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Renaissance Painting
Selection copyright © 1997 by Rictor Norton. All rights
reserved. This
edition may not be reproduced or redistributed to third parties
without
permission of the author.
[From Renaissance in Italy. Vol 3: The Fine
Arts, 1877. The massive seven-volume
Kulturgeschichte develops a sweeping
history with the piling up of numerous details, from which it is
not easy to lift self-contained selections. The following two
excerpts illustrate Symonds's key argument about the triumph of
paganism over Christianity in the Italian Renaissance,
particularly as exemplified in the work of one of its powerful
personalities, Luca Signorelli. This selection shows how
Symonds's theory of Renaissance art was really a theory of sexual
liberation, "the inalienable rights of natural desire".
One may go even further, and see that Symonds is proposing that
natural homosexual desire lay at the root of art and the
modern spirit. When he says he is going to cite "a single
illustration" to his argument about the incompatibility of
art and piety, it is not surprising that he seizes upon a
painting of Saint Sebastian. The celebration of the male nude is
the sub-theme that runs throughout all of Symonds's art
criticism.]
Painting . . . was the art demanded by the modern intellect upon
its emergence from the stillness of the Middle Ages. The problem,
however, even for the art of painting was not simple. The
painters, following the masters of mosaic, began by setting forth
the history, mythology, and legends of the Christian Church in
imagery freer and more beautiful than lay within the scope of
treatment by Romanesque or Byzantine art. So far their task was
comparatively easy; for the idyllic grace of maternal love in the
Madonna, the pathetic incidents of martyrdom, the courage of
confessors, the ecstasies of celestial joy in redeemed souls, the
loveliness of a pure life in modest virgins, and the dramatic
episodes of sacred story, furnish a multitude of motives
admirably pictorial. There was, therefore, no great obstacle upon
the threshold, so long as artists gave their willing service to
the Church. Yet, looking back upon this phase of painting, we are
able to perceive that already the adaptation of art to Christian
dogma entailed concessions on both sides. Much, on the one hand,
had to be omitted from the programme offered to artistic
treatment, for the reason that the fine arts could not deal with
it at all. Much, on the other hand, had to be expressed by means
which painting in a state of perfect freedom would repudiate.
Allegorical symbols, like Prudence with two faces, and painful
episodes of agony and anguish marred her work of beauty. There
was consequently a double compromise, involving a double
sacrifice of something precious. The faith suffered by having its
mysteries brought into the light of day, incarnated in form, and
humanised. Art suffered by being forced to render intellectual
abstractions to the eye through figures symbols.
As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the proper end
of art, became more rightly understood, the painters found that
their craft was worthy of being made an end in itself, and that
the actualities of life observed around them had claims upon
their genius no less weighty than dogmatic mysteries. The
subjects they had striven at first to realise with all
simplicity, now became the vehicles for the display of sensuous
beauty, science, and mundane pageantry. The human body received
separate and independent study, as a thing in itself incomparably
beautiful, commanding more powerful emotions by its magic than
aught else that sways the soul. At the same time the external
world, with all its wealth of animal and vegetable life, together
with the works of human ingenuity in costly clothing and superb
buildings, was seen to be in every detail worthy of most patient
imitation. Anatomy and perspective taxed the understanding of the
artist, whose whole force was no longer devoted to the task of
bringing religious ideas within the limits of the representable.
Next, when the classical revival came into play, the arts, in
obedience to the spirit of the age, left the sphere of sacred
subjects, and employed their full-grown faculties in the domain
of myths and Pagan fancies. In this way painting may truly be
said to have opened the new era of culture, and to have first
manifested the freedom of the modern mind. When Luca Signorelli
drew naked young men for a background to his picture of Madonna
and the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of the
attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the
whole range of human interests. Standing before this picture in
the Uffizzi, we feel that the Church, while hoping to adorn her
cherished dogmas with aesthetic beauty, had encouraged a power
antagonistic to her own, a power that liberated the spirit she
sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the earthly paradise from
which monasticism had expelled it.
Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult
problem of the relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would
be to shrink from the most thorny question offered to the
understanding by the history of the Renaissance. On the very
threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my conviction that
the spiritual purists of all ages — the Jews, the
iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savanarola, and our Puritan ancestors
— were justified in their mistrust of plastic art. The
spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative art are
opposed, not because such art is immoral, but because it cannot
free itself from sensuous associations. It is always bringing us
back to the dear life of earth, from which the faith would sever
us. It is always reminding us of the body which piety bids us to
forget. Painters and sculptors glorify that which saints and
ascetics have mortified. The masterpieces of Titian and
Correggio, for example, lead the soul away from compunction, away
from penitence, away from worship even, to dwell on the delight
of youthful faces, blooming colour, graceful movement, delicate
emotion. Nor is this all: religious motives may be misused for
what is worse than merely sensuous suggestiveness. The
masterpieces of the Bolognese and Neapolitan painters, while they
pretend to quicken compassion for martyrs in their agony, pander
to a bestial blood-lust lurking in the darkest chambers of the
soul. Therefore it is that piety, whether the piety of monastic
Italy or of Puritan England, turns from these aesthetic triumphs
as from something alien to itself. When the worshipper would fain
ascend on wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite, ineffable,
unrealised, how can he endure the contact of those splendid
forms, in which the lust of the eye and the pride of life,
professing to subserve devotion, remind him rudely of the
goodliness of sensual existence? Art, by magnifying human beauty,
contradicts these Pauline maxims: "For me to live is Christ,
and to die is gain"; "Set your affections on things
above, not on things on earth"; "Your life is hid with
Christ in God". The sublimity and elevation it gives to
carnal loveliness are themselves hostile to the spirit that holds
no truce or compromise of traffic with the flesh. As displayed
in its most perfect phases, in Greek sculpture and Venetian
painting, art dignifies the actual mundane life of man; but
Christ, in the language of uncompromising piety, means everything
most alien to this mundane life — self-denial, abstinence
from fleshly pleasure, the waiting for true bliss beyond the
grave, seclusion even from social and domestic ties. "He
that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of
me." "He that taketh not his cross and followeth me,
is not worthy of me." It is needful to insist upon these
extremest sentences of the New Testament, because upon them was
based the religious practice of the Middle Ages, more sincere in
their determination to fulfil the letter and embrace the spirit
of the Gospel than any succeeding age has been.
If, then, there really exists this antagonism between fine
art glorifying human life and piety contemning it, how came it,
we may ask, that even in the Middle Ages the Church hailed art
as her co-adjutor? The answer lies in this, that the Church has
always compromised. When the conflict of the first few centuries
of Christianity had ended in her triumph, she began to mediate
between asceticism and the world. Intent on absorbing all
existent elements of life and power, she conformed her system to
the Roman type, established her service in basilicas and Pagan
temples, adopted portions of the antique ritual, and converted
local genii into saints. At the same time she utilised the
spiritual forces of monasticism, and turned the mystic impulse
of ecstatics to account. The Orders of the Preachers and the
Begging Friars became her militia and police; the mystery of
Christ's presence in the Eucharist was made an engine of the
priesthood; the dreams of Paradise and Purgatory gave value to
her pardons, interdictions, jubilees, indulgences, and curses.
In the Church the spirit of the cloister and the spirit of the
world found neutral ground, and to the practical accommodation
between these hostile elements she owed her wide supremacy. The
Christianity she formed and propagated was different from that
of the New Testament, inasmuch as it had taken up into itself a
mass of mythological anthropomorphic elements. Thus transmuted
and materialised, thus accepted by the vivid faith of an
unquestioning populace, Christianity offered a proper medium for
artistic activity. The whole first period of Italian painting was
occupied with the endeavour to set forth in form and colour the
popular conceptions of a faith at once unphilosophical and
unspiritual, beautiful and fit for art by reason of the human
elements it had assumed into its substance. It was natural,
therefore, that the Church should show herself indulgent to the
arts, which were effecting in their own sphere what she had
previously accomplished, though purists and ascetics, holding
fast by the original spirit of their creed, might remain
irreconcilably antagonistic to their influence. The Reformation,
on the contrary, rejecting the whole mass of compromises
sanctioned by the Church, and returning to the elemental
principles of the faith, was no less naturally opposed to fine
arts, which, after giving sensuous form to Catholic mythology,
had recently attained to liberty and brought again the gods of
Greece.
