Chapter XI Italian Sculpture From 1527 to 1650 a.d. Cellini, Giovanni Bologna, and Bernini
The aftermath of Italian sculpture is indissolubly connected with two craftsmen of genius and an historical movement of the first order. The men, Benvenuto Cellini and Giovanni Bologna, stand for all that is best in Italian sculpture during the middle of the sixteenth century. The movement—the Catholic Reaction—dominated the following seventy-five years. Dating the periods a little more precisely, the genesis of the earlier may be associated with the Sack of Rome in 1527 a.d. The beginning of the second period may be roughly fixed by the Pontificacy of Gregory XIII., let us say the year 1580 a.d. It reached a climax with the advent of Bernini, the exponent par excellence of the Baroco style, whether in architecture or sculpture.
To bring to birth a Michael Angelo and to nurture his titanic genius was the supreme effort of the Italian Renaissance in the cause of the plastic arts. That is why post-Angelesque sculpture must be associated with the rather depressing image of “the second harvest.” Compared with the productions of the time of Donatello or the fifty years during which the influence of Michael Angelo was all-potent, the Italian sculpture of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries shows a marked declension. The enthusiasm which had brought the genius of Donatello and Michael Angelo to fruition was waning. Art was no longer imbued with the old intensity of purpose and fervour of imagination.
For this very reason the century which followed the Sack of Rome is of far less importance in the history of sculpture than that which preceded it. But, as many of the phenomena of health are only clear in the light of experience gathered from disease, the circumstances which gave rise to the post-Angelesque sculpture of Italy possess a unique interest. Against the background of comparative failure, the essentials necessary to the production of vital sculpture stand out in the clearest outline.
Starting from the premises that such an art as sculpture expresses the deepest conviction of the people in which it arises, we are led at once from the works to the social circumstances in which the emotions arose. The briefest study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, shows that all the factors which had lifted sculpture to the summit operated no longer. The free burghers who had built and decorated the Church of Or San Michele or commissioned the Baptistery Gates had been forced to acknowledge the tyranny of a selfish nobility. A source of inspiration like Lorenzo de Medici was replaced by the crew of degenerates who represented the House of Medici in the sixteenth century. In the Roman Catholic Church, too, the Reformation called forth sterner qualities and less sunny energies. The Papacy was forced to relinquish the ideals of Julius II. and Leo X., at any rate for a time. Above all, intellectual life was entirely divorced from national feeling. Politics—“the art of leading the majority, not where they wish, but where they ought to go”—interested the individual, not, as in the earlier age, the mass of the people.
We have then at our hand the key to the problem. A picture of Italy between 1527 and 1580 will give us the source of the characteristics of the art of Cellini and Giovanni Bologna. A sketch of the political and social consequences of the Catholic Reaction will explain the popularity of Bernini, the typical sculptor of our second period.
First, the politics of sixteenth-century Italy. The outstanding feature of political life at this time was its utter instability. With the solitary exception of Venice, every principality and city was in a condition of constant ferment. State after state ceased to possess the essential elements of political stability. They had been ruined, for the most part, by the attempt to combine freedom within the city walls with dominion beyond. During the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the success attending the methods of Cæsar Borgia had suggested that a combination of moral agility and political knavery might produce the needful balance of power. The advent of the French, the Germans, and later of the Spaniards, destroyed even this semblance of political stability. Italian liberty became a thing of the past. The old absorbing interest in politics vanished, and with it the clarity of thought and logicality of form which public political discussion does so much to foster. In such a country art exists. It does not live. As Mazzini said two hundred years later:
“Without a country and without liberty we might perhaps produce some prophets of art but no vital art. Therefore it is better for us to consecrate our lives to the solution of the problem, ‘are we to have a country?’ and turn at once to the political question. If we are successful, the art of Italy will bloom and flourish over our graves.”
So much for the political state of Italy between 1527 and 1580. The social was even more anarchical. No reference need be made to the moral code adopted by the leaders of thought and action—to the organized murder by hired bravi, to the general winking at adultery, to the convent intrigues. A low standard of morals by no means involves a low standard of art. But the peculiar viciousness of the morality of sixteenth-century Italy seems to depend upon the connection of this degraded moral sense with a general chaos of social order. The condottieri of the age of Cosimo de Medici were replaced by banditti in the pay of feudal nobles. The old respect for trade disappeared. With the growth of the aristocratic ideals of Spain, the wealthy burgher class, which had been the most stable element in towns like Florence and Milan, vanished. Monopolies were granted to all and sundry. The agents of the Italian princes and the Pope, together with the Spanish viceroys, placed imposts upon all sorts of goods, regardless of the necessities of commerce.
The prosperity of the great art centres of Italy decreased rapidly. Take the case of Rome. A passage from the official report of the Venetian envoy in 1565, Giacomo Soranzo, furnishes a striking contrast between the condition of Rome in the mid-sixteenth century and Rome when Michael Angelo was in his first vigorous youth. In 1565 the aristocracy consisted of a fluctuating nobility and priesthood depending upon the largesses of the chief members of the Papal Court. At times the population totalled 100,000. During an unpopular pontificacy it fell as low as 40,000.
