the arrows. The insubstantial drapery flutters like smoke; and in the corner is a guttering candle encircled, as in mediaeval art, by a scroll which bears the words Nihil nisi divinum stabile, est coetera fumus. Secondly, the picture, which was found in his studio after
1 Unless, as Vasari says, Masaccio's lost Sagra in the Carmine contained actual portraits.

LECTURE

his death, the Pieta in the Brera. It is as far as the St. Sebastian from the confident magnificence of Mantegna' s Rome, and expresses, as movingly as any picture of the fifteenth century, the Christian agony. And Mantegna has made the familiar image unfamiliar and terrible to us by using two elements in the naturalistic painting of the quattrocento, anatomy and foreshortening, for non-naturalistic ends. As in a vision, our faculties of perception are suddenly put to the stretch in such a way as to intensify our emotions. So two of the most serious exponents of humanism in the fifteenth century felt that the physical splendour, the wit, and the measure of man were inadequate, and, as they grew older, thought with apprehension of the menace of old age and the inescapable reality of sin and death. But towards the end of the fifteenth century the feeling of inevitable tragedy, which almost every great artist has faced, conquered or accepted, took on a different character. This is first perceptible in the work -of Botticelli. His later paintings, such as the scenes from the life of St. Zenobius [Plate IV], are not expressions of tragedy, but of a profound lack of confidence in reality and a passionate rejection of all that could delight the senses. The human form is enveloped in sack-like draperies, landscape is reduced to an abstraction; there is no atmosphere, the figures seem to move in a vacuum; there is not even the pull of gravitation. The laws of Brunelleschian perspective, invented to increase the illusion of reality by situating figures in space, are here used to heighten our sense of unreality, and give us that feeling of nightmare distance which was revived in our own time by Chirico. This loss of nerve, which in the case of Botticelli may be explained as a conversion, was inherent in the work of his brilliant young pupil, Filippino Lippi. Even his early works, so close to his master that they were for long ascribed to a painter known as Amico di Sandro, are fragile and overstrained. But after the turn of the century we are aware of a kind ofhysterical

LECTURE

excitement, which condemns his figures to an endless, weightless tarantella, and communicates itself to every detail of the composition. In the background of his fresco of S. Philip and the Dragon in S. Maria Novella is a piece of architecture which is no doubt imitated from the architectural decorations of antiquity (what is known as the third Pompeian style), but is entirely without the gravity and simplicity which the Renaissance had attributed to ancient Rome. And whereas Mantegna' s people look like statues, Filippino's statues look like people, a calculated ambiguity which is surely a sympton of loss of confidence in the reality of optical sensations. The other belated quattrocentist to show this uneasiness is Piero di Cosimo. Every reader of Vasari will remember his life of Piero, that brilliant portrait of a neurasthenic, as good as one of Aubrey's BriefLives. The work which brought Piero most fame in his lifetime was a carnival of death, which included every kind of macabre invention. He stimulated his imagination by gazing at length on clouds or on the places where invalids had spat. He hated the sound of coughing and church bells, and loved to see water pouring from the gutters. This preoccupation with disease and decay may be permissibly described by that once popular, now almost forgotten word, decadent. I need not emphasise how much the visceral shapes of his tree-trunks differ from the geometry of classical humanism, nor remind a contemporary audience that they reappear in the undeniably decadent imagination of Salvador Dali. These examples from the work of painters formed in the fifteenth century, although the actual pictures were executed in the first decade of the sixteenth, show that uneasiness or positive neurasthenia had akeady appeared above the surface in what might seem to be the most unruffled of all golden moments in the Renaissance. They argue not only a survival of late mediaeval fantasies and fears, but also a feeling of insufficiency amongst those who were part of a movement which (ifl may be forgiven a metaphor of a doubtful botanical

LECTURE

validity) had grown too big for its roots. That they did not have a wider effect is due to three men of outstanding genius, who were giving quattrocento traditions a new heroic dimension: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. But even in the work of these heroes there is a consciousness of a world unfriendly to man and of man's inability to carry the burdens laid upon him. The most surprising record of this consciousness is a series of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci representing episodes in the destruction of the world [Plate V]. This must date from about 1513-14, that is to say before the Apocalyptic writings which accompanied the Reformation. Diirer's analogous drawing of a destructive water spout which he had seen in a dream is direcdy influenced by the social and religious disturbances of the time, for it was done in 1525, the year of the Peasants' Revolt. But I believe that Leonardo's drawings were solely the result of his meditations on the forces of nature and of man's feeble hold on the earth. They are a private confession of disbelief in humanism. Michelangelo's humanism, in a sense far stronger, because grounded in his passion for physical beauty, was not qualified by the fear of nature, but by the fear of God. There is an undertone of uneasiness throughout the Sistine ceiling, which for the most part is counter-balanced by colossal energy and faith. But at the end ofhis superhuman task, when even Michelangelo was worn out, his deep pessimism appears without qualification. The last figures to be painted in the Sistine were not on the ceiling, but on the walls, in lunettes above the windows. They are supposed to represent the ancestors of Christ, whose names are inscribed on the plaques between them, but half of them are women and none of them has the slighest connexion with what litde the scriptures tell us about these remote and scarcely credible characters. They follow no precedent and illustrate no programme; we may suppose them to be inhabitants of Michelangelo's imagination, who had been kept floating in the background while his energies were concentrated on the wilful

