FIGURES OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.• THE fine taste and literary
skill of the distinguished art critic, M. Robert de in Sizeranne, have never been more charm- ingly displayed than in his recent book, Les Masques et lea Visages. Lovers of art and of history must alike be grateful
'' (1) Les Masques et les Visages a Florence et an Louvre : Portraits Mares de be Renaissance If alienn& Par Hobert de la Sizeranne. Paris : Hachette at Cie. [b francs:1— (2) Bianca Cappello. By Mary G. Steegmann. London: Constable and Co. [10s. 6d. net.i
to him. But he shows here something even better than taste and skill—that rare gift of insight, mingled of pene- tration and imagination, which makes the past live, so that each of the familiar portraits he studies becomes once more the living, thinking, suffering human creature whom Ghirlandajo or Botticelli, Raffaelle, Lionardo, Titian, Man- tegna, Bronzino, 11 Moretto, and half a dozen more loved to paint.
Many of us, especially perhaps those to whom beautiful art makes the strongest appeal, know what it is to study and rejoice in a portrait by one of these great artists for its beauty alone. The name, the personality, matters as little as that of a flower or a star ; the beauty, with its touch of mystery, is all we want. This, M. de la Sizeranne tells us, was his own experience until the life and the story behind the painter's art, the character, the actual physiognomy, the face behind the mask, began suddenly to lay claim to supreme and absorb- ing interest ; and then these men and women became for him the living models who fascinated Botticelli and his fellows, and he could not be satisfied without something of the same knowledge their contemporaries may have bad. "De cette curiosite est ne ce livre " : and a fascinating book it is.
It is undoubtedly true that this process of gaining intimacy with the original through the portrait is not equally easy in all periods of art. Conventionality, as Id. de la Sizeranne reminds us, is the great difficulty, the obstacle hardest to conquer, and he points to the French portraits of the eighteenth century as proofs of a fact that no observer is likely to dispute. There are few who will not agree that to find a period when the most remarkable persons were tainted by the greatest artists—who were yet, though masters of their métier," trop dependants de leurs modeles pour y ajouter ce gulls n'y trouvaient pas et les ramener, aux &pens de la ressemblance, it un concept artificiel de la beauty "—we have to turn to the Italian Renaissance, to the marvellous fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Italy, and the hundred years of which A.D. 1500 is the central point—this is the country and this the time chosen by M. de la Sizeranne; here and now the masks tell the truth about the faces.
This attractive picture-gallery includes a number of the women and men—women predominate—who charmed, in- terested, or at least occupied the minds of their fellow country-people between the dates mentioned above. Here are " la Bella Tanna " and "la Bella Simonetta," the short- lived darlings of Florence, reigning over hearts there, as their new chronicler says, in the years when those hearts beat strongest for art and beauty, and both dying after a few months of happiness and triumph. Giovanna degli Albizzi, the lovely young wife of Lorenzo Tornabuoni, first cousin of Lorenzo de' Medici, walks grave and stately in Ghirlandajo's great frescoes in the choir of Santa Maria Novella. We know Simonetta, the beautiful Genoese of the Cattanei family who married Marco Vespucci, the Florentine, as Botticelli's favourite model as well as the original of Pollajuolo's curious portrait at Chantilly, with serpents twining round her neck. She is the central figure in Botticelli's " Spring " and in his "Birth of Venus " ; she is the Venus of his "Mars and Venue" in the National Gallery. M. de la Sizeranne goes so far as to say that Botticelli never painted anyone else ; and indeed it is not bard to trace the pathetic features and expression of Simonetta, the girl who knew joy and wonder and yet lived so near death, in more than one Madonna of rounded brow and heavy eyelids ; a type perhaps as strangely suggestive as any that Lionardo da Vinci ever drew. She is to be found, too, in Santa Maria Novella, following Giovanna and her companions to greet St. Elizabeth after the birth of the Baptist; and here M. de la Sizeranne has some profound remarks on Ghirlandajo's treatment and its relation to Simonetta's character. St. Elizabeth herself is supposed to be Lucrezia Tornabuoni, wife of Piero de' Medici and mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, she whom they called "the Queen of Florence," one of the greatest ladies and noblest women the city ever knew. In her time the Renaissance was at its beat— the pure light of a new dawn as yet undimmed by the clouds of human vanity which shadowed the growth of so much pagan artificiality ; in itself, to be sure, little more than a pose, but the excuse for most of the crimes that darkened and maddened the "new age." The story of the renowned Tullia d'Aragon, poetess and courtesan, whose famous portrait by Moretto is to be seen at Brescia, is only an instance of how unreal was this reign of classical affectation. At the approach of death "la deesse paienne redevint une pauvre femme chretienne." It was the same with most of her contemporaries.
