GENRE ARTISTS
It is a temptation to hasten on from Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio to Botticelli and Leonardo, to men of genius as artists reappearing again after two generations, men who accomplished with scarcely an effort what their precursors had been toiling after. But from these it would be even more difficult than at present to turn back to painters of scarcely any rank among the world’s great artists, and of scarcely any importance as links in a chain of evolution, but not to be passed by, partly because of certain qualities they do possess, and partly because their names would be missed in an account, even so brief as this, of Florentine painting. The men I chiefly refer to, one most active toward the middle and the other toward the end of the fifteenth century, are Benozzo Gozzoli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Although they have been rarely coupled together, they have much in common. Both were, as artists, little more than mediocrities with almost no genuine feeling for what makes painting a great art. The real attractiveness of both lies entirely outside the sphere of pure art, in the realms of genre illustration. And here the likeness between them ends; within their common ground they differed widely.
BENOZZO GOZZOLI
Benozzo was gifted with a rare facility not only of execution but of invention, with a spontaneity, a freshness, a liveliness in telling a story that wake the child in us, and the lover of the fairy tale. Later in life, his more precious gifts deserted him, but who wants to resist the fascination of his early works, painted, as they seem, by a Fra Angelico who had forgotten heaven and become enamoured of the earth and the spring-time? In his Riccardi Palace frescoes, he has sunk already to portraying the Florentine apprentice’s dream of a holiday in the country on St. John’s Day; but what a naïf ideal of luxury and splendour it is! With these, the glamour in which he saw the world began to fade away from him, and in his Pisan frescoes we have, it is true, many a quaint bit of genre (superior to Teniers only because of superior associations), but never again the fairy tale. And as the better recedes, it is replaced by the worse, by the bane of all genre painting, non-significant detail, and positive bad taste. Have London or New York or Berlin worse to show us than the jumble of buildings in his ideal of a great city, his picture of Babylon? It may be said he here continues mediæval tradition, which is quite true, but this very fact indicates his real place, which, in spite of his adopting so many of the fifteenth-century improvements, is not with the artists of the Renaissance, but with the story-tellers and costumed fairy-tale painters of the transition, with Spinello Aretino and Gentile da Fabriano, for instance. And yet, once in a while, he renders a head with such character, or a movement with such ease that we wonder whether he had not in him, after all, the making of a real artist.
GHIRLANDAIO
Ghirlandaio was born to far more science and cunning in painting than was current in Benozzo’s early years, and all that industry, all that love of his occupation, all that talent even, can do for a man, they did for him; but unfortunately he had not a spark of genius. He appreciated Masaccio’s tactile values, Pollaiuolo’s movement, Verrocchio’s effects of light, and succeeded in so sugaring down what he adopted from these great masters that the superior philistine of Florence could say: “There now is a man who knows as much as any of the great men, but can give me something that I can really enjoy!” Bright colour, pretty faces, good likenesses, and the obvious everywhere—attractive and delightful, it must be granted, but, except in certain single figures, never significant. Let us glance a moment at his famous frescoes in Santa Maria Novella. To begin with, they are so undecorative that, in spite of the tone and surface imparted to them by four centuries, they still suggest so many tableaux vivants pushed into the wall side by side, and in tiers. Then the compositions are as overfilled as the sheets of an illustrated newspaper—witness the “Massacre of the Innocents,” a scene of such magnificent artistic possibilities. Finally, irrelevant episodes and irrelevant groups of portraits do what they can to distract our attention from all higher significance. Look at the “Birth of John”; Ginevra dei Benci stands there, in the very foreground, staring out at you as stiff as if she had a photographer’s iron behind her head. An even larger group of Florentine housewives in all their finery disfigures the “Birth of the Virgin,” which is further spoiled by a bas relief to show off the painter’s acquaintance with the antique, and by the figure of the serving maid who pours out water, with the rush of a whirlwind in her skirts—this to show off skill in the rendering of movement. Yet elsewhere, as in his “Epiphany” in the Uffizi, Ghirlandaio has undeniable charm, and occasionally in portraits his talent, here at its highest, rises above mediocrity, in one instance, the fresco of Sassetti in Santa Trinità, becoming almost genius.