IO

LECTURE

figures ofProphets, Sibyls, and Athletes. Then, in his exhaustion, they emerged. They are ghostly, remote. Some stare desperately into space, some have collapsed [Plate VI] ; and amongst them are figures, like the man supposed to be Abinadab, which might be used to illustrate a treatise on melancholia [Plate VII]. No wonder they play little part in the conventional estimate of Michelangelo and have long been a source of embarrassment to his apologists.! But the young painters of 1515, who felt themselves crushed by the spiritual energy of the Sistine prophets, could look with a fellow feeling at these distracted zombies and draw encouragement from the thought that even the divine Michelangelo could share their sense of insecurity. Such then are the examples of disquiet, melancholy, and neurasthenia already perceptible in Renaissance art by the year 1512, and we may well ask why so widespread a feeling took almost ten years to develop into what is called a movement. As far as Rome is concerned the answer can be given in one word-Raphael. Added to his superlative professional skill was a balance of faculties and a confidence in physical beauty which was proof against all diseases of the spirit. As long as he was there to charm and inspire the young men who surrounded him, they continued to fmd in every subject a pretext for displaying human beings to the best advantage. But in Florence the situation was very different. After the departure ofLeonardo and Michelangelo official patronage turned first to Fra Bartolommeo and later to Andrea del Sarto. Fra Bartolommeo is an under-rated artist. His voluminous altar pieces are constructed with a mastery of weighty, continuous movement which make him the earliest ancester of Bolognese baroque. But his imagination fell short of his professional skill, he was impervious to the new thoughts and emotions of his time, and to a young
1 As an example of the iconographer's embarrassments, the exhausted figure on plate VI is supposed to be Abija, of whom the Bible tells us (II Chronicles, eh. 13, v. 21) that he was a great and good king who had fourteen wives, twenty-two sons, and sixteen daughters.

LECTURE

II

Florentine of about 1515 he must have seemed a pattern of stuffy academism. This kind of academism was treated more resourcefully by Andrea del Sarto, who gave it a classical austerity in the Scalzo and a more picturesque charm in his beautiful frescoes in the courtyard of the Annunziata; and it is here that we first meet the two young revolutionaries, Pontormo and Rosso, aged twenty-one and twenty,l showing already in their frescoes an uneasiness which immediately distinguishes them from their master. In Rosso's Assumption the Apostles grin and roll their eyes with Germanic intensity; and in Pontormo's Visitation there is an angular abruptness, a lack of suavity, which is not, as used to be supposed, due to youthful inexperience. Pontormo's impatience with academic harmony seems at first to have been unconscious. In the altar-piece he painted for S. Michele Visdomini he used the kind of composition that Fra Bartolommeo had developed to express conformity, in order to exhibit disturbance, tension, and an emotionalism verging on hysteria. The angular movements and sudden changes of direction of the Visitation now fill the whole area, so that there is no point where we can rest and recover our balance. To realise how uncomfortable this picture makes us, and is intended to make us, we should look back at Andrea del Sarto's Madonna of the Harpies, painted in the preceding year; which may be the best way to enjoy Sarto's beautiful sense of balance and space. We can understand why critics of the last century ~ought it one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance; and from our own uncertain position, we can sympathise with Pontormo' s reaction against such bland conformity. But to make uncomfortable versions of the academic style was only a negative solution; and at the same date, in his picture ofJoseph in Egypt in the National Gallery [Plate VIII],
1 Jacopo Carucci was born at Pontormo (Empoli) in 1494 Giovann Battista di Jacopo di Gasparri, known as il Rosso Fiorentino, was born in Florence in 1495.