" Au toucher de la mort," says M. de la Sizeranne, " tons leurs deguisements tombaient, laissaient voir lent Arne, et cette ame etait chretienne." But even in its moment of triumph the later, unnatural pagan pose brought about a certain heaviness of spirit quite alien to the innocent dignity of " La Bella Vanua" and the pathetic gaiety of "La Bella Simonetta." It may be read in such portraits as that of Eleonora di Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I., and those of his daughter-in-law, the Venetian, Bianca Cappello. In her the materialism of the time touches perhaps its lowest point.
And yet Bianca Cappello was one of the strongest and most characteristic figures of her day. The life of this daughter of the Republic, who by her dazzling beauty, her unscrupulous cleverness, her power of fascination, her fearless, resolute, single-minded pursuit of her own advantage, induced Francesco I. to raise his mistress of years to the position of his second wife and Grand Duchess of Tuscany, has been lately written by Miss Mary Steegniann. This is a book which should be read with interest by those who care for the subject of our article, the leading figures of a wonderful time. It will be found more readable than many novels. Miss Steep.. mann's study of her materials has been thorough and practical her book is well and agreeably written, giving an excellent picture of the two cities, Venice and Florence, which shared between them the romantic adventures of Bianca Cappello's life, and describing those adventures in the right spirit, not without a touch of pity for the "beautiful evil thing" who began so foolishly, continued so triumphantly, and was finally refused burial with the rest of the Medici, among whom she had gained more love, honour, hatred and curses than any other woman who ever reigned in Florence. M. de la Sizeranne confesses that the portraits of Bianca Cappello are more difficult to read than any in his collection. Bronzino painted her several times, also Allori, and possibly Titian. All, even the finest, have that inexpressive heaviness already mentioned ; the mask is beautiful beyond discussion, but the living face behind it is invisible. And so to this day biographers doubt whether Bianca Cappello was indeed guilty or innocent of half the crimes laid to her charge in her adopted city.
Probably the finest and, in some ways, most typical figures of the whole Italian Renaissance, man and woman, are Count Baldassare Castiglione, whose noble portrait by Raffaelle has taken the place of the lost Gioconda in the Salon Carre at the Louvre—the "femme revee " of the Renaissance, but hardly more than a dream—and Isabella d'Este, the famous Marchesa of Mantua, drawn by Lionardo and painted by Titian and others. This lady has a very honourable place in M. de la Sizeranne's gallery; he has studied her with extraordinary insight and care, and indeed she is by no means a new acquaintance to the writer of the introduction to the French translation of Mrs. Ady's Isabella d'Este, which appeared not long ago. She and Baldassare Castiglione were friends, a moat honourable friendship to both. The author of II Cortegiano, who might have served as the model for his own book, was one of the best, most highly cultivated, and most charming men of his time, a scholar and a chivalrous gentleman, a gallant soldier and an honest statesman. The Marchesa, a rarity among women as Castiglione among men, also shone with brilliance on the dark background of that age. "La prima donna del mondo," they called her in her own day, to which she was the ideal of perfection in mind, manners, and morals. She was loyal to a husband made of very different clay, whose ferocious ugliness, with a strange mask of adoring piety, was painted by Mantegna in the " Yierge de la Victoire," now at the Louvre, and may be seen more frankly, even comically, displayed in the amazing bust at Mantua. Isabella taught Francesco Gonzaga, half-savage as he was, to be as proud of his wife as of his horses. She had all the dignity, the high-mindedness, the learning and knowledge, the fine unerring taste in every kind of art, the natural magnificence, the passion for beauty, which belonged to the Renaissance at its best. She had an imagination which enabled her to teach and direct the great artists who worked for her in many glorious pictures and made her palace at Mantua a centre of aesthetic loveliness. It is to this aspect
of her character that M. de la Sizeranne devotes most careful study. She was also one of the greatest art-collectors ever known; and here come in the defects of her qualities—they, too, characteristic of her time—a foundation of hardness, a selfish, even greedy acquisitiveness, which profited readily by the misfortunes of others, even of her friends. We will venture to say that Isabella, humanly faultless in her "equilibre parfait de sante et d'esprit," missed that spiritual touch which, as a general truth, the world of the Renaissance left behind in the world of the Middle Ages.
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