Romanticizing the Renaissance
HISTOIRE
DE
LA PEINTURE
EN ITALIE
PAR
DE STENDHAL
(HENRY BEYLE)
Les Carraches s'éloignèrent de l'affectation qui
était à la mode, et parurent froids.
SEULE ÉDITION COMPLÈTE
ENTIÈREMENT REVUE ET CORRIGÉE
[Logo de l'éditeur]
PARIS
MICHEL LÉVY FRÈRES, LIBRAIRES-ÉDITEURS
RUE VIVIENNE, 2 BIS
1854
Quotes:
Caesar Borgia, representative of his century, has found a historian worthy of his virtue, and one who will, as if to mock the stupidity of the people, magnify his soul. Wit, superstition, atheism, masquerades, poisons, assassinations, a few true peers, an infinite number of skillful yet hapless scoundrels, and everywhere ardent passion in all its savage pride: such was the Fifteenth Century...
Such were the men whose memory is preserved; such were undoubtedly the individuals who could only differ from princes in that fortune offered them fewer opportunities. From the heights of history, if one were to descend to the depravity of private lives, by first removing all those rational, cold ideas about the "interests of society" that constitute the conversation of an Englishman for most of his day, one would find that vanity which does not scruple about nuances. At bottom, everyone just wanted to enjoy himself. Life was not a theory to be advanced; a melancholic and somber people that had only passion, and bloody reality for dreams...
One eminent citizen of Florence seized the day, and saw that, in order to keep it, it was necessary to turn from a tyrant into a monarch. That is, to be human. From thence, the scales tipped in favor of the Venetians. In the midst of this uncertain balance, Italy might have been reunited -but for the intrigues of the popes...
Florence was a republic without a constitution, but one where the horror of tyranny burned in every heart, possessed of that stormy liberty which is the mother of great character. Since representative government had not yet been invented, its greatest citizens were unable to avoid factionalism and win freedom. It was constantly necessary to guard against the nobles; but it is decadence, not danger, that kills genius in a people...
Cosimo de' Medici, one of the city's richest merchants, born in 1389, shortly after the first restorers of the arts, enjoying the love of his father, protected the people against the nobles. They, therefore, seized him and, lacking the character to kill him, exiled him. He returned, and in exchange exiled them. Through terror and public consternation, and by means of an inexorable police force, but nevertheless causing only a few heads to roll, he maintained the superiority of his faction, and became king of Florence...
While the banks of the Arno saw the rebirth of the three arts of drawing, painting alone was reborn in Venice. These two events did not help each other; they would have happened one without the other. Venice, too, was rich and powerful; but its government, a severe aristocracy, was far removed from the stormy democracy of the Florentines. From time to time, the people watched with horror as the head of some nobleman fell; and never gave a thought for conspiring for rebellion...
This government, a masterpiece of politics and the balance of power, if one only considers the nobles by whom and for whom it was created, was nothing more than a suspicious and jealous tyranny towards the rest of the people, which, trembling before its subjects, encouraged commerce, the arts, and sensual pleasure among them...
Among the Greeks, who placed the heroes of the homeland among the gods, religion commanded beauty, beauty above all, even before truth. Often, the hands of ancient bas-reliefs have a barely human likeness, the anatomy ridiculous; but the nobility of the forehead already indicates the capacity for abstraction, and the line of the mouth, the confidence of profound reason...
One can hardly praise this oldest of painters except by pointing out the flaws he lacks. His drawing offers fewer straight lines than his predecessors; there are folds in the draperies; one can see a certain skill in his arrangement of figures, sometimes a surprising expression. But it must be admitted that his talent did not lead him to the graceful style; his Madonnas lack beauty, and his angels in the same painting look the same...
As severe as the century in which he lived, he succeeded in capturing the heads of men of character, and particularly the heads of old men. He knew how to mark in their physiognomy, their strength of will, and the habit of lofty thoughts. In this genre, modern artists have not surpassed him as much as one might at first believe. A man of bold and fertile imagination, he was the first to attempt compositions requiring a many figures, and with colossal proportion...
"Cimabue believed he could hold the field in painting, and now Giotto has the cry, so that his fame is dark."
Dante, Purgatorio XI
After filling Italy with his students, and, so to speak, initiating the Renaissance in art, Giotto died in 1336. He had been born in Vespignano, near Florence, sixty years earlier. The name Giotto, according to custom, was only an abbreviation of his baptismal name Ambrogiotto. His family was called Bondone. In the arts, when a man is dissatisfied with his work, he goes from the crude to the less crude, he then arrives at the neat and precise; from there, he passes to the grand and the refined, and ends with the easy...
Giotto awakened Italian painters rather than being their master. Such was the progress of the human mind and the history of sculpture among the Greeks. What happened to Giotto's students happened to Racine's students, and will happen to the students of all great artists. They dare not see for themselves in nature the things the master did not see. They simply place themselves before the effects he has chosen, and claim to be reproducing them, that is, they attempt precisely the thing that, until a change in the national character, is made impossible by the man of greatness. They say they respect him. If they did, they would rise to what they must do, to that than which there is no more bold undertaking, and for the rest of the Fourteenth Century, painting made no further progress. Giotto's paintings, seen alongside those of Cavallini, Gaddi, and his other good students, are always the works of the master. Once one has come to know his style, one has no need to study one's own...