LECTURE

Pontormo turned to the manner of his most unstable predecessor, who, according to Vasari, had also been for a time his master, Piero di Cosimo.We may suppose that he sympathised with this half-crazy old neurotic (who was still alive), for Pontormo was himself a deeply melancholic character, and it may have been the fantastic incidents in Piero di Cosimo's mythological pictures, like the coloured saxophone player who, in a picture in the Uffizi, so surprisingly celebrates the liberation of Andromeda, that encouraged Pontormo to develop his own fantasies to the point of caricature. But although the details of Piero's mythologies may have had a liberating effect on Pontormo, the total effect of unreality in his Joseph in Egypt is carried further and is more artfully contrived. It is, to begin with, a deliberate insult to one of the most cherished principles of Renaissance art-theory, the creation of a rational and comprehensible space. Every plane is wilfully contradicted, and the climax ofunreality is a crazy staircase, which would collapse of its own weight even if it did not have to support an over life-size marble statue. Characteristically, in the only blank space Pontormo has balanced on a pillar a small figure with billowing drapery, which should be a statue, but is in fact a living child; thus carrying further the ambiguity which I have already pointed out in Filippino Lippi. 'Io ardieri di dire' says Vasari, in course ofhis long panegyric of the Joseph in Egypt1 'che non fusse possibile vedere altra pittura fatta con tanta grazia, perfezione e bond, con quanta fa questa condotta da Jacopo'; and it is true that the picture is painted with unusual delicacy and that the drawing is up to the highest standards of Florentine sk:ill; for Pontormo, like so many revolutionaries, was a prize pupil. But we can see in the background and in several of the figures that Pontormo, trying to escape from the stylistic impasse which I have just described.
1 Giorgio Vasari Le Vite, ed. Milanesi, Florence x88I, vol. VI, p. 262 (in subsequent references as Milanesi). Vasari knew Pontonno personally and his life is one of the fullest and most reliable in the Collection.

LECTURE

13

has looked already to the Germanic artists whose prints were begiruring to circulate in Italy, Diirer and Lucas van Leyden.l I use the word 'Germanic' because the art of Bruges and Ghent had been much esteemed in Italy for over fifty years and Florentine painters of the Ghirlandaio circle had aspired to Flemish perfection in the treatment of heads, landscapes and brocades. But Diirer and Lucas van Leyden (who was, of course a Dutchman) not merely influenced the treatment of details, but provided alternative principles of design and a system of drawing based on character, accent, and stress as opposed to the smoothness, proportion, and harmony of buon disegno. In 1522 Pontormo, driven out of Florence by the plague, took refuge in the Certosa; and there, in isolation and in the shadow of death, he painted the series of frescoes based on this alternative system which remain amongst the strangest works of Florentine art. Vasari, in a famous passage, has recorded his dismay that so great a master of disegno should have wantonly thrown away the advantages of the classical tradition. 'Did not Pontormo know', he says, 'that the Germans came to these parts to learn the Italian manner, which he with such effort sought to abandon as if it were bad?' It is true that Pontormo assimilated Diirer's style with uncanny skill. He had evidendy taken with him into his retreat both the Great Passion of c. 1500 (including the five late plates of 1510) and the Small Passion of 151 I; and, in default of other models, had saturated himself in their style. But he hardly ever borrows a figure direct; 2 on
1 The gabled building in the background is typical of Lucas van Leyden, cf. his engraving of Christ Presented to the People, B.71, from which Pontormo may also have taken the idea of the children in the foreground. 2 F. M. Clapp, in his admirable pioneei work, ]acopo da Pontormo, New Haven 1916, enumerates figures in the frescoes which he says are 'derived from Diirer' and gives their sources. But in fact only one of these, the sleeping guard to the left of the risen Christ, could be called a derivation. The stages by whichPontormoassimilatedDiirer'sdesigns can be studied in his drawings, e.g. a study of the Deposition (Berenson 2II9) which has obviously taken Diirer's Deposition in the Small Passion (B.42) as its point of departure. He also continued to use a Diireresque style when drawing direct from nature, e.g. in the drapery, study, Berenson, Drawings of the Florentine Painters, no. 2140.

14

LECTURE

the contrary, he allows two or three ofDiirer's pictorial ideas to grow together in his mind until they produce a new and consistent invention. For example, his touching figure of Christ before Pilate [Plate IX], in the best preserved of the Certosa frescoes, certainly owes something to two of Diirer's greatest designs, the Christ taken Captive (B. 7) of the Large Passion and the Christ before Herod (B.32) of the Small, but His delicate, wilting movement is personal to Pontormo. Similarly the group of mourning women in the fresco of the Deposition [Plate X] is certainly not independent of the Deposition and Entombment groups in the two Passions; but it has a profoundly different character. For one thing, the Italian tradition of design enables him to clarify each area, in a way which the charged, linear style of the Great Passion did not permit; and, for another, Pontormo's rhythm lacks Diirer's sense of purpose, and his figures have a strange somnambulistic movement. Perhaps their ghostly appearance is to some extent due to the damaged condition of the paint-surface. We know from early copies, and can deduce from Pontormo's other work, that the whole series was painted in light, astonishing colours; even today, when in places only the under-painting remains, the Certosa frescoes are in a lighter key than anything else in Italian art between Maso and Tiepolo. But when all allowances have been made, Pontormo's groups of turbaned figures, that seem to sway as if moved by some invisible tide of grief, must always have been disturbing apparitions. His study of the late gothic style, with all its intricate variations of rhythm and stress, has not only released him from current academism, but allowed him a means of expressing his own feeling of insecurity. This freedom from the tyranny of buon disegno, that Pontormo had achieved by studying and absorbing Diirer, evidently gave him confidence, for immediately after the Certosa frescoes he felt strong enough to look again at Michelangelo. The result was the Deposition in the Capponi