“The Court of Rome,” writes Soranzo, “is no longer what it used to be either in the quality or the numbers of the courtiers. This is principally due to the poverty of the cardinals and the parsimony of the popes. In the old days, when they gave away more liberally, men of ability flocked from all quarters. This reduction of the Court dates from the Council; for the bishops and beneficed clergy being now obliged to retire to their residences, the larger portion of the Court has left Rome. To the same cause may be ascribed a diminution of the numbers of those who serve the Pontiff, seeing that since only one benefice can now be given and that involves residence, there are few who care to follow the Court at their own expense and inconvenience without hope of greater reward. The poverty of the cardinals springs from two causes. The first is that they cannot now obtain benefices of the first class, as was the case when England, Germany, and other provinces were subject to the Holy See, and when, moreover, they could hold three or four archbishoprics apiece together with other places of emolument, whereas they now can only have one apiece. The second cause is that the number of the cardinals has been increased to seventy-five, and that the foreign powers have ceased to complement them with large presents and benefices, as was the wont of Charles V. and the French Crown.”
The consequence can be readily realized. There was the old demand for pictures and sculptures. But quick returns rather than sound accomplishment were required by the artists and their patrons. A delayed commission would stand but a poor chance of payment. For it would not fulfil its main purpose—the aggrandizement of a prince or cardinal whose term of power depended upon the life of the Pope or the tenure of office by such a ruler as one of the Medicean tyrants of Florence.
Nor was this all. Not only were the circumstances less favourable but the artists themselves were unfitted for the accomplishment of the greatest tasks. The age, not the earthly parent, is the real father of the man. Lesser spirits attempted to wield a giant’s tools and struggled with themes which Michael Angelo oftentimes failed to make articulate. They sought to obtain his sublime effects by insistence upon such accidents of his style as the exaggerated muscular development or contorted poses of his figures. Immense monuments, suggested by the achievements of the earlier age, were called for. A striving after exaggerated effect replaced the former determination to base every work of art upon the accurate observation of nature and the definite proportion of part and part. The later artists lacked the simple reserve which is only given to men who see life steadily and see it whole. In place of the deeps of Angelo, we find the shallows of Giovanni Bologna and his even less gifted contemporaries. Just because they are shoals, the turmoils surrounding them oftentimes appear tempestuous. But they never suggest the tremendous power which evidences the oceanic depths of the passions of a man who is not only a sculptor but a seer.
Benvenuto Cellini
The character of a typical sixteenth-century Italian artist has been preserved to us in the “Autobiography” of Cellini. From its pages we can conjure up the lives of the men who made this fifty years of Italian sculpture. Cellini, be it remembered, is no Bohemian hanging around the outskirts of the artistic world. On his death in February 13, 1571, his brothers of the Accademia delle Belle Arti record: “Messer Benvenuto Cellini was buried with great funeral pomp in our Chapter House at the Annunziata in the presence of our Academical Body and the Company.”
But the “Autobiography” pictures a born swaggerer, a swashbuckler—a bully, if you like—though a gay-hearted genius withal.
Let us examine Cellini’s life story rather more closely. When little more than a youth Cellini was banished from Florence on account of an affray with a party of his fellows. Returning, a second affair necessitated a flight to Rome, where he took part in the celebrated defence of the town against the Constable de Bourbon in 1527. Once more restored to favour in his native Florence, Cellini took upon himself to avenge his brother’s death. A murderous affray with a notary and an ultra-energetic manner of dealing with a rival goldsmith, ended in the two years’ confinement in the Castle of Saint Angelo with which all readers of the “Autobiography” are familiar. And in all these excitements, Cellini is never in the wrong. “What I have done, I have done in defence of that body which God has lent me.” Adopting the apologia which he attributes to one of the numerous Popes with whom he came in contact, Cellini calls upon the world to recognize “that men like myself, unique in their profession, are subject to no laws.”
GIOVANNI BOLOGNA
Bargello, Florence
BENVENUTO CELLINI
Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence
These darker times heralded the halcyon days of Cellini’s life, which began when he exchanged the dungeons of Saint Angelo for the court of Francis I. With a salary of 700 golden scudi a year and the title of “Seigneur,” Cellini joined the painters, sculptors and goldsmiths whom Il Rosso had gathered together for Francis I. (the school of Fontainebleau). Cellini’s work at this time is of small interest to the student of the history of sculpture. In those days he was a goldsmith. The great bronze personification of a water nymph, now in the Louvre, shows that Cellini had already dreamt of fame as a sculptor. It equally shows that as yet his conceptions would not bear the scrutiny a life-sized design necessarily challenges. Cellini’s “Water Nymph” is a glorified piece of goldsmithery.