A single illustration might be selected from the annals of
Italian painting to prove how difficult even the holiest-minded
and most earnest painter found it to effect the proper junction
between plastic beauty and pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo, the
disciple of Savonarola, painted a Sebastian in the cloister of
S. Marco, where it remained until the Dominican confessors became
aware, through the avowals of female penitents, that this picture
was a stumbling-block and snare to souls. It was then removed,
and what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra Bartolommeo
undoubtedly intended this ideal portrait of the martyr to be
edifying. S. Sebastian was to stand before the world as the young
man, strong and beautiful, who endured to the end and wont he
crown of martyrdom. No other ideas but those of heroism,
constancy, or faith were meant to be expressed; but the painter's
art demanded that their expression should be eminently beautiful,
and the beautiful body of the young man distracted attention from
his spiritual virtues to his physical perfections. A similar
maladjustment of the means of plastic art to the purposes of
religion would have been impossible in Hellas, where the temples
of Eros and of Phoebus stood side by side; but in Christian
Florence the craftsman's skill sowed seeds of discord in the
souls of the devout.
This story is but a coarse instance of the separation
between piety and plastic art. In truth, the difficulty of
uniting them in such a way that the latter shall enforce the
former, lies far deeper than its powers of illustration reach.
Religion has its proper end in contemplation and in conduct. Art
aims at presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and feelings
with a view to intellectual enjoyment. Now, many thoughts are
incapable of sensuous embodiment; they appear as abstractions to
the philosophical intellect or as dogmas to the theological
understanding. To effect an alliance between art and philosophy
or art and theology in the specific region of either religion or
speculation is, therefore, an impossibility. In like manner there
are many feelings which cannot properly assume a sensuous form;
and these are precisely religious feelings, in which the soul
abandons sense, and leaves the actual world behind, to seek her
freedom in a spiritual region.Yet, while we recognise the truth
of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to maintain that,
until they are brought into close and inconvenient contact, there
is direct hostility between religion and the arts. The sphere of
the two is separate; their aims are distinct; they must be
allowed to perfect themselves, each after its own fashion. In the
large philosophy of human nature, represented by Goethe's famous
motto, there is room for both, because those who embrace it bend
their natures neither wholly to the pietism of the cloister nor
to the sensuality of art. . . .
The Church imagined art would help her; and within a certain
sphere of subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and
the lives of saints, by creating new types of serene beauty and
pure joy, by giving form to angelic beings, by interpreting
Mariolatry in all its charm and pathos, and by rousing deep
sympathy with our Lord in His Passion, painting lent efficient
aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very pith and kernel
of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising purists.
Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of
riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of
enforcing mysticism and asceticism, it really restored to
humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty, and helped to
prove the untenability of the mediaeval standpoint; for art is
essentially and uncontrollably free, and, what is more, is free
precisely in that real of sensuous delightfulness from which
cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty
of contemplation.
The first step in the emancipation of the modern mind was
taken thus by art, proclaiming to men the glad tidings of their
goodliness and greatness in a world of manifold enjoyment created
for their use. Whatever painting touched, became by that touch
human; piety, at the lure of art, folded her soaring wings and
rested on the genial earth. This the Church had not foreseen.
Because the freedom of the human spirit expressed itself in
painting only under visible images, and not, like heresy, in
abstract sentences; because this art sufficed for Mariolatry and
confirmed the cult of local saints; because its sensuousness was
not at variance with a creed that had been deeply sensualised
— the painters were allowed to run their course unchecked.
Then came a second stage in their development of art. By placing
the end of their endeavour in technical excellence and anatomical
accuracy, they began to make representation an object in itself,
independently of its spiritual significance. Next, under the
influence of the classical revival, they brought home again the
old powers of the earth — Aphrodite and Galatea and the
Loves, Adonis and Narcissus and the Graces, Phoebus and Daphne
and Aurora, Pan and the Fauns, and the Nymphs of the woods and
the waves.