LECTURE

IS

Chapel of S. Felicita, which from many points of view must be reckoned his masterpiece [Plate XI]. Michelangelo had returned to Florence in 1517, and in 1519 had established a workshop in the via Mazza to which, presumably, he transferred drawings and cartoons for the Sistine Ceiling, in particular those for the Ancestors of Christ, almost all of which have been lost to us. According to Vasari he had seen Pontormo's early work and praised it extravagantly;1 there can be no reasonable doubt that the younger man had access to the fateful treasures of Michelangelo's studio. InS. Felicita they have done him no harm. The dead Christ is ultimately dependent on the St. Peter's Pieta and the youth who, most unconvincingly, supports His legs, is derived from the Ignudi. But what a contrast to those muscle-rippling incarnations of energy is this pale, delicate being who gazes out of the picture with an expression of afflicted sensibility that would be unbearably morbid, were it not lit with an intense inner life. In all the figures there is the same lack of purpose. They seem to be lost in dreams, and to float as dreamers do with endless circular motion round a translucent tank. It is this translucency, above all, which enchants us. It rather disturbed Vasari; 'Always on the look out for novelties,' he says, 2 'Pontormo painted it without shadows and with colours so light and tones so close together that one can hardly distinguish the lights from the middle tones, or the middle tones from the darks'. Only a few years separate this pale, ethereal vision from the heavy altar-pieces of Fra Bartolommeo, but it might have been painted two centuries later for one of those rococco churches of Bavaria, in which every form floats in light and brings a delectable heaven to earth. In these years Pontormo created an entirely personal .style; but his independence was short-lived. By 1530 the weight of
1 'Questo giovane sara anco tale, per quanto si vede, che, se vive e sequita, porra quest'arte in cielo', Milanesi, VI. 250. 2 Milanesi, VI. 271.

16

LECTURE

Michelangelo's terrible genius had begun to cripple his spirit, and the most brilliant draughtsman of his generation was content to spend much of his time in making coloured replicas of Michelangelo's designs. Finally, and rather surprisingly, he was given one of the most honourable commissions which could fall to the lot of a Florentine painter, the decoration of the choir of S. Lorenzo. By this time he had become a complete neurasthenic. 'He was so much afraid of death', says V asari, 'that he would not have it spoken o He was solitary beyond belief, and he never went to festivals, or to places where people gathered together so as not to be caught in the crowd.' And this is confirmed by Pontormo's diary1 of which certain pages have survived for his last three years. In it he notes how many ounces of bread he ate at every meal, and whether it agreed, or more usually disagreed, with him. Almost every cough is recorded. It is a text-book of hypochondria. Vasari, in a famous passage, describes his work in S. Lorenzo, how he locked himself into the choir, and remained there, alone, for almost eleven years. He even prepared his own plaster lest anyone should see what he was doing. No wonder that, when after his death in 1557 the chapel was opened, the unfinished frescoes looked exceedingly odd, so that Vasari said, 'If I tried to understand them, even I who am a painter, I believe I would drive myself mad, or become hopelessly confused.' Strong words from one whose own compositions are often sufficiently confusing ! The frescoes themselves were destroyed when the choir of S. Lorenzo was rebuilt in I 742, but numerous drawings for them have survived, both studies of detail and designs of whole episodes. Assuming that they were carried out in the bright magical colour of the Certosa frescoes and the S. Felicita altar-piece, it may well be that we have lost one of the great visionary works of European art. They must have transcended academic naturalism, both of form and colour, in a way that the generation which admired El Greco would have found
1

Printed in F. M. Clapp, loc. cit., pp. 295-307.