But on his return to Florence in 1545, Cellini started upon a work that was to silence all doubt as to his capacity to succeed in the realm of pure sculpture. By this time Francis I. had tired of the hot-tempered Florentine. Coming home, Cellini persuaded the reigning Medicean prince to entrust him with a commission for a “Perseus” for the Loggia dei Lanzi. The “Autobiography” gives a vivid account of the sculptor’s four years’ struggle with circumstance. Now, the interest of the Duke and his Duchess waned. Now, money, material, or both, were wanting. The promised salary was not forthcoming. Qualified assistants were denied. Constant quarrels with rivals added to these general difficulties.
We can realize a measure of Cellini’s troubles from his story of the casting of the “Perseus”—one of the most vigorous romances in the history of art. We take up the tale where the cast has been placed in the furnace and the metal introduced. Disaster follows disaster. Whether the details have been coloured by the vivid imagination of the artist or no matters little. We hear how the heat sets fire to the shop on the one hand. On the other, a rain-storm threatens to cool the furnace, in spite of the stacks of pine that have been piled around the statue and its metal casing. In the midst of the excitement Cellini is suddenly attacked by a violent intermitting fever. “In short, I was so ill that I was forced to take to my bed.” Cellini therefore left his ten assistants to carry on as best they could.
“In this manner did I continue for two hours in a violent fever, which I every moment perceived to increase, and I was incessantly crying out, ‘I am dying, I am dying!’
“My housekeeper, whose name was Mona Fiore da Castel del Rio, was one of the most sensible and affectionate women in the world; she rebuked me for giving way to vain fears, and at the same time attended me with the greatest kindness and care imaginable; however, seeing me so very ill and terrified to such a degree, she could not contain herself, but shed a flood of tears which she endeavoured to conceal from me. Whilst we were both in this deep affliction, I perceived a man enter the room who in his person appeared to be as crooked and distorted as a great S, and began to express himself in these terms, with a tone of voice as dismal and melancholy as those who exhort and pray with persons who are going to be executed: ‘Alas! poor Benvenuto, your work is spoiled, and the misfortune admits of no remedy.’
“No sooner had I heard the words uttered by this messenger of evil, but I cried out so loud that my voice might be heard to the skies, and got out of bed. I began immediately to dress, and giving plenty of kicks and cuffs to the maidservants and the boy as they offered to help me on with my clothes, I complained bitterly in these terms: ‘O you envious and treacherous wretches, this is a piece of villainy contrived on purpose; but I swear by the living God that I will sift it to the bottom, and before I die give such proofs who I am as shall not fail to astonish the whole world.’ Having huddled on my clothes, I went with a mind boding evil to the shop, where I found all those whom I had left so alert and in such high spirits, standing in the utmost confusion and astonishment. I thereupon addressed them thus: ‘Listen all of you to what I am going to say; and since you either would not or could not follow the method I pointed out, obey me now that I am present; my work is before us, and let none of you offer to oppose or contradict me, for such cases as this require activity and not counsel.’ Hereupon one Alessandro Lastricali had the assurance to say to me: ‘Look you, Benvenuto, you have undertaken a work which our art cannot compass, and which is not to be effected by human power.’
“Hearing these words I turned round in such a passion, and seemed so bent upon mischief that both he and all the rest unanimously cried out to me: ‘Give your orders, and we will all second you in whatever you command; we will assist you as long as we have breath in our bodies.’ These kind and affectionate words they uttered, as I firmly believe, in a persuasion that I was upon the point of expiring. I went directly to examine the furnace, and saw all the metal in it concreted. I thereupon ordered two of the helpers to step over the way to Capretta, a butcher, for a load of young oak which had been above a year drying, and had been offered me by Maria Ginevra, wife to the said Capretta.
“Upon his bringing me the first bundles of it, I began to fill the grate. This sort of oak makes a brisker fire than any other wood whatever; but the wood of alder-trees and pine-trees is used in casting artillery, because it makes a mild and gentle fire. As soon as the concreted metal felt the power of this violent fire, it began to brighten and glitter. In another quarter I made them hurry the tubes with all possible expedition, and sent some of them to the roof of the house to take care of the fire, which through the great violence of the wind had acquired new force; and towards the garden I had caused some tables with pieces of tapestry and old clothes to be placed, in order to shelter me from the rain. As soon as I had applied the proper remedy to each evil, I with a loud voice cried out to my men to bestir themselves and lend a helping hand; so that when they saw that the concreted metal began to melt again, the whole body obeyed me with such zeal and alacrity that every man did the work of three. Then I caused a mass of pewter weighing about sixty pounds to be thrown upon the metal in the furnace, which with the other helps, as the brisk wood fire, and stirring it sometimes with iron and sometimes with long poles, soon became completely dissolved. Finding that, contrary to the opinion of my ignorant assistants, I had effected what seemed as difficult as to raise the dead, I recovered my vigour to such a degree that I no longer perceived whether I had any fever, nor had I the least apprehension of death. Suddenly a loud noise was heard, and a glittering of fire flashed before our eyes, as if it had been the darting of a thunderbolt. Upon the appearance of this extraordinary phenomenon, terror seized on all present, and on none more than myself. This tremendous noise being over, we began to stare at each other, and perceived that the cover of the furnace had burst and flown off, so that the bronze began to run.
GIOVANNI BOLOGNA