来自：ITALIAN FANTASIES
The word is said to derive from the arabesques found in grottoes or excavated Roman tombs; those fantastic combinations of the vegetable and animal worlds by which the art of Islam avoided the representation of the real. But by the art of Christendom the grotesque was achieved with no such conscientious search after the unreal. Nor have I in mind its first fumblings, its crudities of the catacombs, its simplicities of the missal and the music-book, its Byzantine paintings with their wooden figures and gold embroidery. I am not even thinking of those early Masters whose defects of draughtsmanship were balanced by a delicious primitive poetry, which makes a Sienese Madonna preferable to a Raphael, and the early mosaics of St. Mark’s more desirable than the sixteenth-century work that has replaced them. The grotesque lies deeper than unscientific drawing; it mingles even with the work of the most scholarly Masters, and springs from the absence of a sense of history or a sense of humour. That the Gospel incidents should be depicted in Italian landscape and with Italian costumes was perhaps not unnatural, since, as I have already pointed out, every nation remakes the Christ in its own image—psychologically when not physically. Even the Old Testament was de-Orientalised by Raphael and his fellow-illustrators. Bonifacio Veronese, for example, put Italian hills and music-books into _The Finding of Moses_, and his Egypt is less Eastern than the Venice he lived in. But that the fancy-dress Bible should include also Doges and Cardinals and Magnificent Families, and that a Tintoretto in everyday clothes should look on at his own _Miracle of St. Mark_ or a Moretto come to his own _Supper at Emmaus_, this it is that lifts the eyebrows of a modern. One can permit Dominican friars to witness _The Incredulity of St. Thomas_, or Franciscans to assist—as in Marco Basaiti’s picture—at _The Agony in the Garden_. These holy brethren are at least in the apostolic chain; and in the latter picture, which is becomingly devotional, the scene is suggested as a mystic vision to justify the presence of these anachronistic spectators. But how is it possible to tolerate proud Venetian senators at _The Ascension of Christ_, or to stomach the Medici at the building of the Tower of Babel? It is true sacred subjects had become a mere background for lay portraits, but what absence of perspective!
It would be an interesting excursion to trace the steps by which the objective conception of a picture—true to its own time and place—was reached, or the evolution by which singleness of subject was substituted for exuberance of episodes and ideas, till at last Art could flower in a lovely simplicity like that of Simone Martini’s _Annunciation_. You shall see St. Barbara throned at the centre of her anecdotal biography, or the Madonna della Misericordia sheltering virtues under her robe, while her history circles around her. Even when the picture itself is simple and single, the predella is often a congested commentary upon the text, if, indeed, it has any relevant relation to the text at all. What can be more charming than the little angels round the throne of the Madonna in Benaglio Francesco’s picture in Verona—angels with golden vases of red and white roses, angels playing spinets and harps and pipes and lutes and little drums and strange stringed instruments that have passed away! But what can be more grotesque than the predella of this delightful picture, the Entombment and the saints with the insignia of their martyrdom (hammer and tongs and fiery braziers), and the cock that crew, and the kiss of Judas!
In a picture by Lorenzo Monaco at Florence the Virgin and St. John raise Christ out of his tomb, and above are not only a cross and the instruments of martyrdom, but a bust and floating hands, while spice vessels figure below.
To a modern the mere treatment of God the Father suffices to create a category of the grotesque, even though His head has usually the venerable appearance of the aged Ruskin and He is kept a discreet kit-kat or a half-length. But Fra Bartolommeo in Lucca paints Him at full length with His toes on a little angel and a placard in His hand bearing the letters alpha and omega. And Lorenzo Veneziano parts His hair neatly in the middle.
Our catalogue of grotesques is swollen by the explanatory scrolls and inscriptions of the early pictures; by the crude religious allegories, in which devils gnash teeth when Virtue routs Temptation; by the political cartoons at Siena—of Good and Bad Government (though these are more primitive than comic); by the literal genealogic trees—like that of Jesse in St. Mark’s, or on the stone door-posts of the Baptistery of Parma; by the Tree of the Cross in Florence, which shoots out branches with round leaves containing scenes from the life of the central crucified figure, and supports a pyramid of saints and celestials; by the devices of symbolism for representing abstract ideas or identifying saints. All haloes are proleptic even from childhood, and a martyr and his passion can never be parted. Those poor martyrs, what they suffered at the hands of painters without a gleam of humour!