LECTURE

17

particularly inspiring. The expressive distortion of the nudes is carried to a point not reached again in European painting till the present century. Looking at those strange creatures with their tiny heads, torsos like twisted trees, and legs like stems of ivy, it is hard to believe that Raphael's perfect norm of the human body is only one generation away. The rejection of humanism, first apparent in the Sistine Chapel, is now complete. Yet Pontormo is so great a master of anatomy and articulation that these distorted bodies are convincing and when they are combined in a composition we recognise their visionary purpose. As the Inquisitor was to say of Michelangelo's Last Judgement, 'Non vi e cosa se non de spirito'.l They are what Blake might have done if instead of taking his forms as ready made cliches from engravings, he had been brought up on the tradition of Florentine disegno. Rosso Fiorentino who, in the beginning, was associated with Pontormo in the anti-academic revolution, was an artist of very different endowments, whose career followed an almost opposite course. His early work is more openly eccentric, partly because he had not Pontormo's academic skill-'he could not follow a master', says Vasari, 'because he always took the contrary view to those in authority', and partly because he had an irrepressible love of the macabre. I have noticed the maniac grins of his Apostles in the Annunziata. He was also obsessed with skeletons, witches, and very thin men, who appear incongruously in his early altar-pieces; and we have no difficulty in believing Vasari' s story that, when the almoner of S. Maria Nuova saw an altar-piece which Rosso had done for him, he thought the saints were devils and rushed out of the house. 2 Vasari goes on to say that in his oil sketches
1 In the trial ofPaolo Veronese, on account of his having introduced drunkards and Germans into his painting of Christ in the House of Levi, 15 July 1573, published in Adolfo Venturi, Storia dell'Arte Italiana, Vol. IX, pt. iv, p. 752. 2 Milanesi, V. I 57

18

LECTURE

the expression of Rosso's figures was strained and unnatural (disparate), but in his fmished pictures it was made sweeter and more normal; and this is borne out by a large oil sketch in the County Museum, Los Angeles, of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne, which is like a half-crazy caricature of an Andrea del Sarto [Plate XII]. Rosso's drawings are expressive, even haunting, but they lack Pontormo' s command of articulation. And perhaps just because he could not master buon . disegno, he did not need the help of Diirer to escape from it. In his early work he developed an almost archaic abruptness, and in this style he painted that revolutionary masterpiece, the Descent from the Cross in Volterra, of I 521 [Plate XIII]. Once again the figure of Christ is derived from Michelangelo's Pieta in St; Peter's, presumably from a drawing (he had not been to Rome) which he had traced and reversed. But the remaining figures are entirely his own, and have the intensity of obsessions. We know from an unforgettable drawing in the Uffizi that the St. John came to him complete and could be used unchanged. The kneeling Magdalene is more consciously archaic, and may be a direct reference to Arnolfo di Cambio, whose sculptures on the facade of the Duomo were amongst the most venerable archives of Florentine style. Strangest of all are the two excited figures at the top of the Cross, who argue as to the means by which the body of Christ shall be taken down (and in fact it is hard to know how His weight is being supported). The bearded man leaning over the crossbeam has the violence and fantasy of neo-romantics like Fuseli, and the profile of the man to the left might be by Gericault. It is the mixture of the archaic and the romantic-macabre which makes the work ofRosso's Florentine years so fascinating. He is perhaps the first Western artist since the time of Hadrian to look backwards rather than forwards, and to use a primitive style, as Pontormo uses the German style, in order to escape from a situation which had become oppressively evolved. A most curious example is the picture in the Uffizi representing,

LECTURE

19

in a complicated manner, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro [Plate XIV]. Before the war, although it hung in the Tribuna, it had few admirers: now I observe that in the Courtauld Institute there are more slides of it than of any other picture, except perhaps David' s Oath of the Horatii-which shows that people who lecture about art have their own peculiar scale of values. It is an expositor's piece. The figures are derived from an antique sarcophagus of the Sons of Niobe, but the graceful heroics of antiquity have been made harsh, angular, and abrupt. The flattening out of continuous modelling has a particularly strange effect on the two foreshortened figures in the foreground. Here Rosso's model, less remote than Arnolfo di Cambio, was Paolo Uccello, whose decorative foreshortening -depth turned into surface pattern-provided an ambiguity as arresting as Pontormo's living statues. Uccello's Flood had a profound effect on him, so that years later, when decorating the Palace of Fontainebleau, it was still in his mind. I may add that there is a remarkable parallel between this piece of sophisticated archaism and a more naive reminiscence of Uccello, Rousseau Douanier's La Guerre. The flattened foreshortening and the way in which the black head makes a pattern against the pale body shows an exactly similar intention. The Moses picture was painted in 1523, and thus far Rosso followed the same course as Pontormo, rebelling against HighRenaissance classicism, and discovering alternative styles which could be made the means of expressing a more intense and disturbing vision. But, in spite of his interest in witches, Rosso did not share Pontormo's fears and anxieties. On the contrary, he was di bellissima presenza, a grave and gracious talkerl and accommodating enough to hold for ten years, against ruthless competition, the post of court painter to Francis I. Vasari's story that he was driven to suicide by the slanders uttered against him is evidently untrue. He was given a Christian burial. His ornate style, with its mixture of painting and stucco
1

Milanesi, V.

rss.

