Michelangelo in the Bargello

Edward Hutton ended his tour of the Bargello, the sculpture gallery in Florence, with a discussion of Michelangelo, "that beautiful, strong and tragic soul." Michelangelo's most famous works are not in the Bargello but there was still the figure of the Greek god Bacchus, the great Roman Brutus, a lovely relief of the Madonna and Child, as well as a Pieta apparently intended for his own tomb.

There follows Michelangelo (1475-1564). It is with a sort of surprise that one comes fact to face with that sorrowful, heroic figure, as though, following among the flowers, we had come upon some tragic precipice, some immense cavern too deep for sight. How, after the delight, the delicate charm of the fifteenth century, can I speak of this beautiful, strong, and tragic soul? It might almost seem that the greatest Italian of the sixteenth century has left us in sculpture little more than an immortal gesture of despair, of despair of a world which he has not been content to love. His work is beautiful with the beauty of the mountains, of the mountains of which he alone has found the spirit of man. His figures, half unveiled from the living rock, are like some terrible indictment of the world he lived in, and in a sort of rage at its uselessness he leaves them unfinished, and it but half expressed;--an indictment of himself too, of his own heart, of his contempt for things as they are. Yet in his youth, he had been content with beauty—in the lovely Pieta of S. Pietro, for instance, where, on the robe of Mary, alone in all his work he has placed his name; or in the statue of Bacchus, now here in the Bargello, sleepy, half drunken with wine or with visions, the eyelids heavy with dreams, the cup still in his hand. But already in the David his trouble is come upon him; the sorrow that embittered his life has been foreseen, and in a sort of protest against the enslavement of Florence, that nest where he was born, he creates this hero, who seems to be waiting for some tyranny to declare itself.

The Brutus, unfinished as we say, to-day in the Bargello, he refused to touch again, since that city which was made for a thousand lovers, as he said, had been enjoyed by one only, some Medici against whom, as we know, he was ready to fight. If in the beautiful relief of Madonna we find a sweetness and strength that is altogether without bitterness or indignation, it is not any religious consolation we find there, but such comfort rather as life may give when in a moment of inward tragedy we look on the stars or watch a mother with her little son. …

The unfinished Pieta in the Duomo, it is said, he carved for his own grave: like so much of his great tragical work, it is unfinished, unfinished though everything he did was complete from the beginning. For he is like the dawn that brings with it noon and evening, he is like the day which will pass into the night. In him the spirit of man has stammered the syllables of eternity, and in its agony of longing or sorrow has failed to speak only the word love. All things particular to the individual, all that is small or of little account, that endures but for a moment, have been purged away, so that Life itself may make, as it were, an immortal gesticulation, almost monstrous in its passionate intensity—a mirage seen on the mountains, a shadow on the snow. And after him, and long before his death, there came Baccio Bandinelli and the rest, Cellini the goldsmith, Giovanni da Bologna, and the sculptors of the decadence that has lasted till our own day. With him Italian art seems to have been hurled out of heaven; henceforth his followers stand on the brink of Pandemonium, making the frantic gestures of fallen gods.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 296-7.

Florence: Verrocchio

Edward Hutton regarded Andrea Verrocchio as "one of the greatest of all Italian masters of the Renaissance." Sadly, Verrocchio has been eclipsed by his student Leonardo da Vinci. For example, the famous Annunciation in the Uffizi is generally credited to the young Leonardo although it was done in the Verrocchio studio.*  In the Bargello, Hutton found two outstanding examples of Verrocchio's work as a sculptor.

 

It is, however, in the work of another goldsmith—or at least the pupil of one, whose name he took—that we find the greatest master of the new age, Andrea Verrocchio. Born in 1435, and dead in 1488, he was preoccupied all his life with the fierce splendour of his art, the sublime sweetness that he drew from the strength of his work. The master, certainly, of Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo, and finally of Perugino also, he was a painter as well as a sculptor; and though his greatest work was achieved in marble and bronze, one cannot lightly pass by the Annunciation of the Uffizi, or the Baptism of the Accademia. Neglected for so long, he is at last recognized as one of the greatest of all Italian masters of the Renaissance. …

 

More perfect in craftsmanship and in the knowledge of anatomy than Donatello, Verrocchio here, where he seems almost to have been inspired by the David of his master, surpassed him in energy and beauty, and while Donatello’s figure  is involved with the head of Goliath, so that the feet are lost in the massive and almost shapeless bronze, Verrocchio’s David stands clear of the grim and monstrous thing at his feet. Simpler, too, and less uncertain is the whole pose of the figure, who is in no doubt of himself, and in his heart he has already “slain his thousands.”