’Twas not till I had found out for myself that the overwhelming preponderance in Art of the _Crucifixion_, the _Descent from the Cross_, the _Entombment_, and the _Pietà_ were due in no small measure to the opportunities they afforded of painting the nude figure, that I discovered why St. Sebastian was the most popular of all the saints, exploited in every other sacred picture, and—naked and unashamed—the almost inseparable attendant of the Madonna when she sits in saintly society. The superiority of his martyrdom at the hands of a troop of archers to other paintable forms of death leaps to the eye, for the arrows must be seen quivering in the target of his naked figure, though I have seen this pictorially precious nudity marred by such a plethora of arrows—as in the Opera del Duomo at Florence—that the saint is become a porcupine. The grim humour of the situation lies in the fact that St. Sebastian recovered from his arrows to be subsequently clubbed to death, but this deutero-martyrdom is hushed up by the Italian painters. To add to St. Sebastian’s sufferings at their hands, he has been made a plague-saint and his invaluable nudity haled into plague-pictures and plague-churches, as by Bartolommeo Montagna, who turned his arrows into the metaphoric shafts of the Pest. Not that I can blame the Italian painters. If I had ever been inclined to underrate the artistic significance of the nude, I should have been converted by the full-dressed angelets of Borgognone’s _Gesù Moriente_ in the Pavian Certosa. These delicious little creatures were once without a fig-leaf, but at the Father Superior’s protest they were clad in belted tunics and skirts, thus becoming squat little figures whose wings burst comically through their clothes. What might have been a masterpiece is thus a grotesque.
But if St. Sebastian must go sempiternally branded with arrows, like a British convict, it is St. Lawrence who has the clumsiest symbol to drag about. He and his gridiron are as inseparable as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Often it stands on end and seems the iron framework of a bed. Like his halo, it is with him long before his martyrdom, as it accompanies him to heaven. Only once in all Florence do I remember seeing it in its proper place—under the grilling saint—and then he is turning his other side to the flame in true culinary Christianity (“Jam versa: assatus est”). The artist has spared us nothing except the towels with which the angels wiped his face, and these may be seen at Rome in S. Giovanni in Laterano. St. Stephen is also heavily burdened with the stones that still keep falling on his head. In Bernardo Daddi’s frescoes in S. Croce they stick to him like burrs. St. John, transformed to an angel, contemplates his own (haloed) head on a platter, as if thinking two heads are better than one. Lucy keeps her eyes in a dish. St. Bartholomew holds his skin. St. Nicholas—the patron of commerce and the pawnbroker—is known by his three golden balls. Even families had their symbols, and the Colonnas, the complacent Colonnas, had themselves painted as soaring heavenwards at the last trump, each with a small column rising from his shoulder—literal pillars of Church and State.
These symbols, and many others less grotesque, disappear either with the gradual obscuration of the legends or the development of purer artistic ideas. There is another kind of symbolism, which may be called the shorthand of primitive art, and which may be studied in the archaic mosaics of St. Mark’s. Egypt dwindles to a gate (as though it and not Turkey were the Porte). Alexandria is expressed by its Pharos. Trees stand for the Mount of Olives. There is much of the rebus in these primitive representations. The Byzantine symbolism of St. Mark’s reaches its most curious climax in the representation of the four rivers that watered the Biblical Garden of Eden by classical river gods. The palm branch as the shorthand for martyrdom is a more congruous convention. In the mosaics of S. Vitale in Ravenna, Jerusalem and Bethlehem are expressed by towers, in Sant’ Appolinare Nuovo a few Roman buildings stand for Classe. In a Venetian painting ascribed to Carpaccio, Bethlehem is spelt by palm-trees and a queer beast tied to one of them, probably meant for a camel.