20

LECTURE

sculpture, became the basis of similar schemes of decoration in all the courts of Northern Europe. Between Florence and Fontainebleau Rosso had been in Rome, leaving it directly after the Sack. Here the style of painting differed entirely from that which he had left behind in Florence. The crushing weight of High-Renaissance achievement, far from producing a reaction, had led to an effusive conformity. Since the Stanza d'Eliodoro, in which he incorporated some of the stylistic discoveries of both Michelangelo and Titian, Raphael and his pupils had had it all their own way, and the amount of work they produced in the eight years before Raphael' s death remains almost incredible. In order to cover such large spaces with acceptable designs it had been necessary to establish certain formulas of grace and movement. They were achieved, Vasari tells us, by selection and copying of beautiful things, particularly antiques; as a result of which the painter could acquire what he called una bella maniera. We have now reached the point at which it seems to me justifiable to use that recent addition to art-historical jargon, the word 'mannerist'. It accurately describes the style recommended by Vasari, in which flowing movements, graceful gestures, and twisted poses were imposed on subjects for their own sakes, irrespective of truth to appearances or probability. To apply the word, as is often done, to the harsh angularities ofRosso is to disregard its historicalconnotation. Nevertheless, we must admit that after 1525 the two styles became involved with one another: or, rather, that the painters of the bella maniera, in spite of their prodigal use of classic models, 1 adopted the emotive imagery of the :)llti-classical revolutionaries, and thus saved their work from becoming intolerably boring and

1 For the degree to which mannerist painters borrowed their poses and motives from Graeco-Roman art, in particular from Sarcophagi and from the Column of Trajan c Craig Hugh Smyth, Mnpnerism and Maniera, New York University 1963, pp. 14 et seq.

LECTURE

21

insipid. Curiously enough, the fusion of the two styles was ascribed by Vasari to Raphael himsel At the end of his life, says his biographer, 1 Raphael reflected that, even if he could not rival Michelangelo in the drawing of figures, 'the art contained many other possibilities of effective invention or caprice. Such were the variety and extravagance of perspectives, graceful draperies floating in and out of shadow, the fury of horses in battle, with an endless number of other things such as footwear, helmets, armour, women's head-dresses, hair, beards, vases, trees, grottos, rocks, fires, skies turbid or serene, clouds, rain, lightning.' By no means all these inventions appear in the works of Raphael himsel He had, indeed, a romantic strain, evident as early as the Stanza d'Eliodoro: the Liberation of St. Peter is the ancestor of Salvator Rosa. But his use of grottos, rocks, and fires is a fancy of Vasari's, and where turbid skies, clouds, and rain are prominent, as in the Holy Family called La Perla, in Madrid, we usually have reason to suspect the intervention of Giulio Romano. This horribly talented youth2 showed from the first a taste for rather coarse romanticism and glossy contrasts of light and darkness. Since he was in charge of the rooms in the Vatican left unfmished, or perhaps we should say unbegun, by Raphael, he was also a chief purveyor of maniera in the narrow sense, for Vasari's catalogue of mannerist properties, 'helmets, armour, beards, vases, footwear', to say nothing of'the fury ofhorses in battle', have never been more prodigally expended than in the Sala di Constantino. As for 'clouds, rain, and rocks', in the Sala dei Giganti of the Palazzo del Tea he was to use them with an
Milanesi, IV. 375 All documentary evidence agrees that Giulio was born in 1499. Only Vasari gives the date as 1492, but on such points he was frequently mistaken. Of one hundred and eleven artists whose birth dates he gives, only eight are correct. C Kallab, Vasari Studies, NF. 16 (1958), p. 211. 3 The Palazzo del Te in Mantua was decorated between 1527 and 1535. The Sala dei Giganti was painted in 1532 by Rinaldo Mantovano, from cartoons that were unquestionably by Giulio Romano. C F. Hartt, Giulio Romano, New Haven 1958, p. 152 et seq.
1
2