When these dead deities rose from their sepulchres to sway
the hearts of men in the new age, it was found that something had
been taken from their ancient bloom of innocence, something had
been added of emotional intensity. Italian art recognised their
claim to stand beside Madonna and the Saints in the Pantheon of
humane culture; but the painters remade them in accordance with
the modern spirit. This slight touch of transformation proved
that they preserved a vital meaning for an altered age. Having
personified for the antique world qualities which, though
suppressed and ignored by militant and mediaeval Christianity,
were strictly human, the Hellenic deities still signified those
qualities for modern Europe, now at length re-fortified by
contact with the ancient mind. For the Renaissance was a return
in all sincerity and faith to the glory and gladness of nature,
whether in the world without or in the soul of man. To apprehend
that glory and that gladness with the pure and primitive
perceptions of the early mythopoets, was not given to the men of
the new world. Yet they did what in them lay, with senses
sophisticated by many centuries of subtlest warping, to replace
the first free joy of kinship with primeval things. For the
painters, far more than for the poets of the sixteenth century,
it was possible to reproduce a thousand forms of beauty, each
attesting to the delightfulness of physical existence, to the
inalienable rights of natural desire, and to the participation
of mankind in pleasures held in common by us with the powers of
earth and sea and air.
It is wonderful to watch the blending of elder and of
younger forces in this process. The old gods lent a portion of
their charm even to Christian mythology, and showered their
beauty-bloom on saints who died renouncing them. Sodoma's
sebastian is but Hyacinth or Hylas, transpierced with arrows, so
that pain and martyrdom add pathos to his poetry of youthfulness.
Lionardo's S. John is a Faun of the forest, ivy-crowned and
laughing, on whose lips the word "Repent" would be a
gleeful paradox. For the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman
martyrs and Olympian deities — the heroes of the
Acta Sanctorum, and the heroes of Greek
romance — were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the
city of the beautiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent
fragrance was educed from these apparently diverse blossoms by
their interminglement and fusion — how the high-wrought
sensibilities of the Christian were added to the clear and
radiant fancies of the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness of
the Pagan gave body and fullness to the floating wraiths of an
ascetic faith — remains a miracle for those who, like our
master Lionardo, love to scrutinise the secrets of twin natures
and of double graces. There are not a few for whom the mystery
is repellent, who shrink from it as from Hermaphroditus. These
will almost find something to pain them in the art of the
Renaissance.
* * *
Of a different temperament, yet now wholly unlike Mantegna in a
certain iron strength of artistic character, was Luca Signorelli,
born about 1441 at Cortona. The supreme quality of Mantegna was
studied purity of outline, severe and heightened style. As Landor
is distinguished by concentration above all the English poets who
have made trial of the classic Muse, so Mantegna holds a place
apart among Italian painters because of his stern Roman self-
control. Signorelli, on the contrary, made his mark by boldness,
pushing experiment almost beyond the verge of truth, and
approaching Michael Angelo in the hardihood of his endeavour t
outdo nature. Vasari says of him, that "even Michael Angelo
imitated the manner of Luca, as every one can see"; and
indeed Signorelli anticipated the greatest master of the
sixteenth century, not only i his profound study of human
anatomy, but also in his resolution to express high thought and
tragic passion by pure form, discarding all the minor charms of
painting. Trained in the severe school of Piero della Francesca,
he early learned to draw from the nude with boldness and
accuracy; and to this point, too much neglected by his
predecessors, he devoted the full powers of his maturity. Anatomy
he practised, according to the custom of those days, in the
graveyard or beneath the gibbet. There is a drawing by him in the
Louvre of a stalwart man carrying upon his back the corpse of a
youth. Both are naked. The motive seems to have been taken from
some lazar-house. Lifelong study of perspective in its
application to the drawing of the figure, made the difficulties
of foreshortening and the delineation of brusque attitude mere
child's play to this audacious genius. The most rapid movement,
the most perilous contortion of bodies falling through the air
or flying, he depicted with hard, firmly-traced, unerring
outline. If we dare to criticise the productions of a master so
original and so accomplished, all we can say is that signorelli
revelled almost too wantonly in the display of hazardous posture,
and that he sacrificed the passion of his theme to the display
of science. Yet his genius comprehended great and tragic
subjects, and to him belongs the credit in an age of ornament and
pedantry of having made the human body a language for the
utterance of all that is most weighty in the thought of man.
A story is told by vasari which brings Signorelli very close
to our sympathy, and enables us to understand the fascination of
pure form he felt so deeply. "It is related of Luca that he
had a son killed at Cortona, a youth of singular beauty in face
and person, whom he had tenderly loved. In his grief the father
caused the boy to be stripped naked, and with extraordinary
constancy of soul, uttering no complaint and shedding no tear,
he painted the portrait of his dead son, to the end that he might
still be able, through the work of his own hand, to contemplate
that which nature had given him, but which an adverse fortune had
taken away." So passionate and ardent, so convinced of this
indissoluble bond between the soul he loved in life and its dead
tenement of clay, and withal so iron-nerved and stout of will,
it behoved that man to be, who undertook in the plenitude of his
power, at the age of sixty, to paint upon the walls of the chapel
of St. Brizio at Orvieto the images of Doomsday, Resurrection,
Heaven, and Hell.