A more pretentious form of symbolism lies in the allegory proper, but even when the painting avoids the grotesque, the meaning is often hopelessly obscure. Such popular pictures as Botticelli’s _Spring_, Titian’s _Sacred and Profane Love_, and Paris Bordone’s _Lovers_ are still unsolved puzzles, and perhaps only the more satisfactory for that. But allegories that are enigmatic without being beautiful are merely bores. Such are the two pictures of the school of Lazzaro Sebastiani in Venice, in which a company of figures holding scrolls is perched in the boughs of a tree, looking at a distance like a full orchestra. Both of these pictures come from monasteries, and are therefore to be presumed sacred. And in one of them Adam and Eve are unmistakable under the tree, with mice and lizards gambolling around them, so that the tree must be the Tree of Life or of Knowledge; but who is the youth who stands beneath the other tree in a strange city of spires and towers and plays on a golden ’cello, while a maiden offers him an apple? Such intellectually faded pictures illustrate clearly the limitations of painting as a medium for intellectual propositions. But the most lucid of allegories or symbolisms has its own peculiar pitfalls. Luca Mombella introduces into a _Coronation of the Virgin_ a figure of “Humilitas” who is magnificently attired and wears pearls in her hair, while Montagna’s _Nestor Victorious over the Vices_ (in the Louvre) proves that most of the Vices are at least devoted mothers, for they burden their flight by snatching up their satyr-like brood.
But these confused or unintelligible allegories are far preferable to symbolisms which are perfectly decipherable yet perfectly repellent, like Giovanni da Modena’s fresco in S. Petronio which shows us Christ on his cross agonising between two female figures, one bestriding a full-maned lion (the Catholic Church) and the other riding blindfold on a goat (Heresy). The lion has four different feet—a pedal man (St. Matthew), a pedal ox (St. Luke), an eagle’s claw (St. John), and a real foot (St. Mark). The blood from the side of Christ flows into the chalice held by the Church, and in the middle of the stream is formed the wafer. The four ends of the cross turn into hands: the upper hand opens with a key the gate of Paradise—strangely like a church; the lower hand opens Hell with a winch; the right hand blesses the Catholic Church, the left stabs Heresy. Garofalo has a vast but still poorer fresco of this sort in Ferrara, brought from a refectory. Each arm of the cross branches into two hands engaged in much the same occupations as in the Bolognese fresco save that one hand crowns Wisdom. The foot of the cross also turns into hands, the right holding a cross towards Limbo, the function of the left fortunately faded. It is refreshing to turn from such geometrical symbolisms to the meaningless flower-patterns of F. dei Libri, in which Crucifixions, cherubs reading, satyrs blowing brass instruments, and _putti_ playing citharas or puffing at bagpipes are interwoven with wriggling snakes, contemporary poets and ecclesiasts, and shaven monks performing service.
This, of course, is the conscious grotesque, like the borders which Girolamo dei Libri put round a serious picture of the Magi—vignettes of other scenes, hands of donors, floral patterns and scutcheons with strange ramping beasts.
To the deliberate grotesque belong, of course, the stone beasts that crouch before the old cathedrals, the griffin of Perugia, and the heraldic beasts of Tura. I should have added Raphael’s dragons to the same category were it not that though deliberately drawn and though delightfully grotesque, they are mere representation of an object that happens to be grotesque in itself, and this is no more the artistic grotesque than the portrait of a beautiful woman is necessarily the artistic beautiful. There is a deal of movement, spirit, and invention in these great worms of Raphael, and every individual St. George, St. Michael, or St. Margaret is handsomely provided with an original and unique dragon, each with an elegant precision of fearsome form. But Raphael drew with equal hand and the same loving seriousness a monster or a Madonna.
Equally conscientious is the Medusa’s head once ascribed to Da Vinci, with its carefully combed snaky locks and its frogs and bats and toads. Carpaccio’s dragon has far more fun in him, for all his grisly litter of skulls and skeletons.
And I like Vasari’s dragon in his _St. George_ in Arezzo, with its spitting double tongue and its half-eaten man, and the gorgeous dragon on a piece of majolica in Urbino, into whose mouth St. George is driving his spear, and the fierce-clawed, winged dragon of the spirited Tintoretto in the National Gallery, and above all the dragon of Piero di Cosimo’s _Andromeda_ in Florence, with that delightful curling tail and that broad back on which Perseus can stand securely while delivering his stroke.