22

LECTURE

extravagance which later romantics never surpassed even in Wagner operas or Christmas pantomimes [Plate XV). On one wall huge rocks come hurtling down on to the presumptious giants, on another they are assailed by flood, and on a third their vainglorious palace in the High-Renaissance style collapses at the stroke of divine authority. The Fall of the Giants brings me back to the problem with which this lecture began: should we interpret it as an individual fantasy, a sort of pictorial conceit, balancing emblematically as well as architecturally, the Sala di Psyche in the opposite corner of the Palace? Or should we say that it expresses, in a somewhat obvious manner, the current sense of instability? In character Giulio was very far from the neurasthenic Pontormo or the nightmare-ridden Rosso, and certainly Vasari, in his long description of the Sala dei Giganti, treats it solely as 'good theatre'.1 On the other hand we observe that Giulio Romano's collapsing rocks have the same character as the falling mountains in Leonardo's deluge scenes, done only seventeen years earlier. It is hard not to predicate some common factor of the imagination. Or we may notice how another artist, entirely unconnected with Giulio, turned at the same time from grace to scenes of romantic destruction by a higher power. This was the Sienese painter, Domenico Beccafumi. He was fourteen years older than Giulio, and in 1512 had painted for the hospital of the Scala a fresco which may be reasonably claimed as the earliest example of the mannerist style. For almost twenty years Beccafumi, as a painter, 2 appears to be no more than the heir of Sodoma, a graceful and somewhat sentimental Sienese with an attractive freedom of touch. Then, early in the I530s, he
1 Milanesi, V. 541. Vasari goes so far as to explain that this room was built on a piece of marshy ground and when visitors to the Palace saw the falling masonary in Giulio's fresco they thought the actual walls were collapsing: a princely practical joke similar to the trick water-jets concealed in palace gardens throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 2 Much of his time was taken up with designs for the marble inlays on the pavement of Siena Cathedral.

LECTURE

23

executed those two masterpieces of romanticism, the Fall of the Angels in the Siena gallery, and the Last Judgement in S. Maria del Carmine [Plate XVI]. They are as dramatic as Giulio Romano's Giants, and considerably more imaginative; and they achieve their effect not by grotesque imagery, but by a contrast of darkness and flaming light almost entirely new in Italian art. Indeed the flames and tunnels in the lower half of the Last Judgement make an assault on our emotions of a kind which scarcely occurs again before the time of Tumer.l This use of flames was, of course, a northern device, and had been given a limited currency early in the sixteenth century through the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Lucas van Leyden. But although Giorgione and even Raphael. had put fires and flaming furnaces into their backgrounds,2 they never made them the dominating motive of a whole picture, as Beccafumi has done, and we may argue that between !520 and I535 a need to express emotional disturbances affected even the gentleseeming Sienese. We may also allow that the state of mind which I have called a failure of nerve was connected with an uneasy consciousness of the Germanic north. In these years every perceptive Italian must have felt that the compact, harmonious world of humanism was threatened, not only by force of arms but by the uncouth intensity of the German spirit. Pontormo, Rosso, and Beccafumi had all shown their consciousness of this threat by adopting elements of the German or Flemish style. In the north of Italy where arms and ideas could easily penetrate the Alpine passes, we fmd painters adopting more openly both the mood and subject of German art. An example is the picture by Lorenzo Lotto representing Susanna and the Elders, painted as
1 'Scarcely,' because certain northern mannerists in the late sixteenth century went nearly as far in scenes of Lot and his Daughters or the Burning of Troy. 2 Giorgione in the original of which the Orpheus and Eurydice at Bergamo is a copy; Raphael in the Louvre St. Michael, where the devils are also derived from Bosch. The most extreme example is the engraving by Marcantonio (B.359 known as Raphael's Dream, but probably from a design by Giorgione.

24

LECTURE

early as 1517. The walled-in hortus conclusus is that of a Flemish miniature; the texts of scrolls issuing from the mouths of the chief actors are in the convention of such popular Gothic prints as the biblia pauperum; and the Elders, germanic both in pose and costume, bear down on a Susanna whose pose is derived directly from the antique. It is like a stylistic allegory of the age. Lotto was long ago recognised 1 as the painter of self-searching and anxiety, and there is no doubt that he had close relationships with culture north of the Alps. There is sometimes a hint of Griinewald in the lighting and movement of his draperies; and later in life he was actually commissioned to paint portraits of Luther and his wife.2 A very different response to German aggression appears in a work by Lotto's energetic contemporary, Pordenone. Whereas Lotto is apprehensive and dismayed, Pordenone accepts the northern invaders with a kind of exuberance. In 1522, when the Swiss mercenaries were everywhere, he painted in the Cathedral of Cremona two huge murals of Christ nailed to the Cross [Plate XVII] and the Crucifixion. Both scenes are dominated by brutallandsknechts, in full rig, as we know them from the drawings of Urs Graf or Nikolaus Manuel Deutsch. The figures on the crosses are also completely German, reminding us ofWolfHiiber and the Griinewalds at Karlsruhe. Nor is his anti-humanism confmed to the imagery, for, in the design of Christ nailed to the Cross, Pordenone makes a violent and confused assault on the classical idea of space. The Cross and Christ's foreshortened body stick out of the frame, and one of the church fathers from the decorative lunette below puts his hand on it. Never before had the Albertian idea of the picture as a sort of geometrical peep-show, containing its own orderly world, been so grossly defied.
Berhard Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto, 1895, p. 3II. Cf. Berenson, loc. cit., p. 269. This commission, executed for his nephew on behalf of a friend named Tristan would be almost incredible did it not occur in Lotto's account book for 1540. By this time Luther had become the most dreaded enemy of the Catholic Church.
1 2