It is in a gloomy chapel in the Gothic cathedral of that
forlorn Papal city — gloomy by reason of bad lighting, but
more so because of the terrible shapes with which Signorelli has
filled it. In no other work of the Italian Renaissance, except
in the Sistine Chapel, has so much thought, engaged upon the most
momentous subjects, been expressed with greater force by means
more simple and with effect more overwhelming. Architecture,
landscape, and decorative accessories of every kind, the usual
padding of quattrocento pictures, have been discarded
from the main compositions. The painter has relied solely upon
his power of imagining and delineating the human form in every
attitude, and under the most various conditions. Darting like
hawks or swallows through the air, huddling together to shun the
outpoured vials of the wrath of God, writing with demons on the
floor of Hell, struggling into new life from the clinging clay,
standing beneath the footstool of the Judge, floating with lute
and viol or the winds of Paradise, kneeling in prayer, or
clasping "inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-
measure for ever" — these multitudes of living beings,
angelic, diabolic, bestial, human, crowd the huge spaces of the
chapel walls. What makes the impression of controlling doom the
more appalling, is that we comprehend the drama in its several
scenes, while the chief actor, the divine Judge, at whose bidding
the cherubs sound their clarions, and the dead arise, and weal
and woe are portioned to the saved and damned, is himself
unrepresented. We breathe in the presence of embodied
consciences, submitting, like our own, to an unseen inevitable
will.
It would be doing Signorelli injustice at Orvieto to study
only these great panels. The details with which he has filled all
the vacant spaces above the chapel stalls and round the doorway,
throw new light upon his power. The ostensible motive for this
elaborate ornamentation is contained in the portraits of six
poets, who are probably Homer, Virgil, Lucan, Horace, Ovid, and
Dante, Il sesto tra cotanto scuno. But the portraits
themselves, though vigorously conceived and remarkable for bold
foreshortening, are the least part of the whole design. Its
originality consists in the arabesques, medallions, and
chiaroscuro bas-reliefs, where the human form, treated
as absolutely plastic, supplies the sold decorative element. The
pilasters by the doorway, for example, are composed, after the
usual type of Italian grotteschi, in imitation of
antique candelabra, with numerous stages for the exhibition of
the artist's fancies. Unlike the work of Raphael in the Loggie,
these pilasters of Signorelli show no birds or beasts, no flowers
or foliage, fruits or fauns, no masks or sphinxes. They are
crowded with naked men — drinking, dancing, leaning forward,
twisting themselves into strange attitudes, and adapting their
bodies to the several degrees of the framework. The same may be
said of the arabesques around the portraits of the poets, where
men, women, and children, some complete, some ending in foliage
or in fish-tails, are lavished with a wild and terrible
profusion. Hippogriffs and centaurs, sirens and dolphins, are
here used as adjuncts to humanity. Amid this fantastic labyrinth
of twisted forms we find medallions painted in
chiaroscuro with subjects taken chiefly from Ovidian and
Dantesque mythology. Here every attitude of men in combat and in
motion has been studied from the nude, and multitudes of figures
draped and undraped are compressed into the briefest compass. All
but the human form is sternly eliminated; and the body itself is
treated with a mastery and a boldness that prove Signorelli to
have held its varied capabilities firmly in his brain. He could
not have worked out all those postures from the living model. He
played freely with his immense stores of knowledge; but his play
was the pastime of a Prometheus. Each pose, however hazardous,
carries conviction with it of sincerity and truth; the life and
liberty of nature reign throughout. From the whole maze of
interlaced and wrestling figures the terrible nature of the
artist's genius shines forth. They are almost all strong men in
the prime or past the prime of life, chosen for their salient
display of vital structure. Signorelli was the first, and, with
the exception of Michael Angelo, the last painter thus to use the
body, without sentiment, without voluptuousness, without any
second intention whatsoever, as the supreme decorative principle.