But the deliberate grotesque without fun—this, I confess, is a note in Italian art which I find disquieting. For into this polished and palatial world there intrudes at times a touch of something sinister, cynical and mocking, as though the artist, constricted by pompous conventions, sought relief by sticking out his tongue. Leonardo—whatever Mona Lisa’s smile may mean—kept his grotesquerie for his caricatures. But other of the Masters were less discriminating. This something of enigmatic and perturbing—perhaps it is only the acute Renaissance consciousness of the skeleton at the feast—I find most of all in Crivelli—Venetian soldier, as he once signed himself—whose rich lacquer work has had more attention than this diablerie of his. Nobody else touches the grotesque so consciously, dares to give us such quaint, ill-drawn angels as those in his _Madonna and Child_ in Verona, with that bird-pecked _giardinetto_ of fruits over the Virgin’s head, and Christ in a gold frock as in some Byzantine mosaic. The microscopic Crucifixion is perhaps no more incongruous with the subject of this picture than its landscapes seen through arches, its chivalry and pomp of horses. But one cannot help feeling that Crivelli had a grim joy in perching that vulture on the large gaunt tree. And in his Brera _Madonna_, in which St. Peter holds two heavy real keys, gilded and silvered, he gives the celestial doorkeeper a crafty ecclesiastical look, while his St. Dominic looks sawny. Even his baby Christ is cruelly squeezing a little bird. There is a leer in the whole picture. The accident of juxtaposition has accentuated the wilfulness of Crivelli’s grimace, for in the Brera there are two _Madonnas_, side by side, yet at the extreme poles of his genius. In the _Madonna della Candeletta_ we have beauty unalloyed. The tiny candle standing at the foot of the Madonna’s throne strikes, indeed, a note of bizarrerie, but it is beautiful bizarrerie, and the Madonna, marvellously robed and embowered in fruit and leaves, who is offering a great pear to a charming Child, is less the Mother of God than a crowned queen of faery with an infant prince in a golden robe and a golden halo, and less a queen with a prince than a wonderful decorative pattern, a study in gold and marble and precious stones and brocaded gowns, broidered, rich-dyed, and fantastic with arabesques. And beside this poem hangs the other Crivelli, a gaunt crucifix with ugly, contorted figures of the Madonna and St. John. And it is sardonic humour, not _naïveté_, that has turned _his_ St. Sebastian (in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli) into a porcupine.
But even Giovanni Bellini, with his sense of restful perfection and unity of theme, cannot resist putting in microscopic accessories that only catch the eye from anear, as into his green-throned _Madonna and Child_ in the Brera he introduces a horseman, two men talking by a tree, a shepherd, a flock of sheep, and, strangest of all, a shadowy ape crouching on a tomb which bears his signature: “Johannes Bellinus.” What is the significance of this shadowy ape? What mockery of the theme, or of humanity, or of himself, was here shadowed forth?
And that even more sinister ape in Tura’s _Virgin supporting the Dead Christ_—what does he here? The mother, seated on the tomb, holds the poor bleeding figure as though it were again her baby. They are alone, they and the thieves and the cross; other men are moving away, bearing a ladder. The picture is complete, a grim, solemn, soul-moving unity. Why then did Tura, that master of the conscious grotesque, throw in that grinning monkey on that strange fruit-tree? Was he, who lived to see the Borgian Pope become the Vicar of Christ, suggesting sardonically what quaint sequels of orgiastic splendour, what pride and lust of life, were to spring from this tragic sacrifice?
A less perturbing monkey looks on with other creatures at _The Creation of Man_ in a Venetian picture now in Ravenna. A red-girt, blue-mantled Deity floats over a huge recumbent Adam, whose thigh he touches, while the monkey, eating an apple, appears to follow with interest the next phase in evolution, when fruit would be forbidden.
Apes appear again in Fogolino’s _Adoration of the Magi_ in Vicenza; squatting below the castled rocky ways and mountain-bridges, over which winds the great procession with its beautifully caparisoned horses. These apes, like the ape on the elephant’s back in Raphael’s treatment of the same theme, might be merely designed to suggest the East, were it not for the disconcerting, mysterious, lobster-red, sprawling wings? What further note of discord do we catch here?