LECTURE

25

The examples of Lotto and Pordenone warn me that the thesis with which my lecture bagan should not be pressed too far. It is true that the Tuscan painters of 1520 were chiefly concerned with problems of style; and I think it doubtful if they were consciously aware of any impending changes in thought or society. Yet we must be prepared to concede to art a certain prophetic function. The characteristic ofFlorentine art between 1512 and 1520 which I have called a failure of nerve, although it took place at the very summit of the HighRenaissance confidence, does look uncommonly like a foretaste of troubles to come. In northern Italy these troubles and terrors had taken a material form since the beginning of the century. In Rome they remained a menacing shadow till 1527. When the reality occurred, art seemed to have anticipated it, and, with one huge exception, had little more to add. From 1530 onwards the fears and stresses of the revolutionary style disappeared, and the bella maniera, the style of hollow, elegant decoration, triumphed almost without interruption, until the appearance of Caravaggio. The huge exception is, of course, Michelangelo's Last Judgement. It had been commissioned by Clement VII in 1533, and in his choice of subject there is no doubt that he was giving imaginative relief to the memory of that night in May, six years earlier, when beneath his walls, and as a result of his own duplicity, he saw the city burnt, its people massacred, and the civilisation of the Renaissance destroyed. But it had an even deeper connection with the spiritual disasters which were taking place north of the Alps. The Last Judgement was a gothic subject, relatively rare in Renaissance art, but in the North, where gothicism, both of subject and style, continued throughout the fifteenth century, a Doom was the principal painting, often the only painting, in every church. It was there to keep people in order by frightening them; and this was the motive which induced Paul Ill, who succeeded Clement VII before work on the fresco had begun, to continue with the

26

LECTURE

commission. He wished to make it a terrible assertion of the power of the Church. It was over twenty years since Michelangelo had completed the Sistine ceiling, and during the period he had seen his own expressive distortions carried further and given a fresh emotional impact by the yom1g painters of 1520. We know that he was on good terms with them, lent them his cartoons, and admired their work. A great artist can often see in the work of a lesser artist some line of attack which he himself can follow with greater force; and it is not belittling Michelangelo to say that a group such as the resurrected body with two skeletons at the bottom of the Last Judgement may owe something to Rosso. Other macabre horrors, like the landsknecht Charon with his boat-load of terrified sinners, are a new element in Michelangelo's style; and it is arguable that Rosso and Pontormo had created a climate of taste and feeling which allowed Michelangelo to carry much further the vein of noble and tragic grotesque foreshadowed in the Ancestors of Christ on the Sistine Ceiling. The Last Judgement is often claimed as the fom1dation of the Mannerist style. In this lecture I have tried to show that it was the culmination of a mood and of a style which had been looming on the horizon of HighRenaissance art for almost twenty years. Whether or not Michelangelo owed something to the neurotics of 1520, the use he made of their style was more powerful and more positive. They were the Wleasy prophets of disaster; he was its master and exponent. So the failure of nerve which Widermined the confidence of High-Renaissance humanism was transformed into an awe-inspiring acceptance of the will of God.

1. MICHELANGELO.

The Brazen Serpent. Sistine Chapel, Rome

n.

DONATELLO .

The Risen Christ. San Lorenzo, Florence

ur.

MANTEGNA.

St. Sebastian. Ca' d'Oro, Venice

rv.

BOTTICELLI.

Miracles of St. Zenobius (detail) . National Gallery, London

V. LEONARDO DA VINCI.

Deluge (Cataclysm). Royal Library, Windsor

VI. MI CHELAN GELO.

Ancestors of Christ. Jacob. Sistine Chapel, Rome

vn.

MICHELANGELO.

Ancestors of Christ. Abinadab. Sistine Chapel, Rome

VIII. PO N TORMO. Joseph

in Egypt. National Gallery, London

rx.

PONTORMO.

Christ before Pilate. Certosa, Florence

x.

PONTORMO.

Deposition. Certosa, Florence

xr.

PONTORMO.

Descent from the Cross. Santa Felicita, Florence

xrr.

ROSSO.

Madonna and Child with St. Anne and yo ung St. John. County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

xur. ROsso. Descent from the Cross. Cathedral, Voltcrra

x rv. Rosso. The Daughters ofJcthro. Ufftzi Gallery, Florence

xv. cruuo

RO MANO.

Hall of Giants. Palazzo del Te, Mantua

xvr.

BE c CAFU M I.

Last Judgement. Carmine, Siena

XVII. PORDENONE.

Christ nailed to the Cross. Cathedral, Crcmona