 

In the portrait of Monna Vanna degli Albizi, the Lady with the Nosegay, Verrocchio is the author of the most beautiful bust of the Renaissance. She fills the room with sunshine, and all day long she seems to whisper some beloved name. A smile seems ever about to pass over her face under her clustering hair, and she has folded her beautiful hands on her bosom, as though she were afraid of her beauty and would live ever in their shadow.

 

In two reliefs of Madonna and child, one in marble and one in terra-cotta, you find that strange smile again, not, as with Leonardo, some radiance of the soul visible for a moment on the lips, but the smile of a mother happy with her little son. In the two Tornabuoni reliefs that we find here too in the Bargello, it is not Verrocchio’s hand that we see; but in the group of Christ and St. Thomas at Or San Michele, and in the fierce and splendid equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni at Venice, you see him at his best, occupied with a subtle beauty long sought out, and with an expression of the fierce ardour and passion that consumed him all his life. If he makes only a leaf of bronze for a tomb, it seems to quiver under his hands with an inextinguishable vitality.

 

 

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*Today the Uffizi credits the Annunciation to Leonardo but after a Verrocchio prototype. 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 292-293.

Florence: Donatello

In his tour of the Bargello, Florence's sculpture gallery, Edward Hutton had high praise for the work of Donatello and its unique contribution to Renaissance sculpture. Donatello's marble David, pictured below, is less famous than his bronze version, but Hutton regarded his St. George as his masterpiece.

Of Donatello’s life we know almost nothing. If we seek to learn something of him, it must be in his works, of which so many remain to us. We know, however, that he was the intimate friend of Brunellesco, and that it was with him he set out for Rome soon after this great and proud man had withdrawn from the contest with Ghiberti for the Baptistery gates. Donatello was to visit Rome again in later life, but on this first journey that he made with Brunellesco for the purpose of study, he must have become acquainted with what was left of antiquity in the Eternal City. It was too soon for that enthusiasm for antiquity, which later overwhelmed Italian art so disastrously, to have arisen. When Donatello returned about a year later to Florence to work for the Opera del Duomo, it is not any classic influence we find in his statues, but rather the study of nature, an extraordinary desire to express not beauty, scarcely ever that, but character. His work is strong, and often splendid, full of energy, movement, and conviction, but save now and then, as in the S. Croce Annunciation, for instance, it is not content with just beauty….(284)

Donatello: St. George

There are some ten works by the master in the Bargello, together with numerous casts of his statues and reliefs in other parts of Italy, so that he may be studied here better than anywhere else. Looking thus on his work more or less as a whole, it is a new influence we seem to divine for the first time in the marble David, a little faintly, perhaps, but obvious enough in the St. George, a Gothic influence that appears very happily for once, in work that almost alone in Italy seems to need just that, well, as an excuse for beauty. That marble statue of David was made at almost the same time as the St. John the Divine, for the Duomo too, where it was to stand within the church in a chapel there in the apse. A little awkward in his half-shy pose, the young David stands over the head of Goliath, uncertain whether to go or stay. It is a failure which passes into the success, the more than success of the St. George,  which is perhaps his masterpiece. Made for the Guild of Armourers, from the first day on which it was set up it has been beloved. Michelangelo loved it well, and Vasari is enthusiastic about it, while Bocchi, writing in 1571, devotes a whole book to it…. With a proud and terrible impetuosity St. George seems about to confront some renowned and famous enemy, that old dragon whom once he slew. Full of confidence and beauty he gazes unafraid… Well may Michelangelo have whispered “March!” as he passed by, it is the very order he awaits, the whisper of his own heart. … 