In his absolute sincerity he made, as it were, a parade of hard
and rugged types, scorning to introduce an element of beauty,
whether sensuous or ideal, that should distract him from the
study of the body in and for itself. This distinguishes him in
the arabesques at Orvieto alike from Mantegna and Michael Angelo,
from Correggio and Raphael, from Titian and Paolo Veronese.
This point is so important for its bearing on Renaissance
art that I may be permitted to dilate at greater length on
Signorelli's choice of types and treatment of form in general.
Having a special predilection for the human body, he by no means
confined himself to monotony in its presentation. On the
contrary, we can trace many distinct grades of corporeal
expression. first comes the abstract nude, illustrated by the
Resurrection and the arabesques at
Orvieto. Contemporary life, with all its pomp of costume and
insolence of ruffling youth, is depicted in the
Fulminati at Orvieto and in the
Soldiers of Totila at Monte Oliveto.
These transcripts from the courts of princes and camps of
condottieri are invaluable as portraits of the lawless young men
who filled Italy with the noise of their feuds and the violence
of their adventures. They illustrate Matarazzo's Perugian
chronicle better than any other Renaissance pictures; for in
frescoes like those of Pinturicchio at Siena the same qualities
are softened to suit the painter's predetermined harmony, whereas
Signorelli rejoices in their pure untempered character. These,
then, form a second stage. Third in degree we find the type of
highly idealised adolescence reserved by Signorelli for his
angels. All his science and his sympathy with real life are here
subordinated to poetic feeling. It is a mistake to say that these
angels are the young men of Umbria whom he loved to paint in
their striped jackets, with the addition of wings to their
shoulders. The radiant beings who tune their citherns on the
clouds of Paradise, or scatter roses for elect souls, could not
live and breathe in the fiery atmosphere of sensuous passions to
which the Baglioni were habituated. A grave and solemn sense of
beauty animates these fair male beings, clothed in voluminous
drapery, with youthful faces and still earnest eyes. They melody,
like that of Milton, is severe. Nor are Signorelli's angelic
beings of one uniform type like the angels of Fra Angelico. The
athletic cherubs of the Resurrection,
breathing their whole strength into the trumpets that awake the
dead; the mailed and winged warriors, keeping guard above the pit
of Hell, that none may break their
prison-bars among the damned; the lute-players of
Paradise, with their almost feminine
sobriety of movement; the flame-breathing seraphs of the day of
doom; the Gabriel of Volterra, in whom
strength is translated into swiftness — these are the
heralds, sentinels, musicians, executioners, and messengers of
the celestial court; and each class is distinguished by
appropriate physical characteristics. At the other end of the
scale, forming a fourth grade, we mention the depraved types of
humanity chosen for his demons — those greenish, reddish,
ochreish fiends of the Inferno, whom
Signorelli created by exaggerating the more grotesque qualities
of the nude developed in his arabesques. We thus obtain four
several degrees of form: the demoniac, the abstract nude, the
adolescent beauty of young men copied from choice models, and the
angelic.
Except in his angels, Signorelli was comparatively
indifferent to what is commonly considered beauty. He was not
careful to select his models, or to idealise their type. The
naked human body, apart from facial distinction or refinement of
form, contented him. Violent contrasts of light and shadow,
accentuating the anatomical structure with rough and angular
decision, give the effect of illustrative diagrams to his
studies. Harmony of proportion and the magic of expression are
sacrificed to energy emergent in a powerful physique. Redundant
life, in sinewy limbs, in the proud carriage of the head upon the
neck, in the sway of the trunk backward from the reins, the
firmly planted calves and brawny thighs, the thick hair, broad
shoulders, spare flanks, and massive gluteal muscles of a man of
twenty-two or upwards, whose growth has been confined to the
development of animal force, was what delighted him. Yet there
is no coarseness or animalism properly so called in his style.
He was attracted by the marvellous mechanism of the human frame
— its goodliness regarded as the most highly organised of
animate existences.
Owing, perhaps, to this exclusive predilection for organic
life, Signorelli was not great as a colourist. His patches of
blues and reds in the frescoes of Monte Oliveto are oppressively
distinct; his use of dull brown for the shading of flesh imparts
a disagreeable heaviness to his best modelled forms; nor did he
often attain in his oil pictures to that grave harmony we admire
in his Last Supper at Cortona. The
world of light and colour was to him a comparatively untravelled
land. It remained for other artists to raise these elements of
pictorial expression to the height reached by Signorelli in his
treatment of the nude.
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