But it is in the unconscious grotesque that Italian art is richest. I have already shown some of the trap-doors that lead to it, but to enumerate them all is impossible. There are so many ways in which humour can be absent. Perhaps one might generalise as a source of the unconscious grotesque the convention dating from the Byzantine period which expresses souls as small swaddled dolls. See, for example, Paolo da Venezia’s _Death of Mary_, where, by a seeming inversion of _rôles_, Christ flies up to heaven with his mother-doll. Perhaps, too, all pictures connected with stigmata or vernicles are foredoomed to farce. There may be a noble way of expressing this material transference, but I have never seen one. St. Veronica receiving on a handkerchief a head with neatly parted hair is prosaic if not comic, while St. Francis receiving the stigmata is simply ludicrous.
In a picture in the Museum of Vicenza the kneeling saint is apparently flying a kite by red strings passing through holes in his hands and feet. The seeming kite is really a small winged nude figure, feathered at head and feet like a cock—the six-winged seraph of the _Legenda Trium Sociorum_ that bears the crucified figure,—red strings passing through corresponding holes in his head and feet. The treatment of the same scene by Giotto (in the Louvre) gives this kite-like appearance to Jesus himself.
Even more absurdly geometrical is Gentile da Fabriano’s handling of the theme at Urbino, five strong red cords passing to the saint’s breast, hands, and feet from an eight-winged figure on a cross, naked to its waist. It is a relief to find these Euclidian lines absent from the representation in the church of Assisi itself, though it is only in seventeenth-century painters like Sisto Badalocchio in Parma or Rochetti in Faenza that the stigmata are transmitted from a celestial glory or down a broad ray of golden light. Macrino d’Alba at Turin shows the saint receiving the image of a praying Christ on a slate with a golden frame, and this image has the tonsured head of a monk!
And what can be quainter than the six-winged cherubs who hover round the Madonna in a picture of the Botticelli school at Parma? Two of their red wings are spread, the second pair crossed like legs, and the last pair crossed over the head, making a sort of pointed cap. The faces attached to these wings are mature, as of elderly, clean-shaven barristers. Another comical circle of these seraphs, a few with blue wings, tends to spoil a charming fifteenth-century _Coronation of the Virgin_ in Florence.
Martyrdoms, too, are a rich mine of the grotesque, as witness the boiling of St. John in the National Gallery, with its accessories of the bellows and the blowpipe, and God lifting the saint bodily up to heaven.
In the exhilarating frescoes of Montagna in the church of the Eremitani at Padua, St. James’s hair, which is yellowish throughout, turns black, apparently, under the horror of an impending mallet, despite that his halo seems like a protective plate of yellow armour. A very gay and pleasing picture this.
Another source of the grotesque is the angelic aeroplane. In an _Adoration of the Shepherds_ by Francesco Zaganelli in Ravenna three wingless angels employ cherubs to bear them aloft, balancing themselves upon the winged heads. One needs a cherub for each foot, the second places both feet upon the same head, the third, expertest gymnast of all, maintains himself upon one foot. Another primitive aeroplane may be seen at Ferrara, in _The Assumption of St. Mary of Egypt_. St. Mary rises on a platform supported from beneath by a series of nude and clothed angels, to the amaze of a worthy signor walking in the field of strange palms amid quaint green buildings. A rabbit, a pigeon, and a bird continue absolutely indifferent to the phenomenon.
In a Carpaccio in the same town the cherubs fly, three heads together, like a celestial molecule. In Zacchia da Vezzano’s _Assumption of the Virgin_ at Lucca she rides on cherubs. There is an angelic aeroplane in a painted relief at San Frediano in Lucca, and in Guido Reni’s _Immaculate Conception_ at Forli (where the Virgin stands on a leaf on a cherub’s head), and in Lippo Lippi’s picture at Prato of the Madonna handing down her girdle to St. Thomas. Zuccari Taddeo in the Pitti uses the angelic aeroplane to carry up Mary Magdalen, who is further provided with a number of fussy heralds and _avant-coureurs_. Marco Antonio Franceschini in the Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini of Genoa likewise carries up the Magdalen on the backs of angels, her familiar hair streaming over her familiar breast. Raphael’s _Vision of Ezekiel_ suggests to the profane, God the Father holding up His arms as if to start a flying competition.