 So in the bronze David now in the Bargello we seem to see youth itself dreaming after the first victory of all the conquests to come, while a smile of half-conscious delight is passing from the lips; tyranny is dead…. (287)

 

But here in the Bargello we have enough of his work to enable us to divine something at least of his secret. And this seems to me to have been Donatello’s  intention in the art of sculpture: his figures are like gestures of life, of the soul, sometimes involuntary and full of weariness, sometimes altogether joyful, but always the expression of a mood of the soul which is dumb, that in its agony or delight has in his work expressed  itself by means of the body, so that though he never carves the body for its own sake, or for the sake of beauty, he is as faithful in his study of it for the sake of the truth, as he is in his study of those moods of the soul which through him seem for the first time to have found an utterance. (288)

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 284-288.

Florence: Bargello

Before entering the Bargello, Florence's museum of sculpture, Hutton reflected on what his own age had lost. Writing in 1908 he could hardly have imagined the catastrophe that would ensue six years later with the First World War.

 

Often as I wander through these rooms or loiter in the shadow under the cloisters of the beautiful courtyard, perhaps the most lovely court in Tuscany, the remembrance of that old fierce life which desired beauty so passionately and was so eager for every superiority, comes to me, but I ask myself how the dream which that world pursued with so much simplicity and enthusiasm can have led us  at last to the world of today, with its orderly disorder, its trams and telegraphs and steam engines, its material comfort which how strangely, we have mistaken for civilization. In all London there is no palace so fine as this old prison, nor a square so beautiful as Piazza della Signoria…. Our craftsmen have become machine minders, our people, on the verge of starvation, as we admit,  without order, with restraint, without the discipline of service, having lost the desire of beauty or splendour, have become serfs because they are ignorant and fear to die.  And it is we who have claimed half the world  and thrust upon it an all but universal domination. In thus bringing mankind under our rule, it is ever of our civilization that we boast, that immense barbarism which in its brutality and materialism first tried to destroy the Latin Church and then the Latin world, which alone could have saved us from ourselves. … and today, half dead with our own smoke, herded together like wild beasts, slaves of our own inventions, ah, blinded by our unthinkable folly, before the statues that they made, before the pictures that they painted, before the palaces that they built, in the churches where they still pray, stupefied by our own stupidity, brutalized by our own barbarism, we boast of a civilization that has already made us ridiculous, and of which we shall surely die. Here in the Bargello, the ancient palace of the Podesta of a Latin city, let us be silent and forget our madness before the statues of the Gods, the images of the great and beautiful people of old…. [277]

The panels of the Sacrifice of Isaac submitted by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti in the famous early fifteenth century contest to win the commission for the Baptistry doors are preserved in the Bargello. Here is Hutton's comparison. [click on image to enlarge] 

Looking on those two panels where both artists have carved the Sacrifice of Isaac, you see Ghiberti at his best, the whole interest not divided, as it is in Brunellesco’s panel, between the servants and the sacrifice, but concentrated altogether on the scene which is about to become so tragical. Yet with what energy Brunellesco had conceived an act that in his hands  seems really to have happened. How swiftly the angel has seized the hand of Abraham; how splendidly he stands, the old man who is about to kill his only son for the love of God. And then consider the beauty of Isaac, that naked body which in Brunellesco’s hands is splendid with life, really living and noble, with a truth and loveliness far in advance of the art of his time. Ghiberti has felt none of the joy of a creation such as this; his Isaac is sleepy, a little surprised and altogether docile; he has not sprung up from his knees as in Brunellesco’s panel, but looks up at the angel as though he had never understood that his very life was at stake. Yet it was in those gates which, Brunellesco, as it is said, retiring from the contest, the Opera then gave into his hands, that we shall find the best work of Ghiberti….All the rest of his work seems to me lacking in conviction, to be frankly almost an experiment….It was not to the disciples of Ghiberti that the future belonged, but to those who have studied with Brunellesco. His crucifix in S. Maria Novella, his Evangelists in the Pazzi chapel, are among the finest work of that age, full of life and remembrance of it in their strength and beauty. [282-3]

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 277-283.