The Tuscan painters
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The art of Siena exhausted itself in presenting the ideals and feelings of the Middle Ages with an intensity and a beauty not surpassed even by their spiritual kindred, those sculptors of Northern France who, in our weaker moments, almost win us away from Greece. It remained for another school of Central Italy, the Umbrian, to carry on through the Renaissance purposes and aims nowise different in their essence from those of Siena, different as they may seem in actual result. For Umbrian art, as we shall see, is, as a whole, no more in earnest over tactile values and movement than Sienese art had been, and no less devoted to the task of illustrating the ideals and expressing the wistful desires of the time.
But before we turn to the Umbrians, our attention must first be given to a master and his two pupils, neither Sienese nor Umbrian, dwellers in Southern Tuscany and the Romagna, who as men of genius were greater than any of the Umbrians, as artists freer and more powerful, if not always so delightful -- I mean Piero della Francesca, Luca Signorelli, and Melozzo da Forli.
Piero della Francesca
And first to Piero. The pupil of Domenico Veneziano in characterization, of Paolo Uccello in perspective, himself an eager student of this science, as in artist he was more gifted than either of his teachers. He is hardly inferior to Giotto and Masaccio in feeling for tactile values; in communicating values of force, he is the rival of Donatello; he was perhaps the first to use effects of light for their direct tonic or subduing and soothing qualities; and, finally, judged as an Illustrator, it may be questioned whether another painter has ever presented a world more complete and convincing, has ever had an ideal more majestic, or ever endowed things with more heroic significance.
Unfortunately he did not always avail himself of his highest gifts. At times you feel him to be clogged by his science, although never, like Uccello, does he suggest the surveyor and topographer rather than the painter. Now and again those who are on the outlook for their favourite type of beauty, will receive shocks from certain of Piero's men and women. Others still may find him too impersonal, too impassive.
Impersonal art
Impersonality -- that is the quality whereby he holds us spellbound, that is his most distinguishing virtue -- one which he shares with only two other artists: the one nameless, who carved the pediments of the Parthenon, and the other Velazquez, who painted without ever betraying an emotion.
'The impersonality of art' -- a phrase not familiar enough to pass without comment. I mean two different things, one a method, the other a quality. As a method, impersonality has been understood by all the great artists and the few competent critics who have ever existed. They have appreciated the fact that in art, as in life, those few among us who have not reduced the whole of the phenomenal universe (or at least all of it that ever concerns us) to a series of mere symbols, those of us whom physical and mental habits have not so crushingly enslaved but that we retain some freedom of perception -they have understood that such people will react to every different object in a different way, no matter how slight the difference. If a given situation in life, a certain aspect of landscape, produces an impression upon the artist, what must he do to make us feel it as he felt it? There is one thing he must not do, and that is to reproduce his own feeling about it. That may or may not be interesting, may or may not be artistic: but one thing it certainly cannot do -- it cannot produce upon us the effect of the original situation in life or the original aspect of the landscape; for the feeling is not the original phenomenon itself, but the phenomenon, to say the least, as refracted by the personality of the artist. And this personal feeling being another thing, must needs produce another effect. The artist will therefore carefully avoid reproducing his own feeling. He will leave himself out of count, and, reducing the original phenomenon to its essential significant facts and forces, will reproduce these, and thus really make us, in our turn, react to them as he has reacted, and feel as he has felt.
That Piero della Francesca was impersonal in this sense will be readily granted; for was he not a great artist? He was, however, impersonal not in his method only, as all great artists have to be, but he was what would be commonly called impassive, that is to say, unemotional, in his conceptions as well. He loved impersonality, the absence of expressed emotion, as a quality in things. Having, for artistic reasons, chosen types the most manly, and, for perhaps similar reasons, a landscape which happens to be of the greatest severity and dignity, he combined and recombined them as each subject required, allowing the grand figures, the grand action, and the severe landscape, these, and these alone, to exercise upon us, as they must when all special emotion is disregarded, their utmost power. He never asks what his actors feel. Their emotions are no concern of his. Yet no 'Flagellation' is more impressive than one of his, although you will not find on the face of any of the dramatis personae an expression responsive to the situation; and, as if to make the scene all the more severely impersonal, Piero has introduced into this marvellous picture three majestic forms who stand in the foreground as unconcerned as the everlasting rocks. And so, in his fresco of the 'Resurrection', Piero has not even thought of asking himself what type of person Christ was. He chose one of the manliest and most robust, and in the grey watered light of the morning, by the spreading cypresses and plane trees, you see this figure rising out of the tomb. You feel the solemnity, the importance of the moment, as in perhaps no other version of this subject; and, if you are a person sensitive to art, you will have felt all this before you have thought of asking whether Christ looks appropriately Christ-like, or whether there is a fit expression on His face.
The spell of an art as impersonal, as unemotional as Piero's (or that of Velazquez) is undeniably great, but why is it -- in what does its charm, its potent attractiveness consist? It is, I think, a compound of many things. In the first place, where there is no specialized expression of feeling -- so attractive to our weak flesh -- we are left the more open to receive the purely artistic impressions of tactile values, movement, and chiaroscuro. So unnecessary do I find facial expression, and indeed, at times so disturbing, that if a great statue happens to be without a head, I seldom miss it; for the forms and the action, if both be adequate, are expressive enough to enable me to complete the figure in the sense that they indicate; while there is always a chance that the head, in works of even the best masters, will be overexpressive -- in a direction either not necessitated by the forms and action, or in flat contradiction to them.
But there is another reason, less artistic and more general, to account for the effect of impassiveness in art. Ardently as we love those beings who react to things by the measure and in the quality that we ourselves react to them, so, in other moods, in moments of spent sensibility, we no less eagerly love those other beings or objects which, though we endow them with a splendid and kindred personality, yet do not react at all to things that almost overpower us. Taking it for granted that they are no less sensitive than we are, and seeing that they are not moved at all where perhaps we should be overwhelmed, we ascribe to them the calm and majesty of heroes; and as we more than half become the things we admire, we also, for a moment too brief, are heroes. This sentiment, when exaggeration does not make it Byronic, becomes an attitude toward landscape like Wordsworth's, an attitude toward man like Piero della Francesca's. The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature with Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.
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