But when every generalisation is made, it is the individual genius for blundering that opens up the most spacious vistas of humourless humour. Byzantine art affords, of course, the most naïve illustrations. In the sarcophagi of the Christian emperors at Ravenna you may see sheep eating dates from tall palms. In the mosaics of the vestibule of St. Mark’s you may see humanity unconcernedly drowning in the Deluge. Some, it is true, are whirled helplessly on their backs, but others are quite apathetic among the blue, curly waves. Noah looking out of the little folding doors of the Ark is as quaint as in the mosaics of Monreale Cathedral in Sicily. In the ancient church of S. Zeno at Verona there is an eleventh-century fresco of the _Resurrection of Lazarus_ in which the bystanders hold their noses—a poetic touch that was repeated in later treatments of the theme.
In the Scuola of the Confraternity of St. Antony at Padua, Domenico Campagnola has a fresco, _A Hungry She-Ass adores_ _the Eucharistic Sacrament by a Miracle of the Saint, in order to convert a Heretic_. In vain are heaps of green stuffs and corn spread and baskets tendered her and piles of beans; the ass, on her front knees, adores the Eucharist on a priestly table, so that even the baby lad is wrought up to adoration. One is irresistibly reminded of Goethe’s landlady at Rome calling him to see her cat adore God the Father like a Christian, when it was licking the beard of the bust, probably because of the grease that had sunk into it. In the same Scuola there is a representation of the saint’s preaching which liberates his hearers from an approaching rain-storm. People all around are flying to get out of the rain, not knowing that the saint’s sermon is dry. There are charming figures of mothers and children in the audience which atone for the unconscious humour.
But when one considers the libraries written on Italy, it is strange that that book on her grotesques should be as yet merely an impious aspiration, and that nobody has mocked even at those horrid little waxworks that represent the plague-stricken. Meseems the blessèd word “Renaissance” has hypnotised student and pleasure-pilgrim alike, but some day an irreverent refugee from the Renaissance will gather up the threads I but indicate. In that delectable volume of his there will be a chapter on the camel.
For the advent of the camel marks the faint beginnings of an historic and geographic sense, and stands for all the fantastic wonder-world of the East. Strange that the Crusades or Venice’s Eastern Empire should not have earlier awakened the comparative consciousness. But the East, with its quaintness and its barbaric colour, broke very slowly upon the culture of Europe—Victor Hugo had to rediscover it even for modern France. Despite Altichiero’s pig-tailed Tartars, it was not till the Byzantine Empire was destroyed in 1453 and the Turks were firmly established in Europe that the Christian world became really aware that the East was a world of its own. That conquest of Constantinople, from which the blessèd Renaissance is popularly dated, by sending so many Italians flying home, must have provided Italy with Oriental information as well as Greek manuscripts. And the Renaissance (or re-born) camel represents the quickened sense of local colour. At first, indeed, there is little improvement on the Giotto breed. Apparently none of the fugitives rode off on camels. Such fat creatures as take part in _The Reception of the Venetian Ambassador_ (a picture of the school of Gentile Bellini) were never seen on sand or land. The Magian kings should have come riding on camels with swart servitors, but only a rare artist like the animal-lover Gaudenzio Ferrari is bold enough to attempt this local truth. And the result belongs to comedy. But a people without circuses or zoological gardens, to which the camel was as remote as the centaur, was not keenly aware of the anatomical details of this exotic beast, grotesque enough at its truest. And in the hands of Gentile Bellini himself the creature became quite possible, if still curious, and in that great decorative picture _St. Mark preaching in the Piazza of Alexandria_ there is a real feeling of the turbaned, shrouded and minareted East, even if the head-shawls of the women do appear to cover top-hats and the giraffe strolls about the piazza and the dromedary is led by a string.
Nor is Eusebio di San Giorgio’s camel impossible in his _Adoration of the Magi_ in San Pietro, Perugia, though immeasurably inferior to his oxen and his horses. Carpaccio, too, gets something of Eastern architecture and dress, if more of Venetian, into his _St. Stephen at Jerusalem_.